Business Opportunities Weblog

July 18, 2008 by Nicholas | 1 Comment

Greenwich Times:

To launch his first company, 24-year-old Cos Cob native John Zimmer is taking a road trip.

Zimmer, a 2002 graduate of Greenwich High School, has embarked on a cross-country journey from New York City to the West Coast, part of an effort to promote his new online ride-sharing service, Zimride.com. Ride-sharing is “easy, saves money (on gas) and will impact our environment and the future of travel in the United States,” Zimmer said while driving through upstate New York. That, and “it’s just a lot of fun.”

Launched in 2007, Zimride allows car poolers with similar travel plans and preferences to connect with one another using the popular social-networking Web site Facebook, on which Zimride is featured.

To use the service, users sign on; type in their travel times, departure points and destinations; then peruse a database of other car poolers with similar preferences, like driving speeds, the kind of music they like and whether they smoke. Once they’ve selected like-minded car poolers, users correspond via email to hammer out the details of their trip.

The idea of this system, Zimmer explained, is to take advantage of Facebook’s “community-building” features. Whereas other ride-sharing programs, like eRideshare or Craigslist, allow users to scour long, impersonal lists of car pools, Zimride lets people read personal profiles, view digital photos and interact with prospective travel buddies. “It’s a lot easier to get into a car with somebody when you know something about their personality and share common interests,” he said. “That aspect – the social aspect – is really what sets us apart.”

Since launching the site in 2007, Zimmer and his founding business partner Logan Green have watched the number of users skyrocket from about 3,500 to more than 300,000.

Image via Mashable

In Eco-friendly, Entrepreneurs | 1 Comment