Mole End

Last night the Mole attended a pleasant talk by Mark Noworolski on Streetline's smart parking system.  (The talk was presented through the good offices of the IoTSiliconValley meetup, capably organized by Drew Johnson and Elle Wood, and hosted by Hacker Dojo.  </shoutouts>)  While the talk was not particularly technically demanding, the Mole was quite impressed by the expansiveness of Streetline's vision.  

Stipulating up front that the devil is in the details and with a tip of the hat to Streetline's six years of hard work, the general technical architecture was exactly what the Mole expected:  

• Wireless sensor nodes in or on the street,
• Connected as a mesh network to wireless repeaters off the ground,
• Connected to wired backbone nodes,
• Feeding up into Streetline's cloud,
• Delivered via web and mobile applications.

Two strategic decisions are particularly interesting:

• Streetline has built almost the full vertical stack.
  • While the components in the sensor nodes are COTS, even the firmware is bespoke.  (Sorry, Contiki, TinyOS, et al.)
  • Everything from there up is Streetline's:  the hardware, the analytic systems (though there is some sort of partnership with IBM Cognos), the delivery platforms, etc.
  • At the analytic and application layers they do rely on (unspecified) open source tools, frameworks, and languages.
• Streetline is pursuing a pure an almost pure aaS play:  apart from a de minimis installation fee, their business model is to charge a recurring per-month per-space fee.

The verticality is interesting because it indicates a belief that the increased development costs will be repaid by the improvements made possible on the feature side (better reliability, control of enhancements, etc.).  This runs against the grain of trendy lean startup MVP notions, reflecting some combination of the grownup big company backgrounds of Streetline's founders and the stolidity of the customers.  

The service play is interesting because of the capital exposure Streetline faces.  The Mole would love to see their internal numbers:  either they're in a position to loan substantial amounts of money to municipalities for an extended period or they've laid their hands on the goose that lays the golden eggs.  If they can recover the costs of installing a network quickly their margins will tilt sharply upwards the next day.  That allows them to balance strong cash flows with significant ongoing product R&D.

So where is the "expansive vision"?  Streetline have thought deeply about the needs of both their paying customers (i.e., municipalities, private parking operators, etc.) and the end users of the system.  They're even evolving best-practice guidance for how to use the technology (the Mole asked about this), advising cities, for example, not to zero meters when cars pull out.  Although technically possible, the bad feeling engendered among drivers (who feel that finding some time on a meter is a "God-given right") isn't worth the extra revenue.  

They're also working towards a broader sensor ecosystem that will incorporate both Streetline technology and others'.  In addition to creating additional functionality such as traffic flow sensors and management tools they are thinking about opening up (the Mole hopes he got this right...) a network level API that would allow other sensors to ship their data into the Streetline cloud.

In the medium term the Mole predicts moderate chaos as vertically integrated players like Streetline jostle not only with direct competitors (FastPrk, Fybr) and niche endeavors (SFpark), and with lateral moves from nearby domains (Sensys Networks, Iteris), but also with parallel innovations (Parkopedia).  Plan to install multiple parking apps on your smartphone...

And one final nugget of great value:  in the context of advocating "version early, version everything", Mark pointed the crowd to Tom Preston-Werner's Semantic Versioning.  Read it.  Follow it.