Bike culture is a thing. A serious thing. If you are a part of that culture, you spend a lot of time and money looking for cool parts to customize your bike. When I was a kid, I thought it was cool to put a playing card on the frame of my Schwinn bike with a clothespin so that it was hit by the spokes of the back wheel as it spun, making a sound like a motor. Apparently, things got a lot more sophisticated in the past seven decades.
Students Deniz Sumer and Kutay Oczelik at UC Davis are a part of that culture and identified from personal experience that it was a pain to find the parts they wanted and to find them at a reasonable price.
So, they decided to do something about that and entered the Little Bang poster competition with the kernel of an idea. They won and advanced to the Big Bang to develop that idea more. They did a good job with that and walked off with a check for $12,500 as winners of the Clean Energy Prize, sponsored by SMUD.
Their insight was that budget-constrained enthusiasts like themselves often turn to non-profit collectives to find the parts they wanted, but that process was very inefficient. Mental picture: Rummaging through boxes and boxes of random parts for hours looking for what they wanted. It turns out there are about 330 bike collectives like this in this US—with even more worldwide. The team’s insight was that could be made a lot easier with some effort at developing a searchable database and a website for buying, selling, and shipping these parts. Sort of like an Etsy or a Ten Thousand Villages for bike parts. Their new Bike Lane Marketplace would collect a percentage of each transaction. In a larger sense, this Marketplace also creates a community and a social platform that could be used to offer added services and connections to keep users coming back.
Congratulations to the team and on its continuing success.
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California Mobility Center, Revrnt, HumanBulb, Witanlaw, Eco-Alpha, Momentum