When it
comes to finding and paying for parking spots in cities all over the world,
Israeli technologies like Anagog, Parko and Pango are leading the way.
By Abigail Klein Leichman, ISRAEL21c
Chances are you already use the Israeli app Waze to find the best route to wherever you want to drive. After arriving, you might have another Israeli company to thank for
finding you a parking spot and paying for it without a hassle.
Pango is an app that lets you book and pay for on-street
and parking lot spots via iOS, Android or Blackberry device, in Israel and in a
growing number of major US cities. Pango Mobile Parking, based in Kadima, just
raised $6.5 million in a new funding round.
Thanks to the convenience of its patented pay-by-phone
technology – no need for cash or paper tickets — Pango is the leading app to
pay for parking in Israel. If you won’t make it to your car before the time
runs out, you get a reminder to “feed the meter” from your phone. If you’re
done early, you can use the “unpark” option to be billed only for the time
you’ve been parked.
The Pango+ service enables businesses to manage
company fleet expenses more easily, offering a single invoice for all employee
parking expenses and access to detailed online data about employee parking.
Among the major corporations signed up for this service are Microsoft,
Pelephone and Israel Railways.
Because nearly half the car owners in Israel are using Pango,
the company has amassed valuable data on parking habits that’s going to be of
great help to another Israeli startup, Parko, winner of the Google-sponsored 2012 Israeli Mobile
Challenge competition.
Parko uses crowdsourcing and GPS to steer drivers to
spots that other users are about to vacate. Integration with Pango users aims
to give drivers the most accurate info possible.
Parko ran a recent pilot for its crowdsourced parking
app in Tel Aviv, but founder Tomer Neuner tells ISRAEL21c the company is
shifting its focus to the United States and Europe. “We’re negotiating on partnerships with companies, car
manufacturers and large municipalities around the world for payment and
navigation apps,” he says. “When you’re driving to work, for example, you’re
using a navigation app to help with traffic but sometimes when you reach your
destination, looking for parking can be the biggest part of your trip. One app
for the whole solution would be best.”
Parko intends to build statistical maps of areas in
real time. “We’ll start with the map of parking availability and spots about to
become available, and in the third stage we’ll be connecting with drivers,”
predicts Neuner.
Smart software to manage parking
Then there’s Anagog – not an app, but a sophisticated software
development kit protected by eight patents.
Anagog provides crowdsourced parking data to partner
companies such as navigation system and cellular operators, map providers, car
manufacturers and municipalities looking for tailored parking solutions. “But we learned that if we don’t develop our own
consumer apps to demonstrate our technology, nobody will know what we are
talking about,” says cofounder Yaron Aizenbud, who helms the company with
partner Gil Levy. “So we have lots of apps in the market providing
unique services not related to real-time parking [such as FindMyCar and
BabyMinder] and we also have an internal beta version of an app for real-time
parking solutions in Tel Aviv. The apps are vehicles for us to generate the
awareness of our unique solutions in the market.”
Using crowdsourced parking information accumulated
from those sister apps and other resources, Anagog can generate a real-time
parking map of urban centers in the world. The company’s partnership with Parx allows EasyPark
mobile app subscribers in more than 130 cities worldwide to receive automatic
push notifications of a relevant parking spot about to be vacated. The technology under the hood of Anagog includes
signal processing, algorithms and software for Android and iPhone platforms.
“Crowdsourced parking technology is complicated,” Aizenbud
tells ISRAEL21c. “We have a unique technology that can identify accurately when
someone holding a smartphone intends to leave a spot in a few minutes. We know
when they parked their car and where, and when they start to go back to the car
we can communicate that to the community.”
The next step is accumulating a critical mass of data
generated by users in specific areas, sending it to the cloud and filtering out
irrelevancies to focus on actual vacated parking spots. Then, the data is
analyzed statistically to generate parking occupancy information for users. “We think that our product gives a real solution to
the growing problem of insufficient parking in crowded urban centers. We want
to help drivers find parking quicker and waste less time, money and pollution,”
says Aizenbud.