Digital Rails

Time to put it on digital rails.

One evening this week, my partner Arturs Zantmans needed some screenshots of Rently, the system we are developing. I quickly took a few screenshots of the mobile and desktop versions. Arturs replied that he had “fallen in love with the system”—his exact words.

That phrase made me look at the system from a slightly different angle…

I began thinking about the strange twists of fate. For two decades, I spent my time putting a very particular kind of object—books—on digital rails. Now I am doing the same for cars. Like books, cars have positive associations for most people. There is something fascinating about working with things that people are naturally drawn to.

The paradox is that both books and cars are surprisingly poorly digitised. You would think cars, as modern machines compared with printed books, would be different: the amount of electronics packed into them is off the scale. Yet fleet management processes are, frankly, still in their infancy…

Continuing the analogy with the book world, I realised that I did not know whether a single global standard for describing vehicles exists. And if it does exist—which seems unlikely—why does no one use it?

So one innocent message gave rise to a whole set of analogies, associations, parallels and all the questions that came with them. I will keep digging.

In the meantime, I have a question for you. We need to update the screenshots of our system on the website’s home page: one for the desktop version and one for mobile. Which ones would you choose?