Living The On-Demand Life

Since I moved to the Bay Area last week, I’ve been using my iPhone for basically everything. All I had to do was download a bunch of apps and start living as a local.

I bought my groceries with Instacart, moved around the city with Uber and Lyft, had dinner delivered with Sprig, did my shopping with Google Shopping Express and Postmates, and washed my clothes with Washio. All of these from the confort of my rented apartment or my workplace, using the iPhone as a remote control for the physical world.

If you look five years ago, none of these companies existed. The mass adoption of smartphones and improvements in GPS and other technologies are allowing companies to re-design whole industries. Operations are becoming more efficient by means of a decentralized workforce and inventory, all using the smartphone platform for effective communication and technology for automating processes. Lower operation costs allow businesses to provide a better quality of service for the same price, giving *everyone* access to the same luxuries only rich people could afford back then.

Instead of traditional P2P marketplaces, these are E2E (End to End) companies. They establish a brand for consumers and make sure to provide a quality experience in the whole process. You are not just riding John’s car, you are taking an Uber.

In the same way smartphones changed the landscape of what type of businesses are viable, I can’t imagine what will happen when Bitcoins become mass adopted and the whole financial industry becomes decentralized and unbundled.

I also wonder how these innovations and industry transformations could be distributed to other parts of the world, expanding away from the micro-world of Silicon Valley.