Saturday, July 26: We left Las Vegas on Thursday after observing what appeared to be a bizarrely quintessential American Dream complete with money, power, and sex, all in the most unlikely natural landscape: the desert. Redeeming the weirdness was our waitress at a delicious Mexican restaurant who told us about her experience carpooling with her two children from Michigan to Las Vegas earlier in the year along with a stranger to save gas money. This reminded us of the great benefit of a company like Zimride, which ensures you know enough about the person you will be carpooling with to create a mutual trust even before you meet them. Because it employs the social networking profile system, you can go as far as choosing a person to ride with who likes your type of music.

The drive from Las Vegas to LA was tough: the driver’s smacking themselves to stay awake, the filmmakers frantically logging and cutting footage for the next day which included an 8:30 call time with ABC World News. The ABC producers requested not only an interview with our team, but also 20 minutes worth of clips from our trip. With 9 million viewers, Ben and Trevor decided it was worth the discomfort of staying up most of the night compiling footage.

Friday’s interview went smashingly, and we then picked up Margaret’s friend and Zimrider Lien to talk about the vast quality of life improvement that comes from carpooling, as opposed to driving alone, to her job at the Getty Museum. We all then went to a delicious dinner and met two Zimriders Casey and Craig who will be traveling to San Francisco with The Change We Seek.

Saturday morning, the team said goodbye to green gal, Margaret, as she flew (air travel now seems so boring now) back to NYC to return to her “real life” of eco-journalist. After a few SF interviews, the rest of the team will be doing the same Sunday evening: Trevor and Ben to movie making in LA; Cristina to studying Economics in her final year at the University of Seville, Spain; and John to scaling Zimride from his new Palo Alto office with partner Logan.

But, the time spent crossing the US and meeting young green entrepreneurs will not soon be forgotten, nor will the footage be misplaced. In fact, we all look forward to reliving the experiences vis-a-vis a bomber documentary to be released next year and submitted to film festivals, as well as further adventures, local and cross continental, carpooling. As long as communities are formed in vehicles, among new friends with common goals and destinations, The Change We Seek will forever continue.

Yesterday at Facebook's f8 conference we were announced as a recipient of a grant from the fbFund. In short - this means big things for Zimride, and you can expect a lot of product improvements in the coming months. We also got a great mention during Ben Ling's keynote. We'll link to the video as soon as it's up.

A huge thanks Cat Lee and Julia Lam at Facebook for helping us get here, and for being awesome to work with.

Official Press Release

Wednesday, July 23: Denver was awesome: interviews with 1)Marriott, 2)a conservative young law student at University Colorado, and 3)a biodiesel dude. After hearing a corporate POV, we then heard from a 24 year old, politically conservative Tyler Martinez, who gave us a great flip-side opinion on the green debate. He believes in Change, but because he isn’t convinced of man-made Global Warming, he thinks people shouldn’t be told to make change, instead they should want to do it on their own.

On the way out of Denver on I70 we stopped by Golden, CO to meet Ryan from Blue Sun Biodiesel company cultivating agricultural oil for diesel energy. Just as Mr Diesel designed the diesel engine to run off peanut oil but was later beat out by cheaper petroleum oil, now that gas prices are so out of control, biodiesel is a cheaper and greener option. Also to note, as we were leaving, Ryan noted how tired we were and offered that we could stay at his house that night. A sincerely kind and generous offer, but we had to get to Utah. We arrived at Moab by night, the drive there dramatic as hell. In the morning we stopped by Arches National Park, with its gorgeous rocky mountains of burnt orange and red, impressing us all. Now we are off to Las Vegas, the complete opposite of this pristine natural wonder: an artificial man made spectacle for an evening of debauchery and fun. We are hoping to snag some great interviews with people on the strip and if they think about all of the energy use?