Attention people of the Uniiverse! Do you have questions about the Sharing Economy? Thoughts on the future of collaborative consumption? Any type of feedback regarding our platform? Well now is your time to shine!

Uniiverse is organizing a Twitter chat called #ShiftToShare every Thursday from 3 - 4pm EST, launching May 31st!  There will be plenty of opportunities to SHARE your opinions with other members of the Uniiverse and learn from those immersed in the sharing economy. To get involved, simply follow along at the hashtag #ShiftToShare, and if you want to get in on the conversation yourself just be sure to include the hashtag in your tweet! 

The chat will be centred around a specific topic each week, and will include a variety of thought provoking questions to give everyone involved some perspective, and to encourage discussion and debate surrounding the sharing economy. Anyone and everyone is encouraged to ask questions, SHARE insights, and post interesting articles and ideas. Even if you don’t want to contribute, we still urge everyone to follow along at #ShiftToShare to broaden your knowledge. See you on Thursday!

The Uniiverse is full of Extraordinary People like… Kirstie Smallman

Kirstie has a positive energy that draws you in and fills the room, which she brings into everything she does.  As a blue belt Nia Movement instructor, she teaches in the Cambridge, Paris and K-W area. Check out her interview after the jump!

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How many of your Facebook friends do you truly know in real-life? How many of them do you see on a regular basis?  

Uniiverse can spark real-life interactions between you and someone new, but we also want to help you stay closer to your friends and family.  Your personal network is extremely important, and we’re happy to announce a new Uniiverse feature that allows you to share brilliantly with the people who matter most.  Introducing (drumroll please…) listing invisibility cloaks! (just kidding…sort of) You can now create private and semi-private listings on Uniiverse.

Here’s how it works.  When you create a listing, you can now select exactly who can see and book it.  You can choose for it to be:

• available to the general public 
• available to just your Facebook friends
• available to select people (unlisted and password protected listings)

Uniiverse is even more powerful now that you can share with specific people.  Sometimes less is more.

We’re excited to see (and not see) what ideas you come-up with using this powerful tool:

• Invite friends to a party or get-together. Split the cost of drinks, food or entertainment. They can pay you directly through the site!
• Invite friends to a fun weekend away. Going on a ski trip? Split the cost of accommodation and transportation. Ride-share! 
• Create a private service that only your friends or loved ones can book. Remember giving mom coupons when you were a kid?  Go high tech this year and offer her access to a yearlong Mother’s Day helper! 
• Share an item or space with only your friends (you might not share certain things with the whole world, but you’d share it with friends, maybe for a cheaper price, or even for free!)

Now, to drop some science: the average Facebook user has 245 friends – but that’s more than what’s known as the “Dunbar Number”.  Research from the University of Oxford suggests that there’s a natural limit to the number of relationships humans can process: about 150 people.  With Uniiverse, you can now build mini sharing economies with the people who matter to you.  Or, share with the world and bring new people into your circles!

We’re very excited to make this option available.  You can share what you want, with whom you want, when you want!  Keep the Uniiverse close, and your network even closer.

Do you want to help create something that revolutionizes how people interact in real life? How about building a product that will improve the lives of millions?

Uniiverse is building the world’s platform for collaborative living. Our vision is to help people reconnect and share on a scale that has never been possible before.

We’re looking to hire skilled back-end and front-end developers to join our core team! Our approach is lean, user-centric, iterative, fun and innovative. We believe in the Joel Test. We strive to bring happiness, inspiration and creativity amongst our team.

The back-end of our tech stack includes Ruby, Rails, MongoDB, Elasticsearch and AWS. The front-end of our tech stack incorporates lots of JavaScript, jQuery Backbone.js, HTML5 / CSS3, HAML / SASS. These are connected using JSON, PJAX and AJAX. We’re strong believers of automated testing (e.g. RSpec, Cucumber, Jasmine). We love our parallax landing pages, and 404 page.

If any of these delectable tools strike your fancy, and you’re passionate about bringing a bit of magic to the world, visit our jobs page at https://www.uniiverse.com/jobs.

If you or someone you know is a talented software developer, please get in touch! We’re giving out a referral bonus of $2,000* if the person you refer is hired.

* Payable for full time employee hires (i.e. contractors and freelancers excluded), for this particular dev position. Does not apply to candidates with whom Uniiverse was already in contact.

Sharing: More than just a pre-school lesson

In kindergarten we were taught the importance of sharing and its purpose has become much more than making friends and avoiding playground tiffs. Our capacity to share will have a huge impact on our future, and recent trends are showing a shift in the right direction. The sharing economy revolution is under way!

The Problem

The gap between rich and poor is growing and accelerating; the environment is suffering, and as a result happiness is withering. It can be argued that all of these issues can relate in one way or another, to our capacity as societies to share assets. Are we sharing enough to make a difference?

Perceptions of consumerism are being re-evaluated. Does having more stuff truly make us happier, or does it hinder our time, space, and bank accounts? Society has put ownership and ego above access, experiences, and convenience. With recent economic and environmental struggles, this attitude is no longer efficient.

The Solution

The term sharing economy is soon to become omnipresent. It argues that sharing assets, such as our belongings, space, skills, time, and resources, can have not only economic and environmental benefits, but can also increase happiness, overall well-being, and create stronger communities. Sharing is an activity that can solve so many problems and provide so many benefits at once.

Several reports have shown there is a desire to share within our society on a larger scale but most are not good at it or don’t know how. Technology and the social web are going to play the most dominant role in the sharing revolution. Our online sharing habits have made people more open to the idea of sharing off-line.

Uniiverse is providing a solution for those with a desire to share with the new platform for collaborative living. Sharing in the physical realm is now made easy. As a person-to-person marketplace for services and activities, Uniiverse enables anyone to share what they have to offer, or discover what they wish to find.

• Do you have a guitar that sits around collecting dust? Share it
• Are you a yoga enthusiast looking to teach your passion? Share it
• Is there extra room in your car for your drive to New York? Share it
• Can you teach people how to cook? Share it
• Does your garden have extra room for someone to plant on? Share it
• Have a parking spot that you never use during the day or at all? Share it

The shift from hyper consumption to collaborative consumption is happening; are you going to be a part of it? Let’s make a dent in the Uniiverse together.

What will Ü share?

We are now accepting applications for Marketing, Social Media and PR interns from any major city in the world. Take part in making a dent in the Uniiverse.

The Uniiverse Ambassador Program is an exciting opportunity to develop business, marketing, PR and social media skills. You will enter our rotation program and do all sorts of exciting activities! You will also get the chance to express your own creativity, design and implement your own strategies! From guerrilla marketing, to creating social media contests, to learning about PR, we promise you won’t get bored!

If you are looking to work for an exciting start-up and gain valuable experience then we want to hear from you! We are looking for passionate people who are excited about our vision for collaborative living and the sharing economy.

For more information and to apply to join our team, visit: www.uniiverse.com/internship

We’ve launched!

In the increasingly virtual world of today, people have lost the habit of meeting up with friends for a coffee to talk over the day’s events. Instead, friends reconnect with our smartphones. Ever wondered why, with over 500 Facebook friends, some people still feel lonely, spending most of their waking life in front of a screen? You are not alone. Here is where Uniiverse, the world’s first platform for collaborative living, comes in. 

Uniiverse is not a social network. Doing away with status updates and virtual friends, we take an offline approach with users. The reason? We don’t want to see you glued to the screen, your face an eerie pale-blue against the dim light it emanates. Instead, we want you to be outside, feeling the sun on your face, developing bonds with real people, and enjoying a collaborative lifestyle. If you want to gain further insight into our vision, watch the manifesto video.

Uniiverse is the only platform that allows anyone to share any kind of real-life activity or service, and, to make this even better, it’s absolutely free to post. Users can specify what they are offering, the price they want to charge (could be free), and when the event or service is happening. People can then instantly discover, book and pay for the listing through the website. This way, Uniiverse empowers anyone to become an entrepreneur, meet like-minded people, share their passions and, most importantly, live a smarter, happier, more sustainable lifestyle.

With Uniiverse, opportunities are endless:

• Organize a jogging group to join you on your morning run, a tapas party or a yoga session
• Share your knowledge by offering a service, such as a photography workshop, a language lesson or a sushi-making class
• Use your free time efficiently, and make extra money by posting your availability for errand running, babysitting, or pet walking
• Share the objects you rarely use, such as a guitar, a drill or a bike
• Rent out your space when you are away, or offer an unused parking spot
• Organize a ride-share to save money on gas, while helping the environment

Uniiverse promotes trust and creates a safe environment for sharing experiences offline. The platform enables people to get a full understanding of each other’s trustworthiness by showing social proximity (mutual friends), ratings, reviews and participation across categories.

Through this platform, Uniiverse is resurrecting old marketplace behaviors, such as sharing, on a scale that has never before been possible. We are building the sharing economy, where access and experiences are more important than ownership. This movement will help the environment, alleviate global financial issues, build stronger communities and make you smile, even on a Monday.

The sharing revolution begins today. Courtesy of Uniiverse.