Zimride matches drivers, passengers

— UC Santa Cruz student Lauren Vargas was spending a lot of money on gas for frequent weekend trips to Southern California to keep a long-distance relationship going.

But then she discovered Zimride Inc., a San Francisco company that blends ride sharing with social networking. Now she covers her costs by renting otherwise empty seats in her car to passengers willing to pay $20 to $30 to make the same trip.

“I always have two, three or even four people to drive down with,” said Vargas, 20. “It’s cheaper than a plane ticket and faster than a train. And I’ve met some cool people I probably would not have met.”

Founded in 2007, Zimride built its online carpool-matching service at select universities, a similar route Facebook followed in its early days. Indeed, Zimride received $250,000 in seed money from a Facebook investment fund.

But Zimride, which claims to be the largest online ride-sharing service in North America with 300,000 users, began to branch out Wednesday, offering services to any travelers looking for rides or riders between the Bay Area and Los Angeles, one of the busiest transportation corridors in the world.

One driver was offering a Labor Day weekend trip from Palo Alto to Los Angeles for just $25 one way.

Drivers and passengers can sign on to the service at zimride.com, post where they want to go and check out the Zimride and Facebook profiles of ride-sharing matches.

“We wanted to create a new form of transportation for everyone that’s built on this community of sharing rides,” said co-founder John Zimmer.

Catering to students

Zimride built its business on selected university networks, catering to students needing cheap transportation to and from campus or to their homes. The company then began working with companies looking to increase their employees’ ride-sharing options.

The service has booked more than 100 million miles worth of trips, and Zimride has 110 clients in 30 states. They include the University of California campuses, Stanford University, the University of San Francisco, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of North Carolina, JetBlue Airways and Facebook.

Zimride initially concentrated on closed networks that provide an extra layer of security – requiring a campus or corporate login – to build its business and prove the service worked. Zimride generates revenue by charging companies and colleges an annual service fee.

But the move to open up to the general public gets back to the company’s original vision – to create a greener, low-cost, grassroots transportation system for both regular commutes and long road trips. In fact, when Zimride began marketing trips between the Bay Area and Southern California, the company was already offering rides to locations outside the state. One driver seeking passengers for the Burning Man festival in Nevada was asking $80 for the round-trip drive from Berkeley, while another driver sought $8 for a round trip from Buffalo Grove, Ill., to Chicago.

Zimbabwe system

Co-founder Logan Green was inspired by what he saw on a 2005 trip to Zimbabwe – a grassroots public transportation system – and derived the firm’s name from that country. The name also made sense when he met Zimmer through Facebook, where the service started as an application.

Zimmer had also been thinking of building what he called “one network where you can find a ride where you need to go.”

Better connections

There are other online ride-sharing sites, including Ridester, Carpoolworld and eRideshare, and government agencies’ trip-planning sites like 511.org. Then there’s Craigslist, which lists hundreds of thousands of posts by drivers and passengers looking to share rides.

Zimmer said he believes Zimride can offer a better experience than just a ride-sharing bulletin board. He said Zimride gives drivers and passengers a better idea of who they are sharing rides with because the site’s user profiles and Facebook connections include photos, contact information and personal preferences such as favorite music.

Drivers and passengers are encouraged to communicate with each other before the trip to build trust. Passengers can also pay for their trips ahead of time. Fees are based on mileage, and Zimride plans to take a 10 percent cut from trips booked by the general public, although it is waiving the fee initially as a promotion.

Lauren Vargas said she usually checks to see what other Zimride drivers are charging, setting her fees just high enough to cover gas and maintenance. She has also made her profile viewable only within the college community and carefully looks over prospective passengers’ profiles.

“I wouldn’t want to be driving down with just anybody,” she said.

She used to make the trip to Anaheim every other weekend to maintain a long-distance relationship. And it’s worked.

“I couldn’t hold that relationship up without Zimride,” she said.

E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page D – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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Call for Facebook ban on alcohol ads

Mark Gould

Thursday, 18 August 2011

A new report by campaigning charity Alcohol Concern reveals the growing importance to alcohol companies of social networking sites like Facebook and video sharing sites such as YouTube as a means of promoting their products.

It is also concerned at what it says are the inadequacies of online age verification pages aimed at preventing under 18s from accessing content intended for adults.

The report New media, new problem? also highlights the frequent practice of users of social networks  posting pictures and descriptions of themselves drinking and being drunk, and asks why so many of us choose to publicise our alcohol consumption in this way. 

It says health bodies need to counter official alcohol marketing and pro-drinking messages on the internet by fully embracing and utilising new media themselves as a means to promote alcohol-related health messages.

And it wants official alcohol marketing to be banned from social networking sites and for alcohol producers and site administrators to end the unauthorised use of drinks logos and advertising images on social networking sites

It says age affirmation pages are “ineffective” at restricting young people’s access to websites containing alcohol-related content and calls research to find better ways to control access. In the meantime it wants alcohol brand websites to only contain straightforward factual information about products.

The report found that:

• According to a recent survey, 37% of children aged 13-15 year olds have seen photos of their friends drunk on social networking sites.

• 8% of year 9 pupils and 25% of year 11 pupils in Wales have been drunk at least 4 times, whilst 14% of year 9 pupils and 31% of year 11 pupils in Wales drink alcohol every week.

• Almost half (49%) of children aged 8-17 in the UK have set up their own profile on a SNS. Despite the fact that the minimum age for most SNSs is 13 years, 27% of 8-11 year olds who are aware of such sites state they have a user profile.

Alcohol Concern chief executive Don Shenker said the alcohol industry has “very effectively taken advantage of internet technology as a means of promoting its products”.

 

He said that most of the leading drinks companies have a presence on Facebook or Twitter, plus their own websites which often contain content likely to be attractive to young people, such as games and videos, competitions and prizes.

“Many Facebook groups about drinks also mirror official drinks industry advertising and make use of official drinks logos. Much of this can be easily accessed by users of any age. The sharing of pro-drinking messages in this way fuels the normalisation of alcohol – the more people who are regularly exposed to images and descriptions of excessive consumption, the more normal and acceptable this behaviour appears.”

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