>By bringing in utilities like electricity, gas, and water, and setting up “proprietary containers,” the company hopes to turn parking lots into reconfigurable community hubs. Lots might be “formatted” to include mobile kitchens, beer gardens, retail pop-ups, vertical farms, auto-body shops, medical services, rental stations for electric vehicles, and so on. “We have these pods, which arguably are not pretty, but they’re functional. They can support any kind of application,” Ari Ojalvo, the C.E.O. of Reef, told me. “If you want to put a grocery store in there, put a grocery store in there. Laundry, put laundry.” Ojalvo compares his company to Apple: just as the App Store allows developers to create and sell iOS-based tools and services, so Reef provides infrastructure for parking-based businesses. “Apple uses connectivity as a platform; we use proximity as a platform. We allow third-party applications to stand on this proximity platform and get closer to consumers,” he said.
Okay so they are buying real estate and renting it to businesses.
That's a perfectly sound business plan. But I think we are just through the fucking looking glass with this language about "platforms" and "apps" applying to regular old businesses which involve humans being in a physical space.
If replacing the term "retail space" with "proximity platform" isn't the most inane tech bro crap I have ever heard in my life...
"parking-based businesses"...excuse me am I having a stroke?