For hassle-free parking, without stickers

HYDERABAD: Four entrepreneurs and 54 hours of work over an extended weekend, and voila! Park-e-mon was created --- a new parking solution which aims at enhancing the security of a building and also monitors the entry-exit vehicular movement at a particular place. Sudeep D’Souza, Jeevan Reddy Gaddam, Krishnam Raju and Shahnawaz Alam are a mix of working corporate employees and a B-school student who came together to make parking solutions easier.The team leader of the project, Sudeep D’Souza, is also the founder and the chief technology officer of Inforica India, a software firm. The operational procedure of the software consists of two applications --- a web based portal and a mobile application. Talking about the web-based portal, Sudeep says, “This application will help the office administrators and the building management to create a huge database. This database will include details about the building such as the offices in the building,  the vehicles belonging to the employees and their contact numbers. It will also have reports on the status of the vehicles and also snapshots of the vehicles.” As for the use of the mobile application, he enunciates, “It will be used by the parking attendants to register the entry and the exit details of vehicles and can also get instant information about any particular vehicle. As of now, we have limited it to multi-tenant buildings and commercial complexes including hospitals and educational institutions, to get the status of the number of vehicles present in the building at any point of time.”The developers of the application, Jeevan Reddy Gaddam and Krishnam Raju, who also work with Inforica India, deal with the Android-based application. Gaddam develops the application used by the parking attendants to validate the credentials of a vehicle, while Raju handles the design of the database and the front end of the portal.Expressing the idea behind starting such an application, Jeevan says, “In multi-tenant buildings and other commercial offices, there is always an issue with the parking. Sometimes, even the parking space allotted for you is not available, and you end up roaming around to find a parking space.” He further adds, “To avoid this confusion, information regarding the parking status of vehicles at specified time intervals, the vehicle owner’s information and also the allocation of parking space for people, will be available with the building manager at his fingertips.”Park-e-mon also provides authorised parking licenses and will have an update on the issue and expiry of the license. It will also set priority levels for top management positions. Ask about how the mobile application will authenticate the vehicle and Krishnam Raju promptly replies, “A GPRS connection will be required in the mobile to upload vehicle information and then connect it to the cloud based centralised server to authenticate the credentials of the vehicle.” As for the use of this application in public places, he says, “This solution can be used in public places where there is a lot of vehicle movement. But, the only thing that can be tracked is the list of vehicles that are entering and leaving the public spaces.”