Airbnb
A mobile and desktop service, Airbnb connects people looking for short stays in houses or rooms with those offering them. Founded in 2008, it now has about 1 million listings in 33,000 cities and has raised more than US$700 million in venture funding — valuing it at about US$10 billion — from investors, including actor Ashton Kutcher (also an Uber investor). It said more than 10 million overnight stays have been booked through it since its start.
Uber
A mobile app for “ride-sharing,” this in effect functions as a taxi service, usually undercutting registered cabs (though “surge pricing” at peak times can make it far more expensive). Started in 2009, it has raised US$3.3 billion — most of it this year, including some from Baidu, China’s equivalent of Google. The company has been valued at US$40 billion — more than American Airlines and nearly four times car rental firm Hertz. Internal documents from December last year said Uber had generated gross revenue (taxi fares before deductions) of about US$1 billion for the year, had hundreds of thousands of users (including 70,000 in San Francisco, where it started) and thousands of drivers.
JustPark
As the name suggests, this service just lets people park — outside your house. People have been doing this for a long time — near airports, and in places like Wimbledon during the tennis tournament — and an Internet version of the process was probably overdue. It claims to have 500,000 members.
DogVacay
This service says that it will find a “loving dog sitter near you.” The company said it has more than 20,000 available sitters across the US.
Resecond
Based in Copenhagen, this lets members “rent” dresses from a curated selection. In the same city, Chare, started by the Danish Refugee Council, also uses a membership system and offers clothes on the basis that it is good to have something different to wear.
Peerby
Another neighborhood-based scheme, this Amsterdam start-up lets users borrow almost anything, ranging from power tools to pressure washers. It operates in the UK, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, has raised more than US$2 million in venture funding and claims more than 100,000 active monthly members.
TaskRabbit
Connecting people who want something done, for a price, with people willing to do it, TaskRabbit aims to be neighborhood-centered. Described as “an eBay for labor,” it has struggled to grow and find enough people on either side of the deal, and in June shifted to a “hire only” model, which has not been warmly welcomed. The next year might decide whether it survives or dies.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs