A number of new start-ups presented to a pair of investors and a large audience at host BMW i Ventures’ space in Greenwich Village during a recent installment of the NY Future Mobility Meetup. Here are the five presenting companies, who literally focused on trains, planes – and even electric automobiles.
CLICK HERE TO SEE 5 NYC MOBILITY STARTUPS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT
Buster
Buster provides not only an online presence for private charter transport services, but helps them set the whole thing up. Right now if you want to rent a limo or a bus, it’s all either in person or on the phone, with their records being either in an excell spread sheet or on a desk calendar, Buster hope to change that. By providing an online platform for all of these companies, they hope to increase not only the volume of their business but to stream line it as well.
By automating everything and bringing it all online, Buster will allow these companies to not only handle more work, but to make the process of figuring out if they can even take a job or if it needs to be farmed out to another company as simple as a few clicks of the mouse.
Evercharge
Right now, the biggest problem facing electric cars, other than battery life and charge time, is the fact that if consumers who live in apartments want one,, they cannot buy one as there would be no place to charge it. Evercharge fixes this problem by tapping into an apartment building’s power grid and creating charging stations for tenants whose car parks may not offer them.
The unit itself is small and can easily fit on a pillar in a parking garage. After it’s set up, there’s really nothing to be done other than to plug in and charge up. The cost is a combination of both a monthly rate and a usage charge that works much like an electric bill. They are currently the #1 provider for Tesla, and even boast that if you go into a Tesla dealer and tell them you live in an apartment, the dealer will point you towards Evercharge. They are currently in talks to partner with BMW and others.
Smartcar
Smartcar started as an app for Google Glass that would allow users to control a Tesla. It blew up among the community and gained 300 active members quickly, most of them using the app to figure out where they had last parked their car.
From there, they expanded with a simple yet lofty goal: to make all cars smarter without adding any hardware. No car manufacturer will use a system developed by their competitors, for obvious reasons. As a third party not invested in any of them, Smartcar hopes to create a platform that they can all adopt without worrying about giving the competition an advantage. By doing this, Smartcar hope to create a unified system in all future cars that can be taken advantage of by developers and other companies to grow the smart car ecosystem.
Transit Screen
Transit Screen is quite simple, really: it’s exactly as it sounds. Transit Screen displays information relating to the forms of local public transit. Train times, bus times, distances to popular locations and how long it will take to get to them by not only public transit but also by foot and bike.
Transit Screen seeks to help commuters make smart choices about how they transverse the city they are in, and make that information more readily available. So far, it’s availible in the Greater Washington DC Area, the San Francisco Bay Area, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, Portland, Seattle, Tampa Bay, Toronto and Vancouver. As far as how they make money, it’s simply SaaS.
Valet Anywhere
Valet Anywhere looks to solve the problem of finding a place to park in Manhattan by supplying users with valets, well, anywhere. You ring them up from your smartphone when you need a spot and a trained and vetted valet in a purple shirt – the ones with those suspenders drawn on them – will show up and park for you. When you’re done, ring them up again and you get your car back.
The service is $6/hr with a maximum of $42, which includes the cost of parking your car.. There is also a nightly rate of $39, so you don’t have to look for a place to leave your car at night, either.