We were pleased to see an article in today’s Wall Street Journal extolling the leadership of Patagonia (a favorite and long-time Parkio customer) founder Yvon Chouinard.

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!

Parkio is excited to have our work featured in the March ‘Transportation’ issue of Seattle Magazine.

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.

Next week, we’re taking the Parkio team to Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest Interactive, Music, and Film festival.

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).

In this New York Times article, Christopher Leinberger, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, offers his thoughts on how the Great Recession has led to a shift in real estate demand.

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.”

In this article on Forbes.com, author Michael Kanellos looks at auction-based systems for parking spaces in urban areas.

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.

Vegas, baby, Vegas.

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:

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As noted in this Wall Street Journal article, in many downtowns across the country a scarcity of parking has driven demand sky high.

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.

It should come as no surprise that we here at Parkio are big believers in cloud computing and the wide range of benefits offered by web-based enterprise services.

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.

Are you interested in taking ownership of an exciting and growing software project? Do you have a passion for evaluating new technologies and drafting product roadmaps? Do you take great pleasure in writing elegant, efficient code?

If so, we want to talk.

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