MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Sure, we've all lost an umbrella or two. But you'd have to really work at it to lose 300,000 of them. A Chinese startup has managed to do just that. The plan was to follow the bike-share, car-share trend and launch an umbrella share. And people loved it so much that they paid the nominal deposit and, yeah, walked those umbrellas right on home. Founder Zhao Shuping is undeterred - his next idea, umbrellas with GPS. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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