DONKEY REPUBLIC GOES Donkey Republic was one of the first prize 8 “In 2016, we have introduced Donkey Republic in 20 countries,” says Alexander Frederiksen, who participated in Green Challenge with the Donkey Republic project last year, and who is now CMO for Donkey Republic. Bike rental the flexible way Donkey Republic has developed a—in principle— global bicycle rental service, among other things with support from a successful crowdfunding campaign. By means of a smart lock, which can be activated with a mobile phone and an app, you can easily find a rental bike in Copenhagen and pay the fee right away. Donkey Republic has made bike rental flexible. Why a donkey? Why is the bicycle called a ‘donkey’? As a bike is also called an ‘iron horse’ in Denmark, the people behind the project thought it would be fun to call their bike a ‘donkey’, mainly because a donkey is winners of Green Challenge 2015. And since then, it has been full steam ahead for the then small, budding start-up project. reliable and hard-working, even though this may not be quite as fast as a horse. Technical challenges One of the main challenges for Donkey Republic was to make a lock with a low power consumption. The battery must be able to last up to 500 days, which is difficult to achieve. Another challenge was the connection between the lock and a smartphone. The locks are based on stateof the-art Bluetooth technology. It has to work the first time you activate it. The app must always be able to send a message to the lock to check whether it’s locked, a function that eats into battery life. In addition, you need a smartphone to be able to unlock the bike. We have now also launched an offline version of the system, so you only need Internet access once before you pick up a bike
Grøn Dyst 2016
To see the actual publication please follow the link above