I spent some time over the holiday period catching up by reading old-fashioned things like newspapers, looking for new innovations in business and predictions for 2011.

A couple of things caught my eye and sent me scurrying off around the web to find out more, because they had real relevance for the business of Diamondthrills: renting out fine diamond jewellery.

We know that what we do is a bit different: we give women the opportunity to experience diamond jewellery in a new way. They don’t need to spend £thousands buying it, or wait for Mr Perfect-&-Wealthy to come along and buy it for them. They don’t need to own it forever – paying insurance premiums every year and worrying about locking it away in a safe.

Our customers don’t need to fret that it’s gone out of style or how they’ll feel about it if Mr P-&-W turns out to be not so perfect or permanent. They don’t need to feel pressured into wearing the same old piece time and time again because it was so damn expensive and they really ought to get value for money out of it.

But none of this is news to us.

We’ve been doing this for over a year and we know enough about our business to know that it’s a good idea, that we offer women flexibility in their jewellery choices, enabling them to be adorned by something extraordinary that’s otherwise out-of-reach, to experience the joy of wearing fabulous diamonds without the responsibility & commitment of owning them.

Plus, our customers seem very happy, and that’s all the proof that we really need to know that we’re onto something.

But we still get a thrill when we read stuff which makes what we do make sense in a wider context, when journalists and trend-watchers produce articles and buzzy new phrases to describe our model, or something close to our model. Over 18 months ago we came across ‘rentalism‘ – it’s an ugly word, and to be honest it hasn’t really become mainstream since then, but the basic idea of renting instead of owning has certainly gained ground.

So what did we find in a newspaper which triggered all this? It was in The Times: a business piece by Alexandra Frean (here, £) about a start-up that’s ‘putting the social networking generation in the driving seat’.

The article told the tale of RelayRides, a company that allows neighbours to lend cars to each other. They call it “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Carsharing”, which pretty much sums it up. The piece claims that the 50 car owners signed up to the scheme in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are taking in an average of $250 a month, with some making as much as $700.

Well, that sounds just peachy. And there are car-sharing schemes closer to home too: have a look at WhipCar. Apparently it took Zipcar around 6 years to reach 1000 vehicles… it took WhipCar just 6 months.

So these models around renting and sharing and fractional ownership are spreading and growing, but they’re also evolving further away from old-fashioned ownership.

If Version 1 of this idea was about companies owning physical products and renting them out, then Version 2 is about Peer-to-Peer (P2P) exchange of goods and services – the idea that we all own under-used goods (we use cars just 8% of the time that we own them, apparently, so they’re unused for 92% of the time – what a waste!), and we can share those goods with others who need them at a particular time and in a particular place, with the Internet acting as the matchmaker between those who have and those who need.

Not only does this make financial sense in these straightened times (save money by borrowing stuff and make money by renting stuff out!), but it’s also well aligned with the idea that we all probably need less clutter in our lives, and it ticks some green eco–friendly boxes too, à la freecycle.

People are doing this with their cars as we have seen, but also with their spare rooms, parking spaces, and all manner of things from buggies to bulldozers on generalist sites such as Zilok.co.uk.

And then we stumbled upon Trendwatching.com’s predictions for ‘11 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2011‘, which we referenced in a post last week. Number 11 in the list was ‘Ownerless’, which can be summarised by their statement, “for many consumers, access is better than ownership”.

So it’s official. We’re on trend – this sort of thing is going on all around us and it’s getting bigger and bigger.

We want to do some new things in 2011 – more of which soon – but for now I want to leave you with two videos which sum things up rather well.

First up is a film from Collaborative Consumption (much better than rentalism, we reckon). You can visit their site to find out what they’re all about, but here’s their take on this phenomenon:

And lastly, here’s a clip of writer and entrepreneur Lisa Gansky, in which she talks about “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing“:

Lisa makes an interesting point in the video above: that the first ten years of the Internet was about sharing of digital stuff: photos, music, video (and the written word, of course), but that now the time is right for the same sort of thing with physical goods.

Well, we’re fully signed up to all of the above, and in a sense we saw it coming three years ago when we first conceived the idea of Diamondthrills, so we like to think that we’re riding slightly ahead of this wave and we aim to prove that in 2011 by bringing some new ways of sharing to you.

Note: the ‘better things easily shared‘ graphic on our Blog page is taken from The Mesh by Lisa Gansky. Thanks to Lisa for letting us use it.