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A High-Tech Pedicab Dispatch System at SXSW in Austin (Video)
It's Austin, where people are proud to be weird -- and are more environmentally aware and more concerned about energy use than in the rest of Texas. Add SXSW, with its combination of techies, musicians, film people, and general hipsters. What could be more natural at SXSW than combining a pedicab (called a bicycle rickshaw in Old Delhi and other Indian cities) with Uber's smartphone-based dispatch system? Hook Uber up with local pedicab company Easy Rider, get Samsung to sponsor it all, and you are environmentally conscious, high tech, and (possibly) hip all at once. Totally Austin. Totally SXSW. And totally promotional for all three companies involved.
In my experience with Seattle hipsters, stuff like this tends to be very short-lived. Generally, it lasts about as long as it takes for the novelty/hipness to wear off and for the hipsters to realize that it's actual *work* that requires them to show up regularly and on time and shit. Then it's on to the next hipster job to piss off their parents.
A great dispatch system isn't going to help when half of your employees didn't show up to work because the local weed dispensary just got in a new shipment of some amazing new strain. But then, maybe Austin hipsters are a uniquely hard-working and customer-oriented lot compared to their lazy smelly Seattle counterparts.
Bunch of self-indulgent, over-important, overly-commercial, self-involved hipsters.
And I'm from Portland, so that's saying something.
Totally Commercial, Totally pretentious.
Its austin, the precise opposite of punk rock.
Yay.
This isn't novel. I live in a regressive-as-hell southern city, with tons of sprawl, that isn't even all that large, and we've had this exact service for over a year. Yet another super-positive review of a particular company dealing in a not-all-that-interesting product.
Thankfully buzzword free, but still quite shillish.
Slashdot why are you killing me... Seriously if this is news for nerds I'm leaving the nerd herd.
who told me that the key to really SXSWing is to SXSW when I can and not SXSW about missing a day or two of my SXSW routine. I think I really SXSWed a lot at this years SXSW and look forward to SXSWing more in the future. #YOSXSWO
...to global multinationals?
I saw this and thought, aw, crap: the hipsters have finally organized into a military hierarchy. I wonder what you have to do to get promoted to Hipster General... does it involve wearing ironically out-of-date plastic frames with zero-prescription lenses while scribbling notes for your YA zombie rom-com novel in a Moleskine notebook using nothing but artisinally-sharpened Blackwing 602 pencils? Or am I just thinking of Hipster Lieutenant Colonel?
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I though this was talking about a way to deal with high-tech sex offenders that preferred children.
Riding in a normal cab downtown we saw a pedicab and commented. The driver made it known with a mix profanity and some Eastern European language I did not recognize that he felt they were a pest.
If I recall correctly, there is a local councilman who is opposed to the pedicabs, ride sharing, etc. because it takes money from the existing taxi drivers.
I just got back from SXSW yesterday. A high-tech dispatch system for pedicabs? Stick your arm out until you clothesline one off his bike. Seriously, they were everywhere, and maybe 5% ever had a passenger. You don't need a high-tech system to organize something that's both ubiquitous and worthless.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
The assertion that Austin is 'more concerned about energy use than in the rest of Texas' seems curious to me. If the Texans that crawl onto the national stage are any indication, Texans are obsessively concerned about energy use... they just happen to be in favor of it.
Pedicab is the worst possible idea for Austin, especially when it actually starts to get hot.
You're one of those old guys that has actual lenses in their spectacles, aren't you?
Ya freak!
.... then is has to a a hyped-up, neo-mainstream sort of weird with no real impact except to make one feel smug and superior. Nothing "hipster" related is progressive - it's just eco-pretentious.
Unfortunately for the environment of Texas, concern and awareness does not equal to actual effect. For instance, Austin has about the worst carbon footprint in Texas and the nation, ranking 55 out of 100. It is clear why when you look at the basic conservative nature of the city and the lack of infrastructure. For instance, Houston with over three decades of increasingly liberal mayors, has actively adopted renewables, and reducing the cities use of electricity overall. Light rail is increasingly allowing us to get around. For instance over spring break there was times when I did not have to drive at all, and when I went to the rodeo the trained dropped me right there.
Austin wants to believe it is cool, but the reality is that most other urban places in Texas are much more diversified, much more culturally relevant, and musically interesting, unless you like listening to the same type of women or men singing the same things over and over again.
And, to quote my techie friends, SXSW specifically schedules things so all the geeks are out of town before the hipsters arrive.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The Austin downtown area is where most of the SXSW action occurs, and Austin's downtown really isn't that big. People needing cabs or pedicabs to move six blocks is a simple 10 to 15 minute walk.
Oh yeah, hipsters. Good job, assholes.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's been downhill over the last year since Leslie died.
I would argue that the "hipster" concept was ultimately destroyed by the Internet, and the commercialization of "alternative" music that took place in the late 80s/early 90s.
Prior to that, you kind of had to have a yen for weirdness to even understand the hipster concept. Now all you have to do is read the internet and have facial hair.
The motto in Austin is "Keep Austin Weird". The motto in Houston, seen on T-shirts and posters - "Keep Austin 163 miles from here"
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Jackass said: "are more environmentally aware and more concerned about energy use than in the rest of Texas" - OP is no doubt a self-righteous democrat with no concept of the reailty of the climate. Does he know the "carbon footprint" of the foamed nickel in his precious Prius battery? Didn't think so. Does he know how Al Gore makes his money ? Probably not. OP and all who agree with him need to seriously grow up.
As a native, I know the "Keep Austin Weird" movement was from California.
Austin has lost venues left and right (Back Room, Emo's, Prague, and what has replaced them are places great for the spray tan/duck lips crowd, but if one doesn't want to hear someone wail about their dead cat at Spider House, or some generic rock act down on Sixth, you basically have Elysium and that's it.
So, if you want to listen to anything other than hip-hop, country, or whatever some hipster is reading/singing, go elsewhere. Even San Antonio has a far better music scene.
The fact that they're doing it in Austin makes many of the rest of us Texans leary of the idea.
I've had a personal rickshaw for about 6 years. Fun! I haul friends and family around. Good times.
The Chinese one I started with is junky, but the Colorado-built Main Street I have bought since is far more capable. At $3400 new, they also cost about 10x what the Chinese ones run. Mine was bought used, and I have about $1000 in it as it sits today (details here: http://www.rickshawseason.com/about/main-street-pedicab/ )
If you've thought about getting a rickshaw for personal use, without knowing any details I'd say to go for it.
I used to work a block away where Leslie got his fatal braining (Oltorf/I-35 bridge). People don't realize that the local Austin panhandlers are very aggressive and will not hesitate to use a knife or the time-tested "lock in a sock" that has proven itself as a weapon in prisons worldwide.
Plus, Portland has been doing the "keep blah weird" thing for far longer.
And is a perhaps more authentic place for freaks and outliers. So much so that Chuck Phalanuk wrote the guide to Portland, years ago, titled "Freaks and Fugitives".
A bunch of anti-corporate hipsters gathering at an event every year where they socialize and sell-out under corporate banners after over-riding what was once a music festival by bullying it into submission with Twitter, social networking applications, cell phones and portable shit, movies, comics, and every other media trendy thing seems less "weird" and more "douchey".
But, by definition, hipsters follow popular trends and culture, with the modern twist of also being "ironic" (except they misuse "irony" when they really just like this disingenuously). Being a hipster is not about liking things and your taste in things for the sake of those things. Being a hipster is a completely insincere act of liking things and following trends almost purely for the effect it has on your perceived social status.
You and I might like that one band because of that one awesome song they do. Hipsters like that other band, because they believe liking that other band makes them appear smarter, edgier, and unique. Taste is purely a currency, as far as they're concerned.
I think the irony thing has been around longer than that. Even the relatively genuine hipsters of the 1980s had an affectation for 1950s cultural paraphernalia but in an "ironic" mode.
The Replacements have a song from 1983 that underscores it perfectly --
Everybody at your party
they don't look distressed
Everybody's dressing funny
Color me impressed...