Pop quiz – put your books and pencils away. There’s just one question…define Revenue Management.

zzzz….boring! Yea, the topic of revenue management may be the perfect cure for your latest bout of insomnia, but it’s also a critical cog in many industries today. Revenue management, also known as yield management, is the process of understanding, anticipating and reacting to consumer behavior in order to maximize revenue or profits (see Figure 1) . In other words, by manipulating price, companies can maximize their profits. Read the rest of this entry »

Aashish recently discussed ParkWhiz in an interview with Mark Scheffler of Business POV. Check it out here.

Let’s say you’re hosting an event downtown. Obviously you want to make it as easy as possible for people to get there, so you provide driving directions and maybe some info about nearby public transportation. But what about parking?

Now you can link directly to ParkWhiz parking. Tech Cocktail was the first to take advantage of this with their announcement of Tech Cocktail 3. The response has been so great that we decided to make linking to ParkWhiz even easier. Use the new Link to Parking tool to quickly create a link for parking in a specific area.

This isn’t just for events, of course. Stores, restaurants, and other businesses can all improve their customers’ experience by making parking easy. It’s very simple, but we hope you find it useful.

An article written by Frank Gruber at somewhatfrank.com featuring ParkWhiz hit the front page of digg today.

I couldn’t have hoped for a better start to 2007. The team is putting the finishing touches on the ParkWhiz Marketplace and will be making some major announcements in the coming months.

Thanks to everyone who dugg the article, and to those of you who are just discovering ParkWhiz, welcome!

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

Nowadays it’s rare to find a web site that launches without a beta tag. “Beta” has become a badge that implies, “We’re not your grandfather’s boring old internet! We’re Web 2.0!”. Dion Almaer sums up my thoughts perfectly in his post on Beta: The Web 2.0 Neverending Clearance Sale.

Originally, “beta release” meant a feature-complete version of software that was given to a limited number of people for the purpose of finding bugs. Once the bugs were fixed, the software became version 1.0 and lost the beta tag.

Microsoft started the trend of widely-released betas when they offered pre-release versions of Windows XP and Office. Reviewers would say, “the software is buggy, but it’s beta so we can’t hold that against them”. Beta became a way to shield yourself from criticism.

While Microsoft started the trend, I think Google is to blame for the rampant misuse we see in web startups today. GMail has been in beta for 2 years now. Google News was in beta for 4 years. The word loses all meaning when used in this way. Flickr has thankfully moved out of beta over a year after they were acquired by Yahoo, but now their website says Flickr is “gamma”. Flickr launched almost 3 years ago; enough with the Greek letters!

If you’ve been reading this thinking “hypocrite! ParkWhiz has a beta tag too!”, you’re absolutely right. For now.

The parking search tool available right now at ParkWhiz.com is only a subset of what ParkWhiz will be. Aashish and I thought long and hard about how we could convey this to people when they visit ParkWhiz’s homepage. We concluded that a beta tag would be best since people have grown accustomed to seeing it around the internet. When the ParkWhiz Marketplace launches, you have my personal guarantee that the word “beta” (hell, all Greek letters) will be banished from our website.

JetBlue recently announced they will begin flying to and from O’hare Airport starting in January. (Woohoo!!! It’s about time.) This announcement got me thinking about JetBlue and its overnight popularity among consumers. Twenty years ago, American, United, and Delta dominated the airline industry, limiting consumer choice and creating a virtual monopoly. Today, JetBlue has created an efficient, low-cost approach with improved customer service that has shaken up an industry mired in profit loss and status quo. The question begs, was there a paradigm shift that enabled this transition?

The Internet, plain and simple, is the shift that changed the airline industry. With the Internet, the world has shrunk. Consumers can easily know all of their options for flying—price, class, location, etc. They’ve become empowered. (Remember the days when you had to call or visit a travel agent just to book a flight?) Powerful search engines and sites like SideStep and Farecast have brought visibility to discount carriers that lack major airlines’ marketing budgets. Consumers have learned that they can find affordable fares. With the Internet, these new airlines can keep their costs down making flying from one coast to the other coast a cinch. As the Southwest ads say, “The country just got smaller”.

Like the airline industry, the parking industry is undergoing a paradigm shift. Although fragmented, parking is led by industry titans, Standard Parking and Central Parking. These companies manage many of the parking facilities in the United States. If you head out to a ballgame, aside from finding meter parking, you’re pretty much limited to these parking operators and their rates. The reality is, however, that there are millions of unused parking spaces all around us, such as empty driveways and retail shopping lots that can be had for less money and closer proximity. What the industry needs is a marketplace to enable this.

ParkWhiz is dedicated to creating this marketplace. Once the ParkWhiz Marketplace launches, the parking industry will change forever. The ParkWhiz Marketplace will allow you to find parking where you want it, when you want it and how you want it. It’s just a matter of time before the JetBlue of parking comes to a city near you!

If you’ve been searching ParkWhiz for parking in the Chicago area, you’ve probably noticed that there is no pricing information for many of the listings. That’s where you come in.

Anyone can edit ParkWhiz listings, so if information is missing or incorrect, you can fix it. Just go to the “more info” page for a listing and click on “Edit this Listing”.

You can update the facility’s pricing, operating hours, local driving directions, or any other information that you think might be useful to other people.

The more people contribute, the more useful ParkWhiz can be. The idea is very similar to Wikipedia. With an active group of users who are passionate about helping others find parking, ParkWhiz can grow to become a comprehensive source of parking information.