The digital parking key will hit the market in April.
“Uber for parking” – that is how a team of young entrepreneurs from Split, graduates of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, describe their his invention of Smart Parking Barrier, which will be released to the market by the beginning of April next year. Smart Parking Barrier is a moveable barrier for controlling access to a parking space, which is controlled via a mobile application. As a result, the digital parking key can be shared or sold via mobile phones, reports Poslovni.hr on November 24, 2016.
Marko Smoljo, the Smart Parking Barrier project manager and the COO of Amplifico company in Split, whose experts have been worked on its development, says that their plan was to activate all possible parking spaces in order to solve general problems with parking, and not just those owned by towns and municipalities, hotels or other commercial premises. “The owner of an apartment rental can, for instance, send their guest a key through a mobile phone to unlock the parking space. Also, while the guest is away, they can sell the space to someone for an hour or two”, said Smoljo.
In Zagreb, despite the problems with a lack of parking spaces in the centre of the city, there are almost 34,000 parking spaces, including about 7,500 private parking spaces. In Split, as well as on the islands and in other coastal towns, the number of parking spaces is much smaller, while the demand for them is several times higher. In the first nine months, for example, Split-Dalmatia County was visited by more than 2.5 million tourists.
Smoljo says that they first saw how high the demand for their invention is at a fair in Split. “We have a lot of Internet of Things products which we are proud of, but during the fair everybody was interested just in Smart Parking Barrier. We could have sold at least 40 items on the spot”, says Smoljo. He adds that they then applied with their project for the Entrepreneur Camp of the Solin Entrepreneurship Centre, where their project has just been named as the project of the year.
