Messaging Opportunity in Rising Fuel Costs for Carsharing

The New York Times reviewed the Consumer Price Index on a year-over-year basis, comparing March 2010 to March 2011.  Since I love any well-organized, graphical data, I thought I would share and comment on a couple of data points that relate to and support our expanding Shared Economy.  

Source: New York Times via Uncluttered White Spaces

Volkswagen Launches Quicar, Joining Fellow Automakers

Volkswagen is helping to make carsharing programs a trend for automakers with its launch of Quicar in Hanover, Germany.  The Quicar program will include 200 fuel-efficient VW Golf Bluemotion vehicles at 50 locations throughout the city.  The program will operate as a traditional carsharing program, similar to Zipcar.  It is planned to launch later this year.

Source: Volkswagen

Solar Mosaic: Making Existing Solar Investment Model Obsolete

After finding Solar Mosaic at Shareable, my mind is sufficiently blown away.  Solar Mosaic mashes solar energy with crowdfunding to diversify the burdensome upfront capital requirements across the community.  Quoting Buckminster Fuller, Solar Mosaic believes "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."  Based in northern California, the new company creates a marketplace that anyone can use to create solar projects and finance them through their communities, locally and online.

Source: joinmosaic.com

Buying for Buying's Sake

Annie Leonard is a longtime thought-leader of the sustainability movement who has always made a strong and compelling argument against our system of consumption.  In many ways her work makes her strong candidate to be one of the four busts on a hypothetical Mount Rushmore of Collaborative Consumption.  I just stumbled on a great little fact of hers in a image on Unstash.

Ending the Hiatus and Bringing Back the Good Blogginess

The past six weeks have been a healthy but volatile little sabbatical.  Access Trumps Ownership took a seat on the back-burner while I settled into a new job and established better continuity in my day-to-day activities.

During that time, I am happy to report that ATO has been indexed in Google and continues to amass new Twitter followers.  The support through readership and web traffic has been much appreciated.  However, there is no doubt that many, many great things have occurred in the shared economy that I will undoubtedly not report on.  The good news is that I am back and you can count on regular posts once again.

Keep on reading, sharing, and getting more collaborative!