Rejoin zipcar5/15/2023 ![]() ![]() I already subscribe to Google Play Music for streaming music, and to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime for video. It really is remarkable how fully mobile technology has integrated with our lives, hasn’t it? You can navigate where you want to go, find a business, look up reviews, socially network, and even find out where to check out a bike or car, all from the handy little glass and plastic slab in your pocket.Īnd this is yet another piece of my life that I can get by with renting instead of owning. Even the kiosks where you’re supposed to sign up only sort-of work, though you can at least pop in and try out video-conferencing with someone in a French call center. It doesn’t seem to be available yet, but then, not many things about the program are. Like the local bikeshare program, BlueIndy is going to have a mobile app that will tell you where the nearest stations are and how many cars and vacancies are in each. The program has been somewhat contentious in general lately in the local City Council, took though I imagine they’ll get that sorted out sooner or later. Certainly the owners of various businesses elsewhere in the city that are getting BlueIndy stations put in front of them have been decidedly grumpy about it. I don’t expect the people whose regular cars are parked there now will be too happy about losing their parking places. (The apartment house’s back door is my “front,” since it’s right next to my apartment-which makes the rental station even closer.) I went over and took the above photo, which has the area where the cars will go, next to a local church, marked off with paint. I also noticed in one of BlueIndy’s news e-mails that they’re planning to put in a rental station literally just half a block away from me, a mere few dozen yards from my “front” door. It’ll certainly be cheaper than Uber if I use it often for any great distance. Still, it ought to be worth it simply for the convenience. And right now, if you sign up for a year, you can get the first six months free with the coupon code “EARLY BIRD”. The standard BlueIndy rate is $10 per month for a one-year rental, and 20 cents per minute with a 20-minute minimum charge per trip, though they’re throwing in some incentives for the first couple of months like capping up-to-two-hour drives at $10 instead of the $24 they’d usually run. At the moment, it’s planned for a launch in early September, and is accepting membership signups. In April I also wrote a piece for our then-sister site, TechnologyTell, about the new BlueIndy electric car hourly rental program (well, okay, “car sharing,” but there’s that word again) that Indianapolis is getting soon. Physical media, digital media-even physical items, such as bicycles or cars. We’re getting to the point where we need to own things less and less. While this isn’t directly about e-books, it’s about a trend I remarked on in April that e-books are related to. ![]()
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