Community Carsharing with Park&Share
Share your car with the ones you want!
Park&Share uses the GPS location services of your IPhone in combination with the Bluetooth abilities to automatically generate car location points.
In addition location points can also be manually generated by pushing a button.
Only a working Bluetooth handsfree device in the car is needed which has to be "paired" with the iPhone (this means that the handsfree device connects automatically with the IPhone when the car is started).
When starting the car (and connecting the handsfree device) a GPS location point is automatically created.
When parking the car (and disconnecting the handsfree device) again a GPS location point is automatically created.
"Park&Share" manages 5 main tasks which can be used alone or in combination for an arbitrary number of cars:
1) Find a parked car including parking lot statistics
2) Simple Carsharing via automated location emails to other users of the car
3) Realtime Tracking of a car via automated timed location emails for urgent transports etc.
4) Automated generation of waypoints for mileage logs / tour analysis etc.
5) Preparing and exporting the waypoint data as .gpx format for graphical display in i.e. Maps
The automatically sent emails to the other users (community) of the car, containing the location points, allow the generation of a self organizing Carsharing Network. This network simply consists of the user lists of the individual Park&Share users (for example one can have a list for family members or company colleagues which can be easily exchanged.)
No membership, centralized organization of cars, or the restriction for special car types is necessary therefore.
In the opposite one defines by himself who gets informed from the availability of the car.
In addition GPS location points can be generated by defined time intervals. With this feature the realtime tracking of a moving car (or any other moving object) is possible.
All functions are working in the background. After launching the app once (and sending it to the background afterwards) the user has not to care any further about it. This results in a very low battery usage. Compared to other location based solutions "Park&Share" therefore can run a very long time without battery problems and does not have to be run in the foreground.
Note: "Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life."