Team
We have a cadre of experienced planners and engineers. We build the
right team for each project.
Robin Chase, Founder & CEO
robin@meadownetworks.com
Robin leads Meadow Networks, where she is frequently consulted by transportation and planning departments, city and state government agencies, and NGOs about wireless and mesh networking applications in the transportation sector, and impacts on innovation and economic development. She served on the Boston Mayor’s Wireless Task Force, and the Massachusetts Governor-elect’s Transportation Transition Working Committee.
Robin is founder and CEO of GoLoco, an online ridesharing community. GoLoco helps people quickly arrange to share car trips of all lengths between trusted friends, neighbors, and colleagues, and handles online payments from passengers to drivers for their share of the trip costs. GoLoco’s innovative combination of social networks and online payment systems recasts how we think about car travel, making it a time for socializing and with a new emphasis on trip efficiency, in order to reduce per passenger costs.
Robin also co-founded Zipcar and, as CEO, shaped and led the company to become the largest and fastest-growing car-sharing company in North America, whose use of the Internet and wireless technology enables rental cars to emulate personal cars. Zipcar’s disruptive technology facilitates secure vehicle entry and authorized payment processing of hundreds of thousands of driving transactions in real-time, giving its members on-demand access to cars by-the-hour. Robin is also known for the evangelical virtual community she created among the members.
She has received many awards, including the Massachusetts Governor’s Award for Entrepreneurial Spirit, Start-up Woman of the Year, Time 100, Business Week’s top 10 designers, Fast Company’s Fast 50 Champions of Innovation, technology and innovation awards from Fortune, CIO, and Info World Magazines, and numerous environmental awards from national, state, and local governments and organizations.
Robin graduated from Wellesley College and MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and won the competitive Harvard University Loeb Fellowship. A 4-minute TV segment on Robin’s recent work can be found here.
ADVISORY BOARD
Andrew Blumberg is a postdoctoral scholar in mathematics at Stanford
University. He previously held a position at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton. His prior experience includes nearly a decade spent
working in the computer industry, notably a lengthy stint as a researcher
at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He received a doctorate
from the University of Chicago and an undergraduate degree from Harvard
College.
Sharon Gillett is Head of the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable. She has published numerous peer-reviewed and trade-press articles focusing on broadband policy issues and has been a lecturer for communications policy at both MIT and Cambridge University in the UK. She also served as the executive director and research associate for the Internet and Telecoms Convergence Consortium, an industry-sponsored consortium at MIT. Her research lies at the intersection of Internet infrastructure technology and policy. Her experience includes ten years in the high-tech industry developing software and managing projects in computer networking (at BBN) and supercomputing (at Thinking Machines Corporation). Full bio.
Sascha Meinrath is an internationally renowned expert on Community Wireless Networks (CWNs) and Municipal Broadband. Sascha is the co-founder and Project Coordinator of the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN), one of the world’s leading open-source, ad-hoc mesh wireless projects. Sascha is a policy analyst for Free Press, a Washington, DC-based think-tank, and regularly briefs Federal Communications Commission and Congressional staff on issues related to CWNs. Full bio.
David Reed is best known for co-developing the Internet design principle known as the “end-to-end argument” (with MIT Professors J.H. Saltzer and David D. Clark), and “Reed’s Law,” which describes the economics of group formation in networks. An Adjunct Professor at MIT’s Media Lab, David’s research focuses on designing systems that manage, communicate, and manipulate information shared among people. and explores adaptive, scalable, and evolving wireless network architectures. Full bio.