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JC Decaux the French outdoor media company is increasingly finding new ways of connecting advertising to urban environments.

Its latest move is to provide an advertising supported bicycle network in France called Velib.

Users can rent bikes for just $1.50/day with JC Decaux picking up most of the costs.

"But when we look at the city of tomorrow, what we understand from people is that they are expecting a city that is more sustainable, where mobility is easier and so on. So we did a 'trend-zoom' on mobility." Ass�raf's team concluded that city inhabitants have two expected 'givens' for the future. The first is what he calls in French 'intermodalite' (using several modes of transport in one day) and the other is mobility itself (actually wanting to move around, not stay still). "So we met inside our company and said "what can we deliver?", to give a new service to people, mixing inter-modality and mobility - which is out of our core business."

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Posted by Ed Cotton There are 161 million Americans who don’t ride bikes.

Shimano saw it as a market opportunity, so they hired IDEO to find out why.

From spending time with non-bikers, IDEO discovered there were a number of attitudes and beliefs these non-riders held, that had become barriers to them ever getting on a bicycle.

1.    They liked biking as children, but adult biking was serious and competitive
2.    The employees in bike retail stores are intimidating
3.    The bikes themselves can be messy and complicated

To overcome the barriers, Shimano went off and created a new category, Coasting.



It’s basically a new carefree philosophy built around meandering around on a bike.

Manufacturers have responding and have produced special bikes with automatic “transmissions”, like Trek’s, new Lime.



Bike manufacturer Trek is hoping to sell 26,000 Limes this year.

Improved sales training and product innovation have tackled many of the barriers identified by IDEO, but the biggest problem is the lack of facilities (bike paths) and that could be too big a problem for Shimano to solve on its own,