As way of an introduction, ParkShark Amsterdam uses the parking meter data provided by the City of Amsterdam (department DIVV) and Amsterdam’s parking enforcement contractor CITION, and uses a custom built calculation module which is unique to ParkShark provides the total cost of on street parking, given a starting time, duration, method of payment, and location. It also gives a list of nearby places that you could park instead but pay less. This is possible because Amsterdam is divided into parking zones each of which have their own price list.

After we released it to the App Store we became interested in more aspects of parking and attended some conferences on the subject. Out of the blue we were asked to speak to representatives of the parking departments of several european cities about our product. This was because they were part of a larger project called ‘smart cities SDK’ which is funded by the EU and aims to encourage european cities to exchange best practises when they automate similar services. There are seperate meetings for mobility, tourism, energy, traffic control amongst others. We

I am Jonathan Carter, co-founder and CTO of Glimworm IT in Amsterdam. In 2011 we won the PICNIC Open Data Hackathon with an iPhone app called ‘ParkShark Amsterdam’ and as PICNIC 2012 comes upon us I wanted to let you know what has happened in the last 12 months.

PARK SHARK AMSTERDAM END OF YEAR REPORT, PICNIC 2012 By Jonathan Carter

Park SharkWINNAAR PICNIC 2011

Jonathan Carter co-founded Glimworm IT BV in 2001 with partners Paul Manwaring, Marten Hoekstra and Colin Williams. At 15 hisprofessional career began as a game programmer. After more than 10 years of innovative experienceJonathan was asked to join CMG’s prestigious Advanced Technology Department consulting for blue chip companies. Eventually, he shifted his attention to new media and created Glimworm, bringing his talents to the world of web development. With nearly 30 years in the industry his list of accomplishments is hugeincluding everything from project management torobot building and hecontinues to keep on top of new developments by constantly evaluating emerging technologies.

I hope this open letter gives you, as a developer, an insight into some of the things that can happen after winning a hackathon and both inspires and encourages you to enter them. I hope you can see that it is possible to get commercial results from a hackathon win as long as you think creatively and explore less obvious routes.

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have been happy to provide the data model we developed for Park Shark Amsterdam to this group along with the calculation module that works here in Amsterdam to see if they would like to develop it further.

As the calculation and the advice module of Park Shark Amsterdam is its strength we re-developed this module and put it online via an API so that other developers could use it to make their own apps and mashups. This API is in Beta right now and you are free to try it out at http://api.parkshark.nl. As a demonstration of the API we made a button which can be added into any website, similar to implementing a facebook like button The button pops up a parking advice window. We see this being implemented next to a google map on the contact page of businesses websites where they have a visiting address in Amsterdam. With this button we see a potential revenue stream.

We are asked often what our business model is for this product and the honest answer is that we are actively exploring several and we feel like pioneers in this area. We got publicity from the initial hackathon win and we continue to get business contacts which sometimes lead to commercial projects. We provide Park Shark Amsterdam, both the app and the API, free of charge to the city of Amsterdam and our current plan is to explore advertising models for this set of applications and in parallel to see if other cities would like us to make the same set of applications but this time on a paid basis. It is too early to tell whether this approach will bear fruit but we are enthusiastic about it and I’ll keep you updated.

I hope this open letter gives you, as a developer, an insight into some of the things that can happen after winning a hackathon and both inspires and encourages you to enter them. I hope you can see that it is possible to get commercial results from a hackathon win as long as you think creatively and explore less obvious routes.

If you want to get involved with hackathons please Join Appsterdam (appsterdam.rs), Join and attend several meetups (metup.com), and keep an eye on the Waag society (Waag.org). Using these three resources you will enter a network where you won’t miss a single hackathon. Thank you for your time,

Jonathan Carterco-founder & CTO, Glimworm IT BV, Amsterdamjc@glimworm.com, @jonathanrcarter

Tel: +31 (0)20 - 616 56 40Fax: +31 (0)20 - 240 13 57E-mail: jc@glimworm.com

Glimworm IT BVEerste Weteringplantsoen 81017 SK, AmsterdamNederland

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