The average Marketing 101 professor would warn young entrepreneurs about the possible damaging effects when stretching a product or service line. However, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos obviously walked out of that lecture while simultaneously flipping that teacher the bird.
Amazon officials have a strong hold on markets like electronics, clothing, food & package delivery, print & ebooks, healthcare, pharmacy, and have most recently taken aim at the Parking Industry. In order to break into parking, company leaders plan on using Amazon’s Rekognition software and partnering with Swedish startup company and rival of Google’s Maps application, Mapillary.
The first plan of attack: provide major cities with “readable” information from parking signs in order to build an online parking app. Using Rekognition tech, the coalition of companies will be able to extract information like words, faces, objects, scenes, etc. from Mapillary’s database of 350 million photos and videos, reported TechCrunch. While neither business will say which city or cities are interested in the technology, there is word that this solution will be adopted to solve parking issues soon enough.
“City authorities are struggling to keep track of their parking signs and data. For cities to manually track this themselves would cost millions of taxpayers’ dollars, not to mention the enormous time investment,” said Jan Erik Solem, CEO and co-founder of Mapillary. “We believe that working with [Amazon Rekognition], will help us work towards creating automated, computer vision-driven parking solutions that help cities save time and money.”
The parking industry is one that is on the up-and-up due to the fact that there is just now starting to be an influx in parking data. For example, the average parking meter is really nothing more than your mother’s kitchen timer that runs off quarters. However, new parking hardware/software suppliers have taken it upon themselves to develop smarter technology that has the capacity to read and compile data like a driver’s frequency of use, amount of available/unavailable spaces, and much more.
In the coming years, smart parking hardware will begin to interface with the parking applications that have been developed as a result of this Amazon/Mapillary endeavor. As technology advances—from data-gathering hardware, to the application of that data in smart parking software—cities and DOTs nationwide will have scalable data on parking signage, available/unavailable parking, and how to relay this information quickly to motorists in order to automate the daily parking process.
Amazon is undoubtedly interested in the parking industry’s compelling growth and multi-billion dollar market value. While Amazon is one of the biggest names interested in parking solutions, there are a slew of parking software providers that are trying to tackle similar issues across the world. Buckle up, because in the next few years the world may very well see a “Space Race” to autonomous parking that will completely change the way drivers select space for their vehicle to rest.