Parking 2.0

Grush Hour is where Bern Grush, Founder and CTO of Skymeter, blogs about parking, traffic, and the technological/economic solutions to related problems. Welcome Bern, its nice to have another voice blogging about these important topics. As always, you can find Bern’s blog, and others related to parking, in the Parking Blogs section of my Parking 2.0 blog (on the right).

The Economist presents the best overview I’ve seen yet of the future of wirelessly connected devices in A world of connections.

“New wireless technologies will link not just people but lots of objects too. That will be tremendously useful… but getting there will be tricky”

It looks like the introductory article is available at the link above, but for the whole thing you’ll need to be a subscriber, or you can purchase the magazine on the newsstand.

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…

The Parking Network details yet another online parking marketplace set to launch soon. YouCanPark.com helps connect drivers in the UK with owners of parking spaces that would like to sell them. I wish all the online parking marketplace entrepreneurs well, as a fellow parking entrepreneur, but I’m still not convinced that they’ll be able to make a living selling parking online. My main concern is that the services seem to work best for monthly, or at least regular, parking. If you need a monthly spot near your home or work, you can often walk or drive around looking for garages or lots that advertise “monthly parking available”. I’m sure there are a few areas where insufficient monthly parking is available, and those will be helped by these sites, but most areas in which parking is in short supply tend to have paid parking options that are easy to find without going online. For one-time parking (like when you are going to a meeting across town) I’m not at all sure that the parking marketplace website can improve the parking search process so much that drivers will prefer to find parking online before they leave their home or office, rather than just looking for it when they arrive at their destination like they’ve done for many decades. As noted above, I’m not yet convinced one way or the other, and if I’m missing something here, please use the comments to teach me and the other readers why online parking marketplaces are going to succeed.

Update: Whoops, I left out yet another another (yeah, I meant that) online parking marketplace I recently learned about - ParkMatch, which seems to be initially focusing on San Francisco.

Frank Gruber discuss parking startup ParkWhiz on his blog Somewhat Frank. I’ve chatted with the ParkWhiz guys (very friendly, by the way) and I like what they are doing. As Frank notes, they seem to be playing in a similar space to some other Web 2.0 / Parking 2.0 startups like CarHarbor and SpotScout, though so far I like ParkWhiz’s business model the best. Go ahead and sign up on the ParkWhiz site to stay informed as they launch their services in the next few months, and hey, while you are at it why not sign up to stay informed of Spark Parking’s latest news as well!

ColoradoStartups.com has a great post answering the question “How do angel investors evaluate an opportunity?” - with my recent experience raising funds from angels, I can say the answers presented are right on! One thing I might add - once an investor says No, there is very little you can do to change their minds at that time - instead, say thanks, then go out and kick butt executing your business plan - they’ll be happy to hear from you 6 months later with your tale of startup success, and they might even consider investing more at that later date.

While I’ve been hearing about this technology for a while, this is the first I’ve read of an actual RFID parking permit deployment. Advantages of RFID parking permits? Faster, more accurate permit “reading” and elimination of counterfiets. Read more about it here Hoboken, N.J., Battles Parking Permit Counterfeiting With RFID System

While this is some “cool tech”, I’m still generally against parking permits. Instead, parking that is valuable enough to require “rationing” by permits should instead be sold by the hour. Selling parking by the month tends to encourage overconsumption - after all, if you’ve already paid for the permit, you are actually motivate to park more to get more value from your investment in the permit! I’ll write more on this in the future, and I encourage you to share your comments below on the question - Parking Permits: Good or Bad?

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?!).

What About Angels? is a great post by Tom Evslin on his Fractals of Change blog about angel investors, written for the beginning startup entrepreneur. He has some other great posts in this series on funding startups.