Since founding the company in the early 1970s, Chouinard has offered a case study for other retailers and corporations seeking to do good while also doing well. So much so that when California passed legislation allowing firms to declare that the fiduciary duty of executives includes “consideration of the interests of workers, community, and the environment,” Chouniard was the first in line, helping Patagonia to become the very first company to register as a B Corp in the state of California.

Thanks to Yvon and all his colleagues at Patagonia for leading the charge!

We’ve pasted an exert below, or read the article in its entirety at SeattleMag.com.

Many big employers, such as hospitals, build parking garages and charge employees to park in them. But garages cost millions of dollars to construct and they encourage people to drive. Enter Seattle-based Parkio, which offers a way for employers to discourage driving while encouraging alternate transportation.

Instead of a monthly fee, Parkio’s software tools charge a worker a variable rate for parking based on the time of day—and adds money to the paychecks of workers who ride the bus or a bike. Parkio’s customers include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Seattle Children’s.

For the uninitiated, South by Southwest (or SXSW) is one of the largest music festivals in the United States, with more than 2,000 performers playing in more than 90 venues spread throughout Austin. As a music festival SXSW is over 20 years old, however in recent years the event has also developed a reputation as a breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies. Twitter (2007) and Foursquare (2009) are both examples of companies that made splashy, successful breakouts at SXSW.

What does 2012 have in store? The early buzz is that the theme of SXSW may be moving from innovative new technology to how big brands and companies are learning from startups and integrating technologies used by the masses into their products, businesses, and marketing strategies. This is of special interest to us as Parkio itself is representative of the ‘Consumerization of Enterprise’ movement, or the idea that business software is beginning to adopt more of the easy-to-use (and even fun!) characteristics of consumer applications.

We’re looking forward to our trip to Austin, and hope to find a good idea or two for future updates to our product (and maybe watch a band or two).

From Rob: “Everyone who has visited Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam knows part of the magic (love it or hate it) is in the traffic. Ever since I first set foot in HCMC I have been captivated by the cities energy. Saigon is a city on the move unlike anything I have experienced before which I wanted to capture and share.”

The loosers: drivable suburbs and the car dependent suburban fringe.

The winners: walkable, centrally located neighborhoods in cities and small towns.

But as the author himself acknowledges, these areas will require significant investment. “Bus and light-rail systems, bike lanes and pedestrian improvements — what traffic engineers dismissively call “alternative transportation” — are vital,” says Leinberger. “Congress must must give metropolitan areas greater flexibility for financing transportation, rather than mandating that the vast bulk of the money can be used only for roads.”

While we at Parkio focus our efforts on helping employers to manage dynamic charge policies for employee parking lots, this article points to cities such as San Francisco that have begun to experiment with gradual forms of dynamic pricing.

With the help of the parking technology innovators at Streetline, select cities are able to price certain spots at a premium, for instance, during certain times of the day or during certain months. The cities aren’t necessarily selling spots to the highest bidder on the spot, but using pricing to maximize revenue and change behavior.

That’s right, Team Parkio is gearing up to head to the National Parking Association annual convention & expo in Las Vegas, NV.

We’re excited to learn from parking industry veterans, as well the new kids on the block who are introducing some exciting technology in the space. Specifically, we’re looking forward to learning more about the following companies:

• Park Assist. This NYC based company is producing some interesting products related to parking guidance, reporting, and enforcement. Park Assist does a fair amount of work outside the US, and we’re excited to see what alien innovations they may have to report.

• Parking in Motion. While we here at Parkio will forever argue that the easiest way to solve your parking problem is to leave your car at home, Parking in Motion (PIM) has an iPhone app that appears to live up to it’s tagline (‘a smarter way to park’). This location-based app helps drivers find & compare pricing on local lots. Developers looking to build their own apps can tap into PIM’s database & services.

• Pango. While there are plenty of pay-by-phone pretenders, Pango appears to be the real deal. Having effectively locked up parking mobile payments in Israel (live in 37 cities), these guys appear poised to hit the US…big time. Can Pango crack the segmented market and quagmire of American civic politics. We hope so — be’hatzlacha Pango!

• Storably. What’s this, not even a week old and already offering 465 by-owner parking spaces in the City of Brotherly Love? Storably is Airbnb for space –ordinary folks can turn unused space into income, including your condo parking spot that goes unused now that you’ve joined the ranks of ZipCar…

While this article focuses on the rising cost of residential parking, the demands on commercial parking are much the same — crowded conditions and urban revitalization efforts are fueling demand, and building more parking garages isn’t necessarily an option (or is prohibitively expensive).

At Parkio, we help our customers to effectively charge for parking so that they can take full advantage of their existing parking infrastructure while limiting the need to build additional lots. By giving organizations the right tools to manage and properly incentivize their employee base to minimize the number of cars driven to work, hopefully more organizations can avoid the cost of the $100K parking spot.

That said, moving critical business processes to the cloud requires careful thought and consideration.  We came across this Wall Street Journal article which we felt offered a good summary of the key questions to be considered before committing to the cloud.

If so, we want to talk.

We’re Parkio, a small but growing green software company based out of Capitol Hill. Our flagship product enables intelligent employee parking systems at some of the most respected organizations in the country — from regional hospitals to the Fortune 500.

We offer a SaaS product built using a cutting edge stack, primarily running on the JVM. We use Scala/Lift/Spring for our front-end code and Java/Spring/Hibernate/ActiveMQ for our backend. We believe in rich user interfaces, and rely heavily on JavaScript/jQuery to offer them. And of course, everything we do, we do in the cloud.

Qualified candidates for this full-time position will have:

• Quantifiable experience working on large-scale Java/Scala projects and on web-based projects.
• A wide breadth of technical knowledge.
• A strong math background.
• A passion for writing elegant, efficient code.

We pride ourselves on our team of talented, passionate, and fun professionals. If we think that you’d be a good fit for our team, we can offer a competitive compensation/benefits package and an unparalleled opportunity to lead development on a substantial web-based product. (On a less grandiose note, you can also tell us what type of setup you want on your desk).

Interested yet?

If you’re interested in the position, and are based in the greater Seattle area, we’d like you to solve a short programming puzzle, and send us your solution along with a resume.