| It is estimated that 30% of fuel is consumed by cars circling the block looking for parking. But what if you had an application that could tell you the likelihood of getting a parking spot at a particular times of day and even let you book that spot when you were nearby? This describes Sure Park, a business in development and one of the 5 winners of the Urban Prototyping (UP) Festival held in Singapore during June 2012. The UP Festival was designed to get city stakeholders and innovators together to discuss pressing urban issues. It culminated at the UP weekend, a hackathon in which in thirty teams of approximately 8 people each prototyped new civic products and services for the city. For three weeks teams had access to both public and private data sets. This included map information from Singapore's OneMap, telecommunications data from Singtel, taxi-trip information, and transit ridership information. The Sure Park team used one year's worth of data from Metro Parking, which uses sensors to keep track of the number of cars coming into and of their lots. One of the Sure Park team members, currently the second best data analyst in the world (according to the popular platform named Kaggle that hosts renowned data prediction competitions) led the team in building what they call a "predictive analytics model". The model powers an app that will tell you, based on historical records and current availability, the likelihood of getting a parking spot at any time of day. The team toyed with the idea of being able to then be able to book a parking spot from home but decided this would not promote through-put. Instead, they are working on a system that allows you to book when you are close by to the destination. Sure Park is one of three applications developed during the UP Singapore weekend that is currently being scaled into a real business. Post by Christine Outram | "We can tell you the chances of getting a parking spot, minute by minute, hour by hour" The Sure Park team |
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