We just wanted to take this opportunity to thank our users who have provided us with much needed comments, questions, and suggestions.

We have been live for a little over a month and some of the some suggestions we received include:

• “I would suggest replacing the ‘feet’ slider with ‘walking time to destination.’ I bet that’s what people ultimately care about, but aren’t going to go through the trouble of converting feet to minutes.”
• “It wasn’t until I read your Blog did I understand that the service was free for consumers. I don’t know if this is something you want to mention in the ‘About us’ section”
• “the website is friendly though when i searched for parking around union station, it gave me an option to sort by price but did not actually show prices at each facility.”
• “The real money is in taking this mobile…”

As mentioned in Jon’s previous post, we’ve changed “feet” to “walking minutes”. Without user feedback, we would have never noticed this.

We’re definitely working to add more pricing ASAP. But we need your help! If you park at a nearby garage or drive past one…heck if you just feel like calling a garage to talk to someone, jot down their pricing information and send it to us. We’re trying to be THE source for parking information, but we can’t do it without you!

Outside of having more available pricing data, the request for a mobile solution was most suggested. As a FYI, we are working on a mobile platform and will be releasing details shortly after we launch the ParkWhiz Marketplace. (We’ll be blogging on this subject real soon!)

The feedback we received was tremendous as well. Here’s some of the comments our ParkWhiz users sent us:

• “I ran a quick search on parking near my apartment, and it was great. It was especially useful, because I have physically walked up and down the block getting price quotes last time I had a visitor staying.”
• “I look forward to being a user in 2007—bring this to DC!!”
• “I’ve always seen there’s a market for this. Living in the coastal areas, there’s always limited spaces near the beach and there’s a lot of unused driveways! I’d like to see how you can make use of personal driveways in beach towns. Start with Pacific beach in San Diego!”

Please continue to send your suggestions and feedback and thanks again for helping to make ParkWhiz a success!

During freshman year of college, I had a physics professor who would mark a test answer wrong if there was no unit of measurement specified for the answer. Didn’t matter if the number given was clearly the correct answer, no units meant no points.

At the time I thought he was an anal-retentive old man who enjoyed giving us one more unnecessary hoop to jump through for an A. Obviously, I was wrong. By senior year, I too was considering numbers without units to be invalid. There’s a big difference between 6 volts and 6 amps. (Difference: one is good to power a flashlight, the other will cause cardiac arrest.) So that’s why you’ll never see a number on ParkWhiz that doesn’t have a unit of measurement attached to it.

But it’s not enough to have units, they need to be the right units. I can name all 50 states in 7.92219116 × 10-7 years. That’s pretty fast, right? No? You’re not sure?

When ParkWhiz first launched, we expressed the distance from a parking spot to your destination in feet. Lucky for us, a couple users quickly pointed out that they didn’t know how far 1274 feet was. Our choice of units rendered the measurement meaningless.

We’ve since switched to measuring distance in “walking minutes”. If someone is parking their car, they’ll probably be walking the rest of the way to their destination. They don’t care about the actual distance; they just want to know how long it will take them to walk that distance. We settled on an estimated walking speed of 3 miles/hour. It’s a quicker than average pace, but we figured that people use ParkWhiz to get to their destination fast; they’re not going to waste time strolling the rest of the way.

What do you think? Is it better to provide an “interpreted unit of measure” instead of an absolute unit like feet or miles?

Have you ever clicked on an item at Amazon.com and noticed the item’s sales rank number? The other day I was searching for a book recommended to me and saw that the “Amazon’s Sales Rank” was 159,530. Geez. Not too popular, eh? I don’t think I’ll be seeing this book on the shelves of my local Borders anytime soon. But that’s what I love about Amazon. I can enter any book (CD, DVD etc.) that my heart desires and there’s a pretty good chance I’ll have it at my doorstep within 5-7 business days (1-2 business days if I sign up for Amazon Prime).

Amazon.com is the poster child for the Long Tail. The Long Tail is a “power law” demand curve. For you non-stats buffs, it represents a chart with huge appeal or demand for top items and tails off fast for the less popular ones (see figure 1).

According to Chris Anderson, the author who coined the phrase Long Tail, about a third of Amazon’s book sales are in the Long Tail. That’s enough to make you think how much money the brick and mortars of the world like Walmart, Borders, or Blockbuster leave on the table due to their shelf constraints. There’s only so much space at the store to sell a DVD, right? Anderson states that there are two rules to the Long Tail:

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