I’ve just been to New York for 24 hours – one night in a hotel, one day of meetings, and straight back to London this morning on what I suppose I must call the ‘red-eye’ from Newark.

So what’s all this about coffee and hotel rooms?

Well, it all has to do with wi-fi (some of you may know where this is going…).

Here’s the deal: my hotel room, which came with a price tag of several hundred dollars, required me to go through a tedious login process and to pay a $10 fee to access their wifi network (which worked terribly, by the way, and had some sort of daily upload/download Mb limit).

But if I popped downstairs to a coffee shop just across the street (well done Gregorys Coffee, by the way) I could get a coffee for $3 and automatically pick up their excellent wifi service – no logging on, no fee, and all the bytes I could eat to go with my delicious coffee.

So how does this happen? How does a $3 coffee come with perks which you don’t get with a $500 hotel room?

I think of it as a market failure resulting from ‘groupthink’. The people who run coffee shops know that they are in the hospitality business – they’re not just selling coffee – they’re selling a place to catch up on the news, chat with friends, read a book etc.

These days that’s very often done virtually: we catch up on the news by going online, we catch up with friends through social networks, we download a book to read on a Kindle.

The hotel business hasn’t quite made that imaginative leap yet (of course there are some honourable exceptions), and old-fashioned businesses tend to follow industry norms, so if most hotels charge for Internet access, then, well, most hotels charge for Internet access. Groupthink, see.

Plus of course hotels used to make very tidy sums of money by charging exorbitant rates for phone calls, especially international calls, but that lucrative little sideline has been killed off by mobile phones and by applications such as Skype. In the hotel business, it makes sense to recover some of those lost revenues by charging for Internet access.

But let’s for a moment imagine that Internet access is an essential service, like say, water, or light or heat.

Can you imagine a 5-star hotel imposing a surcharge if you switched on the air-conditioning? Would they require you to feed coins into a meter to keep the lights on, or to get hot water from the shower? That’s what happens in a $5 campsite – you must pay extra for a hot shower – but in a $500 hotel room? Of course not, it’s unthinkable.

And the crazy thing is that it absolutely must cost the hotel more to deliver hot water to your shower, or to run the air-conditioning all night, than it does to provide an Internet service, even via wifi which has to be distributed throughout a large building.

And yet they get away with it. Why? Because they can, because it’s just accepted as normal practice in the industry even though a rational analysis shows that it’s barmy.

But most of all they get away with it because too many of us are too lazy to vote with our feet and to go elsewhere. We’re lazy, and we’re tied into corporate loyalty schemes, and we can’t be bothered to complain except by ranting about it after the fact – perhaps in a Blog.

I started out by calling it market failure. But it’s just as much about customer failure – it’s partly our fault, and we should demand better.

PS – In the end I did complain, not just in a Blog but at Reception as I checked out. But my issue wasn’t that it cost $10. I got my $10 back because the wifi reception was so poor, and I went across the street to spend my hard won dollar bills on Gregory’s most excellent coffee (with excellent free wifi).

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When we cooked up the idea of Diamondthrills a couple of years ago, that problem made our brains ache.

Our business model involves handing over thousands of pounds worth of diamond jewellery – items that are rather less traceable than a hire car, for example – to people who we don’t know, people who (in most cases) we never even get to meet face-to-face.

We solved the problem in a fairly conventional way by talking to insurance experts and by turning to established credit & identity checking agencies. We obtained a licence from Experian and we use that licence to check out customers’ identities (we ask for basic personal information: name, date of birth, address).

So far so dull: we’re behaving like a bank or a mobile phone company, asking our customers some mildly intrusive questions and running some bureaucratic checks.

Sometimes we add to the paperwork by asking for copies of passports, driving licenses, or household bills, just as banks and mobile phone companies do.

Luckily our customers don’t seem to mind too much; they accept the need for some checks, and I even remember one bride telling me that she would be worried if we weren’t asking for this sort of information.

Anyway, I’ve been spurred into blogging about this by a fascinating piece that I read this week on Emergent by Design – The Bank of Facebook: Currency, Identity, Reputation.

The piece makes a bold proposal, that identity is a currency, and that Facebook will evolve to become a ‘utility for identity‘.

Facebook users create a ‘virtual vapour trail’ about themselves online, made up of comments, photos, videos, information about their status, interests, holidays, careers, etc.

Much of this information is sensitive and personal, and in its own way it can create and confirm a person’s identity.

Just as credit & identity checking agencies use banks, mortgage lenders, credit card companies, electoral rolls, and court records to help their clients make decisions, so companies (and government agencies?) might in the future use Facebook profiles to help them to flesh out profiles of customers or applicants for credit (oh, and applicants for jobs).

Take a simple example: you apply for car insurance but your Facebook profile includes video of you hod-rodding up & down a desert road, or you regularly lament the fact that you’re accident prone and you’re always crashing into things with your car. Might the insurance company not factor your Facebook exploits into their calculation of your premium? I would.

As I read the article I realised that we’re actually doing this already. When we carry out an identity check on a potential customer we normally also perform a broad Internet search, and sometimes we find out things about customers that help us to make decisions about whether or not to lend them our precious diamonds.

These things can be positive (for example publicly available information about the job that a customer does, such as working for a prestigious law firm in the City), or perhaps negative (for example, we once found that a potential customer had been in trouble with the police and it was reported in the local press).

At Diamondthrills we do use Facebook (we have a Facebook page), and perhaps we’ll start routinely to ask customers whether they’re on Facebook. LinkedIn is also good for this purpose because it can confirm the professional background (or otherwise) of a customer.

Twitter’s less suitable because people often hide behind pseudonyms on Twitter, and it’s generally more anonymous and transitory – information is harder to find once the Twitter timeline has moved on.

The most amazing thing about all of this information is that it’s (more or less) publicly available. Identity & credit checking agencies need all sorts of special permissions and security in order to access data about us from banks and other institutions, but we can all search for a name on the web and most people are pretty cavalier about making their Facebook & LinkedIn profiles public.

We need to establish trust between companies and individuals. Mostly this means that individuals need to trust companies, so the marketing and PR people invest time and money in building trust through advertising, PR, and nowadays through social media.

But sometimes (including in our business) we need to establish trust the other way – we need to find out more about our customers in order to trust them with our expensive jewellery. Any business that offers credit of some sort has the same need.

We can do this in a conventional way, through Experian for example, but we can also do it in a very new way, through Facebook, LinkedIn, and through other information that’s available online.

Here’s our prediction: agencies will spring up that specialise in this exact thing (in fact, they probably already exist). There will be companies that can produce a report on someone’s identity and background purely based upon their ‘virtual vapour trail’ across the Internet.

Included in an individual’s ‘trust audit’ could be the personal recommendations and referrals that are now common on sites like eBay – a seller with 100 positive reviews will have a higher rating than one without any, or one with negative reviews.

Algorithms can be developed which rate us according to how many friends we have on Facebook, connections & recommendations on LinkedIn, followers on Twitter, how much influence we have according to our re-tweets (actually these things already exist: see Klout and PeerIndex).

This is powerful information about us which is just waiting to be harnessed in a more comprehensive and systematic way. Sure it’s not 100% accurate or reliable, and the system will be open to abuse and manipulation, but that’s a risk with any kind of information or system, and the wider the net is cast the more reliable it’s likely to be.

So, if you contact us asking about borrowing some of our jewellery, please don’t be surprised or offended if we ask you about your Facebook page or your LinkedIn profile, as well as your full name and address.

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So three months into our experiment, how’s it going?

Well, we’re mobile and we’re surviving: we haven’t felt the need to rush out and replace the BMW 1-Series which we sold at the start of the year.

I’ve used Zipcar a few times, but they’ve unhelpfully removed our local Zipcars so they aren’t nearly as convenient as they were at first (they’re merging with their rival, Streetcar, so they’re ‘optimising’ the new combined fleet, which is nice, but less than helpful for the time being…).

In fact I tried to book a Zipcar over the weekend for a family trip up to North London, but our local Zipcar parking spaces are empty and forlorn, with a ‘To Rent’ sign hanging over them. We ended up getting two buses and a taxi, which cost about the same as a Zipcar would have cost for the afternoon.

We feel a little duped by Zipcar, like holiday home owners who’ve had their cheap flight withdrawn from the Ryanair schedule, but I’m hopeful that they’ll sort out their fleet with Streetcar and we’ll be Zipsters again soon.

We haven’t used Whipcar yet because none of their vehicles are quite close enough to us or large enough to accommodate two adults, one toddler, plus all the toddler’s stuff. But I believe Whipcar’s fleet is growing fast as new people sign up, so our choice should increase.

And we’re still finding new ways to get around without wheels in our garage: last week I finally got around to signing up for the Boris Bike hire scheme in London (or the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, as it’s officially known) and in this dry sunny weather that’s been a great way to get around central London.

But here’s the key question: are we better off without wheels?

Absolutely, and here are a couple of charts to prove it.

First, our monthly spending on getting around, including cars, trains, Oyster cards, etc.

The chart shows 2011 vs 2010 for each month, January to March, and for 2010 the numbers include the actual depreciation of our BMW.

The high figure for January 2010 includes the major annual costs of insurance and road tax, but after January the monthly costs settled down a bit.

In 2011 we spent more than we expected to in March because we were house-sitting for some friends in Kent, so we spent a lot of time & money commuting back & forth on the train.

Conversely, 12 months ago we had just had Ella – our daughter born in early February 2010 – so we weren’t really going anywhere much and our spending was below average.

So how does that look cumulatively over the first quarter of the year? Here’s how:

By this time last year we had spent over £2,500 (including depreciation) on getting around, whereas this year that number is just £704 – a saving of around £1,800, or £600 per month.

And even if we strip out depreciation we’ve saved almost £1000 so far compared to our travel costs in 2010.

Looking ahead, we’ve got the Easter break coming up and I’ve already booked a hire car for the long weekend, plus as the summer kicks in we’re going to want to get out of town for weekends more often, so we’ll be busily juggling our transportation options in the months to come.

What’s all this got to do with diamonds?

Well, by trying a life without wheels we’re opting into something of a burgeoning movement – the idea that we don’t always need to buy things, to own things; the idea that we can share, hire, borrow, be more flexible and adaptive, less encumbered by possessions – especially expensive possessions: expensive to buy, expensive to insure.

It’s all sounds a bit hippy-trippy, eco-loony, but saving the planet is less of a motivation for us than saving money and space.

It’s accidental environmentalism.

We’ve freed up our parking space and our cash flow, and we get to pick & choose exactly what we need for different situations: a quick zip across town or to the supermarket is a different requirement to a week-long road trip, and we can choose a different vehicle for each circumstance. If the sun is shining we can even pick up a convertible!

You can call it rentalism or collaborative consumption or probably a few other things, but the point is that ownership is less important than access.

Diamonds? Well, we can share them too. You can pick and choose something sparkly for different occasions and just hand back the jewellery once the candles have been blown out and everyone’s gone home.

Let us worry about buying the expensive gems, about insurance and secure storage, about the fickleness of fashion.

Oh, and if you own some diamonds or other fine jewellery and you want to share it with others, earning a tidy little income in the process, then check out our innovative Jewellery Share scheme.

Meanwhile, I’m off to the office, riding a Boris Bike of course.

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Photocredit in Blogroll page: onelowerlight.com

So we keep an eye out for others who are doing similar things but with different products, and in a few cases we don’t just observe what they’re up to, we dive right in and get involved.

Which brings us to Zipcar.

My wife – Fiona – and I sold our car last weekend.

We live in central London and we use public transport for most of our daily comings & goings (and we do a lot of walking). We only used our car for occasional trips outside of London and for visits to see friends in odd places like France and Belgium.

We’ve got an 11-month old baby girl (Ella) who comes with lots of heavy, bulky accessories such as prams and travel-cots, but even so, we did the sums and we reckon that we can hire & borrow vehicles when we need them and still come out ahead compared to last year.

So, at Fiona’s suggestion, I’m going to document our switch to vehicular ‘rentalism’ over the coming months, and I’ll let you know (via this Blog) how we’re getting on, especially in terms of saving money.

Here’s the starting point: we worked out that owning a car last year cost us £7,101. Now most of that was depreciation (we owned our last car – a BMW 1 Series – for almost exactly a year, so we’ve got a very accurate read of the cost of depreciation), but other expenses included insurance, road tax, maintenance, petrol, London’s congestion charge, and parking.

Of course this year we’ll still have to spend money on some of those things, or substitutions such as taxis, but I’m very confident that we’ll spend a lot less than £7,000 on getting around in 2011.

We plan to use Zipcar, and I’ve also signed up to Whipcar (‘borrow the car next door’ – the peer-to-peer version of Zipcar). And I’m sure that we will do the more conventional hire car thing to escape from London for weekends and holidays.

So how was our first Zipcar experience?

It was excellent. Our little Zipcar – a VW Golf with the unlikely name of Gloshen - was waiting patiently for us in its allocated space just a few minutes’ walk from our flat.

It had a clever locking mechanism that was opened by my shiny new Zipcard (pictured —>>), and then I was away, rolling down Bermondsey Street and into the London traffic.

Gloshen helped me to ferry some stuff over to Fulham to put into storage, and then we took a trip to B&Q to get a couple of things for the flat.

I had the car for about 4 hours and it cost me £23.80 (there’s also an annual membership fee of £50). No need to worry about the cost of insurance or the Congestion Charge or even petrol - they’re all included!

It feels very liberating – so far – to be without wheels. We know that we can get a car when we need one, and we can get just what we need for particular occasions: a small hatchback to zip across town, a larger estate to take Ella and her voluminous luggage on holiday.

And there’s another plus to a life without wheels: we can rent out our unused parking space — yet another underused asset which has a value in an Internet-enabled marketplace.

So far so good with our experiment with vehicular rentalism. We’ve written recently about the idea that access is better than ownership, or collaborative consumption, or whatever you want to call it.

I reckon it’s the future. Well, a part of the future, anyway.

Watch this space…

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.

It’s a time to glance backwards to take stock of the year just ending and to look forwards to anticipate what the New Year might bring.

And so in our own little way we’ve taken a look at the last 12 months (our first full year at Diamondthrills!) and tried to pick out a few highlights from the year.

We spent at least 10 minutes trying to develop a complex algorithm – perhaps worthy of Google’s search methodology – which would rank the year’s high points,  but then we remembered that we’re supposed to be on holiday and complex algorithms don’t mix well with holidays, so we settled for a childishly simple measurement: popularity of our Blog posts, as measured by Page Views using Google Analytics.

And so here are the Top 10 Diamondthrills Blog Posts in 2010, counting down from 10 to 1 for maximum suspense…

10. Record Prices paid for diamonds in Sotheby’s Hong Kong sale – this was just one story from what became a regular theme during the year: record prices being paid for exceptional diamonds, in this case a 6.43 carat Fancy Vivid Pink diamond ring which fetched US$7.7 million – or over $1 million per carat – in prosperous Hong Kong. Recession - what recession? It seems nobody told the Chinese about it.

9. Hestia tiara features in State Opening of Parliament – in May’s UK General Election The People spoke – well, we mumbled something unintelligible – and so our politicians had to work out who was going to run the country. Once the coalition was cobbled together HM Queen opened Parliament with all the usual pomp & ceremony, plus one important new constitutional accessory: our stunning Hestia diamond tiara. The Queen wore her own jewels, but we reckon she probably clocked our tiara and made a mental note to rent it for a certain Royal Wedding in 2011. We await Her call.

8. A Pretty Woman gets her diamond thrills – this one was all about Julia Roberts, Richard Gere, a fabulous diamond necklace and a 1990 film which needs no introduction. Julia got to wear the necklace but it was on loan so she had to give it back afterwards. Did that make being adorned by the diamonds any less enjoyable? Judge for youself: our Blog post features the video clip, and Ms Roberts doesn’t really need to do much acting when she sees the necklace…

7. Diamondthrills jewellery at the Oscars – certainly a highlight for us early in 2010, when Susanna Reid of BBC Breakfast rented a number of jewellery pieces from us and took them off to Los Angeles where they adorned her as she presented live coverage for the BBC from the red carpet at the Vanity Fair party immediately following the Academy Awards ceremony. We like to refer to our jewellery & our hire service as ‘Red Carpet Diamonds’ so it was great to see them on the most glamorous red carpet of them all.

6. De Beers sparkles in first half of 2010 – De Beers had something of an annus horribilis in 2009, at least in terms of its financial results, but it administered some pretty tough medicine and bounced back strongly in the first half of 2010, with production, sales, and net earnings all dramatically up (we have graphs!). We expect the strong performance to be carried through to the full year for 2010 [more on this in due course...]. However, the stellar results were somewhat overshadowed mid-year by surprise news that De Beers CEO, Gareth Penny, had resigned.

5. Rima Darwash video documentary features Diamondthrills jewellery – in the summer we worked with photographer Rima Darwash on a video documentary which showcases her superb photography as well, of course, as our diamonds. Shot at the Dorset Square Hotel and with cinematography by Amish Solanki, we love the video and we plan to use some of Rima’s photos in a refresh of our homepage early in 2011.

4. Sex And The City and the big black diamond – the SATC2 movie came & went without, frankly, making much of an impression on 2010′s Best Film listings. But without even seeing it our diamond radar detected one curious detail: the gifting (yuk!) of a 5 carat black diamond by a chap (inexplicably called ‘Big’) to Carrie. Apparently fans can buy an ‘identical’ ring for $10,000, but we don’t think $10,000 buys a 5 carat diamond of any colour, so caveat emptor, SATC2 fans.

3. Hope Diamond to get a new setting for 50th anniversary – this post actually dates from August 2009 but it was popular in 2010 because the story moved on a couple of times. The original post told of a competition to design a new setting for the legendary Hope Diamond, followed by another piece about the famous gem going naked for the first time, then another post earlier this month revealing the Hope Diamond in its stunning new setting. Hats off to the Smithsonian for milking this story for all it’s worth! Look out for further coverage in 2011 when the diamond is returned to its original setting…

2. Our diamonds dazzle in the Dragons’ Den – well, we’re very relieved to see this one near the top of the list because certainly it was a highlight of 2010 for us. In September we popped up on primetime BBC television in the hugely popular Dragons’ Den programme, attempting to raise some finance for Diamondthrills. We didn’t walk away with the Dragons’ kids’ inheritance, but we did get some great advice and had a memorable experience (and yes, the publicity was helpful too).

1. Smash & grab jewel raid at London’s Royal Exchange – for all the glitz and glamour of the world of diamonds, sometimes it’s the grubby world of crime which attracts the most interest. The top spot in our 2010 Blogroll bears this out: it’s a goood old-fashioned jewel heist story from August, when robbers used sledgehammers to smash their way into the De Beers and Omega boutiques at the Royal Exchange in the City of London on a Saturday night. Initial reports excitedly put the haul at £4 million, but this was later revised to a paltry and unimpressive £380,000. We loved the quote from the De Beers boss who said that this violent raid was “yet another reminder of the timeless allure of diamonds“…

So that’s it: our meticulously-researched Top 10 Blogroll of 2010.

We hope you enjoyed reading about the ups & downs of the diamond world on our Diamondthrills Blog over the last year, and we look forward to bringing you more diamond news and views in 2011.

In fact, we’re going to be so bold as to predict some of the key diamond-related stories that we expect to be covering over the next 12 months: next week we’ll publish our list of 10 (or maybe 11…) things to expect in the world of diamonds in 2011 (here they are…).

So watch this space, and in the meantime, Happy New Year!

As it turned out, we didn’t get investment into the business in the Den, but we’re not going to let a thing like that hold us back!

Anyway, at least the Diamondthrills pitch was easy on the eye and — as Evan Davis’ voiceover put it — added a touch of glamour to the Den.

Our model for the day, Amanda, was adorned by four of our most beautiful pieces of diamond jewellery.

Amanda wore: the Hestia tiara, the Lakshmi earrings, the Aphrodite bangle, and the Eros pendant.

All four pieces are pictured below.

That’s a total of around 600 diamonds, with a total carat weight of about 21 carats, and a retail value of more than £50,000.

We took along a few other pieces too – there was lots of interest in our Flora daisy-chain necklace – but despite all our dazzling diamonds the Dragons could not be persuaded to part with their cash.

Would I do it again?

Yes – with a more aggressive business plan and some more aggressive answers to the Dragons’ questions, I would certainly venture into the Den again.

Does the fact that the Dragons didn’t invest make jewellery rental a bad idea?

Absolutely not!

We continue to generate a lot of interest from brides, from other weddings suppliers, from the press, and also from women going to parties, business events, charity balls and other special occasions.

We’re confident that hiring fine diamond jewellery is the great new way to experience the luxurious thrill of diamonds: we give you access to hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of stunning diamond jewellery in a flexible and affordable way.

If you saw the show we would love your feedback – please comment below!

Boris has had the builders in, installing bike stands for London’s new cycle hire scheme which launched on Friday.

For those that don’t know, the idea is that you can borrow a bike for a quick trip across town and then leave it in one of around 400 docking stations.

So the scheme offers riders convenience (you can pick up and drop off bikes almost anywhere in central London), security (you don’t have to worry about it being stolen once it’s in a docking station), and affordability (for regular short journeys it costs almost nothing).

Plus of course you get a warm fuzzy glow because it’s an environmentally friendly way to get around and it’s good for you physically (apart from the traffic fumes, perhaps, and the constant menace of London’s van & truck drivers).

But what have Boris’ bikes got to do with diamonds?

Well, the scheme caught our eye because it’s pioneering a new way of enjoying a fairly traditional experience: riding a bike.

And we like to think that we’re doing the same thing with diamonds.

Just like Boris’ bikes, we offer convenience because you can pick and choose what to wear and when to wear it on a pay-as-you-go basis.

In addition to convenience we offer flexibility: you can select a piece from our jewellery collection to suit a particular outfit or event (note that Boris’ bikes can’t do that: all the bikes are the same model!).

And in a way we offer the comfort of security because you only have to look after our jewellery for a very short period of time, whereas if you own the jewellery you need to make sure it’s secure all of the time, perhaps by keeping it in a safe, and of course it’s going to pump up your insurance premium year after year…

Lastly: affordability. Perhaps you can actually afford to go out and spend many thousands, or even tens of thousands, of pounds on fabulous diamond jewellery. But why should you have to? If you just want to dazzle with diamonds on special occasions, then why not simply pay a modest amount to borrow what you need when you need some dazzling adornment?

But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s some feedback received from a customer just yesterday, “Thank you so much for the use of the diamonds at such a reasonable price, there would have been no necklace in any jewellery shop which would have sparkled so beautifully at that price!”. Quite.

So bravo Boris! We like your cycle hire scheme for London, and we applaud the fact that it’s spreading the convenience and flexibility of the pay-as-you-go model.

It’s been called rentalism, and we’ve looked at other examples in the past.

It fits in with other trends such as fractional ownership, and although it’s a phenomenon that’s probably been accelerated by the recession over the last couple of years, we think it’s a way of experiencing diamond jewellery (and bicycles) which will outlast the recession and become steadfastly mainstream.

So Londoners: if you’ve got a special occasion coming up you might or might not choose to get there by borrowed bike, but we invite you to be adorned by borrowed bling.

Well that’s something like 1 in every 14 people on the planet, which is jolly impressive.

But it got me thinking… what other organisation has 500 million active members/participants/customers?

And it turns out, in my totally unscientific and unresearched analysis, that there are quite a few such organisations.

The first one that occurred to me is the Indian Railways. With a population of around 1.2 billion, I expect that most Indians have at some time used their extensive railway system, and when you add in the numbers from previous generations over the last 100+ years, the total number of unique users of Indian Railways must be getting on for 1 billion or more (although the inter-generational thing is a bit of a cheat: they can’t really be described as ‘active’ users – the phrase used by Facebook).

Next: France. Huh? Yes, really, and here’s my dodgy logic: France is the most visited country in the world, with an annual number of international arrivals of around 75 million people.

So in less than a decade, France as a ‘product’ will be experienced by more than 500 million people (in addition to the actual French, obviously).

Granted: that’s not 500 million unique users because lots of visitors return to France time and again, but I reckon that there must be at least 500 million people around the world who have visited France at least once.

Not convinced? OK then, how about this one: Islam. Actually, not just Islam but also Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, all of which are estimated to have at least 500 million adherents.

What else? Well, there must be some products that are consumed or experienced by hundreds of millions of people, right?

Now here I really don’t have the time or the patience to do much research, but I’m confident that Coca Cola falls into this category (4 billion drinkers, apparently), plus I think McDonald’s, who claim to serve more than 47 million people around the world every day, so that would ratchet up to 500 million quite quickly.

My guess is that over 500 million people have driven or ridden in a Toyota vehicle, fitted a General Electric bulb, smoked a Marlboro cigarette, or made a cup of Nescafé.

And in the world of entertainment, more than half a billion people probably have seen a Disney or Tom Cruise movie, or bought a Beatles or Madonna record.

Every day more than 500 million people must use Microsoft software or search Google, and just this month the best part of a billion tuned into the FIFA World Cup final.

So 500 million users for Facebook merely signals the arrival of the social network as a Division 1 global brand alongside many others with which we are all familiar.

But there is something special (and slightly scary) about Facebook which sets it apart from all the others…

How many of the companies and organisations that I’ve mentioned above know your name, where you live, your date of birth, your family connections, your interests, preferences and passions, your network of friends and the friends of your friends?

We don’t log on and update our personal details every time we buy a Coke or eat a Big Mac, but we do just that when we visit Facebook.

Think about the power of that: our most intimate details willingly submitted to a private company.

Imagine the value of all that information to advertisers, including the companies mentioned above.

And imagine that the database of users features the wealthiest and most connected, the impossible-to-reach but influential and important youth market, and millions of people in major emerging markets such as India.

That’s the power of Facebook, and that’s why 500 million users is an important milestone.

Who knows where it will end?

Oh, and one last thing: please do check out our Facebook page.

People tell us that we’re breaking the mould by renting out fine diamond jewellery for special occasions, and it turns out that there are some other lateral thinkers out there.

So how about renting … a Christmas tree?

Yes, that’s right.

With impeccable eco-credentials it’s now possible to rent a ‘living’ Christmas tree. So that would be an evergreen tree in every sense of the word green, then.

We’ve spotted a couple of companies that do this, one in California that’s the subject of a news report you can watch below, and a second company which is based in Dorset called Trees-for-Rent (www.treesforrent.com) and has the snappy slogan, ‘A tree is for life…‘

The trees are supplied planted into pots with their roots intact, and they need to be watered so that they stay alive and can be returned to the wild (well, to the supplier) after the Christmas season.

The festive trees even come with identifying tags so that they can be rented year after year by the same family, so you can watch them grow up with the kids!

And best of all, it means that these trees avoid the worst of all post-Christmas fates: they don’t end up lying dead and abandoned in laybys and carparks in the first week of January.

It’s a great way to make the most of a natural product by recycling it for use on multiple special occasions.

Just like renting diamonds!