OBike
bicycle sharing company
oBike was a Singapore-registered stationless bicycle-sharing system started by businessmen Yi Shi and Edward Chen with operations in several countries. The bikes have a built-in Bluetooth lock and can therefore be left anywhere at the end of a journey, not just at a docking station. Users use a smartphone app to locate and rent bikes. It launched in Singapore in February 2017, and ceased operation on 25 June 2018 in Singapore. Subsequently, the parent company filed for insolvency in its home market. The effect on operations outside of Singapore is unknown.
The firm had expanded to 24 countries including Australia, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom.
The system
The bicycles were single speed with a plastic chainguard, short mudguards on both wheels, front and rear rim brakes, and dynamo electric lights.
To make use of the system, the user had to download the oBike application, register and pay a deposit. The App was used to rent and return the bicycles and users were charged by 15 or 30 minutes, with payment charged to their Credit/Debit card.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “OBike” is bicycle sharing company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through OBike, bicycle and sharing, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “bicycle sharing company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q33105235. The first chronological checks are 2017 and 2018.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “OBike”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow OBike primary sources, OBike archive and OBike research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “OBike”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “OBike” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.