Innovation in Parking

Quick… what manufacturer shipped the most cameras last year?

Did you answer with Canon? You’d be wrong.

How about Kodak? Not even close.

Pentax? Olympus? Minolta? Nikon?

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

C’mon, this should be easy. You know this company. They are worldwide. They shipped more than 100 million digital cameras last year.

Give up?

The answer is Nokia.

Yep, Nokia.  The cell phone company. The company that makes about a third of the world’s cell phones has, presumably by accident, the biggest provider of digital cameras too. (Heck, some of their phones sport two cameras – one for hi-res photos and another for low-res video).

So I thought to myself “How is it that a company who sets out to manufacture cell phones ends up becoming the world’s biggest shipper of cameras?”

And more importantly “How could this possibly relate to parking?”

Here’s how: Technology is notoriously able to upend an entire industry. Whether we’re talking about buggy whips or digital cameras the result is a new paradigm of business and products, often with a turnover of industry leadership.

I think this is just about to happen in parking. Here’s why.

I attended the IPI show a few weeks back. Since I was part of the CAPP program I wasn’t able to cruise the trade show floor like I normally do. I had to concentrate 12+ hours of exhibit time into about 2 hours..  Ouch!

Instead of rushing from booth to booth I simply asked a few folks what’s new this year. Where’s the cool technology to be found? What’s buzzworthy?

And at first they placated me with “Well, T2 Systems, of course.” (Shameless plug… though I would still argue that our stuff was definitely buzzworthy at the show this year).

So I replied “Okay, what stuff (other than T2) is worth checking out?” But the response that I received was that there really wasn’t much happening in terms of truly new, innovative products and services.

Strange. The IPI has what many are describing as its best trade show in years, and the products are the same old thing with just enhancements and add-ons?!

But then again, this is very typical for aging technology products.

Case in point: Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado are two books by Geoffrey Moore that describe customer adoption of technology products. I read them both a few years back. The typical adoption curve for technology-based products looks kind of like my pathetic rendition of a chart here.

The red line is the adoption of technology-based Product X. As sales are increasing the company is happy – the investment to build this product has paid off! But over time sales level off and then begin to drop. The product ages while newer products become available from the competition with more options and features.

And the folks in the company scratch their collective heads until some Marketing Dude jumps up and says “Let’s add some new features to it. It will be Improved!”

And the Improved Product X sells better, at least for a little while, until the company has to add yet another feature leading to New and Improved Product X. And so on, ad infinitum. In the graph those would be the pinkish-purplish lines trying to extend time and add to sales.

(Note that some Marketing Dudes also say “Let’s find a new geographical or adjacent market where Product X is heretofore unheard of and start selling there.”)

I know you’re very familiar with this tactic. Tide and Coca-Cola are experts at these product/brand extensions. Even potato chips have been new and improved: first chips, then stackable chips, then stackable chips with trivia questions and jokes printed on them.

We’re seeing a lot of this in parking too: aging products with add-on extensions rather than innovation of completely new products. And just like adding that camera to a cell phone, parking companies are coming up with ways to modify their products to extend the product's life.

One great example of this is the archaic single-space parking meter, trying to stay relevant in the 21st century.  What extensions are we seeing?  They’ve added digital timing and smart-card support. Pay-by-cell. And for the really adventurous, self-enforcement too (but if you do this remember to keep the device as ugly and utilitarian as possible).

Now I'm not saying that the IPI show this year excluded all innovation and invention. Far from it!  Several companies showed cool new stuff for the first time in 2006. Here’s a sampling of things that I thought were neat:

Peppercoin

One interesting thing was Peppercoin. Originally I only attended their booth to cuss them out (well they sent me no less than three unsolicited e-mail messages prior to the show, so I thought they deserved it) but it turns out that their product is sort of neat.

Basically what the Peppercoin folks do is provide a service to aggregate small credit card transactions together into one big transaction per month, so that the merchant (the parking office) can save on transaction charges. If a parker only parks once then there’s no savings, but two or more transactions in the month on the same credit card are grouped together and go through to the credit card company as one single transaction, saving on merchant fees.

For the parker, he or she receives a credit card statement like normal, and there's a single line item for their parking charge for the month. However there’s a transaction/reference number included: subsequently the parker can visit a web site and use this reference number to review the details of each individual parking payment that makes up the total transaction. Cool!

PayLock

I always knew PayLock as a company involved in vehicle immobilization (boots) and some creative ways to let the parker remove the boots themselves.  But it looks like they're reinventing themselves.  In their booth I finally saw the first working example of handheld enforcement for RFID permits.

This is not a new idea - RFID tags have existed in parking permits (decals, hangtags, transponders) for years – the difficulty has been in finding a handheld computer that reliably reads these tags and at the same time doesn’t empty your battery faster than a freshman downs a beer.

Nevertheless, PayLock demonstrated RFID tag reads using a handheld from Symbol Technologies with an RFID scanner. I tried it myself and it seemed to work pretty well under controlled conditions.

Aside: Personally, however, I’m still leery of RFID for enforcement purposes. Tags are still too expensive and the RFID industry is still arguing over standards.  This is a technology whose day will come. But in my opinion that day is not today.

Parking Stripe Advertising

A company called Parking Stripe Advertising was showing – well, how do you describe them? Instead of painting lines in your lot you lay down this adhesive “tape” on the ground where the lines go.

Except that it’s not tape, it’s some sort of plastic-vinyl-polymer that bonds to the ground, or concrete, or broken asphalt, or whatever surface you have. And it doesn’t fade in the sun or rip apart when tires squeal over it. It’s like parking lines made of magic.

The neatest thing about this was that this tape can have printed on it anything you want, and in full color. So the business model being toted at the show was advertising – the advertisers pay you to put their message on the lines of your lot. Basically you can stripe your lot for free, and continue to generate revenue afterwards.

And if you’re not into advertising then you can certainly imprint your own message on the tape: directions, logo, a friendly welcome, your URL, or whatever. (See their web site for samplers; check out the line stripe for the Hotel Monaco).

In my opinion this was the coolest new technology in parking this year. No, really, it was!

Boy, I sure have rambled on here. I’ll wrap this up…

In most industries there are turning points when new business models and paradigms take over from the old. Parking is no exception: but most interestingly I feel like we’re at that crux right now – that point-of-inflection where a sudden burst of re-invention about to happen and turn things upside-down.  That's very exciting.  And scary.

One last thought… remember Nokia, the phone-maker who sells plenty of cameras? Last year they also happened to build 46 million phones that can play digital music and MP3 tunes… narrowly beating out the mere 42 million iPods sold by Apple.  Very interesting indeed!