Wouldn’t it be handy to know that if your PC crashes on a Sunday night your neighbour at no 5 could restore your work?
In exchange you could babysit his twins come Friday; he gets a night out, you make your Monday morning deadline, and the best part — neither of you spends a cent. DIXIV’s soon-to-be-launched SkillShare™ cellphone app will change how South Africans and ultimately the world lives — one street at a time.
Combining the collaborative charm of yesteryear’s suburbs with the fast pace of modern urban living, SkillShare™ provides users with instant access to community expertise. The mission statement of its developing company, DIXIV, is to “create the future we want to live by developing creative solutions to life’s challenges”.
When DIXIV questioned suburbanites about difficulties they face, two were common to all. South Africans are feeling the economic pinch and these days everyone seems pressed for time. As a result we’re living increasingly unbalanced, isolated lives and most of us don’t even know our neighbours’ names.
DIXIV’s creative solution: save time and money by trading skills with your neighbours (and socialise at the same time).
How it works
Leveraging off the GPS capabilities of smartphones, SkillShare™ plots the skills of a suburb’s residents online, creating a virtual skills currency. Skills are allocated SkillPoints™ according to the amount of time they take to perform and can be traded for those of equal value.
Residents register their skills by pinning them to SkillShare™ Burb View. All users need to do is hold up their phone within their suburb, type in their needs and wait a few seconds for a reading on who has the necessary wrench and time to help them.
Added SkillShare™ features include: searchability by service ratings, a security alarm that syncs according to residents’ routines and a weather monitor that alerts stay-at-home residents to working neighbours’ washing lines when at rain risk.
Don’t be surprised if one day very soon, instead of waving from a distance and swiping your credit card, you’ll be on a first-name basis with your entire neighbourhood, trading cakes for gardening, plumbing for babysitting and yoga lessons for haircuts.
To read more about this clever little app visit www.dixiv.com
For more information, visit www.designindaba.com or follow @designindaba on Twitter