Parking is a mammoth business
There's a company called Smarking.
Probably the smirk in parking. It's an industry people don't pay much attention to because it seems unremarkable.
But every car needs a parking space when it's not running.
And here's the all-important statistic from the company's own site - 30% of traffic in the US comes from people looking for parking space!
In the large cities, as overall space shrinks, parking spaces becomes invaluable. An asset that can be leveraged in ways that weren't possible earlier.
Smarking makes its money out of the aggregated data from parking spaces around the US. Depending on the size of the parking lot a company or individuals own, they can figure out the rates to charge, when to drop and increase prices and maximise their investment.
Like Uber controls pricing for drivers based on the demand and supply, Smarking lets owners determine how much to charge by the hour.
In India, since the penetration of cars is low compared to developed countries, this is not a viable model, as yet. There was even a time when malls allowed people to park for free, provided they made purchases for a base amount.
Those economics no longer apply. Now, parking has become a revenue stream and weekends are prime time.
Think about it. It is idle and empty space that fills and empties out with the natural rhythms of the city.
And it grows in value simply by being hired for a number of hours everyday.
Airports are a prime example. Overnight parking used to be fairly reasonable when people went for a day trip.
But now, it probably costs more than hiring a cab to the airport.
Parking is the business that grows in the shadow of the automobile industry.
And it's only going to get more complex.
Pollution fines are a new market opportunity
The city of New York took new measures to improve air quality.
They created new rules for large trucks that idled inside city limits.
But enforcing the rule was another matter altogether.
Asking the police to do it would waste expensive resources - and how would the police keep track of hundreds of idling trucks in traffic?
So, they came up with a plan.
Pay citizens 25% of the fine imposed on the truck.
The fines are hefty - $350 for idling beyond 3 minutes.
And the citizen who provides the proof walks away with $87.50 - not bad for 3 minutes of active work!
But truckers who paid the fine quickly understood that they were being video graphed on the street.
And that led to ugly confrontations.
So, the people doing it have figured their own workarounds because the money is a huge incentive.
They make it look as if they are simply answering a call on their phone - the video is being recorded on another one!
They need 3 clear minutes of footage to be recorded - with fumes coming out of the exhaust and the sounds of the engine.
Or else, the truck can escape the fine.
This will get to be a cat and mouse game. New devices to record the truck will be developed. Remote recording from cameras in the vicinity could be explored.
But then, if the owners of the trucking companies manage to camouflage the idling, it could get harder to record proof. Don't expect trucking companies to meekly keep paying!
What is strange is how quickly people discover a completely new money making opportunity.
Are we carrying ads too far? -2
An earlier post was about Walgreens. Today is about another brand pushing the limits
Here’s the first one.
Microsoft may bring ads to File Explorer
The number of places we can escape from advertising is getting smaller all the time.
Now, Microsoft has a huge base of captive users. And there seem to experiments underway to serve 'relevant ads' in places like File Explorer.
The line between what we own and what companies have control over is blurring all the time.
The more ads we see, the better our screening response gets. In most cases, our brains don't even register the messages.
And that's good for us, bad for advertisers.
One of the things we didn't see coming with the millions of channels now available is that we've grown less attentive intentionally.
The brain gets highly selective about what we need to register based on our points of immediate interest. There's so much advertising out on the streets, on websites we browse, even on the mobile screens, we've grown accustomed to thumbing past them without a moment's hesitation.
Those days of mobile ads being small strips at the bottom of the screen are long gone.
Now, they're in every thumb scroll and sometimes we have to look for the 'Read More' button to unfurl the rest of an article.
The more brazen ads get, the better we get at ignoring them altogether.
It does not matter how cleverly the messages are designed; they might as well be invisible.
Being in advertising, I'm perfectly clear that less is more.
When value is delivered without unnecessary distractions, people do tune in. There is clearly a case for people seeing only 1-2 ads every half hour or so.
But the systems we've built work at scale, delivering millions of ads every minute.
And they disappear without a trace with one thumb scroll.