Startup combines carpooling and social networking

(08-17) 14:55 PDT — 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 ridesharing 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 originally received $250,000 in seed money from a Facebook investment fund.

But Zimride, which claims to be the largest online ridesharing service in North America with 300,000 users, today began to branch out to the general public by formally offering services to 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, post where they want to go and check out the Zimride and Facebook profiles of ridesharing 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.

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 reached out to companies looking to increase their employees’ ridesharing options.

The service has booked more than 100 million miles worth of trips and Zimride now 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 to allow for an extra layer of security – requiring a campus or corporate login – to build its business and prove the service worked. Zimride generates revenues 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, while Zimride began marketing trips between the Bay Area and Southern California, the company was already offering rides to other locations outside the state. One driver seeking passengers for the upcoming 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.

Co-founder Logan Green was inspired by what he saw on a 2005 trip to Zimbabwe and derived the firm’s name from that country. The name also made sense when he met Zimmer through their connections on 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.”

There are other online ride sharing sites, including Ridester, Carpoolworld and eRideshare, and government agency-backed 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 Zimride believes it can offer a better experience than just a ridesharing bulletin board. He said Zimride gives drivers and passengers a better idea of who they are sharing rides with because the company’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 the new general public trips, although it is waiving the fee initially as a promotion.

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

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Portugal The Man Thanks Facebook, Twitter for Return of Stolen Gear

Photos like this, posted by Portugal The Man on the band’s Facebook page, helped get word out about stolen equipment.
Photo courtesy Portugal The Man

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks for indie band Portugal The Man. It started with a dream-come-true performance at Lollapalooza, was followed by the theft of all the group’s musical equipment and ended in a rarity: Something truly heartwarming happening on the internet.

After a rained-on Aug. 7 set at the Chicago music festival, the members of the Portland, Oregon, band parked their van and trailer, loaded with equipment, near their hotel. The next morning, $80,000 worth of gear was gone, stolen from a Grant Park parking lot.

After hearing of the heist, lead singer and guitarist John Gourley immediately took to Twitter and Facebook to spread the word, asking fans and people in the Chicago area to keep an eye out for the stolen equipment.

“HELP People of Chicago and @Lollapalooza our van trailer gear were stolen. Red Ford Van, Black trailer Alaska plates FJH244,” Gourley tweeted from the band’s account.

He posted the same message on Facebook, and followed that up with photos of the van and trailer. At around 6 p.m., police found the van and the trailer, both empty. Gourley posted pictures of the band with the missing equipment on Facebook the next day. On Friday night, he heard that some of their gear had been recovered.

“It really just blew up [on Twitter and Facebook] in a really surprising way,” Gourley said in a phone interview with Wired.com, adding that he believes the buzz on social networks led to calls from TV stations about the theft. “It was so cool for me to see people take it up, that was the reason the networks got involved…. It’s funny that this stuff happens, because now NBC in Chicago is now saying, ‘Pick up the new Portugal The Man record.’”

The band’s savvy use of social networking — and the crime story’s mostly happy ending — stands out at a time when authorities in some cities have blamed instant messaging for fueling riots and pre-emptively shut down cell service to shutter protests.

In Chicago, social networking helped raise the profile of Portugal The Man’s plight. Police said they traced the band’s stolen gear to the home of Juan Ocampo. The 39-year-old Chicago man was charged with felony theft after, prosecutors allege, he bought the band’s equipment for $1,000 at a flea market. Ocampo appeared in court for a bond hearing Tuesday.

The band’s Twitter and Facebook campaign didn’t lead directly to the tips that helped track down Ocampo, police said, but Gourley said he thinks the online messages drew media attention to the theft, which made people more aware of the band’s stolen gear.

“Because the story was everywhere it helped them, I believe,” Gourley said. “Patton Oswalt tweeted about the stuff getting stolen, I thought that was amazing. People that didn’t need to do it were helping out.”

Portugal The Man’s manager was headed to Chicago on Wednesday to take stock of what the police were able to recover (not all the equipment was found), and the band was so grateful for the investigators’ work that they posted on Facebook that they were going to “send a pile of doughnuts over” to the police.

Ultimately, Gourley said, the whole incident was as much about the power of social networking as it was about getting back the gear the band needs to continue making its music.

“I feel bad for all the people who follow us on Twitter who could care less about our gear,” Gourley said, referencing the activity the theft caused in the Twitterverse. “But if you’ve ever been robbed before, if you’ve ever been violated in any way, you know how that feels. It was the worst thing that could happen, but seeing those things, it was exciting to see people do that.”

Portugal The Man’s latest album, In the Mountain in the Cloud, came out in July.

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