A quick feedback from Autonomy 2017 in Paris

Most of the things we are seeing or talking about during keynotes are quite nice and somehow crafty. How to unlock car sharing or green mobility in this town, or that other one? Are we are going to manage mobility data? After all the buzz with MaaS, how are we going to do it? Will Hyperloop bring peace and end hunger worldwide? Etc. All that is cute, and sometimes even a bit exhilarating.

But right now OFO is ready to dump thousands and thousands of station-free bikes all other Europe. This is immediately cancelling our clumsy, step-by-step, let’s see what works here and there first, approaches. While we’re playing table tennis with dozens of ill-funded startups all other, reinventing the wheel (quite literally sometimes), massive operators have readied themselves already at scale to play global nuclear warfare.

If we want to have a say in the future or European mobility we need to stop thinking in terms of “Are people in this city going to use our solution?” but immediately “How do we scale our solution Europe-wide?” Everything else is DOA.

But I don’t feel any sense of urgency around me. Autonomy 2017 is like it was in 2016. Is this groundhog day?

This is key.

This is what we need to help solve with the FabMob initiative.