Tesla wrote in a statement:

Electric vehicles simply cannot be sold side by side with gas vehicles because they will always be a minority item in terms of sales and service volume. Existing franchise dealers have an inherent conflict of interest between selling gasoline cars, which constitute the vast majority of their business, and selling the new technology of electric cars.

Tesla’s resistance to the Texas Automobile Dealers Association reminds me of some of the newer transportation companies like Uber, Relay Rides, SideCar and Lyft are facing policy and legal opposition in some cities and states. Per usual, technology and business innovation is moving faster than policy can keep up with it.

Tesla already has two “stores” in Texas where they can show off the cars, but can’t talk about pricing and can’t actually sell anything directly to customers. And in true Tesla and Elon Musk competitive style, the new bill is pretty narrowly specific for a company like Tesla. House Bill 3351/Senate Bill 1659, which was filed by Senator Craig Estes (R-Wichita Falls) and Representative Eddie Rodriguez (D-Austin), permits U.S.-based companies that make 100 percent electric cars (so no hybrids) to sell directly to customers. Tesla says it’s narrow so it affects the dealers as little as possible.

Tesla has been innovating around its stores since it launched the first one years ago. The company hired George Blankenship to lead the store experience, and Blankenship previously helped design Apple’s store experience. Here’s my interview with Blankenship at our RoadMap event November 2012 (RoadMap 2013 info is here).

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While Uber is not currently offering peer-to-peer ride-sharing, the CPUC agreement allows for “drivers not specifically licensed to drive a limousine or taxi” to provide rides, which could include Uber’s drivers, the company notes. And Uber wrote that it could pave the way for ride-sharing in the future.

Update: As TechCrunch first reported and Uber later confirmed with us, the company plans to expand into ridesharing, although it has no immediate specifics to announce. “It would be natural to expect us to go into competition,” an Uber spokesman said.

Lyft’s parent company Zimride announced Wednesday that it had entered into an agreement with the state where the CPUC would drop its earlier cease-and-desist order and fine against the company. Lyft wrote in a blog post that the company has worked to improve safety measures, increasing liability insurance and performing background checks on drivers, and is pleased the state will let them continue operating for the time being:

“This agreement supports the continued legal operation of Lyft and sets a precedent for the upcoming rulemaking process. This agreement would not have been possible without the outpouring of support from the community,” wrote the company co-founders.

Uber announced Thursday that they also have reached an agreement with the CPUC over the company’s technology used to hail rides and has confirmed that its legal in California:

“This settlement agreement is part of a steady drumbeat of progress in which pro-consumer, pro-innovation jurisdictions like Washington D.C., New York City, and Massachusetts are recognizing that everyone wins when new technology that fosters efficiency, affordability, and choice in transportation is allowed to flourish. California has always been on the cutting edge. The CPUC agreement further demonstrates how the Golden State welcomes and supports not only technological advancement, but a better future for drivers, riders, and our cities.”

Rideshare and next-generation taxi companies like Uber and Lyft have struggled to gain acceptance in cities across the country even as users embrace their services, with Uber facing regulatory challenges in D.C., push-back from cab drivers in San Francisco and Chicago, and earlier problems in the more stringent New York City market. With Lyft and Sidecar, questions revolved around how the companies would properly insure drivers and riders.

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Mobile is not an iterative step for the web, but a complete revolution. So instead of asking ourselves how we can adapt web-based stores to our smartphones, we should be asking how we can use unlimited access to information to help us when we are in actual stores. The full potential of the mobile revolution won’t be realized until we build the tools that make every moment of our lives better.

The internet squeezed onto mobile devices

It’s understandable that we use the web as the baseline for measuring mobile, especially since many of our most widely used apps and services originated online – email, text, maps, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and so on. The comparison has worked until now because we’ve spent our first years with smartphones reformatting the desktop experience of the web to fit into our pockets.

Today the web itself  is the product of decades of adapting the real world onto the connected desktop. First we ported over letters (email) and posters (websites). Then we moved what we could of traditional businesses online to the large screen perched on our desks: Bookstores and record stores became (literally) Amazon.com and iTunes; travel agents became Kayak.com and Yelp.com.

Since smartphones have brought computing power and an internet connection to our pockets, naturally we want those tools everywhere we go. But porting these advancements to our phones is only a pre-game to the real mobile revolution: when connectivity reshapes our minute-by-minute lives.

The offline opportunity

Opportunity is everywhere: The offline world is filled with friction, inefficiency, incomplete information, tedium and excess capacity. We feel it all the time. Waiting for elevators. Waiting for delivery drivers. Going across town only to find an empty bar. Forgetting the name of the person you just met.

These problems are so frequent and inherently human we are often blind to them. But for almost every problem we encounter, relief will be found in the same place: The device we carry with us. We don’t need to log in. Sensors minimize the information input. Smart assistants and voice recognition allow hand’s-free use and allow the least technically capable among us to use their deepest, richest features.

Last year saw the first mass implementations of phones making what used to be our offline lives better with companies like Uber and HotelTonight, but 2013 will be the year in which we start looking to our devices to scratch our every itch – for companionship, entertainment and much more.

Why now?

A number of these ideas have been around for a long time, but 2013 will be our first chance to build many of these new companies.

When Amazon.com started in 1994, less than 10 percent of U.S. adults were online. But even though that small segment of the population was spread around the country, everyone used the product in the same way whether the user was in Dubuque, Detroit or Dallas. Everyone hit the same website, bought the same things and was plugged into the same distribution network. In its infancy, Amazon only needed a tiny fraction of the country to use its services.

The comparison today with Uber, the real-time limo service, almost makes itself. Uber instantly pairs available drivers and cars with demand for rides. Crucially, Uber needs a critical mass of both supply and demand on its platform in the same geographical area, down to the same neighborhoods and streets, and needs to be able to update and match them in real time based on their current locations – a task nearly impossible to accomplish at scale on desktops or laptops. There are several forces beyond raw adoption numbers though that enable Uber’s success:

• Smartphones free us from our desks. When we have problems, questions or desires, we don’t need to return to our homes or offices to satiate them; we can address them on the spot.
• Touchscreens, Android and iOS are amazingly simple to use. Not only do people have the technology readily available to them, but even the least technically savvy can (and do) use it.
• Apps are simple, elegant problem solvers. Small, beautiful, and easy-to-use, the best apps are easily understood in seconds.

This is the year these trends will reach critical mass in almost every major market in the US. The result will be that more great companies will be started, gain meaningful traction and drive investment. More startups will get more tries at solving problems, and a virtuous cycle will accelerate the trends.

Bringing the offline world online poses unique hurdles and rewards

While some problems are easy to identify they may be difficult to solve. Unlike many of the first internet companies, the real world has legacy industries with entrenched lobbies, distribution providers or regulations. Many require real infrastructure that needs to be acquired, integrated with or leased. In the offline world, scale is often much harder than simply spinning up additional servers.

On the other hand, many of these new companies will become natural monopolies – difficult to overthrow once they achieve scale, lock up resources within their systems and start generating significant cash. Many are adaptations or improvements of current businesses, but given the inability of incumbents to design, develop and deploy revolutionary software, we can expect many to be upset by startups.

Looking to the future

Unlike any technology we have ever seen, mobile has the opportunity to improve our minute-by-minute lives, wherever we are. While there are unique perils to the offline world, the significant rewards to those that build these new companies more than offset the risk.

Companies like Uber and HotelTonight are just the tip of the iceberg. Square isn’t just revolutionizing payments, but the experience of paying for things in real life. A company like Highlight will eventually be a real-time, in-person LinkedIn that gives us context, history and information for all of our encounters.

Mobile isn’t a portal to the internet we know today, but a gateway to build world-changing companies that will upend entrenched incumbents and exponentially recast even the most bullish of mobile expectations.

Edward Aten is a designer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of CopThis and previously founded Swift.fm. Follow him on Twitter at @aten.

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The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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CEO Steve Humphreys said the company is changing the name because Cabulous is very “very taxi-centric” and very English-specific. Given that the company wants to address the transportation concerns of different types of people with a variety of options, including black cars and eventually international taxis, the company is looking for a more all-encompassing name.

“We want to be your practical get-around-town solution,” he said in an interview. “We didn’t want it to be a super serious name. We wanted the brand to be kind of fun.”

The company just raised an $8 million funding round in June led by RockPort Capital and Shasta Ventures, making the re-name timing slightly odd, but it’s also easy to understand how they’d want a new direction as the ride-sharing and collaborative consumption model has changed so quickly even in just the past few months. Since June, Lyft launched its public product for on-demand rides, Uber added taxis and hybrid cards to its lineup, and even the car-sharing market got more crowded.

It seems that for Cabulous, providing taxis alone isn’t enough, and it will take a foray into new territory — as well a new name — to keep up with the competition.

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I’m not ashamed to say that I was an AirBnB skeptic when I first heard about the service. Like many people, I thought the idea of someone sharing their bedroom or apartment with complete strangers for money was a pie-in-the-sky idea dreamed up by some San Francisco hippie. It seemed like a variation on the idea of “couch surfing, which I figured would appeal to cheap students and other bohemian types, but not many regular people — and certainly not to business travelers or anyone important from a commercial point of view (in my defence, even uber-VC Fred Wilson missed out on the potential of the company).

Both of those assumptions have been proven wrong, and it didn’t really hit home for me until I tried an AirBnB rental myself. On a trip to San Francisco for GigaOM’s Mobilize conference, I rented a one-bedroom apartment using the service, and it was an eye-opener.

The social web lowers the barriers to interaction

In a sense, services like AirBnB — as well as ride-sharing services like Lyft and crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter — take advantage of the same internet-powered social phenomenon that media entities like Twitter do: namely, a dramatic lowering of the barriers to interaction, to the point where it actually changes the way people behave in some fairly important and disruptive ways. And I think the real repercussions of that disruption are only beginning to make themselves obvious.

The main reason I tried AirBnB was that another conference had booked every reasonably priced hotel room within driving distance of downtown San Francisco — but I was also curious to see what the AirBnB experience was like. So I looked for something in the same price range as an average hotel room, and found dozens of potential rentals, each with photos of the home and the owner and reviews from users. At that point, it didn’t look all that different from something like Craigslist (although much more appealing from a design point of view).

But then the influence of social networks was added to the equation: since I had connected with my Facebook account, I noticed that the owner of one of the rentals and I had a mutual friend in common. Any hesitation I had about renting the home of a complete stranger in an unfamiliar city vanished, thanks to the power of the FOAF (friend of a friend) effect. If the couple who owned the apartment knew my friend, then I figured there was a better-than-even chance that I would like them.

Sure enough, they arranged to get me the keys in a friendly and efficient way, they left me a personal note and sent an email with tips about their home and the location, and they offered me whatever was in their fridge. On top of that, the apartment was lovely and well-kept, with homey furniture and personal touches that no hotel could offer: not only was it nicer looking than a hotel, but the whole experience was friendlier and more welcoming.

The scale that the social web provides changes the game

Granted, not every AirBnB experience is going to be so top-notch — there have been some incidents in the company’s history where renters took advantage of the owner and his or her property, and the service has had to adapt to that. But despite those events, the growth of the network suggests that it is disrupting the casual accommodation market in a way the hotel industry probably never expected. Even though bed-and-breakfast operations and corporate or vacation rentals have existed for some time, the sheer scale of AirBnB changes the game.

As Clay Shirky noted in his book “Here Comes Everybody,” even behavior that has existed before — such as sharing information with our friends and family, or connecting with people who have similar interests — becomes qualitatively different when hundreds of thousands or even tens of millions of people are involved. That’s what I think we are seeing with things like AirBnB and Kickstarter and ride-sharing services like Lyft, or job-outsourcing services like TaskRabbit: they aren’t just an incremental change in human behavior, they are a fundamentally disruptive one.

In a sense, each of these services just looks like a more refined and organized version of something you could have previously done through Craigslist: a ride somewhere, a place to sleep, supporters for your new CD or other project. But instead of being something that a small proportion of people do, the growth of AirBnB and other similar crowd-powered services has the potential to seriously impact some of the industries we take for granted — whether it’s the hotel business or the venture-capital or music or transportation industries.

What other industries could be disrupted in this way? Could we see people sharing health care someday, or their phone services, or swapping their corporate vacation time through some kind of online marketplace? It’s interesting to think about what else could benefit from this kind of phenomenon, and what the long-term effects on us as social beings will be when that happens.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Aih

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Uber rides can currently cost up to double the price of a taxi, so that’s a big discount. Traditionally, Uber has offered only luxury town cars for its service, which is one of the reasons that customers have been willing to pay such a premium. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick tells the New York Times that the new service is its first effort to appeal to the masses and move down the cost curve. The hybrid service also costs less because part of the overall price is calculated due to the gas used — the less gas consumed by a hybrid, the lower the customer’s cost can be.

But the hybrid move is also a way for Uber to be more environmentally friendly. About a year ago, I did an interview with Uber execs about whether or not the company’s service was able to reduce cars on the road, or fuel consumed, in the way that car sharing services like Zipcar or Getaround seem to be able to do. At the time I had concluded that Uber wasn’t really all that environmentally friendly in the way that some collaborative consumption services can create a more efficient use of resources.

Uber, a startup that has raised $43 million from venture capitalists, is an example of one of a handful of startups that have been using San Francisco as a test bed for alternative transportation. Others include the first generation car sharing companies Zipcar and CityCar Share, the peer-to-peer car sharing companies RelayRides and Getaround, electric scooter sharing network Scoot Networks, on demand ride sharing services SideCar and Lyft, and commuter van sharing company RidePal. The city offers a condensed space for a test bed, a community of early-adopters to test out the services, and a lack of parking infrastructure to encourage alternative transportation.

I’m actually a major Uber user, and the only thing that dissuades me from using it more regularly is the high price. So I’m personally excited to check out this service this week.

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The app, only available via invite for now, lets potential riders look for available drivers close by and request rides. The riders and drivers can look at each other’s profiles and the app is using Facebook Connect for log-in and social security. Once booked, riders can watch their drivers navigate to them on a mobile map in real-time. Riders pay the driver based on a suggested donation model via the app itself (no cash exchange) and Zimride says the rides will be about 30 percent cheaper than a cab.

The biggest hurdle with these types of apps will likely be safety issues — riders getting picked up by drivers they don’t feel comfortable with. To address some of these concerns, the company says drivers will be vetted via car inspections, background checks, personal interviews and DMV record checks. Zimrides says its fellow 500 Startups-backed company Task Rabbit advised it on some of these security moves.

For now the service will only be available via evening commute hours, which aligns it with car-poolers. Over time, the service will be available 24-7 says Zimrides. San Francisco is rapidly becoming a test bed for these types of next-gen, more efficient, transportation apps, like Scoot Networks and Ridepal. Love this growing movement.

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