We wrote about Waymate and its rival GoEuro last month – both companies are trying to navigate the world of travel comparison services, but Waymate is taking the extra step of letting people book journeys directly from the service, rather than sending them off to the train or plane operators’ websites.

As we noted at the time, this is difficult from a data point of view, due to the complexity of the various services on offer. There’s an even greater barrier, though, in the unwillingness of many operators to let a third-party service handle their bookings.

Despite these hurdles, Waymate’s iOS app is now out and its website is fully up and running. In this initial version, users cannot book journeys directly from the app – instead, they can select a journey then email themselves a link, allowing them to complete the booking on Waymate’s website. The service is also yet to be internationalized, meaning long-distance journeys need to originate in the Eurozone and local journeys can only be searched within major German cities.

The chief benefit of Waymate is the ability to compare all sorts of travel modes: planes, trains and automobiles (car-sharing schemes and taxis are included), as well as metro services and buses. Price and journey duration are clearly displayed on a visual timeline. Sensibly, Waymate has scrapped earlier plans to have two separate apps for local and long-distance travel: this one folds in both ideas.

“Now the task is to expand the app and the website with thrilling new features — especially in social networking — and to internationalize,” Waymate CEO Maxim Nohroudi said in a statement. “In short, we want travel planning to be completely simple and joyful.”

It’s an ambitious aim and one that (as far as I am aware) no-one has been able to achieve so far. It would be no surprise to see the app that finally pulls it off come out of Europe, as the fragmented nature of the market creates a substantial need for a service like this. Now let’s see how far Waymate’s rivals dive into this space.

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But, as two Berlin-based startups called GoEuro and Waymate show, change is underway – a new generation of heavily algorithm-driven travel site promises to make it much easier to compare different types and combinations of transport type, from air to rail to bus, and perhaps even to book multimodal journeys through a unified portal. GoEuro announced the closure of a hefty $4 million seed financing round today, so let’s talk about them first.

Big solutions need big money

GoEuro’s idea is this: one search will show you your travel options between all European cities, towns and villages, including air, rail, bus and car rental. Customers can then choose which combination of these transport modes suits them best, based on criteria including price, convenience and total travel time. A closed beta should launch in a few weeks’ time and, all going well, the full service will open up a few weeks after that.

The seed round was led by Battery Ventures, which previously invested in travel and accommodation companies such as Hotel Tonight and GoGoBot, and Hasso Plattner Ventures, was set up by the SAP founder. Others involved include ITA Software’s Dave Baggett and Global Eagle Entertainment’s Jeff Sagansky – this is a serious crowd and, within Europe alone, GoEuro has a serious problem in its sights.

As GoEuro CEO Naren Shaam explained to me, travel across Europe can be particularly complex partly due to the sheer number of operators in those dozens of countries:

“The financing is mainly going to scale up the technology to integrate some of the partnerships we already have lined up into our platform. Within Europe the number of travel options is huge: train and bus infrastructure is as good as air. And with deregulation, there are a lot of travel providers across Europe.

“Air has a standardized platform – TXL is Berlin Tegel airport [whether you're booking from] Sydney or wherever, but train stations are different. The magnitude of integration is far different from building an air search platform. That requires resources that are able to tackle this challenge.”

A platform such as this would be a big step for Europe’s fragmented travel market, but at the same time GoEuro is still hewing to the traditional model of providing comparison transparency, then sending the user off to the operator’s site to actually book the various legs of their journey (Shaam said this was based on deep links, though, so the user should then be part-way through the booking process when they land on the operator’s site).

According to Shaam, GoEuro is holding back for now on taking that extra step because of the complexity it would entail, in terms of both infrastructure and customer service requirements. One country may allow electronic ticketing, for example, while another may not. Leaving the booking to the operator also removes the need to deal with what happens in the event of a partial cancellation – there, the customer will have to engage with the travel operator, much as they do now.

The next step

Waymate does not have $4 million in the bank – it’s currently angel-funded by Günther Lamperstorfer, co-founder of the IT services firm CompuNet – but that doesn’t stop it from having even more ambitious plans than its neighbor does.

Right now, Waymate lets web users buy tickets for Deutsche Bahn (DB), the German national rail operator. That in itself is a minor achievement – like many such companies, DB is notoriously tight-fisted with its station and timetable data, and not many startups have been chosen as approved partners with the ability to handle DB bookings (UK rail-booking outfit Loco2 trumpeted a similar deal back in January). These bookings are made on the intermediary’s website – customers don’t need to go through to the operator’s site, even to pick up the operator’s frequent traveller points.

But that’s only the start. Waymate wants to apply the same principle to two different use cases: intercity travel, of the sort GoEuro is involved in, and local travel. The company will soon produce apps for both purposes, and late this year or in early 2014 it wants to combine both into a single service – one app to book them all, if you like. As CEO Maxim Nohroudi told me when we spoke a month or so ago:

“We are working on integrating flights, but then we thought, let’s not forget about the door-to-door case. One you arrive in Munich, for example, you want to know the local transport options – all public transport, plus car-sharing, plus taxi.”

Waymate intends to allow the same kind of user criteria as GoEuro will allow. Now, there are some multimodal transport booking sites out there, but they tend to come from the transport firms themselves, particularly the rail operators, making their neutrality doubtful. The big issue is getting access to all the necessary players as a neutral party. In Waymate’s case, that was only made possible by winning an EU Smart Mobility Challenge last year.

And even then, Waymate CFO Tom Kirschbaum noted, you hit the data problem. Sure, you can scrape station and timetable information, but that kind of data needs to be regularly updated:

“Now we have managed to get over these entry barriers, to discuss with those public transport companies, and they said their data was all their own property. Many players… have established data regimes based on an API, but that’s not the end of the discussion. You have to convince them you’re a solid player.”

As a result, Waymate will build up its own infrastructure so that, in time, it can store and handle large amounts of data without relying on APIs. As all this data will need to be subject to a single algorithm in order to return speedy and useful results, this will be an essential move, and an expensive one.

What these companies are trying to do is really, really hard. The pitfalls are many – from massive complexity to closed-off data and competitors with vested interests. But the rewards will be huge, not only for those who can pull it off – if indeed they can pull it off – but also for the consumer. There is real value in increasing transparency and reducing complexity in the travel-booking business. Watch this space.

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But beyond the implications for car sharing as a business, the news is an important indicator of the global and infectious trend of sharing stuff and resources. Airbnb — home sharing — is now looking at a $2.5 billion valuation. With 9 billion people set to live on the planet by 2050, and much of that growth happening in cities, sharing — enabled by IT — will be one of the most important tools to emerge. The companies that are creating massive brands now will be well positioned to capitalize on this future.

The little business that could

Car rental companies are indeed the original champions of cars as a service. Hertz at one point reportedly considered buying Zipcar, but instead launched its own service. Many of the major car rental companies are either testing, or have launched, modest car sharing trials in select cities.

But Avis’ acquisition is one of the largest financial bets to date on the undertapped potential of the more modern version of car sharing. The acquisition price was $12.25 per share, or a 49 percent premium over Zipcar’s stock closing price on Monday.

Zipcar has 760,000 members in 20 metro areas in the U.S., Canada and Europe — but that’s not really all that much considering Zipcar is more than ten years old. Modest estimates project as many as 7.5 million users for car sharing services (not just Zipcar) over the next few years in the U.S. if there are supportive policies in place, and up to 20 million in the maximum case scenario, according to an analysis from RAND Corporation.

The biggest problem for Zipcar was access to capital to help grow its user base. Maintaining and expanding a fleet of cars is expensive. Zipcar only first became profitable at the end of 2011, and its stock price has steadily declined (hovering around $8 most recently) since its IPO in 2011 — back then it had a high of $30 per share.

So in that respect, the Avis acquisition is great news for Zipcar and will provide it with deep pockets. The company will be able to grow more quickly in a sector that has seen increased competition for the rental car companies from new startups with innovative takes on car sharing (like Getaround), and even from some creative auto makers like Daimler.

However, as Felix Salmon points out Zipcar’s brand is really strong with its customers and is a well-liked company. Rental car companies, on the other hand, generally are disliked by their customers for things like inconvenient service, hidden fees and the like. The Avis brand could really taint Zipcar, especially if Avis starts to make Zipcar act like more of an old school rental car company.

Avis needs to just let Zipcar operate its business as it has done and not try to change the brand or the service too much. Avis can also use Zipcar as a model for making its rental car business even more distributed (away from the centralized car rental hubs at airports) and even more on-demand. The backbone of this car as a service model is IT, and Avis is acquiring the leader that invented all those easy to use reservation systems, mobile apps, and key fob locks.

A win for investors

The Zipcar acquisition also shows how some of Zipcar’s early investors made a very long-view bet on the trend of car sharing and mostly won that hand. Zipcar had raised at least $67 million in venture capital funding from Revolution Living, Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Smedvig Capital and Globespan Capital Partners, reports Fortune’s Dan Primack (in his email Term Sheet). Benchmark led an early round of funding back in 2005. Revolution (Steve Case’s firm), Benchmark and Greylock will walk away with $150 million.

It’s one of the better exits for VCs that invested in transforming transportation. Most electric car and biofuel investments have struggled. But car sharing is based on using the web, mobile, computing and wireless tech to manage the on-demand use of cars, and that’s historically a more natural investment for a VC to make.

Still Zipcar returns have taken longer than, say, most web companies. Zipcar is almost 13 years old and went public at 11 years old. The multiple is also not all that high in the VC world.

It’s a sharing world

While Avis might not know it, the rental car company is stepping solidly into the global trend of sharing stuff. Some call this trend collaborative consumption, and others call it the mesh. Examples of these companies include everything from home sharing company Airbnb, to the emergence of co-working spaces, to baby clothes exchange site thredUp.

The easiest and most obviously shareable goods are big expenses that are underutilized and that can be managed with IT. So homes and cars are good examples — most cars sit idly throughout the day. Regular stuff that’s cheap and easy to own aren’t that sticky for sharing (I think the whole tool or neighborhood sharing movement has been over hyped).

The really great thing about car and home sharing is that it also has a sustainability slant. Car sharing reduces car ownership and makes the use of a single car much more efficient. It’s almost like the merger of public transportation and personal cars. Same thing for Airbnb — the more homes and apartments are shared, the fewer new ones get built.

Young, urban people all over the world will be embracing this trend. As cities get more cramped — and as world growth happens in cities — owning a car and finding a place to park it will become harder. Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith told us that it’s the Millennials (18-34 year olds) that will truly embrace car sharing. Millenials think “access is more important than ownership when it comes to transportation and car ownership,” said Griffith.

Betting on the habits of the next-generation of consumers is a pretty good place to be. And Avis — an old school rental car company — just got pretty good access to that new set of customers.

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MyTaxi is actually an older service than the aforementioned upstarts. It’s been going in Germany since mid-2009 and, reflecting quite a lot of international expansion since then, it now claims 2.3 million users and a taxi base of over 18,000.

D.C. is its first U.S. play, and it announced the move in a cute, if crackly, Ustream performance on Wednesday. The functionality of the iOS and Android app should be fairly familiar by now: a peer-to-peer connection between the driver and passenger, a rating system for the drivers and live-tracking of the approaching cab. MyTaxi also has an in-app fare calculator, which is useful.

A driver-side version of the app also exists, for helping drivers monitor customer locations and get some basic information on them.

“Americans took more than 10 billion trips on public transportation last year,” myTaxi CEO Niclaus Mewes said in a statement. “Smartphones can have an immense impact on urban mobility. At myTaxi we want to rethink and reshape how taxi trips are taken. Passengers and drivers want something convenient, transparent and tailored to their needs. We want to deliver on that.”

Rethink and reshape how taxi trips are taken? That seems a bit strong, given that the idea has already become pretty hot in the U.S. over the last couple of years, and plenty of players are trying to take over the space.

But wait, there’s more…

It’s true that myTaxi does have some differentiators up its sleeve, and not just its share-grabbing $5-voucher launch offer. For one thing, the company seems to have the endorsement of the D.C. Taxicab Commission – a useful kind of thing to have, when you look at the troubles Uber has been having in Chicago, New York and, uh, D.C.

“The D.C. Taxicab Commission welcomes any electronic reservation company such as myTaxi, bringing technological advancements to the District of Columbia,” D.C. Taxicab Commission chairperson Ron Linton said. “We are delighted that passengers using DC public vehicles-for-hire will enjoy the enhanced quality of service.”

But the really interesting thing about myTaxi becomes apparent when you look at its investors. One of the big ones is Daimler’s Car2Go car-sharing service. And talk about synergies.

MyTaxi and Car2Go are in fact sharing an office in D.C., and that looks set to be a trend. I asked myTaxi spokeswoman Lina Wueller where in the U.S. myTaxi would expand to next, and she refused to name names but did suggest I check out where Car2Go is active. So that would be places like Miami and Austin, then.

And here’s why:

“We are planning to integrate myTaxi into [Car2Go's] app,” Wueller said. “We’re going to launch that firstly in Europe, and then in other markets.

“We’re aiming for people not needing to own cars anymore.”

So that’s the trick: if you’re out and about, and you need a car, you’ll use Car2Go’s app to find the closest one that’s available for you to drive. If you can’t find a suitable car, or you’re not in a driving mood, you’ll hail a cab through myTaxi, from the same app.

Clever strategy. But will it be enough to displace the companies that have been taking over the U.S. market over the last couple of years? If myTaxi and Car2Go can expand fast enough, they may stand a chance.

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According to the Massachusetts Division of Standards, “there are no established measurement standards for [GPS's] current application and use in determining transportation costs similar to that of  approved measurement systems in taximeters and odometers.” The decision came after a “sting” operation snagged Uber in Cambridge.

Uber disclosed the news in its blog along with its response:

In essence the [Massachusetts] Division of Standards is claiming that until the National Institute of Standards and Technology has guidelines in place for GPS location technology, we cannot provide our application to the public. As we did extensive legal research prior to entering the city of Boston, it is our strong belief that the technology and service we offer does not violate existing law and regulations.

It’s not the first time Uber has faced trouble entering a new city — it got flak the taxi and limo commission in Washington, D.C. six months ago. Some in the Boston area suspect that complaints from local cab companies are at the root of this latest issue as well. Uber launched its service, which lets users summon a private car via a smartphone app, in San Francisco and is now available in 14 U.S. cities.

One commenter on the Uber blog wrote:

There. Aren’t. Enough. Cabs. In. This. City.  And the ones that are have drivers who get pissed when you try to use a *gasp* credit card. Not to mention, Boston cabs are the most expensive in NORTH AMERICA.

Uber could not be reached for comment, but it appears that the service continues. According to the blog:

Uber will continue full speed ahead with the mission of making Boston and the surrounding areas a great place to live and travel and the Commonwealth the Hub of cutting edge technology.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ambernectar 13

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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?

The argument for Hertz successfully competing with Zipcar goes like this: Hertz doesn’t require an annual membership fee (Zipcar charges $60), has no late fees (Zipcar charges $50 per hour), it allows one way rentals in some locations, and yeah, it already has a massive fleet of diverse cars.

On paper, Hertz getting into the car sharing game doesn’t sound good for Zipcar, even if you believe there is room for multiple players and that this is a market with considerable future growth. There aren’t good market projections for this nascent industry, though a recent analysis from RAND Corporation took a stab at it, suggesting that with improving tech to locate and rent vehicles combined with favorable government policy, the industry could include 7.5 million users, more than ten times where it currently sits.

Hertz’s CEO Mark Frissora made news in March when Bloomberg reported that he had considered buying Zipcar. But confident that he could leverage Hertz’s existing fleet of 375,000 cars and its customer relationships, he ultimately decided to launch Hertz’s own service. Referring to the New York market, Frissora has said Hertz has 35,000 cars there and once they’re all enabled for hourly rental, Zipcar will “have a real problem.”

In 2009, Hertz acquired Paris based car sharing technology developer Eileo, which makes the Zibox that Hertz is relying on to convert its fleet. The Zibox immobilizes the engine and interfaces with the reservation system to allow drivers to enter and start the car. Hertz offers drivers a key fob that acts like an RFID card. In testing it found drivers wanted a key that they could take with them on their key chain that controls entry to the car. Drivers wanted to feel like they were carrying a car key. The actual car key that starts the car is tethered to the car so that customers don’t take it with them when dropping off the car.

How Hertz will do it

I caught up with Jordan Reber, the VP of Hertz On Demand, who is overseeing the global ramp up of Hertz’s hourly rental service. In our discussion about Hertz’s entry into the car sharing market, Reber noted, “It’s what people tend to ignore when they compare us to competitors, it’s the size of our logistics and parent infrastructure. The issue of car sharing is scale. When those cars are tech enabled, we’re able to put them where our customers want them, be it Omaha or New York City.”

And it’s this scaling up that will ultimately prove whether Hertz can be a market leader in car sharing. Zipcar currently has 709,000 members and 9,300 vehicles in the U.S. and Europe. Hertz has been fairly measured in its ramp up so far with 160,000 worldwide members and about 1,100 cars available. On the question of how much of the Hertz fleet would convert to hourly rentals, Hertz’s Public Affairs Manager Paula Rivera would only say that it would occur over the next 12-18 months and that Hertz is “aiming to get a significant amount of the fleet installed with the [Eileo] technology.”

If the ramp up feels slow, it’s partially because Hertz is being very careful not to cannibalize its core car rental business and Reber made a point of saying that internal data shows that 70 percent of Hertz On Demand users use the service for hourly rental or after hours use.

Moreover, if most in the car sharing market view car sharing as a discrete business, Hertz is far more inclined to view it as a potential source of incremental revenue where it can gradually pick off markets like New York where it’s well positioned with a high volume of locations and available cars. There are likely to be regional advantages that flow toward any player with good logistics in a given city.

You also don’t get the sense that Hertz wants to launch whole hog with national campaigns and run into the car sharing space (it has minimal presence in other markets like San Francisco). It’s not as if Zipcar is making money hand over fist right now as it hopes 2012 will be its first year of very modest profitability.

What’s interesting about the figures is that Hertz has racked up 160,000 members worldwide (90,000 in the U.S.) with a fraction of the number of hourly vehicles in circulation as Zipcar. Sure a big reason for this is that joining Hertz On Demand is free, but that doesn’t make it any less real that the company has millions of existing customers to market to, so that it can get RFID enabled key fobs into those hands so they can easily rent a car. Reber added that Hertz is open to enabling cars to be opened with smartphones when he believes near field communication technology and mobile payment systems are more mature.

Whatever the rate of Hertz’s ramp into car sharing, it’s not likely going away as a priority for the company. Reber was frank in saying, “Car sharing is closely controlled and watched by our CEO [Frissora]. It’s a big focus for us here, not because of me but because of our CEO.” At this point it’s just a question for Hertz of incrementally executing in key markets, which should be enough to give Zipcar a minor headache.

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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 share economy: Who’s responsible?

Addressing liability and security have become paramount issues as business models based on sharing items have emerged. Luxury peer-to-peer car sharing service HiGear abruptly shut down at the end of last year after a successful launch just four months previous. A criminal ring had stolen $300,000 in fancy cars and the HiGear founders felt they just couldn’t protect its users’ cars. And Airbnb’s lackluster response last summer to the trashing of two Airbnb hosts’ apartments highlighted how critical it is for people to feel safe before sharing their most important valuables like cars and homes, which also can have the best margins in the share economy.

In terms of peer-to-peer car sharing, RelayRides holds a million dollar insurance policy during the rental period, which is most often sufficient. But in the Boston accident, a lawyer for one victim has suggested total claims for the four victims would be in the $1.2 to $1.5 million range. Liz Fong-Jones, who rented out the car, told The New York Times that RelayRides has told her personal insurance carrier to deny any claims against it for the accident. From RelayRides’s perspective, liability should stop with RelayRides as it feels this is no different from any case where an insurance policy may be exhausted by the claims.

And in places like California, which have passed bills about car sharing, the law is clear. Deputy California Insurance Commissioner Joel Laucher clarified to me that California’s peer-to-peer car sharing bill, AB 1871, states that the car sharing program is the owner of the vehicle for all purposes and assumes liability during rental. On the emerging question of whether someone’s personal insurance carrier could drop them because they’re putting their car in a car sharing network, he added that it’s illegal to cancel or non-renew an insurance policy based on someone signing up for car sharing.

So that’s all well and good for states like California, Oregon and Washington, which have car sharing laws protecting consumers, but what about places like Massachusetts, where the accident occurred? RelayRides founder Shelby Clark recently told my colleague Katie Fehrenbacher that while he thinks state car sharing insurance laws provide clarity, he doesn’t think he needs them to operate, evidenced by Boston being an early market for RelayRides. The company has a deal in place with GM to unlock OnStar equipped vehicles registered in the RelayRides network via a mobile phone app, further opening up the number of available cars. One can only assume that GM also isn’t panicked about the liability issues and imagines this program operating in all states.

On a practical level, while there’s a big focus on what happens if the million dollar RelayRides insurance policy is exhausted, the larger concern may just be about what happens if auto insurance companies start non-renewing policies for folks who put their cars into car sharing services. Lieber reported that auto insurer USAA has indicated that car sharing participation would generally result in non-renewal. If multiple insurers go this route and are able to do so legally, then a larger problem would result.

While I think it’s unfair to single out share economy companies for the liability and insurance risks inherent in their business models (all companies have these concerns), it’s important to note that as these business mature they’ll have to confront the very issues of liability that all businesses encounter.

Airbnb’s initial poor response to the apartment trashing is indicative of a startup’s desire to grow and get traction, not manage customer care. In the aftermath, Airbnb installed a 24/7 customer hotline to report problems and a $50,000 insurance policy against theft and vandalism. Though interestingly, it excludes “personal liability,” meaning that if someone opens your closet and a box falls on them, that’s on you. And Airbnb is clear that its policy is not a replacement for renters or homeowners insurance, which raises the same question that has faced car sharing: how jazzed are homeowners’ insurers going to be about their policy holders renting out their homes?

The reality is that no insurer wants to take on additional risk, perceived or real. Conversely, the concern is that the focus on insurance and liability can be the enemy of truly innovative business like RelayRides and Airbnb. And whatever happens with the lawsuits resulting from the Boston accident, this is just an inevitable case of the business model being tested.

Update: RelayRides’s founder Shelby Clark reached out to clarify that he believes that ultimate liability should rest with the person who rents the car from the RelayRides network, and that RelayRides insures the renter up to $1 million. Meaning that if the renter is found to have caused the injuries in question, and the policy is exhausted by a verdict beyond $1 million, the renter (and not the car owner who rented out the car) is responsible for paying any damages beyond that million. The accident occurred in Massachusetts and California Deputy Insurance Commissioner Joel Laucher noted to us that in California, at least, AB 1871 states that “the personal vehicle sharing program shall assume all liability of the owner and shall be considered the owner of the vehicle for all purposes.” He added that as the statute reads, nothing limits the liability of the vehicle sharing program. These are new business models with new questions, and many of these issues are likely to get resolved by state courts.

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