The Mesh - Lisa Gansky [32]
Even some suburbs are becoming more Mesh-friendly. Early on, car-sharing companies chiefly targeted high-density locations with large numbers of college and university students. Those cities are the beachhead for expanding to other types of communities. Increasing numbers of suburbs have train or transit stations that can serve as hubs for bike and car sharing. Developers in northern California, for example, are constructing multifamily communities to support up to 3,000 people in both single-family homes and medium-density town houses. Many developments are organized around transit hubs. In this arrangement, residents can walk, ride their bikes, or drive shared cars to a train station, bus station, or ferry. There were eight to twelve cars in the garage with Mini Mucho, the share car I used in Vancouver. It’s easy to imagine a multifamily community of two hundred or more homes supporting that level of usage.
weaving an ever stronger web.
The Mesh is made possible by well over twenty years of investment in the information infrastructure, and over fifty years of investment in roads and transit. We live inside a global network, with close to 5 billion mobile-phone subscriptions. Well over a billion people regularly use the Internet, which a Harvard business professor estimates has a $1.4 trillion economic impact annually in the United States alone. The network increasingly connects our homes, cars, and other devices, and they are increasingly connected to each other. (IBM recently introduced a kit that enables developers to use wireless sensors to connect anything to the so-called Internet of things.) And our demands are growing. Cisco estimates traffic over the Internet will exceed 667 exabytes by 2013. That’s roughly 667 billion gigabytes and equates to a quintupling of traffic from 2009 to 2013. Cisco predicts that one trillion devices will be connected to the Internet by that time.
This invisible network enables a level of service and ad hoc coordination that is brand-new. That’s how Spride Share helps riders share taxis, how OpenTable enables last-minute restaurant reservations, and how Groupon makes spontaneous, time-limited deals between groups of users and businesses. It’s now hard to move around the planet without having mobile coverage. Sharing physical things is more realistic now that we’ve spent ten-plus years getting very comfortable with the always-on, always-with-me sensation of the Web and mobile devices.
The new connectedness has inspired and enabled companies to glean important data from customers to customize offerings—for iTunes to suggest songs, for example, and LinkedIn to connect like-minded professionals seeking business opportunities and employment. Retailers such as Walmart, Costco, grocery stores, and drugstores are now trying to establish a direct relationship with the consumer. Stores give discounts to “members” with cards. When you use your card at the cash register, a store learns your family buying habits. Think of a Safeway card. When the scanner swipes the UPC code at the cash register, the software combines information from the transaction and the customer identity to make new offers. If you are buying diapers, the cash register will print coupons for wipes or spill-proof cups—products that you might purchase in the future. The retailer wants to up-sell you or extend what you would normally purchase.
Still, the collection and use of consumer data is in its infancy. In particular, manufacturers have had difficulty getting direct feedback from customers about product design. They often solicit information through warranty cards or online registration. Some pay attention to online ratings and comments on consumer sites. But these efforts have largely failed. At Kodak, we were lucky to get 1 percent of the warranty cards returned on our products.
The Mesh enables manufacturers to retrieve more useful information from customers. First, Mesh businesses collect more customer information. Second, as we’ve seen, they have a greater interest than traditional