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I've written a bit about the sharing economy before, such as Uber meets Pretty Woman and Transportation technology and the unknown. Yesterday I was walking in Bnei Brak, a city near Tel Aviv that is partly an ultra-Orthodox enclave but also has large industrial sections. I was in the more industrial area when walking past a bright yellow bicycle locked to a barrier. A bright yellow Ofo bicycle locked to a curb barrier As I passed by I noticed the bicycle belonged to one of the large bicycle-sharing companies, Ofo. My first thought was that it was odd to see a normal lock on a shared bicycle. I thought maybe someone had used the bike and then padlocked it so they would be sure to be able to ride it again when they needed. As I looked closer I noticed that it was missing the electronic lock and the QR code on the back that would allow a user to unlock it using an app. No QR Code above the 'Scan to go' text My assumption at this point was that Ofo must had exited the Israeli market and sold off their bikes without the electronics. Sure enough a quick…

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Renting a Bicycle in Tel Aviv

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Yesterday I spent some time at the Tel Aviv Port, a formerly run-down area that has been turned into a super-trendy nice-restauarant upscale-shopping area of the city. While having lunch at a restaurant facing the water, I did something I occasionally do when I'm in new place, I glanced at the 'Near Me' tab in the App Store on my phone. As is common, many of the apps that showed up were transportation related. This included an app called TeloBike (iTunes link), which provided information on the locations of bike rental stations in Tel Aviv, including how many bikes were available at each station. It worked pretty well, and operated in both Hebrew and English. The data for this app presumably comes from the site run by the city of Tel Aviv for bike rentals, Tel-O-Fun. The site itself is not bad, provides a map of all the locations with the number of bikes available, and operates in Hebrew, Arabic, English, French, and Russian. The app Telobike itself is not from the city, or connected to the site directly, but was created by an independent developer. Why doesn't the city have a mobile app itself? I'm not sure. More on that in a second.…

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