Presenting a clear comparison of multiple local and long-distance transport options by price and duration is no mean feat. But Waymate has even greater ambitions, allowing trip booking from within its service. Read more »
Berlin-based GoEuro has just closed a $4 million seed round with impressive backers. Like its neighbour Waymate, the firm wants to make it simpler and clearer to book a multimodal journey. That’s no easy task. Read more »
With 9 billion people set to live on the planet by 2050, sharing — enabled by IT — will be one of the most important tools to emerge and companies that build brands now will be well positioned to capitalize on this future. Read more »
This quarter Tesla’s production schedule came under fire, and share economy leaders Airbnb raised cash while Zipcar struggled with its membership model. Meanwhile the Indian power outage in July prompted questions about how the developing economy will power itself. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Taxi-hailing apps are already starting to crowd the U.S. market, but the German myTaxi may just have an edge. It already has 2.3 million users, for one thing, but it also has a clever plan in mind. Read more »
Owning physical items — cars, apartments, office space — will be increasingly inefficient for a global market. This is driving a greater interest in the share economy. Companies like Zipcar and Airbnb have paved the way here, but a host of startups have surfaced recently, too. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The Massachusetts Division of Standards says there is no accepted standard for using GPS devices to set the price of transportation, and Uber should stop operating in the greater Boston area until such a standard emerges. Uber says it will forge ahead. Read more »
Overall, between 2012 and 2017, more than 900,000 light-duty PEVs will be sold in the United States. But there remain hefty inhibitors to mainstream plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) use, including limited vehicle driving range and large battery packs, not to mention steep prices. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Good, but not great, growth has Wall Street punishing car sharing market leader Zipcar, which IPO’ed at $18 last year, zoomed to $28 and now sits at around ten bucks. But the question on many people’s minds is: What is Hertz doing? Read more »
The tragic story in which a man rented a car in Boston via peer-to-peer car sharing company RelayRides and wound up seriously injuring four people while losing his life, raised a familiar question for the share economy: Who’s responsible? Read more »
UPDATED: The tragic story, reported by The New York Times’s Ron Lieber last month, in which a man rented a car in Boston via peer-to-peer car sharing company RelayRides and wound up seriously injuring four people while losing his life raised a familiar question for the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The market was not in love with Zipcar’s Q1 earnings, which drove the share price down 10 percent this morning. Read more »
This quarter the EV market struggled to find its footing. Meanwhile, the smart-grid sector solidified and low-power technology proved itself important in the data center. Read more to learn what these news pieces and others mean for the larger space over the next few months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Zipcar’s decision last week to make a strategic investment in peer-to-peer car-sharing startup Wheelz surprised many. But Wheelz is another way for Zipcar to access a young demographic, college students, which it has been courting for some time as a way to build its relationship with ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Automakers have cautiously been exploring car sharing. The inherent conflict is that if more people share cars, fewer people will buy cars. But at CES this week Daimler said it plans to expand its car-sharing service Car2Go to 12 more cities this year. Read more »
Zipcar turned its first quarter profit in a decade recently. Zipcar’s CEO, Scott Griffith, answers questions about the future of the company and the $10B global car sharing market. Read more »
Car sharing company Zipcar says it plans to offer cargo vans — Zipvan — in a pilot project in San Francisco in response to customers showing an interest in renting large Zipcars by the hour for moving stuff around cities. Read more »
The momentum right now in cleantech is as much about connectivity and how it can drive energy efficiency as it is about advancing sources of renewable energy. And as the web and mobile connectivity change our consumer experiences, the opportunities to redefine cleantech are rich, and they are already happening. This research note examines the cleantech space in that context and analyzes the car-sharing, home-energy-management and smart-grid sectors and their relevant companies to see how connectivity will play into their future endeavors. Companies mentioned in this report include RelayRides, Opower, Silver Spring Networks and Nest. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The third quarter’s numbers are out from the Green IT section of GigaOM’s research subscription service GigaOM Pro. Solar is struggling, while IT-based systems like car sharing are soaring. Dig into the details with us. Read more »
The trials and tribulations of the solar industry dominated the third quarter as warnings about a storm of dangerous market forces in the industry finally reached an outcome with Solyndra’s bankruptcy. But not all was dismal for the cleantech industry during the quarter. Car sharing continues to reduce resource consumption, and much capital flowed to that sector. On the data center side of the industry, Google provided insight into exactly how much energy the tech giant uses, as well as the carbon footprint of its data centers. Companies mentioned in this report include Solyndra, Zipcar, Airbnb and Silver Spring Networks. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Two peer-to-peer car sharing startups have launched in the Bay Area in recent months (there’s at least five here now), and there’s four peer-to-peer car sharing companies in France. Here’s my cheat sheet of a dozen companies offering websites to facilitate car sharing among neighbors. Read more »
Auto giant GM is making its first move into car sharing by partnering with San Francisco-based peer-to-peer car sharing startup RelayRides, using its communications system OnStar. RelayRides also says it is in advanced discussions with GM about an investment. Read more »
Zipcar co-founder and former CEO Robin Chase gives her insights into the importance of branding and her experience creating the car sharing company Zipcar. Read more »
The relationship between car sharing companies and automotive manufacturers bears scrutiny, says GigaOM Pro analyst Adam Lesser in his weekly column. Read more »
Cleantech, meet mobile. The intersection between these two industries has grown over the past twelve months as companies increasingly look to use smartphones as a platform to enable their services. This trend will accelerate in the future as more and more companies realize that mobile phones ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Neighbor-to-neighbor car sharing startup Getaround has raised a seed round of funding of $3.4 million. Investors in the round include TechCrunch creator Michael Arrington‘s Crunchfund, Redpoint Ventures, General Catalyst, and a group of angel investors. Read more »
While many of you know this to be anecdotally true, here’s an official study on the trend: According to the University of California Transportation Center, car sharing leads to the reduction of personal vehicles owned. Read more »
Zimride, the startup that allows people to arrange shared car rides together, has been doing quite well with semi-private, paid networks since its 2007 launch. Now, the company is set to reach a much bigger audience with its first public platform and an in-app payment system. Read more »
Tech stocks took a beating on Monday morning, the first day of trading after Standard & Poor downgraded the credit ratings of credit agencies. At the same time, greentech stocks — from solar to biofuels to smart grid — fell alongside the weak macro economic news. Read more »
Skillshare is riding the P2P wave and has built a platform for users to offer real-world classes of any kind to interested students. It is expanding to San Francisco and Philadelphia later this month and is closing its Series A round soon. Read more »
The emerging web-sharing movement, which includes startups like Airbnb, RelayRides, and ThredUP, has its roots in the maturing way that people use the Internet and cell phones, and its future economy will rise around location, niche groups and capital-intensive, under-utilized and time-sensitive objects. For entrepreneurs looking ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With all the attention (not all of it good) that collaborative consumption companies like Airbnb have been getting lately, we’ve been mulling over some tips for entrepreneurs looking to either start one of these companies now, or hoping to make one of these companies succeed. Read more »
Car-sharing companies highlight the fact that people only use their own cars less than 10 percent of the time. But when it comes to boats, owners use them even less, or about two weeks out of the year — that’s according to startup Nautical Monkey. Read more »
Zipcar’s stock is still flying high after the car sharing company debuted on the Nasdaq last month. To the CEO of neighbor-to-neighbor car sharing startup RelayRides, Shelby Clark, Zipcar’s IPO has shown investors that there’s real money to be made in car sharing. Read more »
While car sharing company Zipcar had a smash hit debut on the Nasdaq last month, how big of a market car sharing will become is still unclear — particularly to rental giant Enterprise. Read more »
At Green:Net next week, we’ll be exploring how adding IT technologies to anything from the power grid, to data centers, to buildings, to lighting can lead to energy efficiency and a more sustainable consumption of increasingly-constrained resources. Read more »
Combine a year in which IPOs are back and car sharing is hot and what do you get? A smash hit success. Zipcar’s stock debuted on the Nasdaq Thursday at an eye-opening $30 per share, up over 60 percent from its offering price of $18. Read more »
With Zipcar’s expected public market debut today, the year of the car as a service (in contrast to personal ownership) has arrived. Internet and mobile technology is the platform for cars as a service in a world with increasingly constrained resources. Read more »
On the eve of Zipcar’s Nasdaq debut on Thursday, the car sharing company priced its stock at $18 per share late Wednesday, well above the previous estimated range of $14 to $16 per share, and raising $174.24 million, far above Zipcar’s original estimate of $75 million. Read more »
