Smarking: Paving a New Road for Smart Parking Systems
Anyone who has ever driven in or around Boston can relate to the frustrating feeling of weaving around the Boston Common, being forced underground onto the Mass Highway after entering the wrong lane, and ending up at your location only to spend the next 45 minutes circling in hopes of finding some semblance of a space to squeeze your car into. You return to your car just one minute after your allotted time to find out you’ve already been fined, seeing no meter maid in sight, and wondering how on earth this was possible.
In the summer of 2012, Wen Sang, founder of Smarking Inc. got out of his car feeling the same agitation. Instead of throwing his hands up in despair, he decided he would tackle this problem hands on. He began working on a solution during his “New Enterprise” class at MIT where he was earning his PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Through market research, applied developmental work, and meeting with the City of Cambridge, which welcomed any effort to make the lives of their residents better, he sought for a technological answer. After seeing the costly hardware that both Boston and Cambridge were using, he realized that a sensor based system might be worthwhile.
Sang first teamed up with a few individuals at the MIT Media Lab to evaluate and test available devices on the market in a similar space. He saw that many of these solutions are adopted through municipal government purchases and set up in the system. While this was a positive finding, the process was simply occurring too slowly. With extensive amount of research, they found parking is actually a huge business for airports: on average, the parking revenue makes around 20% of the total operating revenue of airports, and could even exceed 50% for busy airports like Atlanta, Georgia. However most of the airports are not capable of effectively use their IT systems for parking business optimization.
It was from here that he teamed up with his CTO Zhenlong Zhao, a fellow MIT PhD student with Applied Math background and software development experiences to build a SaaS system. The two reached out to potential partners whom they could obtain data from for such systems. By working with one of the top US airports, the team began a pilot in the summer of 2013 with sample data. After three rounds of building out a prototype based on 7 years of data, the team finally built up both trust and a usable system, which was completed in May of 2014. The next few months were spent user testing with four managers and two analysts. The team spent the second half of the summer discussing business planning with key decision makers in order to sign a contract to move forward.
The system contains two portions: a parking management system that aggregates parking data as well as other relevant information such as holidays, thereby predicting supply and demand for the future in order to help with staffing, operations, and revenue increase through price adjustments. The team sees a potential value creation of tens of millions dollars in the current pilot alone. The second component interacts with drivers, showing what parking will look like in the future and allowing adjustments based on this information.
The agile team of seven all drive, park, and are eager to work on this problem. Current or recent graduates of MIT, Harvard, WPI, and Northeastern, their backgrounds include computer science, applied math, transportation, design, and engineering. Currently, they are working at the MIT Trust Center of Entrepreneurship for the Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator where they focus from 9am-9pm every Monday through Saturday on their work. Many other important market players in parking and airport industry expressed tremendous interests in doing business and partnering with them, and even investment. One of the largest parking management firm in the US is already in the process of forming up strategic partnership with Smarking for several pilot projects in both airport and urban parking facilities. Recently, the team has been exploring beyond the enterprise software and putting more thought into the consumer side of their product. They feel that with an established technology model and business, they will be able to grow quickly into many other use cases.
Come check out the team at the MIT GFSA Demo day this Saturday 9/6 to hear more about their progress! RSVP here.
