Data has become so big these days that even DLD starts to love it. But while Big Data is clearly a technology-driven mega-trend, there is another paradigm shift that’s more drive from human behaviour. I’m talking about the so-called Sharing Economy.

The Sharing Economy is, of course, enabled by technology and would not be possible without the Internet. The Net has been built around the notion of sharing, of the free flow of data and information from the very beginning.

In principle, you could call the Net an ideology turned into technology, and critics like Andrew Keen can’t stop pointing us to the consequences this Net Ideology has for our lives and society. The Net fundamentally disrupts the business models of the industrial age of mass-consumerism. In general, that disruption seems to be a good thing, though the side-effects are often painful.

The Sharing Economy is based on the assumption that access becomes more important than ownership. For example, most younger people no longer want to own a car, as long as they have access to a car whenever and whereever they need one. Car makers react to this trend with companies like car2go and car2gether, both owned by Daimler (a sponsor of NEXT).

The same trend propels start-ups like Airbnb and their German clone 9flats that are basically marketplaces for private apartments. Last year, NEXT speaker Tim Ferriss stayed in Berlin for more than a week. Instead of living in a hotel, he spent his time in a nice apartment, courtesy of 9flats. We’ll see if this trend continues this year.

Airbnb founder Brian Chesky spoke on Monday at DLD about the Sharing Economy. Robin Wauters summarised his talk on TechCrunch as follows:

Chesky talked about the fact that sharing used to be an integral part of human life and ‘hardwired’ into our DNA, that it disappeared after the second World War because of increased consumer spending and individualism, and that we’re now at the beginning of the return to sharing.

Access, Chesky purports, will eventually become more powerful than ownership again.

Later, he referred to Airbnb riding a ‘third wave of the Internet’. Chesky asserts that the first wave of the Internet was about bringing commerce online, the second wave was about connecting with others online, and that the new wave is enabling shared offline experiences through online platforms.

The Sharing Economy, by the way, was the theme of NEXT09. We somehow misspelled it as “Share Economy” back then, but the idea was the same. In other words, we saw this coming, but 2009 was probably a bit early, given that Airbnb was founded in August 2008 – around the same time when we starting thinking about the conference motto.

Photo: Hubert Burda Media