It’s Friday, so to ease you into your weekend here is a snippet of Greenbang’s Clean Tech Start-up Index.

• Founder/Chief Executive: James Swanston, CEO; Chris Holt, Founder
• Founding date: March 2008
• Number of employees: 7 including parttime
• Turnover: pre-revenue, pilots starting in Q3 2008
• Website: www.golowtransport.com

‘GoLow: don’t go alone’, pretty much sums up this business model. Essentially GoLow is a technology platform to make road transport more efficient. The initial focus is the taxi and private hire vehicle industry, which currently uses 750,000 tonnes of fossil fuels a year. These vehicles are empty of passengers about half of the time they’re working, with airport journeys one of the biggest culprits.

GoLow systems will match customer demand with the best vehicle for the job, by identifying a vehicle as close to a pick-up point as possible. So instead of a taxi taking a passenger from the airport and returning home empty, the GoLow system will find a customer heading in the same direction as the taxi on its way back to base and match them up: no more empty taxi.

The Greenbang Barometer

It’s still early days, but aside from reducing the dead mileage, GoLow hopes to get the best use out of vehicles on the road. Getting customers to share a journey (not always easy) or using a vehicle to deliver courier packages as well as passengers are two examples of how this might work. GoLow also encourages use of telematic devices to measure driving styles and help drivers to be more efficient.

The company impressed Greenbang not only through its smart use of technology, but for the sheer simplicity of its businessmodel: find a car that needs a  passenger, and a passenger that needs a car and bring the two together. So simple even your granny could understand it. GoLow also has the advantage of being an easy sell to both businesses and individual consumers too, by promising nice eco-credentials as well as money saving.

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