Finding parking in near concerts or sports events can be an incredibly frustrating task. Because of the event, the cost to park in lots near the stadium or venue can be exorbitant. Plus, lots can fill up fast. Enter ParkWhiz , a Chicago-based startup that allows customers to reserve parking on the fly. Via a web app and a newly launched mobile HTML5 website, ParkWhiz allows you to reserve parking near concert and event venues in the U.S. ParkWhiz partners with parking lot owners, which range from people who own a single space to large parking management companies, across the country to list their inventory on ParkWhiz. So far, ParkWhiz has partnered with 300 participating parking locations in over 25 cities in the U.S. Currently, ParkWhiz currently offers parking reservations near Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, AT&T Park, Cowboys Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Busch Stadium, US Cellular Field, Orpheum Theatre, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Beacon Theater, plus 17 airports around the country. For example, ParkWhiz just helped park over 400 cars (who paid on average of $40 per parking spot) for the Paul McCartney concert at AT&T Park last week in San Francisco. ParkWhiz’s CEO and co-founder Aashish Dalal says the startup has also started to serve coupons for restaurants and bars (in neighborhoods nearby the event space) with parking reservations. In terms of pricing, there is no fee to list a parking space on the site; ParkWhiz collects a fee only if a reservation is made and handles payment processing for the parking vendors. Generally, the user has to pay 10 percent customer convenience fee to ParkWhiz in addition to parking price, and ParkWhiz will also take a 15 percent cut from the base rate from the parking vendors. In a year, the site has already taken 50,000 reservations, with the goal of hittig 100,000 resetvations by the end of the year. Of course, ParkWhiz isn’t the first company to use technology to try to solve the problem of finding parking. Car Harbor allows you to rent your parking space, and there are a number of iPhone apps to aim to solve the same problem including Spotswitch and Primospot. Even Google is getting into the parking game, recently launching Open Spot, an Android app that shows you a map with nearby open parking spots marked with colored dots. CrunchBase Information ParkWhiz Information provided by CrunchBase

OExchange , a simple specification for URL-based content sharing on the Web, was introduced today by a number of online service providers and social networks. The open link-sharing protocol has gained support from Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Digg, Instapaper, StumbleUpon, Clearspring Technologies and a handful more. So what’s it all about? OExchange essentially establishes a common way for services like Posterous and Google Buzz to receive content. The protocol defines how third-party tools, e.g. Clearspring’s bookmarking and sharing service AddThis , can dynamically discover and share content to these services, as well as how sharing tools can read and set a user’s sharing preferences. A number of these services, like Google Buzz and Instapaper, have already implemented the protocol, which together with others such as OpenID and OAuth intends to making sharing content on the Web completely open. OExchange is licensed under the Open Web Foundation Agreement – you can get the specs here . Chris Messina , Open Web Advocate at Google, has this to say about the new protocol: “The key to increasing the amount and quality of sharing online is smoothing out the user interaction. By simplifying the underlying mechanism for cross-site sharing with OExchange, people can focus on what they’re sharing, rather than how.” Do you agree that there’s a need for an open URL sharing protocol (which companies like Twitter and Facebook seem to doubt, since they’re not supporting it)?

Online collaboration tool Wiggio has raised $2.1 million in Series A financing, led by New Atlantic Ventures. Founded in late 2008, the Cambridge-based company allows users to create online work groups where members can share calendars and files, host web conferences, conduct group polls, and send texts and voice messages. According to CEO Dana Lampert, a large portion of the new funds will be used on Wiggio’s mobile initiatives: the company is on track to roll out a mobile version of its website in mid-June and native apps for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry by mid-summer of this year. The mobile options will have all the functionality of the original site with the exception of video conferencing. Since its 2009 launch, the free service has attracted 350,000 users and 750 schools. While a variety of small businesses and non-profits are using Wiggio , the company has focused on its core demographic: the college market. Its user base is relatively modest compared to its larger rivals, like Yammer (which has more than 600,000 users) and Basecamp, but Wiggio is on a steady growth path— in the last 6 months the user base has grown roughly 43%.  Lampert says he plans to expand and diversify the user base by increasing the company’s marketing budget and aggressively courting high school and small business groups. That enterprise community will be critical as Wiggio shifts from a free to freemium model. Next month, the company plans to release a “pro” version that will include new features like increased customization, security upgrades, hourly back-ups and possibly a new tool that will help groups find the best time to schedule events (Lampert hints that it will be something akin to Doodle’s service). Currently, Wiggio’s monetization scheme is a bit fuzzy— or at least fluid. The company has not set a price for the “pro” package and is still crafting a strategy for advertising on its website. Since it has a variety of groups, Wiggio hopes to created targeted ads tailored to the user’s market. The hope, says Lampert, is to be profitable by early 2011. CrunchBase Information Wiggio Information provided by CrunchBase

Online video streaming is great. But when it comes to zoning out in front of a flashing screen to kill a few hours, TV has it beat by a long shot — building an interesting playlist of YouTube videos simply requires too much effort. Nowmov , a Y Combinator startup that’s launching today, is looking to change that: visit the site, and you’ll find an endless stream of (hopefully) compelling YouTube clips — no brainpower required. The site has already built up an impressive roster of angel investors, including Jeff Clavier, Paul Buchheit, Shervin Pishevar, Ron Conway, Charles River Ventures, and Ashton Kutcher. Nowmov’s site is very, very simple, at least from the user’s perspective. As soon as you browse to Nowmov.com, the site will begin playing a YouTube video. Move your mouse and you’ll see a basic set of controls that let you pause the video, jump to the next clip, and share the video you’re watching with friends (the site supports keyboard commands, so you can just tap your arrow keys to jump between clips). But for the most part, you shouldn’t really need these controls — the whole point of Nowmov is that you can lay back as if you were watching TV, without having to figure out what you want to watch next. Nowmov uses some trickery on the frontend to reduce loading times, so even when you do decide to skip to the next clip there isn’t a jarring pause. Nowmov decides which videos to play by analyzing the Twitter public timeline and looking for commonly shared YouTube links (in the future, the site plans to use other sources to gauge popularity, and will also draw video from sites other than YouTube). For now the site isn’t doing any personalized recommendations — it constantly updates its playlist and uses cookies to ensure that you don’t see the same clip twice, but there isn’t an algorithm that learns which videos you like. That will change in a future version, when the site plans to produce personalized channels of content (think of it as a Pandora for videos). The team has quite a bit of experience with video.  Two of the company’s co-founders  — Thomas Pun and James Black — were longtime Apple engineers working on video encoding and processing; the third, David Kelso, was a technical founder at two startups before this. There’s definitely a need for this, but Nowmov isn’t the first startup that’s trying to solve it.  ffwd has also tried to turn Internet video into a channel-surfing experience, and  Magma is focused on video curation, though it isn’t really a  ’lean-back’ site. And YouTube is always trying to bolster its own recommendation algorithms to keep people watching. Interesting sidenote: Ashton Kutcher is actually directly responsible for this site existing; the Nowmov guys were considering working on another idea until Kutcher told Y Combinator founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston that he wanted something like this. Kutcher decided to invest in and advise the startup, and Nowmov became a reality. CrunchBase Information Nowmov Information provided by CrunchBase

As I wrote about back in February, ManageTwitter is easily one of the most useful third-party Twitter services out there. While there are plenty of services that help you find new people to follow, there simply aren’t enough that help you prune those that you already follow. For those of us who have been using the service for years now, and have accumulated a lot of people we follow over that time, this is a problem. ManageTwitter solves it brilliantly. And now Twitter is going to kill them. As the service posted on its Posterous blog yesterday, Twitter has sent the service an email letting them know that they’re breaking one of their rules. Specifically, this is what Twitter wrote: We’re writing to let you know that your application, ManageTwitter, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates bulk automated user unfollowing, which is not allowed. It’s best for both our users and your users if your application follows the rules, so please make the necessary changes, such as removing the “Select All” option (and requiring users to decide on each user individually) to bring your application into compliance. The problem is that ManageTwitter’s service isn’t automated at all. It simply offers up suggestions for who you should unfollow. As ManageTwitter writes: Yes our application does facilitate bulk unfollowing BUT  ManageTwitter does not facilitate any *automated* bulk unfollowing , the user has to filter based on criteria. The user is still required to do significant processing to unfollow groups of people. Furthermore the system only allows unfollowing of up to only 100 at a time. They go on to note that they understand Twitter’s rule, but again, do not believe they are breaking it. It’s possible that the portion Twitter doesn’t like is that the checkboxes next to usernames are automatically selected for deletion (I don’t particularly like this either because most users — even many of the ones they suggest — I don’t want to unfollow) — and if so, that’s an easy fix. I have an email into Twitter asking them if that would be good enough and will update when I hear back. I can certainly see Twitter not approving of the name for trademark reasons — but they’re apparently not disputing that at the moment, just the bulk unfollow bit. Or maybe Twitter just doesn’t like the fact that ManageTwitter has managed to help 35,000 users unfollow nearly 6 million people on the service. I can’t imagine any social network would like a third-party service changing the social graph in such a way. But again, this service is very useful to many users, and I believe makes Twitter better — even if it is slightly less connected. ManageTwitter is asking that you retweet this tweet in support of them. [Thanks Courtenay ] CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase