Andreas Randow, Founder of StudioShare.org

StudioShare.org aims to…
dramatically lower the cost of a photo shoot or audio production by making community-owned photo and audio rentals as easy as possible. Everything on http://photo.StudioShare.org and http://audio.StudioShare.org is bidirectional. You can make money on equipment and space you already own, and gain access to the resources you need at a much lower price point.

The idea came …
from seeing all these professional studios sitting idle most of the time. The photo and audio industries are known to be equipment-heavy and every single production is completely different. So bring in everything you need from your community. It’s already there, just under-facilitated.

The easiest way to explain StudioShare.org is…
to say that it revolutionizes the way photo shoots and audio productions are being done. You can get everything you need whenever and wherever you need it.

The biggest misperception about StudioShare.org is…
that it is all B2B. By no means. In fact, StudioShare.org enables people without much business experience to create their own little rental business and StudioShare.org takes care of the entire business process.

The best moment so far is…
when the first studio owners called us to tell us how much they love the service and asked us what they could do to help.

The biggest challenge to overcome is…
turning this nationwide business into an international one. Multi-language interfaces, different currencies, and different time zones make our life a little harder than anticipated. The first thought was to have a different StudioShare.org site for each country or region but now we are working on one truly international platform.

A unique factor about StudioShare.org is…
that it is actually derived from a software development kit called TSA Core. We’ve developed this kit to help people who have great ideas in the Collaborative Consumption space but don’t have a software development team. You can read more about this on SharingAuthority.com.

Another example of Collaborative Consumption I admire is …
if somebody had told me five years ago that I would go car-less, I would have said: “That is never gonna happen”. It did. I love Zipcar and use it at least once a week. All StudioShare.org members also get a special discount on Zipcar.

In the future StudioShare.org will…
be an international platform and will probably be run as two separate business units. We will add locations (such as churches or old factories) to the photo platform to give photographers even more choice when it comes to finding a good place to shoot. We’re also striving to collaborate with schools and universities so that every student in the photo and audio fields is on the platform.

Link

POSTED IN: CC Pioneers and Protagonists / FOR: December 1, 2010