Jevon MacDonald of StartupNorth published an interesting article today called, You are supposed to break the rules. It talks about entrepreneurship and how great companies are built by disregarding the way things are done today.

And I think it’s for that reason that many stupid sounding ideas (think Airbnb and its initial idea of offering air mattresses) actually turn out to be great ideas. In reality, they weren’t stupid ideas. They just contravened the norm, and that made them sound stupid. It made people feel uncomfortable. And as humans, we tend to have a bias towards things that reinforce our existing view of the world.

In any case, Jevon talks about some of the “big rules” that are being broken today. His list includes:

• You can’t dispatch drivers without doing X

• Cars can only be sold through dealerships

• You can’t expose the MLS to the public, freely.

• Hotels are just rooms, but there are a lot of other rooms travellers should be able to rent. Many cities are fighting that.

But really he’s talking about Uber, Tesla, and Airbnb. They are the startups breaking those rules. However, that’s old news for most of us. What’s more interesting are the following two takeaways.

The first is his prediction that startups are going to start running into more and more regulatory hurdles. In other words, we’re going to see more, not less, litigation. And I think he’s right. As technology starts to creep into other industries (like it has with the taxi industry, the car industry, and the hospitality industry), we’ll probably see a lot of incumbents fighting to hold on.

The second interesting takeaway for me was that out of his list of “big rules”, the real estate industry (i.e. the MLS) is the only one that doesn’t have a formidable disruptor attached to it. Which makes me wonder: Is something like Opendoor.com inevitable?

I’ve been a big fan of MIT’s Senseable City Lab since I was a grad student at Penn. Their work sits at the intersection of cities and technology, and so I’ve always found it incredibly fascinating.

Recently, the lab examined data from all of New York’s 13,586 registered cabs and looked for ways that technology and mobile tech could potentially optimize the way the system works today. In particular, they were interested in examining instances where people were heading to the same place at the same time, and were within no more than a 3 minute walk of each at the start of the trip.

What they found was that, of the 150 million taxi rides taken in New York City during 2011, almost 80% of them could have been shared.

That is, 80% of the time, there was an overlap in both time and route. That’s an hugely interesting stat because it starts to show just how much waste and inefficiency there currently is in the system. Think about all the trips and carbon emissions that could be potentially eliminated through optimization.

Here’s a video they produced on the project. Click here if you can’t see it below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gyq_Zr96uzs?rel=0]

It’s a great example of how technology is and will continue to creep into every segment of the economy. It’s exactly what I was talking about in my post, “Disrupting everything.”

Jevon MacDonald of StartupNorth published an interesting article today called, You are supposed to break the rules. It talks about entrepreneurship and how great companies are built by disregarding the way things are done today.

And I think it’s for that reason that many stupid sounding ideas (think Airbnb and its initial idea of offering air mattresses) actually turn out to be great ideas. In reality, they weren’t stupid ideas. They just contravened the norm, and that made them sound stupid. It made people feel uncomfortable. And as humans, we tend to have a bias towards things that reinforce our existing view of the world.

In any case, Jevon talks about some of the “big rules” that are being broken today. His list includes:

• You can’t dispatch drivers without doing X

• Cars can only be sold through dealerships

• You can’t expose the MLS to the public, freely.

• Hotels are just rooms, but there are a lot of other rooms travellers should be able to rent. Many cities are fighting that.

But really he’s talking about Uber, Tesla, and Airbnb. They are the startups breaking those rules. However, that’s old news for most of us. What’s more interesting are the following two takeaways.

The first is his prediction that startups are going to start running into more and more regulatory hurdles. In other words, we’re going to see more, not less, litigation. And I think he’s right. As technology starts to creep into other industries (like it has with the taxi industry, the car industry, and the hospitality industry), we’ll probably see a lot of incumbents fighting to hold on.

The second interesting takeaway for me was that out of his list of “big rules”, the real estate industry (i.e. the MLS) is the only one that doesn’t have a formidable disruptor attached to it. Which makes me wonder: Is something like Opendoor.com inevitable?

I’ve been a big fan of MIT’s Senseable City Lab since I was a grad student at Penn. Their work sits at the intersection of cities and technology, and so I’ve always found it incredibly fascinating.

Recently, the lab examined data from all of New York’s 13,586 registered cabs and looked for ways that technology and mobile tech could potentially optimize the way the system works today. In particular, they were interested in examining instances where people were heading to the same place at the same time, and were within no more than a 3 minute walk of each at the start of the trip.

What they found was that, of the 150 million taxi rides taken in New York City during 2011, almost 80% of them could have been shared.

That is, 80% of the time, there was an overlap in both time and route. That’s an hugely interesting stat because it starts to show just how much waste and inefficiency there currently is in the system. Think about all the trips and carbon emissions that could be potentially eliminated through optimization.

Here’s a video they produced on the project. Click here if you can’t see it below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gyq_Zr96uzs?rel=0]

It’s a great example of how technology is and will continue to creep into every segment of the economy. It’s exactly what I was talking about in my post, “Disrupting everything.”