Self storage

One of the most perplexing trends I’ve seen is self-storage facilities that rent people space to store their things.  Working at U-Haul I Saw first hand the demand for storage.  Renting trucks was expensive for the company.  You need to maintain them, fix them, tow them when the die, and rotate them out of the [...]

Join the nation of freelancers

Join the nation of freelancers.
Gen Y makes a mark and their imprint is entrepreneurship
There is no doubt about it, we’re a nation of entrepreneurs.  We have always been founded on the small business and it’s one of the many things that makes this country great.  It drives immigrants from around the world to come to [...]

VMware: Good product, uncertain times

VMware: Good product, uncertain times.
Like we’ve said before here at Crowd Rent, we love virtualization.  We’d virtualize everything if we could.  I’ve never used anything but VMware and while it has it’s shortcomings, it’s amazing.  I couldn’t imagine managing a data center without VMs.  It’s like the first time you used broadband.  Could you go [...]

Challenge No 3: Another day, another 26,000 jobs lost – Jan. 13, 2009

Challenge No 3: Another day, another 26,000 jobs lost – Jan. 13, 2009.
Wow, I feel like a total downer!  I’m constantly posting about job loss and other economic issues but there’s a reason for it, the economy is all doom and gloom.  It is the very reason we started Crowd Rent.  You look around your [...]

We’d virtualize the whole world if we could…

A true value

So I’m in Cheyenne Wyoming for a few days working for a client.  Cheyenne isn’t such a bad town even if the population is about the same as ASU.  It’s a pretty miserable day though, mid 30s, overcast, and it’s tried to snow all day.  All in all the people are good and the hotel [...]

Dollar Stores doing well?

Value-seeking shoppers boost Family Dollar; shares on the rise – MarketWatch.
You know why dollar stores are all the rage right now?  Sure a nice car or a name-brand purse are fashionable but eating and having a place to live are pretty cool too.  People are just trying to keep their heads above water.  The economy [...]

Wal-Mart CEO Sees Long-Lasting Shift In Consumer Spending

Wal-Mart CEO Sees Long-Lasting Shift In Consumer Spending.
Even Wal-Mart admits that consumer spending habits have changed and probably won’t go back to the way they used to be.  Gone are the days of buying until we’re blue in the face.  Where we had to have it all and the fuller our garage/basement the happier we [...]

Rentalisim, the new Consumerisim?

Some people bemoan the death of consumerism as the downfall of our economy.  That if we, as a people, are not willing to spend all our money to acquire things we’re causing this economic strife.  Now let’s set the record straight, we here at Crowd Rent are not against consumerism.  We buy things too!  We [...]

How do we power local rentals?

We say Crowd Rent powers local rentals.  And that may be true but what powers Crowd Rent?  Free software!  There is not a single piece of software that cost us money.  We use the NetBeans 6.5 IDE to develop the code, we use MySQL as the database for all of this, Ruby on Rails to [...]