As our growing population competes for resources and space, car sharing may become more prevalent. We looked at how some of the biggest car- and ride-sharing companies that operate in the U.S. compare with each other. Read more »
Peer-to-peer car sharing startup RelayRides tells us that long-term sharing — over days, weeks and months — makes up the bulk of their sales. Is this an emerging trend for this nascent service? Read more »
His new venture will help build other companies, and will work with large corporations and other founders to come up with ideas. 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 »
Peer to peer car sharing is hot for investors, recently drawing interest from the funds of Eric Schmidt, Ashton Kutcher and Marissa Mayer, as well as Google, GM and Zipcar. But the sector is still emerging and has a lot of growing pains to go through. Read more »
The around 6 million subscribers to GM’s OnStar connected car service can now rent out their cars to other drivers via a deal between the auto giant and peer-to-peer car sharing startup RelayRides. The partnership was announced back in October of last year. Read more »
Uber, the startup that has disrupted taxis everywhere with its on demand car service, plans to launch a new lower cost, and greener hybrid option for customers this week, according to the New York Times. Read more »
You may have noticed there’s a growing amount of alternative, tech-focused, ways to get around San Francisco these days. Why is San Francisco so chock-full of these services? Read more »
Zipcar’s recent investment in peer-to-peer car sharing startup Wheelz signals just how important college students are to the car sharing pioneer. Read more »
Will car sharing pioneer Zipcar move into the emerging industry of peer-to-peer car sharing, or enabling neighbors to rent out other neighbors’ vehicles? Well, Zipcar hasn’t launched such a service, but it’s invested in one of the new peer-to-peer car sharing startups Wheelz. Read more »
Mark Gilbreath of LiquidSpace predicts that the driving force of the sharing economy will become time, and the companies that can do business in real-time will occupy a more strategic, and profitable, place in the ecosystem. Read more »
As we look toward the next year, the cleantech sector faces many challenges, which we examine in detail in this 2012 outlook. Renewable energy generators encounter an increasingly difficult subsidy environment, and key cleantech innovations like electric vehicles face an uphill climb in terms of connecting ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
The old idea of reuse is at the heart of the web-based sharing economy which uses the maturation of the Internet and mobile to enable the sharing of under-utilized resources. Is it a trend that can have a real impact on reducing waste? Read more »
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 »
Blazing fast networks, cheap silicon, always-on devices and a torrent of data will fundamentally change everything — how we consume media, how we work, and even who we are. We examined 10 areas that show how connectivity is profoundly changing the present and future of technology. Read more »
Peer-to-peer car sharing has emerged in select cities as a way for car owners to rent their vehicles to people in their neighborhood. But are car owners, drivers or the companies making money? The key will be that the economics pan out for everyone. Read more »
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 »
HiGear, a peer-to-peer car sharing startup that focuses on luxury and sports cars, has raised $1.3 million in a seed round from a group of investors, including Battery Ventures, BV Capital, and 500 Startups, HiGear President Murtaza Hussain told me in an interview. Read more »
The peer-to-peer car sharing space is getting crowded. On Wednesday a startup called Wheelz launched at Stanford University with the idea to bring student-to-student car sharing to campuses. 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 »
If you thought renting out a room in a house via Airbnb was cool, try renting our someone’s car. That’s what Getaround does, and for this week’s Green Overdrive, we sit down with Getaround to check out the company’s brand new, yet-to-be unveiled, iPhone app. Read more »
There’s been an explosion of interest in web-sharing services, a growing movement of lending and bartering services that create economical and sustainable consumption methods. Take a few minutes to tell us how you feel about this movement in our new survey, and maybe even win prizes. Read more »
The Airbnb horror stories that have emerged in recent days expose the biggest pain point for the economy that has built up around using the web to share “stuff,” from apartments to cars to tools: security. Read more »
Whoever thought that renting your bed to strangers would work? But Airbnb has made it work and now Getaround, a peer-to-peer car sharing service, is looking to find similar success by letting people rent out their cars to other users. Read more »
If you own a car but don’t use it much, growing numbers of startups are itching to help you rent it out. One of the latest ventures is Getaround, which aims to set itself apart with a recipe involving Facebook, smart phones, and green cars. Read more »
