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

Building Buying Power Through Crowdsourcing

In an article over the weekend, Jo Thornhill at The Daily Mail in London made an effort to categorize some of the ways that the "crowd" is lending a hand to one another to increase buying power.  The focus of the article is on the collective buying power of crowds versus the individual.  When I discuss collaborative consumption models, I speak more broadly, including borrowing/lending schemes, landshare, carsharing, etc.  Thornhill's focus is primarily in the businesses that bring individual's together to save money through collective purchasing power.  The article breaks these businesses into four categories:

Mortgage merger: Stefan Canavan, left, and James Bertioli bought a flat together. Source: The Daily Mail

Get Your "To Do List" Accomplished with Runners from TaskRabbit

As I begin to absorb and discover more of the innovation in the collaborative consumption niche, I am continually impressed with the creativity and intuition of many business starters.  TaskRabbit, established in the spring of 2008 originally as RUNmyERRAND, uses the power of the community to help people get everyday tasks completed.  Currently operating in Boston and San Francisco, the company allows users (Senders) to list any task that needs completing - dog-walking, packing, grocery pickup, graphic design, etc. - and pre-qualified "Runners" will sign up to do them for you.