Share&Charge, Laura speaking.

Hi Laura. My name is Leo.

I'm doing a short documentary on Blockchain for energy,

and I was wondering whether I could have

an interview with you and the CEO of Share&Charge.

Do you think that would be possible? Yes, of course.

Great. We have a free slot this afternoon at our office in Hilton.

That's great. I think I can get there by three. Is that okay?

Yes. Thank you.

Okay, see you then. Bye.

Laura, can you explain this Share&Charge thing. What is it about?

So Share&Charge is actually an app that tries to solve the problem of

range anxiety of electric car drivers so to say,

by making private charging stations

as well as public charging stations available to everybody.

Do you think that this solution answers a real need?

It basically solves the problem of range anxiety,

and the lack of public charging infrastructure by

giving people the chance to register their private charging stations through our app.

I would just take the example of you and me.

You having an e-car and me having a charging station.

I could just simply set up the tariff of my charging station,

I could register it,

I could decide that I want to give you family and friends tariff.

For instance, I would allow you to charge for free at my charging station,

and I would give the general community the ability to charge for,

for instance, one Euro 50 per hour.

The other good part about it is,

when you're taking the charging station market in Germany currently,

the main part that is available to chargers

or e-car drivers is actually public charging infrastructure.

We know that around 90 percent of the e-car drivers also have a charging station at home.

But if like for instance,

10 percent of these private charging stations are being shared with others,

the infrastructure in Germany is already doubled.

Basically, we are trying to solve the problem as I said,

of the lack of public charging infrastructure by making private ones available,

and therefore giving people the chance to,

on the one hand of course earn some money on the investment on the charging station back,

but also yet to kind of boost E-Mobility themselves,

because E-Mobilists are kind of that way. Yeah.

So, the government also organizes charging stations,

electricity producers do that, how do you see that?

We are a network for all kinds of charging stations.

So even the charging stations of energy or of eon, so energy providers,

or of car dealers,

or from car manufacturers can be onboarded on our system.

You are a marketeer, how do you go about commercializing this?

Bringing this to the market?

Since we're a start up,

we had tried to do some unconventional ways.

And in Hilton, there is a E-Mobility meet up so to say.

So every Saturday, E-Mobilists are coming there,

exchanging about the current status of E-Mobility.

And in our early days,

we were just trying to get in touch with the ecosystem,

so there were actually our attach plan for the ecosystem,

and we were kind of asking them for continuous feedback during the app development.

And from a marketing perspective,

I'm trying to get even more in contact with ecosystem.

So what I do a lot is community management.

So, I'm doing lots of conversations on Facebook with people where they are for instance,

discussing about, "hey, I do have my charging station here,

and it's actually not used,

why did nobody invent that?"

And I'm trying to jump into these conversations making people aware.

And I think especially in such a small group,

you can easily get in touch with these people,

and engage with them.

Because it's a small community,

and they had different difficult times.

I mean like they're really early adapters,

and they had really lots of discomfort with being early adapters.

And I think it's important to value their opinion,

maybe they're even doing mouth to mouth communication for us. Yeah.

Which difficulties did you come across while developing this Share&Charge solution?

So I think there are several sites,

and several points that were difficult for us.

So on the first hand,

it is that Blockchain technology,

as well as the E-Mobility market itself, it's pretty new.

So, actually, when you're looking into regulations for Blockchain,

as well as regulations for E-Mobility,

you're always coming into points or tipping points where you see only gray zones,

and where you try to make decisions not knowing if maybe in two years,

you're not stepping into a gray zone,

but into a problem area anymore.

So, that really was a difficulty for us because you're trying to do decisions,

and you don't know how the government will regulate these zones so to say.

It is really difficult to find the important players in that field,

and also to kind of have also a good setting ourselves.

Is privacy an issue?

Of course. On the one hand,

data privacy is always an issue especially in Germany,

as Germany is regulating and toughly,

even though the transactions on the Blockchain are actually hidden,

people caught with a certain amount of effort found out that you for instance,

if you were using our app,

has this day charged there,

this day charged here, and the next day charged in Amsterdam for instance.

And of course, this ability to follow people can make things difficult.

So, we're trying to to solve

these problems with our app interface at certain points. Yeah.

Thank you very much Laura.

You're welcome.

Good luck.

Thank you.

Introduction Share & Charge

Software Architecture for the Internet of Things

Meet the Instructors