youMove, a Fourteen-Year Mobility Story

From the first five bike sharing stations in Capo d’Orlando to the platform that now manages thousands of vehicles for SMEs, municipalities and mobility operators. A retrospective — and a look at what is coming with youMove 7.

In 2012, when we at TMR started writing the first lines of code for what would become youMove, bike sharing in Italy was little more than an experimental idea. Five stations in Capo d’Orlando, a few hundred users, a management system called BikeGest, and the belief — a minority one, it must be said — that vehicle sharing would become a serious part of urban mobility. Fourteen years later, youMove is a platform that manages more than 2,200 vehicles in production, is installed in more than 60 Italian municipalities, counts tens of thousands of registered users, and covers a scope that starts with bike sharing and extends to corporate fleet management, protection for work machinery and metropolitan-scale on-demand sharing systems.

In between, there is a product story worth telling. Not out of nostalgia — that is what our piece on TMR’s 25 years is for — but because this story explains how a national technology ecosystem can be built from a small Sicilian company, without shortcuts.

The Origins: BikeGest and the Pioneering Years of Bike Sharing (2012-2014)

The first years were dedicated to building the core system. BikeGest, and later youBike, were the names under which the product appeared on the market at that stage: a management system for municipal bike sharing services, complete with user apps, card readers, booking system and backend dashboard.

Those were the years when sustainable mobility was still a bold political choice rather than a structured market. In 2014, the Municipality of Capo d’Orlando created the “Biciclando Award” and gave it to a user of our system, recognizing responsible use of the service. In those years, the product grew through public projects: bike rides in Sant’Agata di Militello, Capo d’Orlando, and a network that gradually expanded across Sicily and beyond. Every installation was its own worksite, every municipality had its own needs, and this forced us from the very beginning to build a flexible and modular platform.

2015: Palermo, Bike Sharing Reaches the Regional Capital

December 13, 2015, is a turning point in our story. The mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, inaugurated the city’s bike sharing service in Piazza Alberico Gentili: 420 bicycles across 37 stations. The service was operated by AMAT, the official user app was still called youBike, and our technology powered the system behind it. The starting rate was fifty cents per half hour.

The project was the result of the vision of those who, from inside the administration, wanted and built Palermo bike sharing: Eng. Domenico Caminiti — then Special Director for Mobility of the Municipality of Palermo, now General Manager of AMAT — together with Eng. Antonio Mazzon and with the contribution of Eng. Marcello Marchese, now Commercial Director of AMAT. It was a team determined to bring bike sharing to a regional capital at a historical moment when the topic was far from obvious on Italian public-administration agendas.

It was not the first youBike installation, but it was the first time our product entered a large Italian city, with the numbers and complexity that a regional capital requires. The bicycles were equipped with GPS/GSM tracking and an anti-transport saddle system. From day one, the system was integrated with Palermo car sharing, through a single card that allowed citizens to access cars and bicycles alike: a first concrete example of integrated mobility, years before the term MaaS became commonly used.

For us, this was the moment when the product stopped being an experiment. In 2016 we also released the youBike app for Windows Phone, a technical choice that makes us smile today but says a lot about how determined we were to cover every possible channel and bring bike sharing to as many citizens as possible.

2017: The Trip to Barcelona and the Industrial Leap

There is one precise moment when youMove stopped being just software and became something more. It was 2017, when our CEO, during a leisure trip to Spain, was captivated by Barcelona’s bike sharing system. We came back with hundreds of photographs, a few clear ideas and one conviction: from that moment on, we would design the Italian bike sharing station ourselves. Better, leaner, more effective.

That is how the automatic youMove Station was born, in the form we still see installed in dozens of Italian squares today. It is not a shell for housing electronics: it is a complete industrial product, with its own CE certification process, dedicated suppliers, mechanical processing, logistics and spare parts. The design involved new skills for the company — mechanics, onboard electronics, embedded firmware — alongside software development. For those who follow us from the institutional side, this is probably the least visible but most significant step: TMR became an industrial manufacturer, not just a software provider.

2019-2020: youMove Is Born, and COVID Arrives

In 2019 the product changed name, and with the name its ambition changed too: youMove was no longer the bike sharing software, but the mobility platform. Bikes, cars, motorcycles, scooters, station based, free floating, MaaS (Mobility as a Service): everything in a single app for end users and a single dashboard for operators. The technical architecture relies on AWS — Amazon Web Services — in which TMR had already been investing for five years, and adopts serverless paradigms that make it possible to manage traffic peaks across thousands of vehicles moving simultaneously. In 2022, Pietro Terranova, CTO of TMR, discussed this architectural transition on the official AWS Italia podcast with Alex Casalboni.

Then came 2020. The world stopped, but the product did not. During the lockdown months, our firmware engineering team rewrote Smarthook 4.0 from scratch, the component that controls bike release and locking in automatic stations. It is the most delicate part of the system, the one that decides whether a user leaves smoothly or is left standing in the rain. The rewrite was completed entirely remotely, with improvised test setups inside our engineers’ homes, and today that firmware is installed in every youMove station in production. It is one of those chapters that explains the nature of the company better than any commercial presentation.

2023-2026: The Season of Cities

From 2023 onward, youMove entered a phase of territorial consolidation that brought the product into some of the most important mobility projects in Southern Italy — and, from the point of view of the TMR catalog, also marked the arrival of an entirely new category of service.

The debut in car sharing: amiGO Palermo (2023). In 2023, amiGO was launched: Palermo’s on-demand sharing service operated by AMAT Palermo S.p.A. It is the first car sharing service built on TMR technology — an important step for us, because it means taking the platform beyond bike sharing and into shared cars, an area with completely different commercial and technical dynamics. The Palermo circle closes: eight years after the 420 bicycles of 2015, we returned to the same city with a new service. A few months after launch, in October 2023, our Car Control System physically prevented the attempted theft of two cars from the amiGO fleet in central Palermo. For the first time, the protection technology was told as news, not just as a technical specification.

Bike sharing in regional capitals: Agrigento. In parallel, in summer 2023 we inaugurated Agrigento Bike Sharing ahead of Agrigento Italian Capital of Culture 2025 — five stations, sixty e-bikes and a network designed for citizens and tourists, connecting the railway station with the Valley of the Temples. It is a project that clearly reflects the logic of public bike sharing in regional capitals: an urban scale, and tourist and cultural value.

Integrated multimodality: CTGO Catania (2025). In 2025 came the second car sharing service in the TMR family: CTGO, operated by AMTS, which integrates city car sharing and bike sharing in a single technology ecosystem. It is the first time a multimodal car+bike service was born entirely on a single TMR platform — an architectural step that validates what had been the thinking behind youMove since 2019: one technology, different modes of mobility.

Mobility and tourism at territorial scale: Nebrod’E-move (2026). Since April 2026, Nebrod’E-move has entered its operational phase: 32 municipalities in the Nebrodi area, 150 pedal-assist bicycles, 15 tourist itineraries, hundreds of mapped points of interest and photovoltaic-powered stations. It is not “the bike sharing service of a city”: it is an inter-municipal system for mobility and tourism use, with a territorial extension that has few precedents in Europe. For us, it is also a scale test — managing a service distributed across dozens of municipal administrations requires a different platform from the one that is enough for a single city.

Alongside these are dozens of other public and private projects, from urban freight transport by cargo bike to corporate vehicle monitoring for fleet management.

What Changes with youMove 7

In 2026 we are completing work on youMove 7, the new generation of the platform. The innovations we consider most relevant for public stakeholders and mobility operators are four.

The first is integrated cost analysis, which gives operators a complete view of fleet operating costs — maintenance, expirations, insurance, consumption — directly in the dashboard. For public administrations managing institutional vehicle fleets, it is a reporting and optimization tool that until now required parallel spreadsheets.

The second is opening the platform to conversational interfaces, through an integration with the MCP protocol (Model Context Protocol) that allows AI assistants to query youMove in a structured way. In practice, this means an operator can ask “which vehicles have insurance expiring this week” and receive the answer as if they were asking a colleague.

The third is the revision of the commercial offer with the new plan dedicated to fleet management, which integrates software, cloud services and device SIM connectivity into a single fee, drastically simplifying cost forecasting for those managing small and medium-sized fleets and dramatically reducing costs for the management of medium and large fleets.

The fourth is the release of the Partner Portal for the youMove partner network. It is a platform designed to standardize and accelerate all field operations: onboarding of new installations, technical ticket management, documentation, installation monitoring and post-activation support. For public bodies and operators, this means faster intervention times, greater traceability of activities and a distributed technical network capable of supporting project growth in a scalable and coordinated way.

The Long View

Starting in 2026, we are working on a series of evolutions that will make the platform even more suitable for complex scenarios:

• advanced geofencing and route optimization,
• complete automation of the commercial cycle
• further expansion of the hardware catalog with hidden devices dedicated to protecting high-value assets and new technologies for connectivity.

The goal is the same as ever, applied to the present: to make mobility more manageable, safer and more sustainable, and to do so by shaping technology in the service of people, not the other way around.

Fourteen years after Capo d’Orlando, 25 years after the company’s founding, we work for the same reasons we started. Only on a different scale.