A revolution in the making

Mobile-for helps transform the way we pay for mobility

Driving around the quaint streets of Leuven you’ll soon discover the one thing this picturesque medieval town lacks: parking. When you DO find parking, the last thing you want to do is scrabble around to find loose change for the meter. You’ll also prefer not to have to calculate just how long you’re going to be up front. Luckily, this ancient town has a state of the art parking system: Mobile-for’s ‘Pay-by-SMS Parking’.

The system is dead easy to use, and works via your mobile phone: SMS the zone that you’re in (written on the nearby parking station) and the details of your car registration to the short-code 4411 and the system registers your parking session. When you reach the maximum allowed parking time, you’ll receive an SMS to warn you, but when you come back early, you can just stop your session with a simple Q.

Established in June 2006 as a joint venture between APCOA (The European parking leader), the Estonian company Now!Innovations (the company that built the first mobile gateway platform) and Stéphane Jacobs, the company’s initial goal was to manage a mobile on-street parking service. It was soon apparent that this mobile payment gateway initiative could be applied to a number of different commercial scenarios. Branded under the banner of ‘PingPing’, the company plans to explore opportunities in micro-payments and electronic purse in general. Applications will be developed mainly in public transport, vending machines, catering, and entertainment. Mobile-for are essentially going after the low hanging fruit in a market that’s ripe for the kind of solutions that they develop – mobile innovation. Having been recently wholly acquired by the telecom giant Belgacom, it’s clear that the business model is getting all the right sorts of attention.