Let’s talk about cars…From Tim Bos -ShareRing CEOWe’ve had a lot of people come onto our Telegram, Twitter and Reddit channels to ask what the ShareRing x Keaz partnership means. I’m hoping that this post goes a long way to explaining the integration that’s currently happening between the 2 companies.
First, a bit of background… in 2012, I had a vision to create a platform that allowed for the sharing of anything. The idea was that rental companies, sharing providers, and start-ups could use our platform to run their sharing business. We raised some angel funds and started to develop this platform. After about 6 months of development and testing, we came to the realization that there were too many insurmountable obstacles with developing a global, centralized, platform that allowed anyone to plug into it and run their business, so we pivoted the business and focused solely on developing a car sharing platform that allows any vehicle fleet, rental company, or corporate pool car manager, to white-label (re-brand) it and run their own car-sharing operation. This has been a huge success, and has resulted in the KeazACCESS platform being deployed in over 300 locations globally.
Fast forward a few years, and in comes blockchain technology, distributed ledger and ‘smart’ contracts. This technology has turned out to be the holy grail for us to realize our original vision of creating a marketplace for the sharing of ANYTHING. I’ll save all the technical reasoning for another post, but we are finally in a position to address the highly fragmented sharing economy and provide a central access point for consumers and businesses around the globe.
So where does Keaz fit into this?Well, with all of the work that we’ve done at Keaz to develop a highly flexible user experience, API, and back-end system, we have had a huge head-start in developing the software that will underpin the ShareLedger blockchain. We have entered into an agreement with Keaz for them to provide direct access to the IP and codebase required to develop our own set of API’s that are built on ShareLedger. What’s more, we also have an immediate customer-base that will use ShareRing when we launch later this year. The Keaz integration will come under our ‘mobility’ stream within the ecosystem that we are developing.
Keaz already provides white-label car sharing services to the likes of: Toyota, YooGo Share, Merchants Fleet, Enterprise Fleet, Envoy There, Telstra, and a large number of private companies and government fleets in Australia and the USA.
What’s more, with the Keaz technology, we have worked directly with the following manufacturers to ensure that our systems will be compatible via direct API integration to them, or via a custom telematics unit (black box):
So why haven’t these manufacturers been listed on the ShareRing site as ‘partners’? That’s because they’re not partners! In most of the cases, we’ve simply worked with them to integrate their vehicles into our platform so we can remotely check the status of a vehicle as well as lock/unlock and enable/disable the starter motor. The benefit with that is we can confidently allow any aspiring car sharing, or pool car management company to jump onto ShareRing, create an account, and be on-boarded very quickly so that they can start renting out vehicles to their customers.
We will be posting more information on our other ‘streams’, such as travel, events, daily life, etc. in the near future.
https://medium.com/sharering/lets-talk-about-cars-1e0be1384a8a
