Entrepreneurs are now creating products that depend on the net but don't live solely on it

ONE OF the clearest trends to emerge from Silicon Valley and its environs in the last year or so has been the escape from the pure internet-play. Innovators and entrepreneurs are now creating products and services that depend on the internet, but don't live exclusively on the internet.

One of the smartest net thinkers I know, Briton Stefan Magdalinski, now heads up a business card company, Moo Cards, but it's a business card company with a unique tie to the net and new technology: when you order a set of cards from them, each one is unique, using images you've uploaded to your favourite photo-sharing site.

The other trend I've been tracking has been the move into green products and services.

The reasons are partly down to the liberal, Californian outlook of Valley entrepreneurs, and the slightly more self-serving realisation that as global warming continues and fuel prices rise, this will be a growth industry for some time to come.

Recently, I got to see how businesses are combining these two industry directions into one. You might not think of Robin Chase as a techno-entrepreneur, but her last company, ZipCar, depended for its success on new technology that was unavailable to previous efforts in the same area. ZipCar is a car-sharing service that runs in most of the United States' major metropolitan areas. Rather than owning your own car (or indulging in a second for your family), subscribers can pay $8 an hour to hire one of the ZipCars parked all across the city, drive it around, and then deliver it back to the same spot.

Car-sharing has been attempted before, but the reduced hassle of being able to browse and pick out the car you want online, have the car instantly recognise your keytag and open for only you, and load up your favourite playlists and radio stations when you sit in the driving seat, has made ZipCar a success where other companies had failed.

The company recently merged with its rival, Flexcar, and when the merger is completed, will have 180,000 members using 5,000 vehicles in the US, Canada and Britain.

Chase's new venture edges a little closer to the network. Go Loco (http://www.goloco.org) doesn't depend on its own car fleet to lower costs and carbon emissions. Instead, it's a social networking site for car-poolers.

Members enter their regular trips onto a map on the site, or search for trips they're planning in the future. Go Loco will suggest drivers or passengers who might want to share the trip (and its cost). Like Facebook or MySpace, you can add and invite your friends to form a network of people you know.

Car-sharing and car-pooling are not new ideas: variations of them have been tried since the 1960s. But Chase's new twists are sufficiently innovative that they promise to turn unsuccessful business plans into viable projects. Viable - but perhaps not businesses.

Clay Shirky, another smart net thinker, calls these potential new business models a consequence of the net lowering the "Coasian floor". Ronald Coase won the Nobel prize in economics for showing that the economics of running a company could mean that a large company could be run cheaper than a small company, but that it could become tangled up in its own bureaucracy beyond a certain size - a businesses Coasian ceiling, as it were.

In his new book, Here Comes Everybody, Shirky points out that the net has decimated the organisational costs at the bottom of the chart: making previously complex organisational challenges possible for minimal outlay, and even without having charges at all.

ZipCar showed you could make money from a shared fleet of cars with the help of the organisational power of the net: profit where once there was a disastrous headache of planning. But once Go Loco or something similar to it gets going, it might not even need a company to sit behind it.

Car-sharing might just blossom from an application written by a bored coder for Facebook.

Trust issues will be handled by Facebook's existing infrastructure; arranging trips and payment through the application itself and users just organising for themselves.

That's one of the reasons why net investors are shifting away from pure internet plays.

There are few companies competing with ZipCar, because few will risk investing in a fleet of cars. Moo Cards is the only company doing what it does, because no others have the printing technology to output high-quality, individually unique business cards.

Go Loco, on the other hand, just needs people to work. And those people might go to another of the handful of carpooling sites online.The disadvantage of the modern age is the competition for new ideas; the advantage is that, for the bright entrepreneur, there are always fresh new ideas to pursue.