I’ve just spent a good 3-4 hours deep in the world of community marketplaces offering all kinds of awesome products and services, powered by the individual. These sites are empowering people around the world to become part-time (or even full-time) entrepreneurs who get to choose what they do and when they do it. It ranges from sites like TaskRabbit and Zaarly, which offer skill-based listings, to Vayable, which offers tour listings, to Airbnb, which offers accommodation listings. Whatever the niche, the message is clear: personalized, personable services provided by your neighbors or that local in your destination city are on the rise.
Our society is seeing a shift away from “traditional” jobs and towards the more flexible, on your own terms type jobs that are a far cry from the salaried employee. And those people clamoring for these unconventional/unpredictable job bookings find themselves serving a consumer that has evolved too. It used to be that consumers had to go to the store and choose from whatever was available at the time, or customers had to sit through customer service calls before finally getting help. Now it’s all about getting what you want when you want. Who needs to sit through half an hour of automated phone menus when you can just hire the guy in your town to install that new TV? Why go to the store and be forced to choose from food in flavors you don’t like when you can have someone come cook for you or bring you delicious baked goodies just the way you like?
It’s service to the max, because it’s customized for your needs. On TaskRabbit and Zaarly, you can post exactly what, when, where, and how you want things done, then choose who to do it. Or, for sellers, you can post exactly what and how you’ll do something, then determine the when and where with the “who” who’s booking you. The great thing about these services is that it not only empowers people to make money for doing what they love and/or what they’re good at, but it offers a better experience for us as clients. Get a tour of a city you’re visiting customized to your interests! Discover that perfect room to stay in that’s closer to everything you want to see than any reasonable hotel option. Let someone else handle the chores for once, so you can relax and take time to do what you love. Meanwhile, the people doing this work find themselves more fulfilled AND with more money to line their pockets. It’s a wonderful win-win situation.
Along those lines, I have a similar idea of connecting people with specific needs to those who can help fulfill them. I’m still working on the details of the idea, but as far as I’ve seen there is no other service out there that completely addresses the issue. I’m really excited to develop it further and hopefully I’ll be sharing it with the world sometime next year! For now, you can use your imagination to try to guess what it might be… and hey, maybe you’ll come up with another brilliant (and viable) idea to take advantage of the power of community-powered marketplaces, where everybody’s a micro-entrepreneur!
My first unique experience was the monorail, which sit atop these concrete tracks suspended above the roads of the city. It’s nice to be able to look out and see things when you’re traveling, which is my one complaint against subways. Being underground and in the dark is just not very exciting. Floating over the cityscape is. Granted, they do move far more slowly and these little monorails don’t take many passengers (not that they need to). I got in pretty late that night, so I just went to my hostel to rest. I only left to go next door to get something to eat back at the hostel.
The next day I went to check out Batu Caves. I walked through Chinatown to get to the bus stop and was driven out to the surrounding countryside. A huge golden figurine guarded the stairway leading up to the cave, no doubt some sort of religious being meant to protect the place. There is a plaza area before you approach the stairs and on the string of lights in that area perched dozens of pigeons. Many more were cooing on the ground and the entire place was speckled with their droppings. I climbed up 272 steps to arrive at the foot of a big open-air cave in the middle of the mountain. The cave was mostly empty except for some roosters and, well, cavernous. I went to the other end where another set of stairs led up to an area that opened up directly to the sky and held a shrine or worshipping temple. On that side were a cluster of monkeys, climbing up and down the walls of the cave and running up and down the stairs.
On my way down the mountain, a man brought out bananas and began to throw them up the stairs towards monkeys that were streaming towards him. They grabbed whatever they could and horded what they caught, then each found their own place to enjoy their food. Being hungry myself, I decided to get some lunch after I explored the rest of the grounds and took a spin around a much larger temple structure at the base of the mountain. My lunch was pretty simple, just pickled vegetables and rice with a salty, crispy wafer of bread, but it was filling and good for my exhausted body.
When I got back to the city, I walked around Central Market, where they had a lot of goodies for sale. There was a Fish Spa place where a lot of people were getting their feet nibbled at by the “doctor fish” that eat away your dead skin and leave your feet softer. I was tempted to give it a try, but decided that I would get around to it at another place. It’s pretty popular in some countries in Asia and at the least I knew there was a place back in Singapore that I could visit if I didn’t get around to it before then. Instead, I bought a little keepsake cloth art to remind me of the place and summer dress to wear when things got hot. I then wandered through Chinatown, too lazy to bargain and not really in a spending mood. I nearly stopped for a massage service but then decided against spending money and went back to the hostel.
At night, I went out to eat dinner and found myself in front of a huge shopping center called Pavilion. A beautiful fountain (Liuli Crystal Fountain) stands at the entrance of the massive collection of shops. I went inside for a stroll and found a lot of classy shops in a mall that’s probably twice the size of the largest mall I’ve ever been to before. There are something like six stories and the food court at basement level is four times as big as my own mall’s.
My final day there, I met with some people from the company distributing the Livescribe Pulse smartpen in Malaysia. I was treated to dim sum before we sat down to share our experiences and ideas. I was then taken to KLCC (Kuala Lumpur City Centre), where the iconic Petronas Twin Towers are. Yet another shopping center is situated at ground level there and I was shown the shops where the smartpen is being distributed. After a break for lunch (and sitting out a quick rainstorm), I was shown how the cloth art I purchased the day before is made. It’s called batik and they melt wax in these special “pens” and draw out designs on cloth. When the wax hardens, colors are painted on to the design and then the color of the cloth is “fixed” (not sure what that means or how it works). Cloths are then dewaxed and dried and the result is a pretty design with the white lines as areas where the wax was. Sometimes the wax is left on so the lines appear to be golden in color. A final pit stop at a chocolate-making factory was a bit less exciting since they wouldn’t actually let you view the process and only offered a huge shop with every flavor of chocolate imaginable (including durian and chili, for example).
