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Showing posts from September, 2015

Huge remote working test in Finland

The Finnish trade unions organized a huge remote working test today. In order to really test the limits the office workers were forced to work from home by totally shutting down public transport in Helsinki. Even some kindergartens were closed to test how working from home can be arranged with children jumping around. The ones opting out of the test could do so only by losing their days salary. The results showed a huge success! Video- and telemeetings went up, traffic went down. There were virtually no trafficjams and all the work got down. The environmental impact was huge as the nation used substantially less electricity and gas. As a result of the success the Finnish government is planning to launch a program to promote teleworking and move people away from Helsinki to towns were they actually could afford their own home.

How to succeed in the sharing economy

Fastcompany published a very good article how the sharing economy, that everybody believed in five years ago, has pretty much died. With the notable exeptions of AirBNB, Uber and the likes, that is unfortunately true. The businesses that enable you to lend your powerdrill to your neighbours have not been successful. However, we should not yet bury the idea of the sharing economy! As if we analyse the success and failure of the businesses there are some clear differentiators that make the businesses fly. I would list here three of the most important ones: The more expensive the shared item is, the better . Appartments (AirBNB, Booking.com) and cars (Uber, Autolevi ) are good segments. Powerdrills costing 30 euros are not good for sharing. Essentially the cost and hassle of renting should be marginal compared to the cost of the item. Renting out the item should be sensible as a business and attractive for small investors . People do not want strangers to use (and break) their own st