Innovative startups in urban logistics: What’s happening?
Transport & Logistics is one of the world’s oldest industries. An industry generally marked by huge upfront infrastructure investments and strict quality or just-in-time requirements it is also a very difficult industry to experiment and to innovate in. But observing the ever-growing transport volumes, rising transport costs and bottlenecks in our transport infrastructure, it is a very important industry to innovate in.
In the following I will highlight a couple of startups innovating in the logistics space:
One hour city deliveries with Postmates
Postmates is a courier booking platform with the goal to get anything from A to B within one hour within a city. You can for example get your flowers or donut order picked up and delivered.
Taskrabbit – Crowdsourced Tasks
Although not specialized in logistics per se, deliveries are a popular task on peer to peer marketplaces such as taskrabbit. Anyone can sign up to be a taskrabbit and do deliveries or transports for customers closeby. For every job done, the customer and the taskrabbit agree on a price.
Meemeep – Peer to Peer transports
The Australian startup MeeMeep crowdsources private transport capacities for long distances. Whether you are moving or just need help getting a suitcase from A to B across the vast country you can find a ride here.
Züriwerk – No more pain carrying your grocery shopping
No more muscle pain carrying your groceries home and no more need to go shopping by car. The Züriwerk home delivery service delivers your shopping from the shop to your home. After your shopping just drop off your bags at a designated drop off point in participating stores and your shopping will be delivered to your door a little later.
The shopping will be delivered by handicapped or disadvantaged people who find opportunities to get into the work force with the help of foundation Züriwerk.
ByBox – Safe deliveries to parcel boxes
To take the pain out of missing a package delivery, the British company ByBox has installed parcel lockers around the country. Customers pay about 3.15$ to retrieve a parcel from its 1350 locations.
Kinek
Kinek is an alternative delivery network which pools shops, gas stations or restaurants into a unique network of pick and drop off stations. Kinek has thousands of stations all across the US and Canada and is a way to deliver you online shopping to a safe location close to you when you are not home. The shops log the drop off and pick up in a webbased system and charge a little fee per package.
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