The future of scooters and media (but not scooter media!)

We have two great deep dives on the future of scooters and the future of media. Thanks to the many of you who joined our live conference call today with Kate Clark and Kirsten Korosec, where we talked all things Lyft today. If you weren’t able to join us, we will be publishing the transcript in the next few days, and we are going to try to embed the audio as well (we’ve heard your requests and working out a solution as we speak).

The Future of Scooters

Our long-time transportation and scooter aficionado Megan Rose Dickey has all the latest on where the scooter world stands today and what’s in store going forward:

Data rules everything around me (D.R.E.A.M.). Cities are relatively down for this new era of transportation and operators are increasingly more willing to share their data with cities. Now, cities just have to find out what to do with this data and how to extract learnings from it.

“We’re able to share more data with those companies which I think is really helpful for policymaking and decision-making but it also helps us to set up rules of the road that meet the needs of everybody in San Francisco,” Maguire said.

A number of startups have emerged in this space, including Populus, Passport and Ride Report.

The Future of Media

TechCrunch media columnist Eric Peckham has an interview with prominent media venture capitalist Pär-Jörgen Pärson of Northzone. His comments on content exclusivity:

In terms of exclusive content, I do believe that the content market, and the idea of exclusivity, is flawed in many ways. And I think Spotify proved it really well. Proved that what the artists or the content owners really need is maximum distribution — and distribution at a certain minimum RPU (revenue per user), of course. But the thing is when you start to restrict distribution, you can get a higher RPU, but the underlying market is still actually eyeballs. So what is ultimately fueling the interest of Man United or the Patriots is the number of people who want to watch their games. If you restrict that, then you’re undermining the company. We saw that when Twitter had acquired the online rights for the NFL…I think it was the Superbowl, a few years back. It was a total disaster for the NFL. They got no eyeballs for that and it really undermined their OTT business.

Thanks

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