One of the ideas behind the option is to provide Scoot Networks customers, many of whom are commuters, with a solution to the “last mile” of their commute. That’s the pesky problem of getting people to public transportation from their homes, when it’s a little too far to walk — sometimes people bike, own a motorcycle or scooter and park it there, drive a car to a parking lot of a public transportation spot, or even taxi.

For now, Scoot Networks is only offering one route to test out the feature — specifically between a parking area on 21st St. & Valencia St. and a garage next to the Caltrain at 4th St. & Townsend St. But if customers really like this option, expect to see more one-way routes launched this year.

Some car sharing and bike sharing networks throughout the world provide this one-way feature, but most of the car sharing networks in the U.S. (and San Francisco) like Zipcar and City Car Share don’t provide one-way trips. Could the one-way feature be enough to bring in new users to the electric scooter sharing service, launched just back in September?

Scoot Networks raised a $550,000 seed round last year and will be looking to raise a series A round this year. The startup had around 50 electric scooters parked around neighborhoods in San Francisco at launched time in September.

Check out this video interview with the Scoot Networks folks:

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But there were also quite a few things that excited me this year, which in honor of our upcoming day of thanks, I’ve decided to call out. Here are 10 things to be thankful for in cleantech.

1). Obama won: Thank goodness. The entire cleantech sector dodged a bullet — and breathed a sigh of relief — as the votes rolled in and President Obama was re-elected for a second term. Obama delivered an unprecedented amount of cleantech funding: billions in incentives for clean power, electric cars and energy efficiency through the stimulus package. While the incentives won’t likely be as high as they were when the stimulus package was determined, if Mitt Romney had won, it would have likely been a real blow for cleantech. Romney is a self-professed coal-lover, who used speeches to point out misspending for clean power companies, and made a now infamous joke (post Sandy) about climate change.

2). New solid customer: Internet infrastructure: A growing amount of Internet companies — and web infrastructure providers — are looking for ways to add more clean power to their data center energy consumption mix, and are also looking for ways to be less reliant on the power grid. Some of the leaders in this area include Google, eBay, Microsoft, and Apple, and many of these companies have invested in both solar systems, energy efficiency technology and even fuel cell farms. Fuel cell maker Bloom Energy has managed to find a niche and growing market here.

There’s also a growing trend of IT companies looking to utilize low power servers — servers built off of low power cell phone chips. AMD this year acquired startup SeaMicro, and weeks ago AMD launched its SeaMicro low power server. Calxeda just raised $55 million to move toward commercializing its own low power server product.

3). Digital green, or clean web: Cleantech — from a VC and entrepreneur perspective — is in a transitional state. But in the meantime, clean technologies that are based on IT — like mobile, big data, cloud computing, software — are still seeing a lot of innovation and investment. Examples of startups in this sector include Opower, Nest, Solar Mosaic and Sungevity. Investors are calling this sector different things — Greenstart calls it digital green, Spring Ventures calls it Clean Web, and MDV calls it where cleantech meets IT — but it all means the same thing to them: a way to make money that more closely mimics making VC investments in web and mobile companies.

4). Smart thermostats: A particularly interesting area to me in terms of the smart grid and cleantech startups is the growing use of thermostats that are connected to the internet and that can smartly cut building energy use. Nest says it’s sold in the mid-hundreds of thousands of its learning thermostats, which can learn the users behavior and shave off energy consumption overtime. EcoFactor’s service is being used in a commercial deployment in Las Vegas, and Opower’s software is being used in three utility trials with Honeywell’s thermostats. Startup EnergyHub is also working on providing the software for smart thermostats.

Connected thermostats could be the answer to what utilities call demand response, which is basically turning down the energy use of its customers during peak times of day. The customers agree to the programs and can see lower energy bills. If the system is automatic and non-intrusive — which can be done using smart thermostat analytics — customers are far more likely to join the programs, and the utility’s results are better.

5). Tesla: Electric car maker Tesla has one of the most ambitious ideas in cleantech, and has actually — mostly — delivered on its goals. Yes, it was slow to get its estimated volume of Model S cars out to owners in 2012, but it’s on track to deliver its new estimates over the coming months. The company is also one of the few cleantech ideas that have captured the imagination of the public, and recently won Motor Trends’s car of the year award — the first time in history that an electric car won it.

6). The learning curve: Like I said, cleantech is in a time of transition. And I think that’s a good thing. As Greenstart founding partner Mitch Lowe said on a recent panel I moderated, fewer companies are being funded, but that just means the bar is higher. While bubbles are fun — like the one that grew in cleantech between 2006 and early 2008 — bubbles mean a lot of stupid money is flowing. Hopefully the smarter money of the next 18 months will deliver some breakthrough cleantech startups.

7). Cheap solar panels: One of the most dramatic clean power economic factors to emerge in 2012 occurred via super cheap solar panels coming out of China. While rock bottom solar panels make a difficult market for competing solar manufacturers, that ecosystem has created a boom in solar panel installations. In the U.S. there are now 250,000 rooftop solar panel installations, and companies like SolarCity are seeing large growth.

8). Wish for big ideas: Outside of cleantech, in the general tech and IT markets, there’s been a growing drumbeat of entrepreneurs and investors calling for greater attention on “big ideas.” While there can be easy money in social media and mobile apps ($1 billion for Instagram), there’s an emerging discussion around technology being used for higher aims, like solving problems for resource constraints. Investor Peter Thiel has been a chief champion of this approach and recently created a growth fund that will tackle big problems — the fund has already backed firms like compressed air energy storage startup LightSail Energy. They’re not calling it cleantech, but it is under the hood.

9). Meat 2.0: When the population explodes to 9 billion people by 2050, livestock for consumption could become a constrained resource — particularly because the emerging middle class in developing countries are increasing their meat consumption. That’s one of the reasons that innovation is occurring around fake meat. As Greentech Media wrote, paraphrasing a VC: “having a “fake meat” company in one’s VC portfolio was becoming a must-have, like having a cloud computing firm or a failed thin-film solar company.” Beyond Meat is one startup and Sand Hill Foods seems to be another. Modern Meadow Meat is a startup working on meat manufacturing, with backing from Thiel.

10). Collaborative consumption: And another sector of cleantech that’s not really cleantech: sharing goods. The next-generation of young people are less interested in owning things, and more interested in gaining access, or using things as a service. That makes the use of goods more efficient and sustainable. You don’t need to buy a car, because you can pay for access via Zipcar. There’s tons of startups in this space from giants like Airbnb, to new comers like electric scooter rental startup Scoot Networks.

Image courtesy if Aine D, waywuwei,

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Up until this point, Scoot Networks’ hundreds of beta testers have been quietly using (and paying for) the service to get between locations in San Francisco, but if you weren’t part of the beta testers you couldn’t get access to them. I spotted a few of the Scoots from time to time throughout the city over the past couple of months, like outside of the Caltrain station on 4th Street. But now anyone can sign up for it.

Scoot Networks co-founder Michael Keating told me in an interview last week that they decided to open up the public launch early to help the company continue to test out the model. Bringing in more users means they can more quickly refine the service for the best user experience. Through its beta testing, Scoot Networks has already honed pricing, options and locations of the Scoots.

Right now to use Scoot’s network it costs $10 to sign up, $5 per month, and $5 per hour. There’s also a $10 per day option (that seems like a steal), and a $25 per month package that includes four half day rides. Additionally there’s an option to rent out your own personal Scoot for $185 per month.

Using a Scoot electric scooter will be a completely different experience than using a Zipcar car. Scoot users will want to use the scooters to ride short trips around the city — a coffee meeting at Sightglass, or stopping by the farmers market at the Ferry Building during your lunch hour — particularly places where parking is difficult.

Commuting could be the killer app for Scoot. Keating told me that he was surprised that so many people wanted to use the Scoots for the last mile of the commute, like between the train station and their house. “Commuting is more of a pain then people realize,” said Keating.

The scooters aren’t meant for highway use or long distance rides. The have a top speed of around 30 miles per hour, and you don’t need a motorcycle license to drive one. The battery only lasts around 20 to 30 miles. The scooters were made in China, and are a premium version of a common type used there.

Some of the hurdles the service will have to overcome include: getting people who haven’t driven a scooter before to feel comfortable signing up and driving one (they provide tutorials), and getting enough parking spots with the needed plugs to charge the batteries. But San Francisco, with all of its new alternative transportation modes, will be the place to figure it out. Scoot Networks wants to expand out of San Francisco after it’s got a few thousand scooters in San Francisco.

Scoot raised a $550,000 seed round this year and will be looking to raise a series A round next year. The company has 5 full time employees.

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Each startup gets $115,000 and three months of marketing, design and business model guidance from Greenstart’s team. Previous startups that have gone through the program include the Android for battery startup GELI, and Scoot Networks, which makes an electric scooter sharing network. People Power has been around for a few years, and I’m interested to see how the Greenstart team tweaks their plans.

Earlier this year Greenstart restructured its program, and decided to focus solely on IT-based cleantech companies, and also boosted the size of its investment in the startups in its program. The pivot seemed like a good idea — early stage non-IT cleantech companies can be capital intensive to scale, can be difficult to vet without industry-specific experience, and also can take a long time to mature.

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Alt-transportation overload! Why is San Francisco so chock-full of these services? I’ve been thinking about it for awhile and I’ve got a pretty good idea. Here’s why I think it is:

Tech, startup cluster: One of the more obvious reasons is just the vibrant startup and developer ecosystem in San Francisco. Most of these alternative transportation services are reliant on mobile and web technology development, and having a strong developer and startup ecosystem here means there’s more of a braintrust of young creators willing to work on these tools. For example Scoot Networks’ secret sauce is based on using the iPhone as a dashboard for an electric scooter and Zimride’s new mobile app connects commuters and drivers in real time. In addition, local tech companies can provide the testing ground for some of these projects — both Ridepal and Scoot Networks are starting off by selling services to fellow tech companies.

Muni, BART, taxis and parking suck: There’s actually a real need for alternative transportation in San Francisco. Unlike in New York, where you can get a cab in most places pretty easily, and the subways system is pretty efficient, San Francisco’s public transportation and taxi services are pretty lacking. There are also a lot of commuters that come into San Francisco, but there’s very little affordable parking downtown.

San Franciscans are early adopters: San Francisco-ans have always been early adopters, given the city is the heart of the Valley and was the location of the birth of the Internet. Services that are reliant on iPhone use can actual gain traction here, because of the high penetration of iPhones. San Franciscans also care more than most about trying to have more eco-friendly, and more energy efficient, transportation, like car sharing and ride sharing.

Small enough: San Francisco is also compact and small enough that a startup can launch a pilot project here and can actually cover a decent amount of the city. While the same pilot project might be overwhelmed in Manhattan, San Francisco can offer a more compact scale with which to experiment.

City support: The city of San Francisco is actually generally very supportive of these types of transportation. Anything that can help alleviate the public transportation systems and parking spots in downtown can potentially get support from the city.

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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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At the event at the Greenstart offices, five startups focused on using software to change energy and transportation, showed off their ideas to a packed house of hundreds of investors, potential partners and the media. The startups seemed as excited to present their ideas as the investors were to hear their pitches.

But just don’t call the crop of five companies greentech firms. There’s a lot investors that came to look at these five companies because they are just interested in technology and software, not necessarily in greentech, explained Greenstart partner Dave Graham to me. Greenstart shifted its strategy from incubating broad greentech companies last year to solely focusing on working with digital green companies this year.

And the move has paid off. Greentech or cleantech, as an investment class has a become a dirty word these days. There’s just been too many missteps and investors and entrepreneurs that have lost a lot of money. And, at the same time, there’s been a rush of web and mobile-focused folks that have started to make a real killing (Instagram). As I wrote in this article, I’m not even sure cleantech as an umbrella moniker will survive for too much longer.

However, the overarching trends of a growing population, constrained resources (energy, food and water), people moving to cities, and information technology as a way to manage these resources, won’t go away for decades. And the class of companies that presented at Greenstart’s Demo day all fit into this digital green description.

The digital green players

One of the most buzzy and fun ideas came from Scoot Networks, an electric scooter sharing network, which I covered last month, and which we’ll post a Green Overdrive show around this week. Scoot Networks is still in alpha phase, but is starting to roll out its e-scooter network to companies first (think big Internet companies and co-working spaces) as a way to test the concept and the market. Later on — and after they get the required insurance coverage — the company will eventually open up the network to everyone else, in the hopes of becoming the Zipcar for electric scooters.

Scoot Networks is looking to continue to raise a seed round of $700,000 (it’s raised $300,000 of that) and eventually wants to raise $5 million in a Series A round. The low cost of the electric scooters (they come from China), and the fact that they use an iPhone app as the bulk of their scooter control system (your phone fits snugly into the dashboard) means that Scoot Networks will have high margins, said Scoot CEO and co-founder Michael Keating during his presentation.

Another company that stood out was GELI (Growing Energy Labs Incorporated), which is developing software that can control and monitor batteries for the power grid — think the Android for batteries. The system can help companies and utilities make money off of using batteries for various applications like buying and selling energy, demand response, and energy load shifting. GELI is looking to raise a seed round of $750,000 to ship product to its first customers.

The other three companies that Greenstart picked and which pitched to investors on Wednesday included Ridepal, a startup organizing Google-style commuter buses for companies, kWhours, which has developed an iPad app for building energy efficiency professionals, and finally Smart Grid Billing, which makes software to enable real time pricing for utilities. Looks like “digital green,” “cleanweb,” “collaborative consumption,” “green IT,” or whatever people want to call it these days, is going to be the leading way that investors and entrepreneurs will be able to lead to more sustainable changes — and even make a little money.

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Scoot Networks is still in closed alpha mode (meaning its not open to the public just yet), but CEO Michael Keating explained to me in an interview that the company is building out a network of electric scooters that can be rented out by the minute or hour (like Zipcar cars) and unlocked with an iPhone. The iPhone will act as the scooter’s dashboard throughout a ride (the company removed the old instrument panel), and Keating told me the company “wanted to peg our transportation service to the rapid pace of innovation of smartphones.”

Keating, a Harvard Business School grad, says the emergence of low-cost Chinese electric scooters (there are 25 million of these in China already, he says), European bike-sharing networks and new real-time transportation services like Uber are changing the face of urban transportation and have paved the way for Scoot Networks. As cities become even more crowded, figuring out new systems of transportation beyond the car, and utilizing IT, will be a growing trend.

To implement its vision, Scoot Networks is buying up one model of scooter from a Chinese distributor, and the electric scooters have a top speed of 30 miles per hour. That’s fast enough to keep up with city traffic and get you to your location across the city quicker than most public transportation, but is low-power enough that the driver doesn’t need a motorcycle license or much training. The idea is basically to offer an alternative that is faster than public transportation but cheaper than a taxi.

Scoot Networks just started offering the service to just a handful of paying customers last week. The company will first target creating electric scooter pods outside of co-working spaces and company campuses, which will pay to offer their participants and employees access to the network. The second step of Scoot Network’s deployment is to work with the public transit agencies. Finally, perhaps a year down the road, the plan is that the service will be opened up to the public with a critical mass of e-scooters. Expect a subscription to eventually cost between $100 to $150 per month for unlimited scooter access.

Sharing stuff

Scoot Networks is one of a variety of startups that are looking to join the trend of collaborative consumption, or using mobile and web to share “stuff,” from cars, to scooters, to apartment space, to tools (and now even dogs). Scoot Networks is also entering the arena of alternative urban mobility, looking to attract users that don’t necessarily want to own or use a car around the city but would be willing to rent and drive a scooter.

Scoot Networks has raised half of a seed-round of financing, and Keating tells me that the company is hoping to start raising a Series A round in the summer. Perhaps Zipcar will kick down for an investment or partnership if Scoot Networks starts to take off. Zipcar recently invested in campus peer-to-peer car-sharing startup Wheelz. If not, I could see Zipcar extending its service into two-wheelers on its own, the way it’s started offering vehicles beyond cars, like moving vans.

A couple of parting thoughts on this potential market: The type of user for a car-sharing service may be significantly different from that for a scooter-sharing service. First, car-sharing users often rent cars to drive to the store to pick up groceries or other goods — in contrast, scooters don’t have much storage space. Secondly, car-sharing users like to rent cars to take them out of the city, but riders of scooters, with their top speed of 30 mph, won’t be able to take them onto the highway and out of the city. Lastly, the company plans, for now, to offer scooter rides only for round trips, not one-way (you have to pick up a scooter and return it to the same spot), so round trips won’t really compete with taxi or Muni rides for commuters. Eventually, when they get enough critical mass, Scoot Networks will offer one-way trips.

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