How Technological Advancements are Beneficial for Sharing Economy
Sharing economy is a business trend that thrives on collaborative consumption, enabling people to borrow or rent goods and services thus promoting monetization of assets. Previously, individuals discovered and shared such resources through word of mouth or classified ads in a local newspaper. With the latest technological advancements including the internet, pervasive computing, and mobile payments, sharing economy is breaking new frontiers as it opens new avenues of doing business. By easing the sharing of assets on a large global scale, technology today acts as the platform for ordinary people to advertise and sell their goods and services. This trend marks a significant shift from the legacy business practices that were a prerogative of full-time businesses.
Fueled by IT consumerization, people today have easy access to sharing services with just one click on their mobile device. The sharing services today are supported by technologies that have the capability to maintain and process huge amounts of data regarding people and assets.
Companies today are leveraging technologies such as GPS, Big Data and Machine Learning, and other open source technology to match up owners with the renters in real-time. GPS helps service providers to get current location of the user along with the unoccupied resources in the located area; secure payment gateway helps in easy and secure money transfer between service providers and customers. Search algorithms are used by organizations to find out relevant data and then surface the listings according to the user’s query. Easy-to-use digital technologies allow people to access shared services on the go irrespective of the geographical location.
Big Data is playing a vital role in the operations of shared services by deploying an economic model that gathers different types of data for analysis and making informed decisions. The gamut of data is leveraged by companies to derive customer insights. The big data algorithm performs significant tasks of capacity calculations to find the best of the possible suggestions and helps in customer service and operational efficiency enhancements.
As reported by Airbnb, everyday 20Tb of new data is created in the company database along with the tons of already available data.
