Rentoid :: A Recession Proof Business

Not many of can safely say that our business is Recession Proof. My friend Steve can.

Steve runs a little website called Rentoid. Rentoid is like the ‘ebay of renting’.

Instead of buying a lawnmower that you use once a quarter, to mow your dining-table-sized lawn, you can rent one for a day on rentoid. And instead of having your drumkit sitting unused in your shed 363 days a year, you can list it on rentoid (and make some money).

It’s a simple idea. Definitely a good one (Disclaimer time – I worked with Steve on Rentoid in it’s infancy).  And one that’s going to strengthen even further, given the state of the economy and the environment.

It’s great to see a lot of businesses finally getting their act together, and making greener products for us all to buy. But rentoid goes a whole lot further, by challenging ‘consumption’.

As the recession kicks in, people are starting to think harder about how much ‘stuff’ they actually need. At the same time, more and more of us will realise that we need to pull the reigns on climate change too. That’s why rentoid.com is the sort of forward thinking business that’s going to suceed; it turns our over-producing, over-consuming capitalistic world on its head. I’ll drink to that.

Anyway, the purpose of this post was supposed to be to give you a link to a cool video that Steve and his team put together to promote rentoid. But as soon as I start thinking about Steve’s business, and it’s potential, I just go off on one. It’s truly a recession-proof business idea.

Here’s the vid:

Ten Commandments of Good Design

vitsoe.com has a great article on the 10 Design Commandments of 1960′s Braun industrial Designer, Dieter Rams. The 10 commandments state that:

• Good design is innovative
• Good design makes a product useful
• Good design is aesthetic
• Good design helps us to understand a product
• Good design is unobtrusive
• Good design is honest
• Good design is durable.
• Good design is consequent to the last detail.
• Good design is concerned with the environment.
• Good design is as little design as possible.
  

It’s well worth reading the article in full, and seeing how wonderfully timeless Rams’ product designs are. Like these speakers below, which were designed over 50 years ago.



Dieter Rams’ work is considered to be a huge inspiration for Apple’s chief product designer, Jonathan Ives. The similarities are definitely there.

(via Daring Fireball)

Save the Economy AND the planet?

With governments around the world continuing to pump colossal sums of money into their plunging economies, a grand global experiment is under way: can the unprecedented spending provide not only a quick fix for the economic catastrophe but also the measures vital for dealing with global warming.

Yes It Can!

Dare I say it … Thank gawd for the downturn.

Can the economic rescue plans also save planet? | Environment | The Guardian

Social Media – Listen, Say Sorry and Move On

This post is not a rant about why Big Brands don’t belong in Social Media. Nor is it a plea that that you HAVE to get your brand on Twitter and any other hot social media property de jour.

It’s about one of the really great benefits of Social Media marketing – If you mess something up, you can just apologize, learn from your mistakes, and move on.

Look at Telstra Big Pond for example. Clearly, they set up a Twitter account before they had ANY idea about using Twitter – as illustrated by their first 5 tweets shown below:

I could sit here and whine and moan about how “Big Business” don’t get it, like i usually do. But I won’t. Because that’s irrelevant.

What is relevant is BigPonds most recent 5 Tweets:

Did you see that? Real Humans instead of robots. Telstra learnt, probably quite quickly, that Twitter wasn’t the place for automated responses. They listened to some feedback:

They wised up. They learned their lesson. They re-thought their approach to Twitter. They got some real people onto the case. And they kept going with it. Now Telstra BigPond … they have over 500 followers.

My point is this. The great thing about Social Media marketing is that if you make a mistake, it doesn’t really matter. All you need to do is learn from your mistake, apologise, and move on. It’s that simple. And it’s just as true for a big corporations as it is for a small business using any type of social media tool.

There are countless other examples of forward thinking brands that experiment with Social Media, but don’t get it right the first time. And that’s OK. No one remembers if you fumble in the first place. And even if they do, you can recover from this easily.

Just listen, say sorry and move on.

Business Card for 2009

Business card status updates. What a cool idea.

(via SwissMiss)

Flocking fantastic!

Wondering why I’ve been able to blog 3 times today? (And I’ve been busy today) Well, it’s because I’ve discovered a new blogging weapon – Flock.

Actually, that’s not entirely true -
I’ve tried Flock  before. But that was back in 2005 when I first started blogging, and my all-round online addiction. Back then, it was a little buggy, so I gave up on it.

Now Flock has grown up, having recently released version 2.0. I tend to get excited about anything with “2.0″ tied to it, so I decided it was time to give it a another go.

V.G.I.D! Very Glad I Did.

What is Flock? Well, for starters it’s a web browser. Based on the Firefox code-base, it runs just like Firefox. But it’s a whole lot more that just a browser. Flock integrates a whole stack of social networking features, from Twitter to Flickr to Facebook to WordPress, and a whole lot more.

I’m writing this blog post from within Flock’s blog editor. Which means I can publish a blog post without even visiting my blog page. I can also add pictures from my flickr stream directly into my posts, and copy a quote from a site, and simply re-post it. Makes posting a quick blog post easy, without interrupting your flow. You can also post a tweet, check my rss feeds, and my web-based email, all within the browser.

It’s probably not 100% perfect yet – I can already see some improvements that I’d like to see. But I think it’s definitely worth trying out.

Keep your eye on Samsung

This looks interesting. A mobile phone that is A) solar powered, B) touchscreen, C) made from recycled plastics, D) extremely energy efficient and E) non-toxic.

The Blue Earth phone by Samsung has been launched Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. Perhaps it’s a promising sign of greener gadgets from Samsung and other manufacturers.

via – PSFK: Samsung Releasing a Solar Powered Cell Phone – PSFK.com

Tags: gadgets, green, samsung, phone, mobile

Copying the Wrong Thing

Nice quote from John Gruber today

“The key ingredient I see in successful apps, Mac or web — and, really, in creative commercial endeavors of any kind — is that the creators are building something they themselves love. That’s what you should copy.”

Tags: daringfireball, johngruber

Anyone for Layer Tennis?

I think Adobe are definitely onto something with their ‘Layer Tennis‘ championship.

Originally conceived by Coudal Partners, the idea is simple, but very cool:

Two artists or designers battle out their skills by swapping a Photoshop file back a forth, adding to each other’s work in real time. Each competitor gets fifteen minutes to “volley” the file, and each volley is posted on the site.

The matches last for ten volleys and when it’s complete, everyone with an opinion sounds off in the Forums and then they declare a winner.

A third participant, a writer, provides play-by-play commentary on the action, as it happens.

Seems as though they have some high calibre creatives going head to head. This week’s battle was Skinnycorp’s Jeffrey Kalmikoff up against interactive designer Brendan Dawes – and special comments by daringfireball’s John Gruber.

What a great campaign – Artists inspired by other artists, in a format that you can easily digest. And spread to other artists.

It reminds me of a simple thought that Andy Sernovitz spoke about recently – If you want your marketing to get spread by word-of-mouth, it can’t be about You. It’s about them. It’s not your company, your product, or your message. It’s about theirs.

That’s why this campaign has already proven to be a word-of-mouth winner.

What I also love about this type of marketing is that it doesn’t smell like a marketing campaign. It’s fun, not corporate. It’s like something you’d expect from Crumpler. It’s great. And it doesn’t leave you feeling as though you’ve been marketed to.

Another 10 must have iphone apps

My “10 must-have iphone apps” post back in November was rather popular. And since I folded in December and got myself an iphone, I thought you might be interested in another top 10 apps that I’ve discovered, post purchase:

What the Font – Actually, I’ve just downloaded this, so can’t really say whether it’s must have, but I think it will be. What the font allows you to whip out your camera, take a photo of some type, and wait patiently to find out what the font is. Fontastic!  

Tweetie – After a long love affair with Twitterific, I have recently swapped to Tweetie as my iphone Twitter client. Better for retweets, replies and dms. $3 well spent.

CSS Cheat Sheet – Now that I’m teaching myself CSS, I’m finding this handy little app very useful. CSS Cheat Sheet is what it says, an app that gives you a quick refresher on all things CSS. Not 100% perfect, but I’m sure it will improve in time.

Things – ’bout time I got things done. Things is handy little GTD app is the priciest app I’ve bought. But it’s only $12. Heck, that’s only 2 beers. A very simple app to use and get organised – for once and for all.

Remote – Now i can wirelessly change tracks on my mac’s itunes, which wirelessly changes songs on my stereo via this very hand app from apple themselves.. An amazing revelation, or a one way ticket to obesity? You decide.

CameraBag – Camera Bag is an essential tool for taking photos on your iphone. It comes with a stack of photo filter effects to emulate different camera and film styles. It’s like having a lomo camera on your iphone – and more.

Bloom – I admit, I was lured into buying this one purely because Brian Eno was involved in the creation of it. But it was worth it. Bloom a nifty little ambient music generator with a beautiful UI, and soothes one’s soul. 

CliqCliq colors – CliqCliq is a beautiful little app you can use to lookup color references and create color pallettes. It’s a keeper for any designer or color lover. You can even create colour paletters from photos you take. Lovely.

Touchgrind - I don’t really do games on my iphone. But Touchgrind, the finger skateboard game takes me back to a my teen skating days. It’s great, and tremendously addictive. If you only have one game on your iphone, this is it kids.

WordPress – You all know how much I love wordpress. Did I mention that the blogging platform also has it’s own iphone app? Splendid.

Here’s the link to my first post, with another 10 iphone apps you may very well be interested in.

And if there are some other apps you’d like to point out, I’m all ears.