From GigaOM
Virtual Vehicle Company: Unlocking Green Car Data With Cell Phones
By Katie Fehrenbacher
Virtual Vehicle Company, a startup that was one of the 100 finalists showing their technologies at the California Cleantech Open conference on Thursday, is the first company I’ve seen that truly uses the latest cell phone innovations to unlock useful data about greener transportation. Developed at UC Berkeley, VEVCo (as the company calls itself) has developed a mobile application for smart phones that can track a user’s driving behavior using inputs like the embedded GPS and largely without the driver having to manually input any information.
Co-founder Laura Schewel told me at the event it was only when Google and Apple launched their mobile operating systems that VEVCo was able to make an app that was inexpensive and could pull driver information unobtrusively. By using the GPS chip, the app can tell when the driver has started driving, when they stop, how fast or slow they drive, their daily average range, and the common length of the trips they take, among other things. While Schewel said she’s seen other companies spend millions of dollars trying to get that type of driving data, VEVCo’s app cost in the hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars range to build....
The VEVCo project team includes I School graduate Gopal Vaswani (MIMS 2010).
This story also appeared in Salon.com.