BikeParking.Club connects a social network to bike locks in a city

Palo Alto has a bicycle lock problem, and a pair of application builders and a designer took a shot at making an attempt to remedy that problem in 24 hrs in New York this weekend.

Eugene Tonev, Alexander Sivura and Yuri Dymov — at this time at health and fitness startup HealthTap — place together a product of the sorts of bicycle racks you may well see on the streets of Palo Alto. But this rack has a related lock on it, paired with a social network, that can activate on demand. It’s component of an app referred to as BikeParking.Club, which is a network for bikers that may well put in structures and locks like this to make sure they often have a location somewhere close by for their bikes. All this was thrown together and essentially worked onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt New York’s hackathon this yr.

“You often require to have all these chains, or buy two chains and leave a single in office or a single in household,” Tonev claims. “You often have a lock all over your places. So, if you have chains almost everywhere, why share them [to make sure you often have a location somewhere].”

The prototype they confirmed onstage was a mock-up of pipes and plumbing pulled from Household Depot close by — but it is a little something that resembles what a lock network may well glimpse like in the actual earth. People hook up to the app, which helps them obtain a close by open location and then offers them the ability to lock their bicycle on the rack. The three bicycle to get the job done every working day, and that is why they figured it is a problem that almost certainly demands an answer at some point.

The big problem is twofold, Tonev claims: owning more than enough places all over that bikers can entry and not owning to have locks all over almost everywhere to make sure those bikes (with any luck ,) continue to be in those places. So when a user installs a lock, they’ll automatically get entry to the parking network all over the town although often owning entry to a location in the lock they installed.

“The lock is an entry point, immediately after that — If even half of the [tens of hundreds of cyclists] will put in that [in Palo Alto], we’ll immediately have a little something like 350,000 parking a lot for bikes.”

It’s a hack, of study course, but in accordance to the trio, HealthTap encourages them to check out out new concepts. Opening up the biking universe may well not be these types of a international concept for a health care startup, even though the application builders suddenly owning to offer with a components problem was a little bit of a taller buy. So, who is aware of in which it goes, but at the very least when they fly back again to the Bay Area they’ll have a further neat undertaking to toss on their portfolios.