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A new Silicon Valley startup is taking the charge put forth by the recent expansion of ADUs and other non-traditional forms of accommodation in the uphill battle to provide affordable housing to the millions of Californians struggling to find a way forward. Business Insider recently took a closeup... View full entry
A Crunchbase News analysis of residential-focused real estate startups uncovered a raft of companies with a shared and temporary housing focus that have raised funding in the past year or so.
This isn’t a U.S.-specific phenomenon. Funded shared and short-term housing startups are cropping up across the globe, from China to Europe to Southeast Asia.
— TechCrunch
Crunchbase reporter Joanna Glasner takes a look at the new crop of shared and short-term housing startups that have recently raised millions of dollars in funding, such as Common, Starcity, Roomi, Ollie, HubHaus, and others. View full entry
On Tuesday, Waymo announced they’d purchase 20,000 sporty, electric self-driving vehicles from Jaguar for the company’s forthcoming ride-hailing service. [...]
They estimate that the Jaguar fleet alone will be capable of doing a million trips each day in 2020. [...] if Waymo is even within 50 percent of that number in two years, the United States will have entered an entirely new phase in robotics and technology.
— The Atlantic
In his piece for The Atlantic, Alexis C. Madrigal looks beyond the technological and economic implications of Waymo's latest announcement to add 20,000 electric self-driving Jaguar I-Pace SUVs to its rapidly growing ride-hailing fleet by 2020 and instead think about the social (how... View full entry
The 5th issue of BRACKET just launched its Call for Submissions, and this time the theme is [On Sharing]. Electronic Submission System Launch: January 10th, 2018Submissions Due: February 4th, 2018, Midnight EST The following is the full submission brief: Bracket [On Sharing] Sharing is one of the... View full entry
PlansMatter is a new travel website that offers vacation rentals for design-minded individuals. The accommodations are hand-picked by two architects, Scott Muellner and Connie Lindor, the founders of the website. The site is not just another Airbnb—listings for each property point to various... View full entry
When Uber picked this former Rust Belt town as the inaugural city for its driverless car experiment, Pittsburgh played the consummate host. [...]
Nine months later, Pittsburgh residents and officials say Uber has not lived up to its end of the bargain. [...]
The deteriorating relationship between Pittsburgh and Uber offers a cautionary tale, especially as other cities consider rolling out driverless car trials from Uber, Alphabet’s Waymo and others.
— nytimes.com
"Starting later this month," wrote Bloomberg less than one year ago, "Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved." Since then, Pittsburgh appears to have... View full entry
...even as Uber talks up its determination to treat drivers more humanely, it is engaged in an extraordinary behind-the-scenes experiment in behavioral science to manipulate them in the service of its corporate growth — an effort whose dimensions became evident in interviews with several dozen current and former Uber officials, drivers and social scientists, as well as a review of behavioral research. — the New York Times
"Because its drivers are independent contractors, they lack most of the protections associated with employment. By mastering their workers’ mental circuitry, Uber and the like may be taking the economy back toward a pre-New Deal era when businesses had enormous power over workers and few checks... View full entry
The vast majority of Uber’s full-time drivers return home to their beds at the end of a day’s work. But all over the country, there are many who don’t. These drivers live near, but not in, expensive cities where they can tap higher fares, ferrying wealthier, white-collar workers to their jobs and out to dinner—but where they can’t make enough money to get by, even with longer hours. — Bloomberg
To maximize their time, drivers find supermarket parking lots, airports and hostels where they catch several hours of sleep after taking riders home from bars and before starting the morning commute. View full entry
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis
“First Class Meal does what the best sharing opportunities do — it identifies excess capacity from one person or organization and makes it available to another one in need, creating a symbiotic relationship that improves the success and efficiency of both partners,” said Linda C. Samuels... View full entry
Mexico City is notorious for its gridlock (and the smog it produces). The ride-sharing platform Uber has taken advantage of this captive audience with an unusual advertising medium: drones.As reported by Bloomberg, Uber has sent off a fleet of sign-bearing drones to hover over windshields... View full entry
What’s extraordinary about a smart contract is that it gives blockchain the power to not only record property rights but enforce them. Once deployed, a dozen lines of computer code can fulfill the same role as the county records office, the courts and the police. You can have “the function of a trusted bureaucracy without the expense of putting together a trusted bureaucracy”, Waldman explains. — the Guardian
The homeowner posts a price for the rental. The renter sends the money through her smartphone. Inside the front door is a very small computer connected to the internet. The computer knows when the renter is allowed to enter and unlocks the door for her when she pushes a button on her phone.Smart... View full entry
Landlords have had a gripe with Airbnb for a while. The sharing platform facilitates subletting apartments without their consent or knowledge, not to mention a cut of the profits. Now, Airbnb is hoping to make amends by rolling out a new initiative dubbed the 'Airbnb Friendly Building Program'... View full entry
OMA teamed up with the digital consultancy and product development studio Bengler—who also converted the firm’s massive data set into a website—to put together an installation-cum-digital platform for the 2016 Oslo Triennale. Dubbed PANDA, the “counter-organizational platform” both... View full entry
Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot [...] But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market. — Bloomberg
Related stories recently in the Archinect news:Google, Uber, Lyft, Ford and Volvo join forces to lobby for autonomous vehiclesA look at the history and future of the American commuteNew study finds ride-sharing apps like Lyft and Uber have no effect on drunk-driving fatalities View full entry
Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados [...]
The interchangeability, ceaseless movement, and symbolic blankness that was once the hallmark of hotels and airports, qualities that led the French anthropologist Marc Augé to define them in 1992 as "non-places," has leaked into the rest of life. [...]
This confluence of style is being accelerated by companies that foster a sense of placelessness … Airbnb is a prominent example.
— theverge.com
Nicholas Korody previously explored this phenomenon, of supposedly idiosyncratic Airbnb styling converging on the generic.Related on Archinect:Airbnb turns to urban planning as it looks towards the future of home-sharingAfter allegations of racial discrimination and #AirbnbWhileBlack fallout... View full entry
