Mayor says city should market Parkplus now
New iPhone payment app unveiled
The Calgary Parking Authority shouldn’t delay in offering its ParkPlus technology to other users, regardless of the agency’s ongoing legal battle over the system’s patent rights, says Mayor Naheed Nenshi.
After a closed-door presentation from consultants this week, council approved a secret set of next steps in the long-discussed plans to market ParkPlus. These measures come with an October trial date set in a $42-million lawsuit against former parking authority managers Dale Fraser and Al Bazar, who claim the invention is theirs.
Fraser had long mused publicly about international customers of ParkPlus but nothing happened during his tenure. The city was quietly trying to get him to surrender claims on the intellectual property, at one point offering Fraser and Bazar $50,000 each, according to court documents.
Since they were terminated last year, new parking brass have pressed ahead on marketing plans for the parking system that blends cellphone payment and enforcement with camera cars. The mayor doesn’t want to wait longer.
“If you’d have had the iPhone killer in 2006 and decided not to market it and put it out five years later, well the world would have passed you by,” Nenshi said in a year-end interview. “So I think that it is the correct and responsible thing for the Calgary Parking Authority to do is to test the market on this.”
The city has obtained a private valuation of the ParkPlus system, and it’s part of the sealed evidence in the lawsuit, but Nenshi isn’t expecting a financial gusher.
“Certainly every little bit helps, but I’m not expecting hundreds of millions of dol- lars in licensing from ParkPlus every year.”
Meanwhile, ParkPlus has unveiled yet another way to use the system, a free iPhone app called MyParking.
Motorists can already use their cellphones to buy parking time, but the app makes it even quicker, eliminating the need to wait for voice prompts. Now users can just punch in the four-digit parking zone code. Texting is another option, but the app shows how much time is left in the parking session and exactly where your car is located.
As well, the app is able to indicate where there may be parking spots available nearby, in a city parkade or lot or on the street.