A rose by any other name

Is it underused asset utilization? Collaborative consumption? Allocative efficiency? Idle capacity reduction? Fractional ownership? Timesharing? 


Or is it just sharing?


When multiple people use the same asset, it's just sharing. And it's just smart. Hotels aren't known as "p2p room sharing networks" (for good reason)- but it makes no sense to buy a whole new house when you go on vacation for a few days, or to bring your existing house with you. 


Access is the new own. Assets will (should) be more like that famous coffee commercial, "good til the last drop".

Get your viral url ID here...

Some of you are starting to discover a great new tool we are using to introduce people to new features and upgrades on the site. Rather than keep it running in the background, we wanted to introduce our integration with LAUNCHROCK.com and how it will affect your experience on neighborrow.

If you already have a group or if you are already verified, your account most likely will not be affected, but we still would LOVE IT if you go to v2.neighborrow.com and get your unique URL and use it to invite people to the site.

If you don't have an account already, we are using this tool to manage how new members can access the site.

As a site that relies on not only geographic proximity but social proximity for exchanges, as well as a critical mass of users in each "neigh*borrow-hood", launchrock is a perfect fit for us.

If you try to create a group or borrow something and are redirected to v2.neighborrow.com, don't despair, it's super easy to get started and these tools help us keep the community close knit and thriving.

HERE IS HOW IT WORKS

1. You will be directed to v2.neighborrow.com and asked to enter your email
2. You will receive a unique url
3. Post this url anywhere you can- Lauchrock tracks the people who follow that link and sign up because of you
4. The more people you get to sign up, the more quickly you will gain access yourself. We will also have contests and upgrades based on your invites. 
5. You can check your progress (Launchrock is a 3rd party site we can't touch the numbers) by going back to v2.neighborrow.com and seeing how you are doing.. We will post the exact number of invites needed to reach your goal (for example, you need 8 to start a group)

Help her borrow...

Support 3 great organizations at once!

Investing in our raise helps support Profounder's launch, GoodsforGood's incredible mission, and of course... neigh*borrow.

We are thrilled to join the other entrepreneurs in Profounder's first class of companies to seek public "crowdfunding."

The Internet is one of the most disruptive mediums in history and will continue to drastically change the way people communicate, consume and live. Peer-to-peer networks and transactions are thriving and we continue to see amazing innovation in this space. It has even begun to change how start-ups raise their initial capital! :)

You need the hole, not the drill.

Borrowing (heavily) from the simplistic experiment, goingtorain.com, we are adding (another) experiment to neighborrow, drillavailable.neighborrow.com. We are building an inventory of every drill in America and creating a marketplace for short term use.

The page shows the real-time availability and current price for access to a power drill within 3 miles of your current location.

Rachel Botsman and Roo Rodgers point out in their book, "What's mine is yOURs" that the average drill is used between 7 and 13 minutes in its lifetime. They also guess there are around 50 million drills currently sitting in people's homes today.

That just doesn't make any sense! Even @ $50/drill (and power drills cost much more) people are paying $300 an HOUR just to own a drill. Silliness! We can do better than that. Let's see how many of them we can catalog (and help the other half of the households when they need a hole and not a drill).

Victor Papanec would be proud! 

Vote for us!

Please vote for us in the myoo create "beat waste startup challenge"

As the paradigm shifts from owning things to using things, everyone stands to save more than a pretty penny! Shared access means access to higher quality items and less waste:)

Competition. It's a beautiful thing:)

Once in a while, we Google ourselves. We search for "neigh*borrow" and other keywords not only out of curiosity but also to see how well our pages are being indexed and what our SEO campaign looks like. Sometimes we are pleasantly surprised to find a nice blog post that we hadn't seen before. Rarely do we find an unpleasant surprise as even criticism helps us learn and improve.

The other night, we found the ad below in the sponsored links section. Not only did swaptree use "neighborrow" as a keyword that they bid on (a borderline move itself) but they used our copyrighted name as the HEADLINE in their ad, basically purporting to be us! We were flattered that they feel as if they need to resort to these antics, but also annoyed. And confused (did they not think we would see it?).

You need not be familiar with Google's algorithm to see, unequivocally, the organic search results on the left and the sponsored links on the right.

Anyway, rather than waste time sending them a letter, we wanted to use this opportunity to focus on something positive. We at neigh*borrow have always tried to reach out to the brave and bright people trying to solve the same problems that we are. It's not easy to start a business from scratch, especially in an infant industry. We have nothing but respect for the fine folks at NeighborGoods, Loanables, and others attempting to use this unprecedented human interconnectivity to save financial and natural resources. We even talk to Micki and Ryan from time to time on Facebook, Twitter, etc. To them we say, keep up the good, important, difficult work!

Using a copyrighted name without permission in advertising copy such as the one above, is not only illegal and fraudulent, but a tad classless as well. We encourage our readers to Google the term "neighborrow" and click on the top organic link and the top paid link to see which one is more useful in finding you something you need to use. Enter #stcopyr along with your search!