O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference - June 29-30, 2005

Speaker

Greg McGuire
Zipcar

Growing up in the heartland of the American automobile outside of Detroit, Michigan, Greg McGuire grew up around cars--even driving an ambulance for a time in high school. The son of an electrical engineer, he also grew up working on computers, learning about building networks just as they exploded in popularity. It was no surprise then that he eventually found himself helping to build a new type of service based upon the merger of vehicles and computer networks: Zipcar, which he joined as a senior engineer in 2001.

Zipcar is short-term "on-demand" car-sharing company for urban dwellers. With a fleet of vehicles placed throughout a city, members have 24/7 self-service access thanks to a web and telephone reservation system, and wireless access built in to each vehicle. Started in 2000, Zipcar now boasts over 35,000 members driving just 500 vehicles in 3 metropolitan areas on the East Coast.

A graduate of Case Western Reserve University, McGuire has a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering (Computing and Imaging). He has many years of experience building and scaling database-backed web sites, although he still considers himself a relative novice in the field.