Electric-scooter leasing company Skuro Moto (史庫諾) chief executive Frank Chen (陳孟偉) never expected he would run his own business at the age of 24.
Now, the one-year-old Skuro works with electric-vehicle maker Ahamani EV Technology Co Ltd (其易電動車) to provide a leasing service at Yuan Ze University in Taoyuan.
The business plan of this young startup goes back about seven months, when Chen won an Internet of Things (IoT) contest coorganized by MediaTek Inc (聯發科).
Chen’s team won second prize by developing a monitoring system for vehicle leasing based on MediaTek’s LinKIt platform.
Unlike other scooter-leasing firms, Skuro uses the monitoring system to enable riders to monitor power usage of scooters and to locate their vehicles through a smartphone application.
“The idea is simple,” Chen said yesterday.
“We hope to help students travel between school and their dormitories easily, while the vehicle has to be green,” the Yuan Ze University graduate said.
At a Skuro Moto Computex Taipei booth demonstrating the firm’s service based on LinKIt, Chen said the service was rolled out rapidly, as the platform offers an integrated structure so that new features can be easily developed.
It also helps reduce costs by about 30 percent, he said.
A electric scooter hired from Skuro Moto can travel 70km, while it takes about three hours to fully charge the battery.
Customers can turn on the electric scooter by swiping their student identity cards, Chen said.
To return the vehicle, they can find the nearest leasing center via a smartphone app, he said.
“We began offering the service at our university about a month ago. This is a start. We plan to expand our services to more schools,” Chen said. “To fund the expansion, we have a fundraising program.”
Chen is one of many examples indicating the arriving of the IoT era and possibly an era of startups.
ARM Holdings PLC chief marketing officer Ian Drew said during a summit forum at Computex that half of IoT device developers would be three-year startups in the next five years.
Drew said that there would be 400 billion sensors installed in connect devices over the next five years, compared with 14 billion now.
Another local startup, Alchema (得心股份), showcased a wine brewing device that helps people to make wine at home more easily by monitoring the production process.
The device uses at least five sensors to monitor alcohol content and the brewing environment. It was also developed with LinKIt.
Alchema plans to raise fresh funds on Kickstarter, the world’s biggest fundraising platform, before launching the product next year.
The company was established early this year.
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