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 »
Avis Budget is buying Zipcar for $500 million in cash as it takes a big leap into the car-sharing market. Zipcar will get a big backer who can make it more efficient and help it grow. Read more »
A new startup from the founder of The Climate Corporation is looking to use driving data to remake the stodgy car insurance sector and is launching in Oregon on Wednesday. Read more »
What happened this week in cleantech on GigaOM Pro, our premium research service? — The opportunities and risks in the share economy, the third quarter dreary cleantech figures, Google Ventures explains why it backed Nest, and Calxeda forecasts its next low power chip. 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 »
Scoot Networks, which has created a network of shared electric scooters, officially launched to the public on Wednesday. One of the killer apps of the service caters to commuters looking to solve the last mile problem of their commutes. 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 »
Car sharing company Zipcar has acquired a startup in Austria to help expand its presence in Europe, Zipcar’s CEO Scott Griffith tells me. Read more »
Zipcar tweaks its pricing (a sign of increasing competition), scientists peg the cost of climate change at $1,240 trillion, and there’s a new fuel cell outta an MIT lab that uses vanadium oxide as the anode to both generate and store energy. Today in cleantech! 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 »
While web sharing sites — like Airbnb and Zipcar — have an environmental angle, potential users of these services aren’t all that motivated by the environmental benefits, according to a new survey. Instead web sharing users are motivated by saving money and by having easy access. Read more »
San Francisco is truly the test bed for alternative tech-focused transportation. And on Tuesday, folks in the Bay Area will have access to yet another option: SideCar, a mobile app that will offer real time ride sharing. Read more »
There’s definitely a generational shift going on as young folks care about fuel efficiency and environmental impacts, which makes them question the absolute need to own a car in the first place. 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 »
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 »
Zagster aims to bring shared bikes to a campus, apartment complex, or hotel near you. The startup (once called CityRyde) just signed Cisco and Hyatt Hotels to install its shared bike service in their locations, CEO Timothy Ericson told attendees of TechStars Boston Demo Day. Read more »
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 »
Feel like standard car sharing, via networks like Zipcar, is getting a bit old? Well, a startup called Scoot Networks is officially coming out of stealth on Wednesday at the Launch Festival in San Francisco and is announcing its Zipcar-style sharing network for electric scooters. 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 »
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 »
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 »
The ability of coworking spaces to keep talent in town and boost local businesses is relatively well known to the movement’s fans, but another possible economic benefit of the spaces is less obvious. They help people share resources more efficiently, argues one space founder. Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
In the past few years we have seen accommodation-sharing company Airbnb grab a valuation of over $1 billion and car-sharing leader Zipcar squeak into profitability sooner than expected. Those developments, among others, suggest the share economy is alive and well, but how can this space continue ... 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 »
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 »
Our GigaOM Pro Green IT analyst Adam Lesser reports: Zipcar reported its third quarter after the bell yesterday and finds itself getting hammered this morning, down 5 percent. Sadly, the street is missing the story. Zipcar is finally profitable. Period. Read more »
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 »
In a shift that’s analogous to the movement toward cloud computing, work is changing from a place to a network armed with collaboration tools, and this change raising questions about environmental impact. But are we underestimating the green benefits of new ways of working? 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 »
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 »
