Gustavo Palacios, our Global Curator based in Bogota, Colombia, shares with us a collaborative lifestyle guide for his country.

Colombia, known as a great cultural centre in South America by travellers, now also has a growing entrepreneurship ecosystem. The country has signed trade agreements with more than 40 countries and is now becoming very attractive for foreign direct investment.

Here are just some examples of the long list of interesting startups in the collaborative consumption space right now.

Transportation and Mobility

Rides

EasyWay is a company committed to environmental care. It offers an alternative sustainable mobility option—carpooling, promoted through a virtual platform. It started in Bogota and is already planning to expand throughout the whole country.

Bikes

The bike sharing project in Bogota is called “Pedaleando por Bogota” (Riding bikes in Bogota). On its first phase, the project has reserved 20 km from the oldest and most recognized avenue of Bogota, for the exclusive use of pedestrians and public bicycles available for shared use. Through prior filling out of a simple online form, citizens can approach one of several counters available, to get free access to city bikes equipped with a GPS based monitoring system. Up to now, more than 100K people have already subscribed and enjoyed the city bikes. Next phases will expand the project to other city areas. Some other cities in Colombia are already planning to implement similar projects.

International Player

Uber has presence in 2 cities in Colombia, Bogota and Santiago de Cali.

Money

Lending

Lenddo is the first online platform that helps middle class people to use their social networks to build a credit reputation and use it to access loans and financial services.

Wikibanco is the social network of the financial system. It is a tool to compare all products and services from banks, facilitating search and feedback, helping providers to improve their customer service and be more transparent with users. It also allows to book appointments with the banks, directly from your mobile.

Crowdfunding

LittleBigMoney is a space for collaboration between individuals, promoting and allowing creation and execution of projects with social or environmental impact.

Donaccion.org is the first ‘crowdfunding’ social platform in Colombia, where individuals and companies can donate from COP$ 20,000 to social causes in the country; promoted by local organizations that create positive impacts in their communities. Donaccion.org provides visibility to these initiatives and channels the economic contribution of solidarity Colombia

Housing

International player

Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world — online or from a mobile phone. Colombia has 1.000 ads of rents space and properties in Airbnb.

Stuff

MercadoLibre.com, the largest platform for internet purchases and sales by Latin American buyers and sellers meet to exchange information and conduct e-commerce with a wide range of products and services at a fixed price or bidding.

AlaMaula is the Latin American online media for promotion and marketing of new and second hand products and services. AlaMaula offers listings of jobs, housing, cars, goods, services, and more … alaMaula is a network of local online classified sites for users of Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking Latin America. This is an eBay company.

Co-working and Makerspaces

HubBOG is the first “Campus For Startups” of Latin America that integrates Acceleration Academy, Co-working and Investment in one space with the aim of promoting entrepreneurship based Information Technology (IT).

AtomHouse is a space for entrepreneurs, hackers and innovators. More than just a co-working space, is a community with everything you need for world domination.

Co-logistics

MiCarga offers excess capacity of vehicles so people can take full advantage of the compensatory load. They created an intelligent platform that enables users to optimize their freight rates.

Education

Tareasplus is the largest collaborative platform of educational videos in Latin America to learn math and science, business, technology and languages. In tareasplus you can learn and practice with multiple courses created by teachers specialized in different disciplines. Tareasplus includes even complex topics such as differential equations, how to create a website from scratch or simply reinforce concepts of arithmetic, you only need to use the search engine to discover our courses and tutorials.