Rent (out) your parking spot

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I saw an interesting (upcoming) app that lets you rent or rent our your parking spot, for example if you only use it during certain hours of the day. You can also use it opportunistically, e.g. "find the nearest parking spot I can rent for X hours".

It seems it hasn't fully launched yet (?) but it's still an interesting idea that I hadn't hear about before.
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Social Innovators Connected

"Social Innovators Connected is an open network of urban activists and social innovators. Network also organizes conferences and meetings around the world. The first conference called SIC! 2014 was held in Helsinki 3. - 6.9.2014 and the next ones are planned to be in Rome and Riga during the year 2015."

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/socialinnovatorsconnected

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Is the sharing economy a "racket"?

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...Evgeny Morozov (well-known Internet activist) seems to think so in a recent article in The Guardian:

"Don't believe the hype, the 'sharing economy' masks a failing economy"

At its worst, the sharing economy turns us into perpetual hustlers, cementing our connection to the global market. This sharing imperative dictates that everything that we own, from tangible assets to intangible thoughts, be categorised and assigned some kind of a unique identifier like the QR code. When somebody somewhere – it could be our neighbour or an advertising company across the ocean – expresses an interest in "borrowing" an item that matches the description of what we own, our phone would notify us of their offer, pitting us against all the other "micro-entrepreneurs" with similar ownership profiles. 
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Course on 3D-prining (Swedish language)

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We will have a guest who will talk about 3D-printing visit us two weeks from now. He is however also involved in a course at "Folkuniversitetet" about "Getting started with 3D-printing that might be of interest to some of you(?). The (Swedish-language) course starts next week (Sept 30 - Oct 14)!

"Would you like to be able to create product prototypes, parts, models of houses, art or unique items? 3D printing and 3D printers allow you to create unique shapes and objects ... You will learn basic modelling and how to prepare models for 3D printers. You will learn how to handle a 3D printer and will learn both the theory and the practice of 3D printing during a three-week period."

Here's a link to the course! It could definitely be of interest if you are dead set on working with that topic in our course on the Future of Media.
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Your guide to the sharing economy

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I came across this on the Internet:

Welcome to this blog - it is all yours!

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Hello.

The KTH Royal Institute of Technology course "DM2571 Future of Media has a new theme every year (last year's theme was "Future of News/News of the Future").

This year's theme is "The Future of the digital commons, the sharing economy and collaborative consumption". All students who take the course are invited to become contributors and post blog entries here.

We will primarily use the blog to:

- write about interesting "stuff" (news, services etc.) that we find on the internet and that relates to this year's theme).
- we will later, during the second half of the course, use the blog to disseminate information from the executive group to the project groups.

- we will later, during the second half of the course, also use the blog so that the different project groups can disseminate information to the teachers and other course participants (mainly in the form of "weekly status reports").

Throughout the course, we might come across many different interesting examples of developments in the area (digital commons, sharing economy, collaborative consumption) that point towards the future. In this blog, you can post information about what you come across so that we all can learn about and benefit from the information that we all together come across. 50+ pair of eyes are better than the teachers' 2 pair of eyes!

Feel free to post whatever you come across that you think is interesting and that has a relationship to things we have read, seen or heard in the course, or that in general is related to this year's theme!

Feel free to check out others' blog posts and also comment on them. Hopefully a few blog entries will generate some discussions!

Yours,

Daniel Pargman & Malin Picha

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