Here is a case study:

Jack signs up for a BYKE partner account using his Facebook account as the identifier.  With this account he creates a unique program name, and thinks that his local town Cambridge is a sensible place to target.  He finds that cambridge.byke.mobi is still available, so he secures this program name.

Now, he needs some bikes.  Under a conventional bike sharing scheme, Jack would have to buy the bikes and racks, which at $3000 a bike, can be quite expensive.  However, Byke is different, because the bikes already exist.  They are sitting unused in people’s Cambridge back yards, and those bike owners could be earning from the bike’s rental.  So all he needs to do is communicate to those bike owners that they can be earning from their bikes.

Communicating the message can be done several ways

• Local Facebook Ads
• Local Google Ads
• Classified adverts in papers
• Local news media
• Local radio
• Existing mailing lists
• Tweeting or Facebook sharing
• Local outdoor advertising

Some of these methods cost, and others don’t, but lets assume Jack tries a local Facebook advert.  He runs an advert using this message:

Rent Out Your Bike

Help save the planet and earn

some pocket money at the

same time in Cambridge!

Jack sets the cost per click at $0.30, and runs the campaign targeted to Cambridge.  He finds that the cost per added partner bike (which can be checked in the Byke account) is $8, and it takes a day of advertising on Facebook.  This is considerably cheaper than buying the bike himself!

After a sufficient density of bikes has been achieved, the service will become useful. Jack feels 30 bikes and hence 30 bike locations within the town, provides a good density for end users of the cambridge.byke.mobi scheme to choose renting over taking a bus or driving.  This means he invests $240.  Proud of the fact that he now has a bike share scheme working for him, he announces the scheme in the local media.  Word spreads and the bikes start being used.

How much does he earn?  Jack shares 50% of the net revenues with Byke themselves, which has a 33% share in the bike rental earnings (66% goes to the individual bike owners in the scheme), and an average of $5 per day per bike.  Given a 30% rental filled rate per day, this equates to $7.45 per day or $225 per month.  Within one month of operation, he makes a return on his investment, and then starts turning a profit in the second month.

Word spreads, particularly with 30 hi-vis cycling bibs moving around town, and the number of people signing up with bikes increases.  Before long there are hundreds of bikes in the business and Jack decides to quit his day job!

Note: this business is repeatable where you are, so feel free to copy the creative or graphics.

Bike sharing started in the 1960s, when bikes were freely shared in Amsterdam. The difficulty was that bikes were often stolen.

Lock systems were then introduced – 2nd generation biking, and became relatively popular in some cities, particularly in Germany.  3rd generation bike sharing, in common use today, uses electronic methods to detect and track a particular bike.

Current costs for each bike in a public bike sharing scheme are US$3000 – US$5000, which has meant that only a limited number of cities have been able to front the investment required.

Peer to peer bike sharing is an alternative sharing scheme.  Using the power of location services on mobile phones, and the social network of existing bike owners, bikes can be added to the scheme at no cost other than communicating the message to their owners.  The bikes already exist as personal bikes, it is simply a matter of matching up the right person to the right bike at the right time.

However as of writing the 3rd generation sharing schemes still have some advantages:

• Costs for end usage are zero for short trips (expensive for longer ones to recoup the investment however)
• There is no need to return the bike to the original location

Advantages for peer to peer schemes

• Costs for end usage are usually administered on a low daily basis, which means there is no dash for the nearest station
• Near zero costs for adding new bikes to the scheme
• Scalability, worldwide

Perhaps the best approach is to have a combined 3rd generation sharing scheme with a peer to peer model to enhance it.

Disadvantages of the 3rd generation model include

• Bikes become mis-distributed, meaning a service provider must maintain the set of bikes
• Lack of scalability to outside a given area
• Inability to handle large volumes of traffic in one busy area (Waterloo station in London was a prime example).

Disadvantages of peer to peer model include

• Bikes must be returned to their original location
• Some hand-over is needed of the bike (although there are solutions in development for this)

A little history: the idea for peer to peer bike sharing came from a novel journey that I had to do in July 2010 (limited by not having access to a car at the time).  I needed to travel to somewhere 5-6 miles away from the Bedford train station in England on a regular basis from London. A taxi was prohibitively expensive, but I was relying on someone to offer me a lift.  I soon grew tired of this and had the idea of taking a bike, leaving it at the station and then using it once a week to do my trip there and back.  But with this in mind I then had an ‘asset’ sitting at Bedford station during the week.   Why not rent this out to someone who could make use of it?  As it happened I was also involved in web development, and in particular location based services.  If I could rent out my bike, why couldn’t other people rent out theirs when they’re not using them also?

All that was needed was a location based search engine and a payment model.  I say all, but development of the site, while originally only taking a matter of hours/days, naturally expanded into a fuller system as time progressed.

The resulting site can be found at http://byke.mobi It was also the work of my family of advisors, so I thank them for their input too.

The new product includes a graphical install, and a ready-made layer of information, which can be edited at a record level using the control panel.  Additionally, the package allows a spreadsheet import, so that a list of points of interest can be imported quickly.  This brings creating an augmented reality layer for the Layar browser or the owlz browser (which is included in the package) to a much wider audience.

We predict it won’t be long before the majority of websites need to be location-activated, and LightRod’s server aims to meet that need.  Every company has a head office, or some information which is location-relevant, and users will quickly determine that by entering a company’s website address into a location browser, they should be given the nearest relevant local information from that company.

The open source LightRod product also includes advanced configuration and code APIs for developers wanting to use it’s proven scalable search engine.

The OAR servers are referenced from  the web-page of the URL and are compatible with Layar, for which some 200 layers of information are available world-wide.  LightRod also provide an open source server to supply relevant nearest results to the OAR browser.

OAR layers are internally hyperlinkable, so that a tree of layers of geographic information can be created.

What does this mean for augmented reality?  It means that anybody can freely create and promote their own layers of information in an open playing field.  They can also host a browser, or make adjustments to it.  Geographically relevant information is not only in the hands of large corporations, but is available for all to publish and explore.

The browser is explained at LightRod.org and available to run immediately on mobile phones (or desktops) at http://oar.lightrod.org without any download.

See the Timulator quick interface, or full description page.

The application is currently available anywhere in the UK, but is global in extent, with retailers able to add their product details in any location worldwide.

The product could form a key element in the need to serve up ‘where is my nearest’ requests in a scalable manner from within AR applications.  The server has been tested with databases of half a billion geo-located keywords, and the software will scale further if required.

See

http://www.lightrod.org

However, as of yet the name of the service is not disclosed, but the geosearch software is downloadable from

http://www.atomjump.com/mediawiki/

It is an exciting development, and opens the road for a whole variety of different roles for the timulator.  The templates are written in plain HTML/CSS with the addition of several time related variables.