There are multitudes of parking spot locator and reservation apps, but SpotHero is trying to set itself apart from the pack by becoming a parking broker of sorts. As co-founder and COO Jeremy Smith explained at Excelerate’s demo day in August, SpotHero has built the back-end systems that not only allow lot owners to notify drivers of parking availability, but to tailor space reservation and parking pass offers based on inventory, demand and specific customers needs.

By using SpotHero’s platform, parking lot owners can sell discounted spot reservations for specific hours or days and even sell monthly passes through the startup’s website and consumer facing Android and iOS apps. Lot owners can even bid against each other for a customer’s business, Smith said.

Parking in a big city like Chicago may seem like a scarce resource, but in reality during most hours lots are sitting half empty. Consequently national and regional parking lot companies have taken a shine to SpotHero’s e-commerce platform in hopes of filling up those empty spaces. The service has been available for less than a year, but the startup claims to have generated more than $2 million in revenue for parking companies, even though its available in just two cities, Chicago and Milwaukee.

SpotHero was the first of the Excelerate’s 2012 class to raise funds, announcing an investment from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups the week before demo day (SpotHero won’t be participating in 500 Startups’ accelerator program though, choosing instead to remain in Chicago). SpotHero plans to use its new funding to hire more developers and expand beyond the Midwest.

Image courtesy of Alex 92287.

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Called TruCentive,  and highlighted in a post on the New Scientist blog Thursday morning, the software works like a bartering system of sorts for information on open parking spots. The more information users share about open spaces, the more credits they get for information on parking spots when they’re in need. And the more valuable the data users share (e.g., crowded downtown areas are worth more than the ‘burbs), the more credits they receive.

The credit system is a particularly smart idea in a world where citizens don’t always get value in return for their troubles. The thinking behind TruCentive is to encourage use of the system by rewarding citizens’ efforts, as opposed to similar crowdsourced parking apps that rely on citizen participation but have neither a carrot nor a stick at their disposal, according to the New Scientist post. Active users can be assured they’re getting special treatment in return for the data they share, while parasitic users will have to contribute or keep getting lower-quality information.

As I’ve suggested before, actually rewarding users for desired behavior might also work in the realm of web apps, where companies such as Facebook require more data to keep services free, but users don’t want to sacrifice their privacy. Even if data exchange is a largely a one-way street, there has to be a quid pro quo in there somewhere.

A screenshot of Xerox parking software.

To me, however, the greatest aspect of a system like TruCentive might be its marriage, if possible, to other parking projects such as Xerox’s ExpressPark. Although the parking revolution is just getting underway, the (hopefully) forthcoming combination of smart parking meters, crowdsourced data on other spots and predictive models should save commuters time, clear congestion and generally improve everyone’s lives. Maybe even pedestrians can reap the rewards — the more confident drivers are there’ll be a spot waiting for them in a particular location, the less they have to stare at a device searching for one.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Felix Mizioznikov.

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In San Francisco (and across the bay in neighboring Oakland), Parking Panda will have 5,000 to 10,000 parking spaces available for reservation. Users can search for spots available in a certain area and see what the garage or driveway owner is charging before committing to a reservation. It can be for a a few hours, a day, week, month, whatever. Though it’s one of its most useful features, you don’t have to plan in advance to use Parking Panda.

“Parking is always the unknown,” Parking Panda CEO Nick Miller said in a phone call last week. “You have the tickets, you have a dinner reservations … we sort of take that [parking] problem away.”

The service works in two ways, Miller said. “Like AirBnb, private owners can list spaces for rent, and we’re working with commercial operators to yelp them optimize their yield.” In other words, it’s helping privately owned parking garages that aren’t full manage their space inventory better. By doing peer-to-peer driveway renting, and helping large garages rent out space, Parking Panda is combining the services of a few of its competitors; ParkAtMyHouse lets individuals rent out their driveways only, while ParkWhiz, for example, just does event parking.

Miller and company started off just doing the AirBnb model, but soon realized that wasn’t going to cut it in large cities. “That’s great, but one of the things we find is that [model] only works in certain neighborhoods.” For instance, a notoriously difficult SF neighborhood to park in, the South of Market area, doesn’t have many private driveways. “In SoMa, you need garages to supplement that.”

Parking Panda has been live in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore for several months with 20,000 spots between the two cities. But its debut in San Francisco on Monday comes with another important milestone for the company: its first iPhone app. (Android is “coming soon.”) Also, users can still use the app outside of D.C., Baltimore and SF — there are 25 other cities where you can search for open spots, you just can’t reserve or pay in advance just yet.

Also coming soon: more cities. Boston, Los Angeles, and Austin are in Parking Panda’s near future. But before those, Miller promises me he has a bigger priority: my own city, Philadelphia, a place where the parking situation is so nightmarish, there’s a reality TV show about it.

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Central to most of Xerox’s anti-congestion projects, including ExpressLanes,is the idea of dynamic pricing, which rises with demand in order to maintain some semblance of order. As Natesh Manikoth, Xerox’s chief technology officer for transportation solutions, explained to me, if a driver is paying to drive in the HOT (high-occupancy tolling) lane, he’s guaranteed a consistent speed of 45 miles per hour. If traffic starts backing up, prices for individual cars will rise to discourage them from entering, saving the lanes (which, before this program were high-occupancy-vehicle lanes) for high-occupany vehicles such as buses and those involved in carpools.

Xerox has another program in Los Angeles called ExpressPark, the goal of which is to let people know when they’re about to leave the house whether and where they might find parking, and how much it will cost. “It’s not enough to know how to set the price, you have to make sure that data gets to users in real time,” Manikoth said. Drivers also need to know parking spots will still be there when they arrive in 40 minutes. That’s a prediction problem.

The answers lie in big data, difficult data

The key to all of this, of course, is lots of data. ExpressLanes, Manikoth explained, works by sensing traffic flows in the HOT lanes as well as in the adjacent lanes and calculating travel times. Because a pre-defined algorithm won’t work, the model is designed to learn as it takes in more data about how any given set of conditions affect traffic flow. Xerox is just getting started with developing its model, Manikosh said, and he aknowledges it won’t be easy.

Traffic accidents, broken down cars and other unforeseen incidents can quickly make a mess of even the best models, especially because no one can predict how long an accident will take to clean up or how many lanes it will close down. And Los Angeles is a particularly unique beast among large cities because it lacks a strong city center, so traffic is relatively constant and in all directions. However, he said, “We stepped up, we’ll have to now prove it.”

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While the parking project depends heavily on prediction, those predictions rely heavily on history. Manikoth said his team can build a machine learning system that looks at historical data as it relates to the current price of parking to predict whether spots will remain available. But that’s easier said than done — or at least, done right — because parking behavior is affected by myriad hard-to-predict factors such as how long someone will be at a meter and how many drivers are willing to park illegally. The meters’ sensors and payment systems can track occupancy rates and what people pay, but not how individual people will act in any given situation.

Solve traffic, solve a lot more

Xerox isn’t alone in trying to help bring order to the chaos that is big-city driving, though. Companies such as IBM and Siemens are also working on the problem — and it’s all part of a larger effort to minimize the problems that cities — the economic engines of our society — experience as they grow. Drivers circling blocks looking for parking spots and commuters stuck in freeway gridlock contribute to pollution and generally lower the quality of life for everyone involved.

Manikoth said the real answer lies in combining information from other sources, such as mass-transit systems, toll highways, traffic sensors and weather data (all of which Xerox also collects) to paint a real-time picture of what traffic actually looks like. Armed with this type of information, city planners might be able to devise more-intelligent stoplights, bus routes and train schedules — maybe even dynamically — and commuters might be able to decide they’re better off just taking the subway today. By collecting diagnostic data from buses, he said, transportation authorities could spot potential issues that might otherwise result in a future breakdown that messes with schedules and people’s lives.

Of course, given how big and expansive a problem traffic management is, there’s monetary incentive for anyone who’s actually able to solve it. “We firmly believe that solving problems for cities is a good thing for society as a whole,” Manikoth said “but it’s also good business.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Aaron Kohr.

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Last year, Pell founded a company called Moon Express that is focused on building lunar landing craft. So his new venture, QuickPay, is a little more down to earth. [Ed. Note: Sorry, couldn't resist.] But what is it about parking or payments that got his attention? I passed along a few questions by email to see.

GigaOM: Why parking or payments? What is it about that particular market that attracted you to innovate on current services?

Barney Pell: I’m always thinking about how the basic things of life can be done better. Every time I look for parking, pay for parking, or worry about a parking ticket, I think that there must be a better way. Last year, I met another entrepreneur who had an initial product in this space and the opportunity totally captured my imagination.

GigaOM: What’s the market opportunity or focus of Quickpay? Are you looking to improve efficiency of the current system, reduce friction in payments or enable more users by taking away cash and making the technology mobile?

Barney Pell: All of the above, and much more. The market opportunity for QuickPay is massive. Parking in the US is a $26B industry (from end-user parking fees alone), but the parking operators know hardly anything about the people who park in their facilities, and parkers have little in the way of technology to help them carry out one of life’s daily activities. With QuickPay, we are bringing the parking industry to the age of the cloud and mobile devices. This brings benefits for parkers, parking operators, and facility owners, of efficiency, convenience, loyalty, rewards, dynamic pricing, and real-time data. QuickPay makes money in general on a per-transaction basis, with a market opportunity for just the payments piece >$3B per year.

GigaOM: What’s the buy-in from on-street (municipalities) or off-street (garages)? What exactly do you need to do to enable this technology to work with existing systems?

Barney Pell: QuickPay [is] getting a great response from municipalities and private parking operators. We are live in 80 locations in the Bay Area and have an active pipeline of national and regional players and municipal RFPs.

To onboard a new facility, we let the parking operators enter the lot information, such as location, open hours, and rate table, into our cloud-based system.

Then to work with their existing systems, we have a proprietary and inexpensive gate-arm kit that we install at each parking entrance and exit gate, which lets our cloud-based system raise the gate whenever a user scans the gate’s QR code with their mobile device. For ungated facilities and metered on-street parking, our system pushes the license plate of our parked users to the enforcement systems of the parking operators, so that our users don’t get tickets when they have paid to park with our system.

GigaOM: It seems like QuickPay is a bit of a departure from NASA or natural-language processing. What parallels can you draw between the technology you’re building now and some of the projects from your past?

Barney Pell: Actually, QuickPay is very closely related to my most recent work on Bing and, in particular, Bing Mobile and Local Search. Parking is largely a local and mobile search and commerce problem. You need to organize large amounts of structured data about users, prices, and locations, organize it, and deliver the data and transactions in vertically optimized user experiences. While at Powerset and Bing I identified major trends in search as Mobile, Local, Social, Personal, Contextual and Semantic, all supported by Cloud. It turns out that all these trends are directly relevant in the future of parking (in fact I’ve published some papers in parking magazines elaborating on all this).

GigaOM: Is parking just the first vertical that you hope to tackle with QuickPay? What other industries could this technology have the potential to disrupt?

Barney Pell: Parking is, in itself, a major vertical upon which we can build a great company. Parking extends naturally to transportation, such as fares for bus, trains, and tolls. But at the heart of it, our system is a cloud-based mobile wallet and payment system, so the possibilities are endless.

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