This time last year, several media outlets pronounced 2012 as the Year of Sharing. And over the course of the last 12 months, we have witnessed countless amazing developments and advancements from our peers in the sharing economy.

Our team spent the year, hard at work, working to improve the Getaround product with the hopes of making car sharing a possibility for people everywhere. In 2012, we launched Getaround communities in Portland, Austin and Chicago. We introduced Getaway – a new way for people to share cars, and worked hard to update and improve our product.

But as 2012 came to a close, we asked ourselves how we should leave our stamp on the year. And what better way to wrap up the Year of Sharing than working with our fellow sharers to pay it forward.

We started on Thanksgiving, when we partnered with the team at Exec to deliver a turkey for every Getaround car rented that weekend and an SUV full of donated food to GLIDE – a long-standing San Francisco charity located only a few blocks from Getaround HQ.

After the success of Operation Turkey Drop – we were excited, and knew we could go even bigger. So we partnered with Twice and ZeroCater to launch the TechGivesBack campaign across The Bay Area. Our goal, to collect goods and rally volunteers for local charities, including Goodwill of San Francisco and the San Francisco Food Bank.

With a clothing drive sponsored by Twice, food drive sponsored by ZeroCater and transportation provided by Getaround we were able to enroll 30+ startups to participate and in just 2 weeks raised over $45,000 in goods and services for charity:

• 3,487 lbs of food worth $20,000 to the SF & Marin Food Banks
• 1,125 lbs of clothing worth more than $19,000 to Goodwill, Dress for Success, Boys & Girls Club and Raphael House
• More than $6,000 worth of transportation, volunteer time, and services

Thank you to the Getaround community and all of our Collaborative Consumption peers for making 2012 a huge year for sharing. Here’s to 2013!

Here at Getaround, we love cool cars. When we heard about the new Bond movie, we knew a trip to the theater just wouldn’t cut it. So instead of watching 007, we thought… what if YOU could be 007? We can’t promise you the charm, the good looks or the wit, but we can 007 your lifestyle for a day.

Better yet, we’ve made it easy (and fun!) to enter – all you have to do is take a lap around the Getaround raceway. On Monday, November 19th, we’ll randomly select one player to be 007 for the day. The top 50 players will each receive two tickets to Skyfall. There’s no limit to how may times you can race, so feel free to keep coming back for more.

So what does it mean to be 007 for the day?

• A day in an Aston Martin courtesy of Getaround. Ejector seat not included.
• A night in a luxe hotel hand-picked by our fabulous partners at HotelTonight.
• A decadent five-star dinner. Shaken – never stirred – martinis throughout.
• A custom tailored suit. You supply the bow-tie.
• 2 tickets to an IMAX screening of Skyfall.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not. Enter now, 007!

We’ve had a lot of big days at Getaround. From winning TechCrunch Disrupt last May to launching in Portland with $1.75 million in federal funding to landing insurance through Berkshire Hathaway—we’ve been lucky enough to have our fair share of celebrations. But today is different. It’s a huge day. One we’ve been anticipating eagerly—for quite some time. And it’s not just for us – this is the next step in the car sharing revolution, and a big day for our entire community.

We have two incredibly exciting announcements to share.

First, we’re announcing our Series A funding: $13.9 million from an incredible list of investors led by Shervin Pishevar at Menlo Ventures, with participation from Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Investments, Marissa Mayer, Innovation Endeavors, and many other equally amazing investors. With this funding, we’re one step closer to our goal of empowering people to car share everywhere, solving car overpopulation and helping people get around.

We’re humbled to have a stellar list of investors that believe in our mission to disrupt transportation as much as we do. Choosing investors is no easy feat—trust us, we’ve been there—so we’re thrilled to have Shervin leading our round. He’s an amazing investor already heavily involved in mobile and collaborative consumption, a visionary, and a true evangelist. Shervin’s been with us every step of the way and he’s helped us shape our strategy for the coming years.

Second, we’re also thrilled to introduce a brand new service launching in beta—one that is brand new to the industry, and one that we think will take off. Getaway, launching in beta today, gives people a chance to share their cars full-time. From managing rentals and facilitating upkeep, you get paid and we do the dirty work. It’s win-win. We’ve heard from people across the country in the past year that they had cars sitting idle—but they weren’t always around to rent them out. From backpacking through Europe, to going off to college, to leaving on military deployment, we’re now giving people a chance to make money from cars that would otherwise do nothing.

And this launch is exciting for renters as well. Each Getaway car will now have a brand new feature called “instant rental”—that gives people a chance to rent a car immediately. Each of our Getaway cars will include the Getaround Carkit, that features GPS technology, usage tracking and advanced security protection. Now you can get a car easier than ever, instantaneously.

Visit getaround.com/getaway for more information.

So join in saying thank you to our all our amazing customers, partners, and investors as we celebrate this big day at Getaround. We’ll be coming to an area near you, soon.

Cheers!

- Sam Zaid, Founder & CEO, Getaround

I was in the mood for a burger, but the movie Food Inc. burned some frightening images of industrial food operations into my mind. Plus, all the recent talk of ammonia-treated, pink-slime filler had me even more concerned about the origin of what I am eating. What could I do?

Use the interwebs! A wide array of websites and mobile apps are making it easier to find restaurants and markets selling locally grown fruits, vegetables and meats – the kind of food your great-grandparents would have eaten.

Enter your zip code into Real Time Farms and your regional map will be populated with local area farms, markets and eateries that function outside the corporate food system.

In Austin, Texas, you can find out which of more than three dozen markets is nearest to you, what days and times they’re open and what’s currently in season. In Portland, Oregon, see what’s on the prix fixe menu this week at Abby’s Table, a restaurant serving straight-from-the-farm, Mexican-inspired dinners on Wednesday and Thursday evenings.

The Slow Food Movement

Increased awareness of food and environmental issues, combined with a fast growing Web-presence, is driving unprecedented growth in local food, which is also referred to as “slow food,” because the focus on building relationships with local farmers and cooking seasonal recipes take time. It’s also about as far as you can get from a fast food drive-through.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicted revenue from locally grown food would hit $7 billion in 2011. While that’s a small slice of the pie compared to Food Inc., it’s enough to support a younger, web-savvy generation of farmers. According to the Statesman Journal there are now more than 7,000 farmers’ markets nationally — a 150 percent increase since 2000.

Jan Kozak manages a popular market in Athens, Georgia. In just three seasons the market has tripled its number of weekly visitors from roughly 800 to 2,300. Kozak says simple online marketing tools like MailChimp and Facebook have had a big impact in keeping customers in touch with the market’s 80 vendors and making the weekly event a centerpiece of community life. Like many others across the country, the Athens market now accepts food stamps, and vendors can use Square to accept credit card payments via smart phones.

A typical carrot has to travel 1,838 miles to reach your dinner table.

According to a report by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, a typical carrot has to travel 1,838 miles to reach your dinner table. Even if it is grown on a small organic farm (and it probably isn’t), the transportation alone creates an oversized environmental impact, and most of the money you spent leaves your community.

Hungry? Interwebs to the Resuce!

So, if you’re ready to buy a carrot (or a burger!) from the farmer down the road – the info you need is just a few clicks away. Start with some of these mobile apps and sites:

• The Locavore app explains what foods are in-season in your area and guides you to the markets where you can buy them.

• With the Foodtree app, you can help map and share the fresh food available in your community.

• Like Real Time Farms, FarmPlate and Local Harvest are two sites working to aggregate regional information about farms, markets and restaurants making up the local food web.

• Locallygrown.net is an online farmers market platform used in more than a 100 locations across the U.S. to allow people to shop for local food from their computers and pick up their goods at a set location and time each week.

• Local Dirt (Web and app) enables you to not only find, but also buy, local food online.

• Good Eggs, based down the street from Getaround in the Mission, is a venture-backed effort founded by former Google, Yahoo and Aardvark veterans to research and prototype new ways to connect producers, vendors and buyers within a local food ecosystem.

• There are also many region- or city-specific tools, like Farm Fresh NYC, Gobble.com (California), Michigan Farm Market Finder, and Georgia Organic’s Local Food Guide.

• And here’s to hoping someone will reproduce Sustaination in the U.S… It’s a terrific UK-based social network connecting patrons and business focused on sustainable food.

Local food abounds – enjoy!

Consider the irony: of all industries so beautifully disrupted by the sharing economy, why is there such little progress in the health and fitness niche?

After all, the mantra is “be lean, healthy and nimble” — just like collaborative consumption. Yet, with all those billions spent on fad diets, gym memberships and experts advice, America consistently ranks as the most obese nation on Earth.

How to trim the fat

Collaborative consumption offers a tremendous opportunity to optimize our bodies and our communities while transforming a broken, bloated industry.

For example, take your average gym membership. Did you know people overestimate their membership usage by 70%?

Let’s say gyms made a small change in their rules to let people share their membership with new or other less active members. They could limit the sharing to, say, three people at a time, with at a cap of three months length, after which the “guest” would have to purchase their own membership (with the option to repeat the cycle of sharing).

Everyone benefits:

• the original member saves money on their underutilized gym membership
• the new member gets to try out the gym at a fraction of the cost before they commit
• the gym gets free exposure while leveraging a community of existing member to help organically grow their business

This approach eliminates a lot of wasted time and money for everyone, including the gym that no longer has to rely on hype marketing to generate revenue.

Let’s move on to personal trainers. Right now, there are basically two categories: those who train as employees of a gym, and those who train independently.

Each scenario comes with its own constraints: a really good trainer in a gym rarely gets the pay she deserves, while an equally awesome solo trainer cannot scale the benefits he’s providing without raising serious capital.

So why not create collaborative consumption marketplace solely devoted to personal trainers? Trainers can offer their services to larger numbers of people and, as in any viable marketplace, the best ones will rise to the top. That’s more people getting fit and happy!

Sporting equipment and fitness DVDs are multi-billion markets that likely create more waste than results. How about starting a sharing platform for gently used sporting goods? Or a Netflix for fitness films?

Let’s close with the idea of upcycling our energy expenditure. We could offset the cost it takes to power our fancy cardio machines by converting all that exertion into clean, usable, human-powered energy! Imagine if every mile you ran on the treadmill kept the gym showers hot.

It would be cool to have a huge display board in the cardio room showing how much energy all active people are generating at any given moment. Maybe then we’d start looking up for inspiration instead of down at that niggling little timer.

***
Here are some sharing platforms with health and fitness-related offerings, but they are not exclusively focused:

• NeighborGoods

  As of this writing, there are 1,867 Sports and Outdoor items, which counts stuff like snow chains in Kansas.

• TaskRabbit

  There appears to be a pretty sizable Yoga class network, as well as the occasional personal trainer—if you look hard enough.

• Uniiverse

  Scroll down the homepage to locate a Pilates instructor, gymnastics conditioning, a ping pong coach and more.

photo credits: vgm8383, Noodles and Beef, ЯAFIK ♋ BERLIN & kate at yr own risk via photopin cc

Finding a parking spot in the city can take just as long as the actual drive or cost just as much as a monthly car payment, but now—thanks to collaborative consumption—there are more promising options.

Peer-to-peer parking services pair drivers with people looking to rent out a private parking spot on an hourly, daily or monthly basis, monetizing spots that previously sat empty.

Most companies offer a mobile app to enable real-time discovery, which helps drivers quickly locate spots in neighborhoods where parking is a challenge.

For drivers, cheaper spots and more of them

“Circling for parking accounts for approximately 30 percent of San Francisco’s congestion”
—Tom Nolan, Chairman of the SFMTA Board of Directors

Chad Meyer—co-founder of Park Circa—discovered through beta testing in San Francisco that people were paying about $2 an hour for other people’s spots. Public spots that were previously unavailable were also being rented.

“People started renting out the space that blocks their driveway, which puts more parking spots back in the public market,” says Meyer.

He adds that so far it’s been a good experience, albeit a little new to people. Having signs to identify these spaces will help legitimize the concept, he says.

For spot owners, some extra cash

Nick Miller, co-founder of Parking Panda, says the cost for parking spots vary depending on location and timing of events, but averages $2-4 an hour and $15/day. Most owners rent their spots out about 7-10 times a month.

For instance, Mondiu Ladejobi lives close to Baltimore’s Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium. After letting friends use his parking spots for free, he now uses Parking Panda to earn some money during Orioles and Ravens games, when demand for parking spikes.

“ParkingPanda has unlocked value which a lot of homeowners in situations such as myself had no way of capturing previously,” Ladejobi says, adding that vacant parking spots around event venues are notoriously expensive.

Peer-to-peer parking companies now available

ParkatmyHouse: started in the UK and recently launched in the US. Instant bookings allow drivers to secure a spot without waiting for the owner to approve.

ParkingPanda: mobile app lets users search for spots. Currently operating in Baltimore.

Park Circa: mobile app lets users search for spots. Currently in private beta mode, but the platform is usable anywhere. Automated posting of spots to Craigslist is in the works.

ParkingSpots: integrates with Google Maps, offers spaces on a monthly or hourly basis. Prices are negotiable at the spot owner’s discretion, and spot seekers can sign up for alerts.

ParkingSpotter: puts owners and renters in direct communication instead of facilitating the transaction as a middleman. Renters can narrow search results according to walking time, cost and other factors.

Storably: offers parking spots and storage spaces such as basements and attics. Once the renter and owner connect, Storably sets up a month-to-month rental.

Photo credits: akarkayu and Dirk Dallas via photopin cc