Parking 2.0

Normally I’ll keep this blog to discussion of parking in general, but I can’t resist letting you know that Spark Parking has been featured in an article on the Discovery Channel website entitled Find Parking With Your Cell Phone. Now, back to our regularly scheduled blogging…

I’m a big fan of the latest parking innovation at airports - small, free parking lots, near the terminal, that are for short-term use by people in their cars coming to pick-up friends and relatives. The rules for these lots typically include a 1/2 - 1 hour maximum stay, and a requirement that the driver remain with the car. When the traveller arrives and gets their bags, they call their “driver” to come pick them up. These lots will eventually significantly reduce the number of cars “circling” the terminal, causing traffic congestion and burning fuel.

Now I read that the Orlando International Airport Offers Wi-Fi For Drivers waiting in the “park and call” lot. Presumably the drivers will use this wireless internet service with their laptops to keep themselves informed (of flight arrival times) and entertained (YouTube?) while they wait. Brilliant! As long as the airport adequately promotes this amenity through new signs, I’m sure the park and call lot at OIA will be very popular.

In this article: Payments News: PayPal in the Air! the excellent Payment News site reviews and analyzes the new PayPal Mobile service. Given how busy I am these days with Spark Parking, I’m going to renege on my previously promised PayPal Mobile review and send you to Payment News instead - enjoy!

A couple days ago I blogged about TextPayMe, a mobile Person to Person (P2P) payment service that I’ve used and liked. Today I’ll introduce one I haven’t used, and don’t like already!

PayWi is a Person to Business (P2B) payment service that essentially embeds your credit/debit card info in your phone. To use it, you must sign up online, then patronize a merchant that is PayWi enabled (uh, how do I know? Who are they?). Once your bill is due at this merchant, you provide them with your mobile phone number (I don’t really like giving people I know my phone number) or you “swipe your PayWi card” (how is this significantly better than swiping my credit card?). You’ll then, if you have a sufficiently sophisticated phone with Java, receive a confirmation message from PayWi, which you respond to with a PIN to complete the transaction.

So, in order to not use my credit card at some very limited set of merchants, I need to sign up, publicize my mobile phone number, and run a java app on my phone?! And what benefit am I getting from this? Not having to carry a credit card? Sorry, I’m just not seeing the compelling value proposition here - but as a fellow entrepreneur, I wish PayWi luck!

TextPayMe makes it somewhat simple to send money, from your credit card or bank account, to someone else, using only text messages. You need to sign up online, and both the signup and money sending/receiving processes are not as smooth as they could be (in my limited testing) but otherwise this is a great service. Fees seem like they’ll be lower than PayPal, and for now they are offering $5 to each new customer (didn’t that go away with the dotcom bubble?!).

The gethuman database is a long list of companies, their phone numbers, and the quickest way to get a live human on the line when you call. This site exists because too many companies have terrible IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems that do all they can to keep you, the caller, and customer, from speaking with a human.

Does it take a genius to point out that these firms are damaging their brand value, and thus their future success, but royally pissing off their customers each time they call? Did someone in every one of those firms make the calculation that results in (savings from IVR + cost of IVR) > (lost revenue from pissed off customers)? Somehow I doubt it…

Here is a free business idea - toss me a few founders shares if you do this:
1. Get a nice 800# like “800-TALK-TO-A-PERSON
2. Mashup the gethuman database with Voxeo’s new super cheap Prophecy IVR system
3. Invite anyone to call your 800 #, when the call is connected ask the for the company they’d like to be connected to, play them a short ad while Prophecy executes the gethuman instructions to get to a human, then connect the caller directly to a human at their desired company.

Update:
Who knew the New York Times would be covering this exact issue about the same time as I did?! Your Call Should Be Important to Us, but It’s Not

This article Early-warning service helps motorists beat the Enforcers again shows amazing efforts some people will undertake to “protect” their “rights” to free parking. In the Warden Watch system, recently launched in the UK, various kind souls will see a parking warden (enforcement officer), then SMS the license plate number of a car wearing the “Warden Watch” sticker to the service, which will then SMS the car owner to warn them that a warden is in their vicinity.

Or, of course, that car owner could have simply parked legally and not had to worry about getting a ticket!

Khaleej Times Online reports on the first robotic parking facility in Dubai. Sounds interesting, though in the absence of a photo, and with some curious translation, it is difficult to ascertain if this is something new, or just a new trial of an old automated parking system.

I like how the system retrieves your car through an automated touch-tone interface via your mobile phone! With Spark Parking you could also pay for your robotically parked car from your phone.

The pricing quoted in the article is intriguing. The pilot project holds 14 cars in a 7.5m x 7.5m footprint at a cost of about $681,000, or about $49,000 per space. A similar facility for 500 cars would cost about $5.45 million, or about $11,000 per space. This is remarkably cheap for structured (as opposed to surface) parking, which typically ranges in price from $15,000 to $50,000 per space, especially when you consider that the “robotic” parking system can pack far more cars into a given footprint.

If anyone has more details on this project or the technology, please feel free to post a comment!

This article Early-warning service helps motorists beat the Enforcers again shows amazing efforts some people will undertake to “protect” their “rights” to free parking. In the Warden Watch system, recently launched in the UK, various kind souls will see a parking warden (enforcement officer), then SMS the license plate number of a car wearing the “Warden Watch” sticker to the service, which will then SMS the car owner to warn them that a warden is in their vicinity.

Or, of course, that car owner could have simply parked legally and not had to worry about getting a ticket!

Engadget, one of my favorite “fun” blogs (as opposed to “work” blogs) has a great post on the high tech in use at the recent Super Bowl, including an interesting sensor network.