Meter Feeder is a company launching out of our Winter 2016 class that replaces the
hassles of traditional parking meters by allowing people to pay with their smart phones.

To use Meter Feeder, all you have to do is
enter your license plate and tap a button to pay with Apple Pay, Android
Pay, or a credit card. Notifications tell users when they have 5
minutes left, so they can add more time if needed.

Current
competitors in this space only solve half of the problem: They either
offer tools for traffic officers, or payment processing for parkers. Meter Feeder
is the first to offer both — and this means huge cost savings for
government.

TechCrunch’s Josh Constine wrote about Meter Feeder in a story this week:

“More big cities are switching to credit and mobile-enabled meters
that aren’t nearly as awful as the old coin-only ones. Companies like
PayByPhone, Pango and ParkMobile make the payment systems, while t2,
Duncan and United Parking Safety handle enforcement. But many smaller
cities often can’t afford these intensive hardware updates.

For example, a town with 250 spots would have to pay around $100,000
to revamp their meters, says [Meter Feeder co-founder Dan] Lopretto. But it would cost merely $3,000
to enable Meter Feeder. The only thing the cities pay for are the
enforcement kits, which come out to about $1,500 each for the 7-inch
tablet, printer, paper and Internet connectivity.

Big cities could see cost savings too. San Francisco is now using
automatic license plate scanners that can cost tens of thousands of
dollars each, and still take five seconds per plate scanned. Punching in
the first few characters of a license plate with Meter Feeder takes the
same amount of time, but is way cheaper.”

Read the full story on TechCrunch here.