Drawing the Line Between ‘Peer-to-Peer’ and ‘Jerk’ Technology
Peer-to-peer commerce, with high-tech companies building apps and managing transactions between individuals, is disrupting long-stable businesses like apartment rentals, car and taxi services, and food delivery. Many peer-to-peer companies fall into a legal grey area, and local governments around the country are scrambling to figure out just how to regulate them.
But while Airbnb (apartments), Uber (car service), DoorDash (food delivery), and their brethren may be pushing the boundaries of what makes an acceptable commercial enterprise, they didn’t leap right over those boundaries.
In contrast, Monkey Parking and likely its competitors—ParkModo, Haystack Parking, and Sweetch—did. And they’ve landed themselves right in the center of what is beginning to be called “JerkTech,” or #JerkTech, a term coined by Josh Constine at TechCrunch. Reservation Hop, a startup that created a peer-to-peer market for restaurant reservations, is in that spot too. After much pushback and a legal slap for Monkey Parking, both startups last week said that they will “pivot” —a Silicon Valley term that usually means scrambling to figure out how to survive as a company.
More: Drawing the Line Between ‘Peer-to-Peer’ and ‘Jerk’ Technology - IEEE Spectrum