For a glimpse of the parking industry’s future in the U.S., cruise past the narrow, brick-faced building snuggled among the row houses at 916 Garden St. in Hoboken, N.J.

The four-story garage, which opened in late 2000, almost completely automated parking. A driver pulling up to the garage’s front door swipes a specially coded card through a computerized "reader," then drives a few feet into a bay. The driver locks the car, picks up a claim check from a nearby machine, and leaves. All done. The car is carried away to one of the garage’s 324 spaces on a pallet controlled by the "flexible transfer" technology that keeps assembly lines moving at Detroit automobile plants.

To retrieve the car, the owner inserts his claim check into another computerized reader, and the automobile reappears in the bay just 60 to 90 seconds later.

Worldwide, parking facilities are investing heavily in similar technological marvels that do everything but check the oil. The goal is to say goodbye to attendants, punch clocks, exhaust fumes, crunched doors, long check-in or check-out lines, purse snatchers, and car thieves. Call it pure, drive-by convenience and efficiency.

Among other things, parking facilities have begun using computerized license plate readers or "smart cards," which are placed on the inside of a car’s windshield and which can be read by a radio signal from several feet away. The readers and cards can be used to allow or deny entrance or exit, without human intervention. They also can be linked to computerized payment systems that bill the driver’s debit card or place the parking fee on his credit-card bill. No more fumbling around for dollar bills and coins. In fact, drivers don’t even have to stop as they drive past the payment booth.

"The two main objectives in the parking business today are moving cars in and out at a fast clip, and minimizing revenue shrinkage," says Rick Rich of Rich & Associates, a parking consulting firm. "Shrinkage" is an industry euphemism for employees’ stealing from the cash register. Eliminating cashiers will, of course, greatly reduce the opportunities for shrinkage.

Parking facilities also are installing sensors that tell managers which spaces are available at any given time. That information can be fed to traffic-management systems that direct drivers to openings. No more meandering, time-wasting searches. Data about whether spaces are open in a garage eventually will make their way to drivers on the road, perhaps through their wireless personal digital assistants or cellular phones.

As cameras become less expensive, facilities are installing more of them to ensure that drivers aren’t speeding and terrorizing pedestrians, that muggers aren’t skulking about, and that exits aren’t blocked.

At a new, 11,500-space facility being built at the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport in Michigan, for instance, computer-driven cameras will monitor traffic flows, accident clean-ups, and other developments. Changeable message billboards will alert incoming drivers to open parking spaces. For good measure, travelers will be able to check their baggage in the new parking facility and head straight for their plane’s departure gate, thanks to an army of skycaps, a high-speed conveyor-belt system, and a computerized system for processing claim checks.

"More and more, we’re seeing these things demanded by the traveling public, especially as they become more aware of new technology and how it can be applied to everyday situations," says Linn Day, the director of properties, planning, and facilities at the Detroit airport.

Technology isn’t cheap. The Hoboken Parking Authority is spending $6.2 million on its new facility. Electronic ticket-taking or traffic-guidance systems can start at $10,000 and quickly run up to $200,000 and more.

Still, industry experts say those expenses can be covered in as little as nine months, and raise margins in an already lucrative business as much as 10 percentage points.

"The technology is getting better all the time, so when you look at a facility—especially the larger ones with 500 spaces and up—[a system like the one in Hoboken] becomes a very cost-effective way to conduct business," says Don Monahan, a principal with Walker Parking Consultants.

Robotic Parking, which is building the Hoboken facility, is planning to construct facilities using the same technology in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and several other U.S. cities in the next few years.

Gerhard Haag, founder of Robotic Parking, says: "The bottom line is that there are better economics, better security, and better customer service."

What is down the road? More of everything we are seeing today: automated garages, cash-free transactions, more spaces being built on less ground, and so on. And just wait until cars hit the market equipped with Internet-access features in the dash board. The information superhighway may not just speed our lives along; it may come with parking, too.

STOP, THIEF!

When Irwin Jacobs, chief executive officer of wireless technology developer Qualcomm, recently had his laptop stolen, news reports about the amount of sensitive corporate data on the machine had lots of executives clutching their computer bags a little tighter. Lucira Technologies may help executives relax.

Lucira, a start-up company, has developed a piece of software called SecurePC that you install on your laptop. Anytime the laptop is used to get access to the Internet, it signals Lucira about what phone number it is using. Lucira ignores the information until someone reports a laptop stolen. At that point, Lucira becomes your private detective. When the stolen machine next signs on, Lucira sends a fax to local law-enforcement officials so they can locate the phone line that the laptop is using and recover the machine.

If there are particular files that you want from the machine and worry that someone may find, the SecurePC software lets you recover them once the stolen laptop goes online.

The software is extremely difficult to remove without proper authorization and "nearly impossible to detect," according to Lucira. SecurePC was the brainchild of Ravi Hariprasad, a former University of Pennsylvania medical student who dropped out of school to start the company after his own laptop was stolen.

The software, which was released to the general public in October, is available free via download from the company’s Web site. Once you report your computer missing, you pay Lucira a search activation charge of about $20. (For privacy reasons, searches can be activated only with the express approval of laptop owners.)

There may be a market. In 1999 alone, some 319,000 laptops were stolen, according to Safeware, the largest insurer of laptops. Federal Bureau of Investigation figures indicate that computer theft cost more than $100 billion in lost data and hardware in 1998.

For more information: www.lucira.com.

ANNOTATING THE INTERNET

A new service lets you mark up Web pages and e-mail them to friends and colleagues. The service, called E-Quill, is designed to overcome some of the clumsiness that still exists when people share information from the Internet. (Clipping and sending the text from a Web page can leave the text seriously garbled in an e-mail. Most people can’t both look at a Web page and read e-mailed comments about the page at the same time. And so on.)

E-Quill tackles the clumsiness issue through software that lets a user employ his mouse to make notes on an actual Web page with a yellow highlighter or a colored pen. The user can also type notes and "stick" them on the page. The user then simply e-mails the marked-up page to anyone. The recipient doesn’t need to have the E-Quill software to call up the scribbled-on pages (though, clearly, the hope is that he will be impressed enough to go to the E-Quill Web site and download its free software). The recipient receives a URL that takes him to an E-Quill server, where the sender’s annotations have been stored.

E-Quill figures that people will use its service to deliver a strong hint about what they want for birthday presents, to share news, to provide directions by marking up street maps, to collaborate on updating a corporate Web site, or just to draw moustaches on the mug shots of executives.

Once you sign up, a toolbar will sit along the bottom of every Web page you call up. The toolbar can be reduced to a tiny icon when you’re not using the service.

E-Quill, a one-year-old company, grew out of pen-based-computing research conducted by software developers at Brown University’s Computer Graphics Lab. The product was launched in October.

For more information: www.e-quill.com.

TECHNOPHOBES, TAKE NOTE

If you’re one of those people who would rather jot down notes and log appointments on paper instead of punching them into a Palm organizer or personal computer, there’s a new technology that may allow you to have the best of both worlds.

A new pen from Anoto comes equipped with not only an ordinary ink cartridge but also has a tiny digital camera embedded just beneath the tip. As you write or draw on special paper, the pen records everything. (The camera can’t actually see the ink jottings; it registers how the pen moves across the patterned paper.) If you then mark a box on the page, the pen will send your scribbled notes wirelessly to a computer, a mobile phone, a fax machine—you name it.

The Anoto pen transmits the data via Bluetooth, a short-range data transmission technology that lets devices speak to one another without cables. The technology, which is still in its early days, does limit the pen to transmitting to a device that’s within the radius of a building. Another limitation is that, for the moment, the pen can store only several pages of notes.

Anoto plans to make money by licensing the technology to companies that will bundle it into innovative products. Anoto has already formed a partnership with mobile phone maker Ericsson and has linked up with Norwegian office-supplies company Time Manager, which is working to create a series of products that incorporate the special Anoto paper.

Anoto, a unit of Sweden’s C-Technologies, said it expects products using the Anoto technology to hit the market in mid-2001.

For more information: www.anoto.com.

IT NEVER FORGETS A FACE

Remembering all our different passwords, codes, and security numbers is making us a nation of PIN heads. But help may be on the way.

A software company called Viisage is making it possible for a person’s face to be used as what it calls a "private, secure, and convenient password of choice" in at least some cases. The software, originally developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, can translate the characteristics of a face into a unique set of numbers. The image is known as an "eigenface." It can be stored in a database for later comparison to the live image of a person.

So far, early adopters are using the company’s face-recognition software to verify the identities of customers using automated teller machines. Some corporations have been installing Viisage so employees no longer have to carry around magnetic cards to gain access to buildings.

Criminals may find the technology a little less convenient. A number of big casinos have already put in Viisage to use as a way to identify known scam artists. It’s also being used at prisons, airports, and in other security and law-enforcement applications. It could help stop welfare fraud by preventing recipients from using a number of identities to collect multiple benefits.

One of the advantages of face-recognition technology is that it doesn’t require an establishment like a casino to obtain fingerprints or signatures from those it’s hoping to identify or track. The software can instantly calculate an individual’s "eigenface" from either live video or a still digital image, then search a database of millions in about five seconds to locate similar or matching images.

For more information: www.viisage.com.

CLICKS IN THE STICKS

While lots of companies talk about the need to fix the "last-mile" problem so that home users of the Internet can operate at high speeds, StarBand Communications thinks that for many people the real issue is what might be called a "last-22,300-mile" problem. Instead of trying to find ways to speed up data traffic over the old copper wires that constitute the "last mile" to the home, StarBand has launched a new product, Gilat-To-Home, which plans to beam the data off the Loral Telstar 7 satellite, 22,300 miles up in space.

Gilat-To-Home—a joint venture whose partners include Israel’s Gilat Satellite Networks, Microsoft, and EchoStar Communications—will provide consumers even in rural areas with an "always on" link to the Internet at speeds more than 10 times faster than typical modem speeds. Cable television modems and DSL (digital subscriber line) services already offer the same speedy links to the Web, but they are currently available only in limited parts of the U.S. StarBand estimates that there are between 20 million and 26 million Americans living in parts of the country where high-speed Internet access is not available through either the local cable provider or the phone company.

Consumers will need to buy an oblong, 24-inch by 36-inch satellite dish, which will allow them to send and receive data via the Internet, as well as receive hundreds of TV stations via satellite. StarBand said that the service will be "priced to compete aggressively" with cable-modem and DSL services.

The service launched in the U.S. in October, and the company has announced plans to make it available in Latin America in early 2001.

For more information: www.gilat2home.com.

DERIVATIVE DERIVATIVES

Saying an idea is derivative may be a putdown, but don’t try telling that to onExchange, a start-up that hopes to nurture online marketplaces by helping them develop financial instruments known as derivatives.

OnExchange notes what has happened on Wall Street, where experts known as "rocket scientists" have constructed options, futures, futures on options, options on futures, and almost any other financial instrument you can imagine. These derivatives—so-called because they are derived from stocks, bonds, and commodities—serve a solid economic purpose. They let people take the risk associated with owning, say, a stock, cut the risk into tiny slices, and apportion it to the people most interested in bearing it. For instance, someone who owns a stock but is worried that it might tumble could spend a small amount of money to buy a put option—the right, but not the obligation, to sell at a guaranteed price on a specific date. By letting people reduce their risk, derivatives make the whole market grow.

Companies that run online markets might well want to produce what could be called derivative derivatives—financial instruments that draw on Wall Street’s long experience at reducing participants’ risk. Companies that participate in online markets are often buying and selling at real-time, market prices, which are inherently more volatile than the fixed prices that companies got when they bought through catalogs or negotiated long-term prices with suppliers. So, participants might welcome the ability to buy derivatives that would let them set, say, a maximum price that they would have to pay for a key component.

OnExchange says it hoped to get necessary federal approvals by the end of 2000 and quickly begin helping online marketplaces generate derivatives.

For more information: www.onexchange.com.

Diddlebock, a Denver-based writer and editor, has been driving up and down the information superhighway for the last 10 years without finding a permanent place to park.