The smartphone boom helps clever
companies turn ephemeral real-world
resources into marketable goods.
trading spaces
tech edge
by farhad manjoo
chad meyer and Omid
Saadati met at a Bay Area coffee
shop about a year ago, and the t wo
young entrepreneurs immediately
began talking about what everyone
in San Francisco talks about when
they first meet: how long it had
taken to find parking. “We’d both
been going around and around the
block, and we’d seen all these
prime parking spaces that we
couldn’t use,” Meyer says. The
prime spots were privately
owned—driveways, carports, park-
ing lots attached to apartment
buildings—and many were unoc-
cupied while their owners were off
at work or on vacation or just out to
the store. “We thought, Wouldn’t it
be great if there was some way that
we could communicate with those
owners and say, ‘Hey, here’s 10
bucks, here’s 20 bucks. Can I just
park in your space for t wo hours
while I go to a restaurant?’ ”
In January, Meyer and
Saadati launched Park Circa, a ser-
vice that does just that. An owner
registers his parking space, its
availability, and his asking price
on the site; drivers use their smart-
phones to search for spaces while
they’re looking for a spot. When a
parker sees one in her price range,
she checks into it on her phone.
After she checks out, Park Circa
transfers her payment to the owner,
taking a 25% cut of its own. “We
made it a simple process,” Meyer
says. “It doesn’t require much
work from anyone.”
Park Circa is an example of a
new trend in startups: Call it “peo-
ple commerce,” because in Silicon
Valley, no new trend is worth men-
tioning unless it’s been blessed
with insider jargon. When we con-
sider the economic potential of
smartphones, we usually think of
ways our phones will help us con-
nect to the likes of Starbucks, Gap,
and Home Depot. But the bigger
story may be in how they give us
the power to digitize the real
world—to catalog the price and
real-time availability of things that
some people own, other people
want, but which have so far been
logistically impossible to trade.
