The 2007 Colliers’ 7th annual North America Parking Rate Survey indicates the cost to park your car continues to increase. The average monthly parking spot in the US is now $150.81, up 4.4% from last year according to Colliers’, while daily rates jumped up to $15.38, up 3.2%.

The pinch is being felt in places like Chicago, where over 200,000 people drive downtown to their job everyday. New York City receives the honor once again with the highest rates in the US, coming in at $630 on average to park your car in Midtown. At least NY residents can be thankful the situation isn’t as dire as our friends in London have it, where they pay a whopping $1198 a month for parking! Wow!

So the question is, are you getting the best parking deal in town? Enter your destination and find out!

As announced at last night’s NY Tech Meetup, ParkWhiz is now available on your cell phone, smart phone, or BlackBerry. Just open up your phone’s browser and point it at parkwhiz.com. You can do a basic search for parking and see details for indivual spots. We’ll be rolling out additional mobile functionality over the next couple months.

We’ve tested in on Opera Mobile and the Blackberry browser. If ParkWhiz doesn’t work with you phone’s browser, tell me and I’ll fix it!

Presenting at last month’s Web 2.0 Meetup was a blast. The crowd had some great comments and ideas — everyone seemed to think ParkWhiz is a great solution for the proposed congestion tolls in NYC — and I met a lot of really cool people. Check out AudioSnacks, another startup with roots in NYC and Chicago. Big thanks to Brett Petersel for organizing everything.

If you missed the Web 2.0 meetup, I’ll be giving 2 more demos/presentations next week. Come to the NY Tech Meetup on July 10 at 7pm (Great Hall @ Cooper Union, 7 E 7th St) to see a tech-oriented demo of ParkWhiz. RSVP soon, because the event is almost full.

I’ll also be presenting at The Hatchery’s Gauntlet event on July 11th at 6:30pm. This event is full, but you can sign up for the wait list at meetup.com. The Gauntlet will be held at the offices of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge on the 8th floor of 750 Lexington Ave.

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 advatanges 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!

Merchant accounts are not fun. There’s the complex pricing schemes ($.32/trans + 2.9%*trans + $29.99 account fee + $? misc charges = huh?), and the weird reselling structure, whereby the company you pay isn’t the one actually doing the payment processing. Nevermind the fact most merchant account provider websites appear to have been designed by someone who has been without an internet connection for the past 9 years. This company’s site has a bad SSL certificate! Are you kidding me?

When we started designing the ParkWhiz payment system, I was not looking forward to picking a merchant account provider. I expected it to be something like the Douche and Turd episode of South Park. Except less funny, because it wasn’t a cartoon and it was happening to me.

ParkWhiz was competing in the U of Chicago NVC at the time, and by some stroke of luck one of our fellow competitors was a merchant account provider called Braintree Financial. Their business was focused around cutting through all the crap associated with typical merchant accounts. I’m not a religous man, but my prayers had been answered.

After working with Bryan and the rest of the team at Braintree for the past two months to get the ParkWhiz payments set up, I’m happy to say that Braintree lives up to it’s promise. They delivered the complex payment solution we were looking for, their manage console is well desgined, and the service has been fantastic.

Braintree won the U of Chicago NVC a couple weeks ago, and rightfully so. If you’re looking for a way to process credit cards or work with e-checks on your website, check them out.

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.

Just got back from this month’s NY Tech Meetup. Tech Meetup has been going on for a while, but this is the first time I got around to going. The event is hosted by Scott Heiferman, who is also the founder and CEO of Meetup.com. NY Tech Meetup also happens to be the “original” Meetup.com event.

A number of companies/groups demoed, but the ones that stood out were Hitchsters and HouseParty. Hitchsters had the balls to do a live demo with text messaging in a basement auditorium. And it worked. They seem pretty focused on a very niche idea right now, but still a very cool idea.

HouseParty was presented by Gene DeRose, who had previously founded Jupiter. HouseParty stood out because: a) the other presenters weren’t millionaires, and b) they’re pretty far along. Given the recent high-profile aquisitions in the advertising field, I wouldn’t be surprised if we hear more about HouseParty in the next year.

Many websites have found that linking to ParkWhiz is an easy way to serve their users better. CenterStageChicago.com makes their guide to Chicago even more informative by helping their users find parking, and TechCocktail links to ParkWhiz so that you never have to worry about parking when attending one of their awesome events.

Now linking is pretty cool and all, but sometimes it just feels a little too “Web 1.0″. What if there was an easy way to put live parking info directly on a website or blog? Maybe a map or something. Yeah, that’d be neat.

Introducing the ParkWhiz Map Widget. We’ll generate all the code for you, and you just paste it into your website or blog. The map shows the 20 closest parking spots near a point, with links to ParkWhiz.com for detailed information and more results.

Sign up at ParkWhiz.com and log in to My ParkWhiz to access the widget maker. We hope you find it useful!

The Tech Cocktail events have become legendary in the Chicago tech scene, and ParkWhiz was lucky enough to demo at last Thursday’s TC4. Over 500 people came out, and Aashish and I enjoyed spreading the word about intelligent parking. Big thanks to Justin and John at Menuism who saved us when we realized we needed a power adapter.

As always Eric and Frank, the TC co-founders, did a great job making sure the even went off without a hitch. These guys are becoming superstars and are taking the Tech Cocktail event nationwide. Next stop…DC!