Craving music? Tired of listening to your ipod day in and day out? Then head out to the Ravinia Festival. Located in Highland Park, Illinois, Ravinia is the oldest outdoor music festival in North America. Over 600,000 concert-goers attend the 100+ performances spanning genres from classical music to jazz to music theater over each three-month summer season.

The Festival has brought musical greats from Tony Bennett, ABBA, and the Steve Miller Band to name a few. This weekend, Lyle Lovett and k.d. lang will be performing and in upcoming weeks, the great Wynton Marsalis and the Doobie Brothers will take center stage.

For those of you who already have your ticket in hand and are driving to the festival, make sure and plan ahead with ParkWhiz! Parking your car can be a hassle and the last thing you want is to miss the beginning of the concert. With ParkWhiz, you’ll know when and where to park before you leave and can reserve your space avoiding any frustration.

And if you’re own or operate a parking garage, surface lot, or have an unused space available around the area, sign up and rent it out on the ParkWhiz Marketplace!

For those of you living in the New York City area who’d like to see a live demo of ParkWhiz, today (well, tomorrow) is your lucky day. I’ll be giving a quick demo of ParkWhiz at the Web 2.0 meetup at 7:00pm on June 26. The event is being held at Slate Plus at 54 W 21st Street. For more info, check out the Web 2.0 New York meetup page.

If you feel like braving the tail end of rush hour and driving, here’s the nearby parking:

One of the big advantages of advertising parking on ParkWhiz over craigslist is that people can actualy find your parking if you list it on ParkWhiz. Have you ever tried to shop for a monthly spot on craigslist? While it’s nice that anyone can put up a listing and add as much or as little info as possible, it makes sorting through those listings a real drag. To remedy this problem, all ParkWhiz listings need a specific address and a contact phone number.

Now as we all know, “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” What if you don’t want some random dog seeing your address or phone number? We’ve built privacy-protecting features into ParkWhiz for just this reason.

When listing your parking for sale, you have the option to have interested drivers call or email for more information. The “call” option will display your phone number, but the email option will just create a message box on the listing page that people can use to contact you. The email communication goes through ParkWhiz, so your personal email address is kept hidden.

We’ve also added an option to not reveal your full address. For example, if you listed parking at “31 Main Street” but were concerned about displaying your home address, you could choose to have it displayed as just “Main Street.” Only when someone has purchased a parking reservation is the full address revealed. This poses little inconvenience to people searching for parking, while protecting your privacy.

These are just some new features; ParkWhiz has always valued your privacy. We want to help you buy and sell parking – on your terms!

The ParkWhiz Marketplace has been helping people find parking for a couple months now, but it was missing one key piece – payments. While you could see prices and other information online, it didn’t change the parking experience too much. You decided where to park, and paid when you got there.

I’m pleased to announce that has changed now, with the introduction of an integrated payment system for the ParkWhiz Marketplace. What does this mean?

For drivers: Never again worry if the garage accepts credit cards, or whether you’ll be able to find a parking spot next time you head downtown. You can reserve parking ahead of time and pay for it with your credit card. Then just drive to the parking spot, present your ParkWhiz receipt, and be on your way.

For parking owners: Offer your customers the unique service of reserved parking and get paid ahead of time. ParkWhiz offers sophisticated tools to help you advertise your parking and manage reservations, whether you’re renting out your driveway or operating garages in several cities. Learn more here.

We’re really excited to be offering this new service, and I’ll be posting more later this week about what’s next.