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1. #Zipcar denver software#
2. #Zipcar denver plus#

The car recognizes him as the person with the reservation, and the doors unlock automatically. In the parking lot, where the City of Cambridge donates a free spot to Zipcar, Griffith takes out his Zipcar membership card and holds it over a special reader installed under the car’s windshield.

The message told a small computer hidden in the car who had reserved it, and for how long. Making the reservation took about two minutes.Ī few seconds after we made the reservation online, Zipcar’s system beamed a message to the Mini via Verizon’s two-way paging network.

#Zipcar denver plus#

Using this particular car costs Zipcar members $7 an hour, plus forty cents a mile. In his office nearby, we’d used the company’s Web site to reserve a banana-hued Mini Cooper for a few hours. Standing in a parking lot behind the post office in Central Square, Griffith demonstrates how Zipcar works. (Chase remains in a business development role, and still serves on the board.) Jonathan Seelig, a co-founder of Akamai Technologies and one of the early investors in Zipcar, took over as chairman.

#Zipcar denver software#

Griffith had been CEO of Digital Goods, which made software that prevented e-books from being copied. It needed to attract more funding, but the willing investors insisted on replacing the old board of directors and bringing in a new CEO to take over from Zipcar founder Robin Chase.Įnter Scott Griffith, who joined as CEO in February. It was losing money, and didn’t have enough left in the bank to reach profitability. The Cambridge company, which operates a car-sharing network in Boston, Washington, and New York, was veering off course last year. The question: can a new chairman and a new CEO from the world of high-tech steer it in the right direction and step on the gas? Zipcar is one of the most promising start-ups in Boston. My column, "New chairman, CEO shift gears at Zipcar": I went back into the archives to pull out the column I wrote in 2003, a few months after Griffith joined Zipcar as its CEO, replacing co-founder Robin Chase Chase's husband Roy Russell was still serving as Zipcar's VP of technology. Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith holds 3.92 percent of the company, about 2.4 million shares. The three biggest shareholders are ex-AOL CEO Steve Case's Revolution investment arm, Benchmark Capital in California, and Greylock Partners. Cambridge-based Zipcar filed to go public this morning (here's the press release, and the SEC document).