Among the myriad of guests at O’Reilly Fluent, we had the chance to sit down with Daniel Riegel of ScootNetworks for an interview. ScootNetworks is a company which offer scooters for hire that are half the price of taxis, as fast as public transport, and four times as fun! These scooters are parked in garages and transit hubs all over San Francisco [for now] but the company is planning to expand to new locations really soon.

In order to ride one of these scooters, just dock your phone (iOS and Android only) in to start the vehicle because your phone will acts as the key, dashboard, and payment method. Scootersfrom ScootNetworks does not require the driver a driver’s license and they provide helmets of varying sizes to accommodate everyone! With scooters for hire, commuters don’t have to buy a ride of their own and worry about its maintenance and depreciation and parking tickets etc.

When asked to talk about what his team has learned while building ScootNetworks from the ground up and how they came up with the idea of scooters for hire, Riegel explained that its basically just taking advantage of the latest technological innovations aka scooter and smartphones, and making them work together.

“Technology is everything and that’s good. We started observing this technological innovation that recently surfaced which is the electric scooter, and electric scooter is a very affordable vehicle. It’s actually unlike cars where the electric version is more expensive than the gas version. Electric scooters are actually less expensive than the corresponding gas scooters. Now, you couple that with the super computer that we all carry around in our pockets and you can get this really quite premium experience without a whole lot of capital investment, without putting a lot of risk on the line. “

Moreover, ScootNetworks was among the three winners picked by a panel of four judges during the O’Reilly Fluent Startup Showcase, along with Modulus.io and kWIQly. The company is undeniably innovative, offering people transport on-demand just like there is computing service on-demand and storage on-demand. As Riegel jokingly said, ScootNetworks offers SaaS or scooter-as-a-service.

Watch the interview in full bellow!