A new mechanism

It’s not just your time. You have possessions that have spare time.  Take your lawnmower. You probably use it once a week for 30 minutes at most? Suppose you could profitably hire it out for as much of the rest of the time as you liked? And imagine the same was true for your vacuum cleaner, car, dining set and other household goods. At the moment this scenario is unthinkable. It would be impossibly time-consuming, risky and overhead-laden to rent your car out in this ad hoc way.

NEMs’ usefulness extends beyond home products. Imagine a small company with a truck they don’t use on a Sunday afternoon, or warehouse capacity that will be empty for the next 4 days, or a production line that won’t run until a new product design is finalised sometime next month or just a meeting room that won’t be in use tomorrow. These are all wasted resources at the moment. There is currently no one market efficient enough to bring them into the economy as simply, safely and profitably as possible.

Transferring ownership of an asset is easy. Amazon do it every time you click the Buy button. Trading the time of people, or resources, for precise amounts of time in exact geographic locations is much more complex.

Assume you're willing to rent out your caravan for 2 days. Any website brokering a deal for you must handle issues including: constantly changing availability, personalised contactability, varying reliability, real-time multi-parameter price construction, buyer/seller acceptability to each other, resolution of failed transactions, underwriting of transactions, payment escrow and transfer, tax implications and insurance of assets. That’s the starting point. If it’s to be truly useful, it also needs to offer futuristic facilities like aggregated investment in targeted seller development. We’ll explain in the other facilities section.

Think of e-commerce in terms of a spectrum of mechanisms for trade. No one mechanism is right for every kind of transaction. You don’t auction groceries, it would be unnecessarily time consuming; and price discovery, a key benefit of auctions, isn’t an issue. Here’s an overview of existing trading mechanisms in online markets.

NEMs demands a new mechanism. There is technology that enables very precise localised time-based trades. It’s called UltraFlexi. Developed over 14 years in British think tanks and technology companies, a version is currently allowing people across the UK to sell their spare time to local employers. The scheme is called Slives-of-Time Working.

•  How it works: for buyers