Robin Chase, founder of ZipCar, told attendees at Cloud Connect 2013 in Chicago that the human race must reorganize around the means provided by cloud computing and social networking to better utilize resources to solve pressing world problems.
Chase spoke in Tuesday’s opening keynote session to argue that human activity in recent history has consisted of individuals spending part of their week working for a company, then acting as a consumer for the rest of the time. Now those roles are beginning to merge as consumers gain the social networking and feedback mechanisms to react to their consumer experiences. Their reactions in turn influence the course of the companies around them. She refers to her ideas, which focus on individuals acting without waiting for their governments, as “cooperative capitalism” involving businesses that share “excess capacity” in the hands of individuals.
Chase is a former CEO of ZipCar, a city car rental business based on frequent, short-term car rentals, which in some cases substitute for owning a car. She also founded GoLoco, a local ride-sharing service, where the driver opens up empty seats to other riders headed in the same direction. She also launched Buzzcar in France, under which individuals rent their autos to strangers. It’s grown into a business that lists 7,000 vehicles of “different attributes, available at different price points,” she said.
A recent user of the service told her that he rented a car to vacation on an island off the coast, and its owner included personal impressions of the best beaches, views and restaurants. “That’s an individual- to-individual transaction that you can’t get standing at the counter at Hertz, or at ZipCar,” she noted.