Evoking the memory of E.F. Schumacher, the German born economist who wrote Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, a new service by the name of Uniiverse has launched with the goal of serving as a platform for collaborative living. Schumacher’s vision of local economies moves one step further with Uniiverse, which “is an online marketplace for offline services and activities. It’s not a social network, but a platform that encourages trust, and face-to-face interactions.”
Uniiverse, which launched earlier this week, bills itself as the “first online platform to take an offline approach for its users.” The service works by its users offering services or activities for others, some for free and other for a fee. The takes a similar idea to that of Craigslist and classifieds and adds the human component. This marks yet another move in the direction of collaborative consumption, a trend that has gained quite a bit of traction lately.
A proliferation of sites offer “collaborative living”, as Uniiverse refers to it. Car and Bike sharing programs have become increasingly popular, especially in denser, urban areas where these modes of transportation supplement public transit and walking. Collaborative consumption helps reduce waste and over consumption, both of which benefit the environment and bottom line. Uniiverse goes one step further by encouraging face-to-face interactions, moving closer to the triple bottom line, or “People, Planet, Profit.”
