Por Javier el 2 April 2008
Although it seems to me a bit pretentious their line of presentation: Tuplaza.es is the first project in the world that allows people to share parking space through the mobile in an organized way, the truth is that it is indeed a very interesting idea.
I like the idea of being able to share my parking space when I am not using it, in exchange for being able to use other parking spaces that are free in the area where I need to park (the model of FON applied to parking spaces?). What I find even more interesting is the format of information via SMS.
The functioning of Tu Plaza is like this:
When the user registers, she will receive every day (or the period selected by the user) a message on her mobile that asks if her parking space is free (Is your parking space available today?). If it is, somebody else will be able to use it during the time indicated by the owner. The more hours a parking space is available for others to use, the more benefits the owner will accumulate to use the parking spaces of others.
If the user needs a parking space, she sends a message: Park today, and the area where she wants to park. If there is a parking space available in the area, she receives a message with information of the available space and a code that she must use to enter the corresponding garage.
The key for the functioning of this whole system apart from the SMS is the remote control Armando that allows, by means of security codes, access to the garages with available parking spaces.
As you can imagine, this whole system has some important difficulties with respect to implementation, but given the problem of parking that exists in big cities like Madrid, I understand that there will be many people willing to make the effort necessary to put it into practice.
Via Blog de emprendedores.
Por Javier el 27 January 2008
Since some time now I had the desire to see new things developed for ‘themselves’ by the people at The Cocktail as they did with La Coctelera.
Alberto Knapp has been commenting since long on his twitter that he is very much interested in mobile applications, and apart from that is supporting specific events for developers of these applications and also collaborating with the Open Movilforum platform.
This interest has manifested itself with the launch of Tvienes, which Alberto has just announced. The application has been developed by the team of The Cocktail based on API’s available in Open Movilforum and it basically serves the purpose of meeting up with a group of friends via messages to the mobile or email.
As I so much like the applications developed at The Cocktail, I threw myself in to try it out. I loved the registration process, everything is explained to perfection and the process to create an event and invite people is also very well executed, not as much as the registration process though, but it shows that the work has been done by experts in usability.
The structure, design and functioning of the web reminds us of Twitter, which made me think as soon as I started using it that apart from being able to send invitations to events via mobile or email, it should also allow the same function in Twitter.
After trying it out, I thought that one thing that could be added is that the message sent to the mobile includes some information regarding the event. As it is right now, you only receive the name of the event and a web address to enter and see the rest of the information.
Vote for Tvienes in Loogic Rank.
Update: I forgot to mention that Alberto Knapp will be in the next Iniciador to talk about product development.
Read the origital post in spanish.
