XYO: Bringing Geospatial Data to One of the World’s Biggest Electric Scooter Companies!

Jenn Perez
XYO Network
Published in
2 min readApr 4, 2019

There’s absolutely no question that electric, rentable scooters have been warmly embraced by pedestrians all over the planet.

In hundreds of cities, this simple workhorse of a vehicle shuttles millions of people to their destinations every day; a fun, cheap, and eco-conscious gateway to exploring trendy new neighborhoods, traveling to rowdy bars, and even making the mad rush to work before the day’s first meeting.

These scooter fleets have also flipped the transportation industry upside-down. With their parent companies worth billions of dollars, and there’s no sign of scooter mania slowing down as these businesses add more cities — and scooters — by the day.

There’s also arguably no industry more primed for XYO location technology than rentable electric scooters!

This is why we’re partnering with one of the world’s largest transportation companies, even though we can’t tell you their name — at least not yet.

So, what can we talk about? A use case.

Imagine finding a scooter on the corner near your house. It’s Saturday, the weather’s nice and you have nothing really planned, so you decide to use the scooter rental app, hop on, and ride over to your favorite neighborhood bookstore.

As the wind rushes through your hair and you whip past houses and businesses, that scooter is transmitting location data at certain intervals to the company that owns the fleet. The scooter is telling the mothership — the company that owns it — where it is.

And when you abandon the scooter and someone else sees it and borrows it, the same thing happens. The transmissions continue.

The problem? This process of sending data back to the mothership is expensive, and the data is not always accurate. It also drains the scooter’s power.

With this partnership, we plan on making scooter location tracking cheaper, more efficient, and way more accurate.

Here’s the plan. We’ll start by integrating our proof-of-concept tech — most likely by way of our Internet of Things (IoT) beacons (XY4+s) — into scooters in sunny San Diego, the home of our super secret hacker headquarters. Then we plan on delivering the data, cost and energy savings by way of our geospatial cryptonetwork technology.

If all goes well, XYO could be deployed in scooters the company owns world-wide! It will bring brand new meaning to the phrase “Everywhere I go, XY, XYO!”

So, why aren’t we naming the company? We’re discussing the integration and the best way to deploy our tech. When both sides are ready to make an announcement, we’ll reveal the name.

In the meantime, let’s celebrate our brand new partnership with this mystery company, and a new year of alliances where we can prove — beyond all doubt — that XYO is the technology the world needs!

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Jenn Perez
XYO Network

Lead Content Manager, XYO Network. Former LA Times Reporter. I write about blockchain, cryptocurrency, transportation, smart cities, and the future.