Searching for a parking spot? Soon, it'll be online
A new Cambridge company is planning to launch a service that would allow drivers to hunt for parking spaces using their cellphones.
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The company's founder, Andrew Rollert , said SpotScout.com will be available within the next two months by computer and cellphones with access to the Internet.
"People check the weather every day; they figure out what it's like every day before they leave the house," said Rollert, 32, who got the idea while directing friends via cellphones to open spaces he could see from a Beacon Hill rooftop. "We're going to try to create something that tells people what the parking is like in their area. It's like a parking forecast."
To use the service, customers would punch in the address of a destination, along with the date and time they want to arrive. A map would pop up with a list of nearby available spots, showing the price of each and the time it would take to walk to the final destination.
The service, to be tested in Boston, Cambridge, New York, and San Francisco, uses information from local garages, which will list spaces they have empty at any given time, and posts from those who own spaces they don't use during vacations or work hours. Eventually, Rollert said, the service will include postings from motorists who have parked at metered spaces and want to auction their departure time to the highest bidder.
Searching for parking spaces on SpotScout will be free of charge ; the site will make its money by taking a 15 percent cut of each transaction. All payments would be made with credit cards or PayPal, the online payment service.
Users can later go online and rate their experiences. If a garage overcharges or someone leaves their street parking space before they said they would -- thus leaving it open to be taken by any driver -- then future users could avoid their business in the future.
Company officials concede that for the system to work well, a critical mass of users would have to participate. Rollert , a Cambridge resident, said he is counting on a young demographic that already has Internet access on cellphones and is comfortable using the technology. Home computers could also be used to make reservations or to post available home parking spaces, but most of the services are geared toward handheld devices.
SpotScout is also counting on buzz, online and by word of mouth, to make the service catch on. Company officials declined to specify how many people have registered, but they said that it was more than 500,000. They said they have partnered with several businesses to provide data for such things as maps and directions, and they are looking into soliciting advertisers to buy space on the maps that could draw people into a store while they walk to their destination.
City officials say the service's plan to sell information about departure times from metered parking spots could run afoul of laws against charging additional money for a public parking space. The officials said they have requested a meeting with company representatives.
The company says it is technically not charging for the spaces; instead it is charging for information about what time a space will come available.
The company discourages people from holding spots for one another, and in areas with heavy traffic, the spot still could be snatched by someone who did not pay for the information, Rollert said.
Still, he said, customers in a notoriously parking-hungry city such as Boston will pay to gain an edge. "Right now, it takes money, time, and gas to find a space," he said.
Similar parking services are springing up in other areas, though they are often tied only to parking garages. Maryland-based mobileParking , for example, is an operator-assisted reservation service that monitors parking facilities in 50 cities, including Boston, and provides drivers with a price, reservation, and directions to the nearest available spot for $1.75. A similar system is being rolled out this month in Paris, and airport parking garages have started offering reservations.
The Massachusetts Port Authority this year implemented a program at Logan International Airport that guarantees travelers a parking space if they are part of the PassPort Gold system, which has a $200 registration fee and adds $5 a day to normal parking rates.
Rollert, who said he has about a dozen employees, has been traveling to Beijing, Tokyo, Taipei, and Singapore -- areas notorious for traffic congestion -- to recruit people to help the company develop in Asia.
Matt Viser can be reached at maviser@globe.com. 
