Searching for a Zipcar with the company's new iPhone app.
(Credit: Zipcar)SAN FRANCISCO--It's like the ultimate yuppie geek convergence: there's finally an iPhone app for car-sharing company Zipcar. To put it in the most stereotypical of terms, you now no longer need a computer to book that Prius for your weekend Whole Foods run.
Apple gave a green light to the free download earlier this week, so Zipcar members can now use the app to find and book available cars using GPS-enabled maps, access account and car database information, contact the company's headquarters, and use a "virtual key fob" to lock and unlock their reserved cars. It's the first-ever mobile endeavor for Zipcar besides text-message alerts, something that may be surprising considering the company's outside-the-box, next-gen image.
"This is an entirely new channel of communication with members," Zipcar Chief Technology Officer Luke Schneider told CNET News in a meeting at the company's San Francisco office, adding that over a quarter of the company's 325,000 members (which it calls "Zipsters") own iPhones. Applications for more mobile platforms are tentatively on the way, he added, as another quarter of Zipcar members own non-iPhone smartphones. But he said the company hasn't decided which to develop next.
Zipcar, founded a decade ago in Cambridge, Mass., is designed as an alternative to car ownership and rental. You pay by the hour, gas and insurance are included, and cars are scattered in parking spaces across cities and university towns (the places where living without a car is most feasible) so that once you've booked a vehicle, you can show up and unlock it with your membership card. Schneider came on board when the company merged with a rival, Flexcar, about two years ago.
With its iPhone app, Schneider said, Zipcar hopes to achieve a twofold goal: first, making the membership experience easier by allowing for mobile reservations and database information; and two, attracting new customers by letting them toy with the app even if they aren't already members. Load up the "virtual key fob" without logging in or having a reservation, and a pop-up message will appear saying, in quirky Zipster fashion, "You do not have a current reservation, but you can make fun sounds anyway." In other words, you can push the horn-honking button until your friends want to wring your neck. It's about "the experience" of the Zipcar brand, Schneider explained.
For the company's management, the mobile app can also fine-tune some of the data that Schneider says they're "constantly obsessed" with: which car models are in demand at which times of the day and year, which locations seem over- or under-served, and so forth. It doesn't collect any sensitive personal data, he assured me.
I had a chance to test drive the new iPhone app on Wednesday, when I picked up a Zipcar to drive to Mountain View for the TechStars Investor Day event. The app is extremely well-designed, and making a reservation is a no-brainer. It's overall terrific branding for Zipcar: newcomers will certainly get the idea that this is a company that's tech-savvy, rooted in convenience, and has a sense of humor.
And Zipcar needs to keep up that image, now that the car-sharing trend is catching on with rivals from both the nonprofit space (like the Bay Area's City Car Share) and the mainstays of the rental car industry.
The Zipcar iPhone app's 'virtual key fob' is cute, but more gimmicky than convenient.
(Credit: Zipcar)"Zipcar established a category that didn't exist yet," Schneider said of competition in the market. "It validates the space when bigger competitors come in."
My gripe with the app, unfortunately, is with the nifty part that everybody's talking about. The unlock-by-iPhone feature is more of a fun toy than a utility; it simply isn't as convenient as it should be. First, you've got to load up the app and let it log you in--which takes a few seconds, enough time for me to fish around in my wallet and find my "Zipcard," the ID card that also locks and unlocks reserved cars. Then, upon hitting the lock or unlock button, the app has to communicate with Zipcar via data connection--not a short-range signal like an automatic door opener--and sometimes that can take another second or two. (Once, in fact, it just didn't seem to want to work.) Typically, I just got impatient and dug out my card.
Additionally, the app won't replace the credit-card-sized "Zipcard." They'll still need to use the card, not the iPhone interface, to unlock a car when they initially pick it up.
But that's a security regulation more than anything else, Schneider told me: "We don't want you to be stranded if your battery's run out."
(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET)
We were expecting a lot from the Mercury Milan Hybrid. After having briefly driven the Ford Fusion Hybrid, we had an idea iof what to expect from the power train, and we've also seen Ford's killer combination of Sync and Sirius Travel Link in a few cars over the last year. But we didn't realize what a car tech dream the Mercury Milan Hybrid would be.
The first clue it gives comes from the high-tech instrument panel, with a variety of virtual gauges that you can configure. Then there's the phone and MP3 player connectivity offered by Sync, along with its incredible voice command system. Sirius Travel Link mixes traffic, fuel prices, and weather into the navigation system. And finally, the driving experience, with its excellent fuel economy and seamless transition between electric and gas.
The Mercury Milan Hybrid is a remarkable car, and we've rated it appropriately.
If you reel in a small sub instead of a rainbow trout from the Sacramento River this summer, don't call Homeland Security.
It belongs to a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley trying to learn more about the river currents in the delta.
The researchers are working with propelled 4-foot-long submarines and floating drifters equipped with GPS-receivers for positioning, GSM-modules for communication, and sensors inside for recording temperature, salinity, and currents.
Researchers prepare to launch a submarine.
(Credit: UC Berkeley)
"We are prototyping an infrastructure and testing it in the delta," said Professor Alexander Bayen, who leads the team at UC Berkeley's Civil Systems Department.
The purpose of all this is to collect data to help the state better understand the river. And researchers have good reason to believe there's urgency to their work. With drought looming for most of California, understanding the state's water supply (much of the state's population drinks run-off from snow melting in the Sierra Nevada range) and how the system works is critical.
The Sacramento River is already monitored by 50 permanent water stations in about 1,000 miles of water channels, but that collection of data is not designed to handle emergency situations, according to the researchers.
"It's totally undersampled if you want a precise, online, real-time measurement of the whole state of the delta," Bayen said.
Heavy rains, levee breaches, or contaminant spills are situations when accurate and up-to-date data is needed. In the river delta in 2004, for example, one of the levees breached and a large agricultural area was flooded. Pumps normally move fresh water from sources in the north down to the south, but silt was confounding in the system. The pumps had to be shut down for a whole month at a cost of around $1 million a day.
"In retrospect, that was too long. But given the information they had, they were forced to act very conservatively. They could not turn the pumps on," said graduate student and researcher Andrew Tinka.
Floaters equipped with sensors deployed on site could have provided real-time information on how the water was flowing and where the silt was heading.
Development of the floating devices starts from scratch at a UC Berkeley workshop.
(Credit: Carl-Gustav Linden/CNET News.com)In a recent workshop at UC Berkeley, undergraduate students and university staff worked on floater prototypes that will be tested this summer in the river. Inside the floaters are a GSM-module, a GPS-receiver and a $120 Gumstix computer running on Linux. (A Gumstix is a computer the size of a stick of gum.)
"They are great little computers that are about as powerful as a 1996-era Pentium. All the power you had at your disposal can be yours in a floating sensor for very little money now, and that's really cool as far as I'm concerned," Tinka said.
The self-guided submarines are developed in Portugal by the University of Porto.
That is the hardware involved. The other part of the project are the algorithms calculated for the complex hydrodynamics models. The software is based on two commercial packages, Telemac and Mike 21, with programs for GPS tracking added.
Bayen said that the combination of the hardware and software is the novelty here. He calls it a "cyber physical system," where the cyber part monitors the flow of information and the physics is the hardware--the floaters.
"In five years, cyber physical system is going to be a tech buzz word," Bayen said.
If the research project is successful, the innovations can be put to use in other parts of the world where there is a need for improved river management. The Berkeley team is already cooperating with Professor Linda Bushnell of the University of Washington on a project in the Mekong--the troubled river that floats through China, Laos, and Cambodia out in its delta in Vietnam.
Attention mountain climbers, hikers, backcountry skiiers, and city dwellers with no sense of direction: new technology could make your handheld GPS device more energy-efficient and let its battery last longer.
Fuel cell manufacturer MTI Micro announced on Friday that it has created a prototype for an embedded fuel cell for handheld GPS devices.
The company said it will provide three times as much power as a set of four AA batteries would, keeping the GPS gadget in question powered for up to 60 hours of continuous use. That's crucial for many users of handheld GPS devices, who are often navigating territory far away from traditional power sources.
CNET News.com first reported that MTI Micro was working on a fuel cell for GPS devices last month. The embedded methanol fuel cell was ultimately unveiled at the 10th Annual Small Fuel Cells Conference in Atlanta.
MTI Micro's GPS fuel cell, which uses the company's Mobion technology, also has a USB interface so that it can be used as a power source for charging other handheld devices, such as cell phones and cameras. Recharging the cell currently involves filling it up with more methanol.
When these will hit the market is unclear: no time estimate was given for when MTI Micro's fuel cells will actually make it into a GPS device that could wind up in your hands.
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