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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There’s a website called Verichannel which styles itself as ‘The Jewelry Industry Search Engine’. It’s a B2B diamond trade/industry thing, but unlike regular search engines, you have to pay to access its services.

Anyway, one of their services is listing diamonds which have just been graded by major gemological laboratories including GIA, IGI, AGS and HRD. It describes these gems as “Fresh Diamonds“.

That sets up a fabulous contradiction – well, it does for me.

Diamonds are arguably the least fresh thing on the planet.

They have been around for a minimum of 990 million years and possibly up to 4.25 billion years (according to De Beers). On average diamonds are likely to be something like 3 billion years old – around two-thirds the age of the planet.

Diamonds are older than almost all life on Earth and older than the surface materials from which they are now ‘liberated’ by mining companies.

A diamond is not just the oldest thing you will ever own, it is the oldest thing which you will ever touch or even see (OK, apart from the sun and other stars).

So, not very ‘fresh’ then?

Of course, Verichannel aren’t referring to the primitive ancient history of diamonds. For them and for most diamond industry professionals, life begins with certification of the polished gem: that’s when the diamond’s attributes, its ‘4Cs‘, become defined by an independent third party. It’s these attributes which determine a diamond’s all-important value.

Despite the unmatched geological age of diamonds and the extensive stock which already exists in the trade, there’s still something important – for the industry – about the ‘freshness’ of diamonds.

When we see a diamond accompanied by a certificate which is a year or two old (they’re dated) we can’t help wondering, “What’s wrong with it? How come it hasn’t sold until now?” Many diamantaires will send an ‘old’ diamond back to the Lab just to get an updated (literally) certificate. They might not always get the same result, but that’s another story…

And of course diamonds are relatively scarce, especially in top colours and clarities and in larger sizes, so there is some advantage to be had by being first to sift through polished diamonds coming off the production line, as it were. That’s the advantage which Verichannel provides and explains its apparent success and rapid growth within the trade.

Perhaps consumers would also like to think that they are getting a crisp, new, ‘fresh’ diamond, but I’m not sure that they are quite so bothered.

‘A Diamond is Forever’ is a forward-looking statement linked to the idea that love is timeless – it will last forever – but it also carries the implication that a diamond has been around forever: it has a timeless past as well as future.

I think that flirting with the idea of diamond ‘freshness’ is risky. It undermines the core message of A Diamond is Forever, and promotes the idea that last week’s diamond is somehow better than last month’s or last year’s.

Oh, and one more thing. There is a much truer sense in which a diamond can be described as fresh: it could be a synthetic/lab-grown/cultured stone, which really might have been created last week. Such a ‘diamond’ comes without 50% of that A Diamond is Forever story: the past.

When I hear ‘fresh diamonds‘, that’s what I think about: synthetics. As if they weren’t a big enough challenge already…

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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 I was interested by some numbers recently produced by (or about) the world’s largest diamond mining companies.

In the diamond mining jungle there are two alpha-male gorillas: one name we all know – De Beers – and another name largely unknown to young couples out browsing for engagement rings: Alrosa, the (mostly) state-owned Russian diamond miner with operations in Yakutia, north-eastern Siberia.

Russian diamonds (c) Alrosa

Between them these two Lords of the Rings unearthed around 67 million carats of rough diamonds in 2010, and we reckon they sold about 70% of the world’s rough diamonds by value.

Much has been made - not least by the Russians themselves - of the fact that Alrosa produced more carats in 2009 and 2010 than De Beers: in 2010 Alrosa recovered 34 million rough carats whilst De Beers managed only 33 million carats.

Reports have breathlessly labelled Alrosa the “world’s biggest producer of diamonds” in advance of a possible 2012 flotation.

I find it ironic that one of the world’s most glamorous products is routinely talked about in terms of carat volume rather than dollar value or (even better), profitability.

Then again, whilst more sophisticated marketers of diamonds and diamond jewellery take fright at anything that hints at commoditisation, wholesalers of rough diamonds are not so squeamish.

But if we’re all being invited to buy shares in Alrosa next year then we’d better have a closer look at those numbers.

As we’ve seen, in 2010 Alrosa and De Beers mined a similar volume of rough diamonds, but De Beers posted rough diamond sales of $5.08 billion, with Alrosa trailing by quite some distance with sales of around $3.4 billion.

Profitability is hard to assess because we’re not really comparing like with like. Those Alrosa numbers include some sales of polished diamonds, and De Beers’ profitability is only expressed for the whole Group, which includes a further $800 million of sales from its non-rough diamond businesses: Element 6, De Beers Diamond Jewellers, and Forevermark.

But the difference between the two businesses is further highlighted by what we know (or is reported) about sales in the first quarter of 2011, just ended.

Alrosa reported Q1 sales of $953 million (again, including some polished diamonds), but De Beers has just completed its third monthly ‘Sight’ (rough diamond sales week) of the year, and one report estimated Q1 sales at $1.75 billion, almost double the Alrosa number.

Alrosa might have been digging up more carats, but on current form De Beers appears to be bringing home the dollars, and in the world of diamonds, it’s also got the ultimate brand name.

So which company would you buy shares in?

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We recently admired the film created for Ralph Lauren, and this time it’s Virgin Atlantic which has caught our attention and imagination.

The film’s actually been playing on our TV screens and in cinemas since October, and it marks something of a departure for Virgin because it’s their first global TV ad, seen here in the UK and also in key cities across the US (and for all we know, lots of other places too). The blurb tells us that it’s a £6 million campaign, and it looks to me like it’s worth every penny.

It’s titled “Your airline’s either got it or it hasn’t“, and here it is:

The film takes us on a metaphorical flight with Virgin Atlantic, immersing us in the experience of their service – on the ground and in the air – and it does so with lavish style and wit.

It calls to mind a classic opening sequence to a James Bond movie – something that I’m sure is entirely deliberate (the martini is also a nod to Bond, methinks).

The James Bond reference is glamorous enough in itself, but it’s also clever because the classic styling of the James Bond titles evokes a different era when flying was genuinely exclusive, glamorous and exciting – like staying at the Ritz, skiing in Gstaad, or playing roulette in Monte Carlo.

Today’s flying experience is rarely like that – flying is too mainstream and the security requirements make it onerous and not much fun – but this ad suggests that flying with Virgin Atlantic is different.

And that classic, timeless feeling has been laced with some nice contemporary touches. The music is Nina Simone updated by Muse. The very 21st century security requirements are not overlooked: they’re included with wit: the businessman in his spotty boxers… the camp little dance in the X-ray scanner. The modern iconic Gherkin building in London and the Statue of Liberty – equally iconic but from a very different era.

It hints at some of the functional benefits of flying Virgin: the red carpet experience before boarding, the menu, the in-flight entertainment, the flat bed in Upper Class, even the Rolls Royce engines… but it doesn’t labour these points; there’s just enough detail there to promise us a great experience, but not so much that we’re bored by ‘features’ rather than enticed by the prospect of feeling the benefits.

For me it is simply a wonderful piece of brand-building. The ad doesn’t give us any practical information about routes (beyond passing references to London, New York and Miami), or prices, or special offers for this weekend or this summer.

That would be tactical advertising, designed to sell tickets tomorrow. This is strategic work of the highest order, designed to build loyalty and to sell tickets at some point in the future – next year, in two years, three years… five years.

And it doesn’t just sell tickets for the airline, it works with other audiences too. Can you imagine running an airport and not wanting Virgin Atlantic to be flying to your airport after seeing this ad? Can you imagine being an aspiring airline pilot or stewardess and not wanting to work for Virgin Atlantic now? That’s rarely the brief for an advertising agency (in this case RKCR/Y&R), but it’s a lovely by-product of great advertising.

It’s a great ad because it creates desire. Right now it creates desire by making us want to watch it again (how many TV ads command our attention in that way?), and over time it creates desire by making us want to fly Virgin Atlantic.

And how’s this for confidence? Watch the film again and look out for the Virgin logo. It’s hardly there at all – it pops up on a couple of tail-fins but – astoundingly – there’s no logo at the end, no phone number, no web address. Brand-building advertising that barely mentions the brand: that takes some cojones!

The only part of the ad that might grate a bit (and I bet they had some arguments about it) is the last few seconds: the sign-off on the wing when we have a bit of banter about the identity of a stewardess who somersaults past.

This interventionist dialogue clearly breaks the spell & punctures the bubble, and it is a bit risky, but I think it reminds us that the airline is run (and staffed) by real people, rooting it in reality rather than Hollywood escapism, although ironically the lines are spoken by actors! The accents also serve to remind us that the airline is British – something that should be celebrated by us Brits (and is perhaps appealing to an American audience).

Your airline’s either got it or it hasn’t. We don’t know what ‘it’ is, but we get an idea. It’s something intangible and it’s definitely a good thing. It could actually be whatever we want ‘it’ to be, but it leaves the competition standing still. Can you imagine British Airways coming up with this? Never.

Virgin Atlantic continues to do something remarkable: it’s an international airline that manages to be a rebel and a challenger, not in a disruptive and anarchic way (that’s Ryanair), but in a positive and aspirational way.

Yep. I like this ad.

It’s not that I was desperate to discover the “people’s choice” awards winners in such luminous categories as Best Comedy Programme (Benidorm - seriously?) or Best Serial Drama Performance (i.e. soap star).

No, I was watching because among the many special guests at the NTAs were some of our lovely diamonds. Even if the red carpet at the NTAs is not exactly star-studded with A-list Hollywood celebrities, we like to think that we did our bit to add some sparkle to the occasion.

Susanna Reid and the rest of the BBC Breakfast team were up for the ‘Topical Magazine Programme’ award, along with ITV’s This Morning and, er, Loose Women. Susanna is a long-term friend of Diamondthrills – she was adorned by our diamonds on the most glamorous red carpet of them all last year at the Oscars in Hollywood – and she wanted to complete her look with some diamonds at last night’s awards bash.

So yesterday we kitted Susanna out with some of our fine diamond jewellery and sat back to watch the show.

Sadly the BBC team lost out to ITV’s This Morning (well, they get to promote the awards on ITV so I guess there’s a kind of built-in advantage there), but we spotted Susanna in the audience and the bright lights caught our diamonds beautifully.

Susanna wore our Aphrodite bangle (she loves it – she’s been seen out in it several times now), plus the Flora daisy-chain necklace and the Mariana zigzag earrings, all pictured below.

After the ceremony we asked Susanna how it went and she told us, “Brilliant! I got so many comments about the lovely diamonds, and it’s fabulous to be able to wear fine jewellery on a special occasion — jewellery which really is too expensive to buy.”

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.

Following last week’s review of our Top 10 Blog posts of 2010, it’s only fair that we turn our attention to some of the diamond stories that we think we’ll be writing about in the year ahead.

And so, in no particular order, here they are: our 11 predictions for diamonds in 2011…

1. Nobody will find a major new diamond mine. Of course we might be wrong about this, but the odds are that we’re right thanks to the law of averages: nobody has discovered a really significant diamond mine for many years now – nothing in the 21st Century – and it’s therefore highly unlikely that diamond explorers will hit the jackpot in 2011. But the lack of significant new discoveries doesn’t mean that new diamond sources won’t come on stream in the next 12 months, notably Lucara Diamond Corp‘s AK6 project in Botswana, expected to start production in late 2011 or early 2012.

2. Miners will find some big diamonds. They might not find any big new mines, but they always seem to unearth a few conkers from existing mines, and whilst big companies like De Beers can secretly hang onto a large diamond for months or even years waiting for the right marketing opportunity, the smaller diamond producers usually want to make a big noise about big stones because of the cash that such a find can generate and the good feeling that it gives to investors in the business – it’s great PR, basically. So look out for more of this sort of thing: Petra Diamonds’ 507 carat diamond from Cullinan in South Africa, and Gem Diamonds’ 196ct & 185ct pair of gems from Letšeng in Lesotho. Nobody can know the details yet, but it’s a safe bet that some exceptional diamonds will finally emerge from their billion year hibernation in 2011.

3. Exceptional diamonds will sell for exceptional prices. The miners will dig up some special rough diamonds, but it’s the polished gems which will achieve the loftiest prices in 2011, continuing the recession-defying trend seen in 2010 (see here and here for two pinks, and here for a vivid blue, all of which sold at auction in 2010 for more than $1 million per carat). We’ll see more record prices in 2011, including $2 million per carat for exceptional gems, typically for the rarest ‘fancy’ colours such as pinks, reds, and blues. And many of the millions being paid for such diamonds will come from the Far East, notably Hong Kong/China.

4. Watching De Beers will be fun. The world’s number 1 name in diamonds has had a fairly quiet couple of years since it got smacked by the financial crisis, but De Beers will once again be an interesting business to watch in 2011. For one thing, it will gain a new CEO. We don’t yet know who that will be, but previous boss Gareth Penny announced his departure last July so a replacement really ought to be in place before too long – keep an eye on the 2010 results announcement in February for an update. Those results will impress, with De Beers likely to post numbers that are back – or very nearly back – to pre-recession levels. A new CEO could take the company back to to its roots as a pure diamond miner & distributor (especially if he/she is parachuted in from key shareholder Anglo-American), or alternatively might look to develop the Group’s downstream and related businesses, i.e. De Beers Diamond Jewellers (the high-end retail joint-venture with LVMH), Forevermark (the Group’s diamond brand, currently available in Asia but reported to be planning its long-awaited entry to the US market), and Element6 (the De Beers’ business which develops & sells industrial diamond materials). Industry-insiders will spend much of 2011 obsessing about how De Beers chooses its rough diamond clients – a process it hasn’t been through since 2007 – and how it sells its rough diamonds to those clients (more via auctions?).

5. Lots more people will hear about synthetic ‘diamonds’ (and some people will buy them). This story has been waiting to happen for a number of years now, and 2011 might just be the year when it moves forward at pace. We’re not even supposed to call them diamonds, but make no mistake: we’re not talking about simulants like Moissanite or cubic zirconium (CZ) – things that just look (a bit) like diamonds. Synthetics are crystallised carbon, just like the gems that diamond miners dig out of the ground, but grown in a laboratory. They have essentially the same physical & optical properties as diamonds so they look exactly like ‘the real thing’ when set into jewellery, and special equipment is needed to detect them. So what’s new? Well, one of the companies that ‘grows’ synthetics recently announced that it was ramping up production of colourless gems and would sell them through the Internet in the US & Canada. Their website currently offers only a coy signpost coming attractions:

Much will depend on pricing and marketing of synthetics – consumers may not easily be persuaded to switch from the romance of the billion-year old natural product to something that was grown in a laboratory just weeks ago, but if they get the pricing and positioning just right, then these synthetics could become very popular. They might be helped along by ethical issues (perceived or real) with mined diamonds – political, human rights, environmental, etc (see point 9 below; the producers of synthetics already point to their ‘clean’, non-conflict credentials).

Finally on synthetics, a couple of wild-card predictions for 2011: Firstly, De Beers, under new leadership and via their ambitious Element6 business, could finally enter the gem synthetics market on the basis that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em (and if the positioning of synthetics versus natural is all-important, then who better to lead that positioning than the daddy of all diamond marketers – De Beers? Note also point 1 above: no new diamond mines, demand exceeds supply… why miss out on this as an opportunity for growth?). Also, look out for celebrity endorsement of synthetics in 2011, for example at the Oscars, and for that endorsement to make reference to those ethical issues re. the natural product (Zimbabwe?). Whatever happens, we expect to be updating this story once or twice during the year ahead.

6. The Royal Wedding will trigger an avalanche of coverage & commentary on bridal customs, including jewellery. We’re really sticking our neck out here: April’s Royal Wedding will generate lots of coverage: shock! But seriously, you can be sure that hundreds of journalists & bloggers will look for an angle on the story, and almost every bridal and jewellery business, and many others besides, will try to find a way to promote their products & services with some spurious connection to the blue-blooded nuptials. It’s already happening of course, especially with regard to engagement rings because that story has already been & gone, but it’ll come around again, and there will be host of other stories about the diamonds and jewellery being worn on the Big Day by the bride, The Queen, Camilla, etc… And yes, we’ll probably join in.

7. There’ll be some diamond anniversaries in 2011. Well, that’s not much of a prediction – of course there will be some diamond anniversaries this year – and we’re cheating a little bit because we’re really looking ahead to 2012, but we know that 2011 will begin the long run in to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 (coupled, rather neatly, with the London Olympics). And in a way this has already begun with the release of the Oscar-tipped film: The King’s Speech, about King George VI whose death led to the accession of QEII in 1952. So 2012 will be the really big year for diamond anniversary happenings, but we reckon that 2011 will be a worthy warm-up act for the main events next year.

8. People will cover consumer objects with diamonds. We know this about 2011 because it happens every year. No sooner has some cutting edge consumer product been launched than somebody decides that what the world really needs is a lux version, and the lazy shorthand for lux is to plaster an object with diamonds and/or gold. We hoped that this sort of showy bling-up veneering had been consigned to history by the global financial meltdown of the last two years, that luxury had evolved to become more subtle and experiential, that people had more taste and discretion these days, that fashion had moved on, but it seems we were wrong because 2010 saw another outbreak of ill-advised novelty diamond encrustation (diamond iPhone, diamond iPad, diamond football) and we expect 2011 to provide more of the same. Oh dear. But let’s hope somebody can do something truly original and exceptional with diamonds in 2011, like this.

9. Diamonds will have ‘issues’. Diamonds are expensive and emotive objects, and for that reason (among others) they can attract the wrong sort of attention, especially when they’re found in parts of the world where democracy and the rule of law are weak, where diamonds become embroiled in corruption & smuggling, exploitation & human rights abuse, violence, even war. And so it was in Sierra Leone and Angola and DR Congo (Zaire) in the past, and Zimbabwe in the present, and who-knows-where in the future. In 2011 the festering wound of Zimbabwe is unlikely to heal, a fact that will continue to hurt the diamond industry, the image of diamonds, and, more importantly, many Zimbabweans. The tragedy of Zimbabwe is made worse by the fact that it’s home to one of the world’s most highly prospective diamond deposits at Marange.

Look out too for diamonds to have issues in 2011 as a result of unrest in the Ivory Coast (‘the world’s biggest remaining source of conflict diamonds’ according to this recent report), environmental issues (the environmental cost of mining in some very remote and beautiful places such as the Arctic, the ocean, the desert…), and lastly in connection with the San bushmen in the Kalahari (a taste of this can be found here).

10. Trust in (some) diamond certificates will diminish. This is a long-running story within the diamond industry but has yet to make much impact in consumers’ consciousness. We’re not suggesting that there will be a seismic breach in confidence in diamond certificates in 2011 (although that is possible), just that trust will be chipped away in an incremental way, bit by little bit. We think that consumers will become frustrated with the inability of most diamond certificates to tell them anything about where their diamond came from or the journey that their diamond took from mine to finger. We think that consumers will read about synthetics and diamond treatments and may not believe that their diamond certificate is a reliable guard against non-natural status (that’s a bit unfair on the diamond labs, but hey, perceptions matter). We think that consumers will continue to be confused by the variety of available diamond certificates, and by the plethora of competing standards and impenetrable jargon that they use. And we think that occasional news of alleged corruption in diamond labs might break out of the industry press and make it into the consumer press, possibly doing considerable damage to confidence in diamonds and their certification.

Why are we telling you this if it puts the diamond industry in a bad light? Well, this is a Blog about diamonds and we want to bring you news & views from the world of diamonds, even if sometimes those are ugly stories rather than warm fuzzy cuddly ones. That way you can make your own mind up. Buy a diamond, or don’t, it’s your call; we just want to help you to make informed decisions about diamonds in 2011.

11. People will discover new ways to enjoy diamonds.  OK, this is the plug for Diamondthrills, but it’s also a more general point. We think that the experience of luxury continues to evolve on a trajectory that shifted about two years ago when the financial crisis hit. Acquisition is still important for most people and many occasions, but we’ve learnt over the last 18 months that there is also a market for the experience of fine diamond jewellery: just being adorned by it; you don’t always have to own it to enjoy it. And this seems to fit with a more general trend towards sharing of assets, fractional ownership and ‘convenience renting’: see also Zipcar, Fractional Life, the London Bike Hire scheme, INeedtoPark (short term car parking space rental), CamShare (a car & bike share scheme in Cambridge), and WhipCar (borrow your neighbour’s car, basically).

So we reckon we’re ‘on trend‘ and we expect to see growth in our business in 2011, plus we’ve got some great ideas about how to expand and bring new services (and new jewellery) to our customers. Last word to a great article on trends for 2011 which we found just this week: “for many consumers, access is better than ownership“.

That’s it! That’s how we think 2011 will shape up in the world of diamonds and we look forward to bringing you lots of news & views during the year. Watch this space to see how accurate our predictions turn out to be…