Share-to is a for-profit initiative to allow people to share physical objects and services for specific periods of time, nurturing collaborative consumption and facilitating novel the sharing economy.
share.to will empower communities to share their resources, allow people to interact with their neighbours and will enhance municipal planning by providing the infrastructure to allow people to share physical objects for specific periods of time.
Leveraging Internet of World technologies share.to will allow people to easily share and access resources in their community, from physical spaces, vehicles, to personal goods.
Sharing your trailer, or boat? No problem, lock it on your smartphone and share the key with trusted people.
Using a friend's boat? Easy, find the boat on your phone's map, approach it and unlock it.
Need to develop community-centric policy? Child-play, access the open data and understand flow of goods, infrastructure requirements and city activity to support your agenda.
Share-to is a mobile-centric platform allowing people to share items with others. Users begin by tapping on Share (+), which allows them to upload a photograph of their item, select its availability and a short description. People can choose to share publicly or with a select group of people they trust. Other people can browse through items on their mobile phones and reserve these items on demand. As they approach the geo-location of the item they are allowed to unlock it and use it until the lease is over. Locks are internet-enabled physical or electronic locks that allow management of things with ease. For example, a car might have a wheel lock, but a stereo might have an electronic lock.
Driven by data, share-to is data driven, bringing usage information back to its users. For example, items on the map are represented by emoticon-circles whose diameter represent how much items are reserved, and whose emotion how many people use the lease full time, giving a sense of review based on usage. People can also explore different types of usage maps, by lease, types of lease, or types of items to understand the beat of their neighbourhood. Share-to is committed to open data and will share its information with the public, allowing better planning and policy to take place.
Share-to's first iteration consists of a Ruby on Rails application that can be deployed in Heroku or BlueMix, its data is hosted by the UrbanOpus.net project and has been designed to be scalable.