Bianca Bartz
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Superstar

The Guardian interviewed Jeremy Gutsche, founder of Trend Hunter, in a piece published this week on future trends.

Here’s an excerpt from James Harkin’s piece, The shape of things to come:

Peer-to-peer lending

“Jeremy Gutsche, a Toronto-based trend-spotter who runs the website Trendhunter.com, is a good example of a new breed of trend-spotter who collects insights by cultivating an online community of trend-watchers around the world. In keeping with the egalitarian ethos of the web, Gutsche argues that one of the key financial trends of 2008 will be the growth of person-to-person lending exchanges in which borrowers and lenders come together directly on the web and cut out the banks. Some of these lending operations use an eBay-like auction in which the lender who is willing to provide the lowest interest rate gets the borrower’s loan; others are for people who already know one another but who want someone to help formalise the loan arrangement. A good example of the latter is CircleLending, an American firm in which Richard Branson’s Virgin USA recently acquired a majority stake. Much the same model of ‘peer-to-peer’ lending is slowly working its way into the charitable sector. Outfits such as Kiva.org, for example, put potential ‘social investors’ together with small businesses in the developing world, who promise to send back regular email updates on how the business is doing.”

Check out some more Trend Hunter coverage in traditional media:

Financial Times Cites Trend Hunter for the 24th Time

This weekend, Trend Hunter was cited in the Times for the 24th time in 2007.  This year, we were also cited in The Free Post, The Gazette, Canadian Business, The Business Journal, The Economist, Economist.com, The Globe and Mail, MTV and thousands of online publications.  In fact, The Bangkok Post r… [More]