Parking, 3G style

As reported by Akihabara News, Japan is once again on top of the technological curve and ICT diffusion in everyday's life. Honestly, what could be more commonplace and anecdotic than the immutable ritual of parking you car? That is, opening the window, taking a piece of printed cardboard you're likely to lose in your pockets; and then, after queuing for paying (if the machine is not down), rushing again to your car before the "exit" timer has expired....

Well this painstaking reality could soon become a thing of the past, thanks to FeliCa, a technology originally developed by Sony. Basically, it is a contactless chip, that holds more information than on the credit cards' chips, with the added advantage of being contactless, as the names implies: just swipe it in front of a wireless reader and that's it (similar to RFID tags).

Now, the neat thing that those chips are integrated into NTT DoCoMo's latest third generation (FOMA) phones - such as the brand new F900iC. It didn't take long for Park24, a large parking company in Japan, to take benefit of that and launch a FeliCa-powered parking area next to the NTT DoCoMo Yoyogi Tower (how appropriate!) in Shibuya, starting October 1st.

In a nutshell, when entering the parking lot, you swipe your 3G phone at the entrance beacon (cf. picture at the top), that way you can pay for the exact time you have been parked. But wait, that's not all! You also get a printed 2D barcode on you receipt.. Those little pixelated squares are (of course) understood by your camera-phone, and upon taking a picture of it, you are redirected to a surveillance camera pointing at the direction of your parked car.
Well, considering the average crime rate in Japan, I don't know if it's really worth the technological paraphernalia, but it's at least a very convincing showcasing of Japan's mastery in mobile, user-pushed and market-driven services.

I now remember how I did find Mint's parking payment in Sweden through SMS already way ahead of its time (compared to lagging France, that is). Different cultures, different adoption curves...