MOVE America is one of the places the mobility industry meets: automakers, transit and city planners, ride services, investors and the startups working on what comes next. This year, from September 1 to 3, it moved online, and Vugo was part of its Start-up Village.

What MOVE covered

The program ran across nine content streams, which together read like a map of where mobility is going:

  • Auto futures
  • Autonomous vehicles
  • Ticketing, revenue and payments
  • Business models and mobility as a service
  • Smart cities
  • Micromobility and accessibility
  • Energy and charging
  • Tech, data and innovation
  • City freight

Two of those streams are close to home for Vugo: revenue and business models. Every shared ride, whether it's a rideshare, a taxi or a shuttle, has the same problem underneath it. Riders want it to cost less. Drivers and operators need it to pay more. Something has to close that gap.

The ride as a source of revenue

Vugo's answer is the time people spend in the back seat. A screen in front of the rider, with entertainment and useful information, can carry advertising from brands that want to reach people on their way somewhere. That advertising earns revenue for the driver or the operator, without adding to the fare.

It's the same model that pays for most of what people read, watch and listen to online, applied to the ride. And it grows more valuable as vehicles become more connected and, one day, drive themselves, when everyone in the car is a passenger.

A different kind of year

Online events are different from a show floor. There's no booth to walk past and no hallway conversation by accident. What MOVE did well was keep the industry talking, at a time when shared rides and the businesses around them have had anything but an ordinary year. The questions on the program didn't go away; if anything, they got more urgent.

Thank you to the MOVE America team for including Vugo in the Start-up Village. If you're a fleet, a ride service or a transit operator thinking about the passenger experience and new revenue in your vehicles, we'd love to talk.

See in-vehicle screens, learn about fleet partnerships, or get in touch.