Christmas shoppers circle the block, scanning the curb for vacant parking spaces, holding up traffic, increasing frustration, congestion and emissions, and perhaps finally deciding to get out of downtown altogether to shop at a big box store with acres of parking. But in something dubbed a “smart parking” pilot, San Carlos, Calif., is hoping to reduce congestion, increase the appeal of downtown businesses and literally curb its traffic.

They say trying something again and again but expecting a different outcome is a sign of insanity. If you’ve ever circled a few city blocks, over and over again, searching for a parking spot, you’ve probably felt your own sanity slipping away. Looking for parking in crowded urban corridors is not just maddening, it’s also a big contributor to carbon emissions and poor air quality.

Finding parking in downtown San Mateo or San Carlos can be a drag for busy motorists but a new app called Parker can make the chore a bit easier. Developed by a company called Streetline, in partnership with Cisco, the free app uses sensors embedded in the street to provide real-time parking availability in the downtown area.

Have you ever wanted to be able to just look at your phone and know where all of the open parking spaces are in your area? That, in a nutshell, is smart parking and it’s coming to the San Francisco Bay Area thanks to a partnership between Streetline and Cisco. Interestingly, San Francisco itself isn’t the first city in the San Francisco Bay Area to get these smart parking spaces. That honor belongs to Sausalito, which will be joined today by San Mateo and San Carlos.

Finding parking is always a chore, but there are new tools and companies coming to make finding a place to leave your vehicle easier than ever. One startup focused on this problem, Streetline, is getting a big boost for its real-time parking data through a partnership with Cisco that could help get its parking sensors deployed in more cities around the country.

Maybe the most important end node for the internet of things of the future will end up being the parking spot. Networking giant Cisco and smart-parking startup Streetline plan to test that proposition with two projects announced Tuesday morning. The two will connect drivers to up-to-the-minute data on parking spots in two busy Silicon Valley commercial corridors — San Mateo’s 3rd Avenue, and San Carlos’s Laurel Street.

In the SF Bay Area, the cities of San Mateo and San Carlos have announced the deployment of their network of sensors aimed at helping drivers find parking spots with ease thanks to the Parker app (by Streetline Inc). Parker helps user find available parking spots, and the overall idea is to make parking more efficient, whether it is for users, or for the city. In cities like the ones above (and Los Angeles), users can see parking availability in near-realtime, and drivers can head to a parking with a good level of confidence that parking spots are available.

Recorded live from the CityAge New American City conference, hear from various city and other organization leaders – including Streetline President & CEO Zia Yusuf – about how cities are using various technologies and transportation to transform the future of our cities.

For anyone having trouble parking on Mississippi State University’s campus, the answer might be found at the push of a button. Many students like Casie Mahalitc, senior business management major, agree finding a parking spot takes plenty of time and searching.

It’s been a busy week for cities in the UK; and we should draw important insights from its events. On Monday, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB); Department of Business, Innovation and Skills; and the British Standards Institution were the sponsors of a meeting in London to establish a UK “Future Cities Network”. One of their objectives was to build a consensus from the UK to contribute to the City Protocol initiative launched at the Smart City Expo in Barcelona this month.

How important are Maps to Apple [AAPL]? Very important, if the recent rash of senior sackings and the company’s public apology mean anything at all. So why do Maps matter? Here’s three potential reasons behind the company’s cartographic conundrum.

Want to know what’s driving the future of cities? Just peruse this list and be up to date on everything from the future of parking to the maker movement–and how they’re changing the urban landscape.

Urban regions enjoy density. It’s what makes for serendipity — running into someone you know in a crowd of strangers is all the more meaningful. It can also make certain infrastructures more efficient. The vast number of people cycling in and out of subways, coffee shops and freeway lanes is the grounds for an amazing data set, if those people will agree to contribute to apps such as Foursquare or Waze. But, as much as we love the idea of democracy and helping out our neighbor, it turns out crowdsourcing will not solve all problems.

Historic Ellicott City is now the first town in Maryland to offer a free smartphone parking app, making it easier for visitors to find available spaces. Howard County Executive Ken Ulman announced the app’s launch last week in front of the Howard County Visitor Center. ”Everything that we’re doing with this application is to get more people excited to come down here, to shop and enjoy the great, great merchants and business owners here in the historic district of Ellicott City,” Ulman said to a crowd of about 30 people gathered outside the visitor center.

If you want to find parking in Ellicott City, County Executive Ken Ulman told a small crowd standing outside the Howard County Welcome Center Thursday morning, “We now have an app for that.” The app – mobile phone application — is Streetline’s Parker. It allows people to look up real-time information about available parking spaces in the Historic District.

Drivers in Ellicott City will not have to waste time finding a parking spot during this holiday season. Howard County Executive Ken Ulman announced Thursday the creation of the Parker, a new smart phone app created by Streetline, Inc. that will direct drivers to open parking spots.

At the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona Telefónica Digital presents a Smart City solution based on the company’s M2M capacities. It is an offering which will allow municipal corporations, urban service providers and entrepreneurs from worldwide to integrate in a single scalable, flexible and self-managing solution the complex environment of necessary sensors and technology, which are characteristic of the so-called “Smart Cities”.

Telefonica has reached a partnership agreement with smart city services provider Streetline. Under the terms of the deal, Telefonica and Streetline will jointly market telematics-enabled smart parking services that allow cities to optimize parking management, while reducing car traffic. The agreement gives Telefonica’s professional teams access to Streetline’s telematics products and services. The product suite is designed to enable cities to launch their smart city initiatives.

At the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona Telefónica Digital presents a Smart City solution based on the company’s M2M capacities. It is an offering which will allow municipal corporations, urban service providers and entrepreneurs from worldwide to integrate in a single scalable, flexible and self-managing solution the complex environment of necessary sensors and technology, which are characteristic of the so-called “Smart Cities”.

Frustrated motorists circling downtown Fort Lauderdale in search of an open parking space can now turn to their mobile phones for help. A free smartphone app that launched Monday will show them in real time where the open spaces are and how to get to them. They can also use the app to pay for the space, to add money without going back to their car and to find their way back to the spot when they’re ready to go home.

Need help finding a parking spot in and around downtown Ft. Lauderdale? Now there’s an app for that. The city is now using technology from Streetline to let drivers know where and when parking spots open up. Sensors embedded in the pavement detect when spaces are available.

There are some very cool car apps — such as PlugShare, which gives you the location of home-based chargers whose owners will let you plug in your electric car. And Recargo, which helps those same owners find stations, plan trips and join a community. But I haven’t heard of one that addresses the bane of any traveler — parking. Until now, anyway. Streetline is such a sensible idea I’m surprised nobody thought of it sooner.

Cleantech Group‘s Greg Neichin opened up this morning’s panel “Startups and Corporations: Bringing Clean Technology to Market” with an important observation. The cleantech market, and certainly the broader energy space is a bit different when it comes to getting big companies in the same room with startups. “For the most part, they tend to get along,” he told a packed session. The session assembled a good mix of panelists, from a startup and venture capital firm to sustainability executives from Nike and Intel.

SXSW Eco, the second annual green offshoot of the perennial Austin, Texas conference, kicks off this week with a flurry of announcements promising to make going green a socially connected, mobile-delivered lifestyle choice, rather than a chore. Think of software developers as struggling bands, successful entrepreneurs as the rock stars, and VCs and corporate investment managers as the record industry moguls, and you’ve got a rough approximation.

Learn how Russ Martin, CEO of AustriaTech, the Technology Agency of the Ministry of Transport, views the Intelligent Transportation Society World Congress taking place later this year in Vienna, Austria, the importance of partnerships between organizations making our transport systems smarter, and how Streetline is helping cities with the pressing challenges of parking.

How can a goliath international company reach the brilliant amateurs who will shape the next generation of tech? Pit them head to head in an entrepreneurial Hunger Games. I’d like to tell you about the one camp mostly likely to attract future billionaires of the world, but first, the back story.

Under the motto “Smarter on the way”, the exhibition at this year’s ITS World Congress will bring together all of the important players in the field of intelligent transport systems. The exhibition will show the huge amount of potential there is for improving our everyday lives by implementing ITS systems. The exhibitors will cover all aspects of transport systems: from complex information and communication systems and increasingly advanced navigation and payment systems to security, ecology and electromobility.

Here’s how Zia Yusuf, president and CEO of Streetline, describes the new smart parking app Parker: “Driving through the streets of Los Angeles for the first time, I remember asking myself if, perhaps, this was the city where the phrase ‘driving in circles’ was coined. Finding a parking space in the City of Angels isn’t easy; one yearlong study found drivers in a 15-square-block district in Los Angeles drove in excess of 950,000 miles searching for a space, producing 730 tons of carbon dioxide in the process. That’s a lot of circling the block to find a parking spot, but it’s the reality in L.A.

From his ability to fly to X-ray vision and other enhanced senses, Superman has among the best-known catalog of powers. Coming from another planet, it’s only to be expected that he’d be more than just “a little different.”

Enalee E. Bounds has been running Ellicott’s Country Store on Main Street in historic Ellicott City for 50 years, telling customer after customer that they have stepped into a house that could be the oldest “duplex” in the country — built in the late 17th or early 18th century — and how Mr. Walker lived on one side, Mr. Chandler on the other.

Parking is a pain. Searching for a spot transforms time and gasoline into stress and CO2. Studies estimate that 30 percent of the traffic in central business districts is produced by drivers cruising for parking while IBM’s 2011 Global Parking Survey noted that drivers spent an average of 20 minutes looking for a parking spot. This is the driving force (sorry) behind a new wave of urban systems that use sensors and analytics to make parking more efficient.

Streetline, a startup based in Foster City, California, uses mobile sensors, web applications, and analytics to collect, transmit, and analyze data from parking meters and parking spaces. The company is transforming parking operations into digital ecosystems to the benefit of the cities, the drivers, parking lot operators, and local merchants.

A familiar sight at Metro’s metered lots is that of a customer searching for coins to feed the parking meter. Priced at $1/hour, that can add up to a lot of quarters or dollar coins. Starting Monday, July 30, 2012, at the Fort Totten and Rockville Metrorail stations, Metro is introducing a new parking meter technology from Parkmobile that will allow customers to pay for parking using a smartphone app or over the phone. It’s the same payment system widely in use in the District of Columbia, but with an extra twist: within seconds, thanks to sensing technology from Streetline, the time you pay actually displays on the meter.

So it’s 2012 and we don’t have any flying cars (yet) but that doesn’t mean driving should be straight out of the Flintstones. There’s a number of tools out there turning driving into a high-tech event.

There are about 1 billion cars on the world’s roads today. By mid-century, forecasts have that number climbing to 4 billion. Meanwhile, Congress is mired in a debate over whether to pass a new highway bill. Senator Barbara Boxer, a chief negotiator of the pending bill, lamented recently that she was “embarrassed for the people of this country” that this measure had not been enacted. After all, she said, passing highway bills used to be as popular and as important as “motherhood and apple pie.”

Once upon a time – like, for a few thousand years – a guy pulled his horse up to the general store, tied him, bought some cod liver oil, tobacco and maybe a jug of whiskey, jawed a bit with the proprietor, and went on his way. The idea of being charged 25 cents per ten minutes to park a horse with a possible $125 fine if you were 30 seconds late untethering him was unheard of. Today, parking one’s ride is a $30 billion industry undergoing a revolution in technology which is not only changing how we park, but also enabling parking to be more sustainable and more customer-service oriented.

Today’s cities contain more than 50 per cent of the world’s population, account for 75 per cent of global energy consumption and emit 70 per cent of greenhouse gas. They face challenges driven by changing demographics, scarcity of resources, such as energy and water, pollution, overloaded physical and social infrastructure, traffic congestion, and crime.

Smart cities need a smart infrastructure to get ahead and draw more young talent in, according to Wim Elfrink, chief globalisation officer of Cisco Systems. Speaking during a panel discussion about app developers and intelligent cities during The Economist’s two-day summit about big data and information on Tuesday afternoon, Elfrink explained that a smarter city has one network with everything connected rather than current models where most city departments and utilities each have their own network and databases that don’t talk to each other.

A new website and app promises to help drivers heading downtown find parking. The tools, www.parkdowntown.com, were created by the Knoxville Central Business Improvement District (CBID). “The CBID is committed to helping improve the parking in downtown” said Michele Hummel, CBID Director. “This includes letting the public know about all the available parking options, and helping them find their way there.”

Studies have found that 30 percent of all traffic congestion stems from drivers looking for a place to park. All too often the prices for on-street parking are set too low. When the price of on-street parking is set too low the competition for cheap on-street parking leads to circling for available spaces. Traffic, travel time, and pollution all increase, making parking very inefficient.

If you drive to do business in a heavily traveled urban area, chances are you’ll get caught up in a search for parking. You know the drill. You circle a block several times, slowing down whenever you catch a glimpse of someone who might be opening up a space. Your hopes rise as a woman walks toward her car, but then she opens her trunk, throws in a package, and walks away to do more shopping or business. You drive on, finding a spot only much later. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, there are plenty of spots, but there’s no good way for you to know that.

Drivers in downtown Los Angeles may have more time on their hands starting today. LA ExpressPark™ goes live, an advanced parking system developed by Xerox and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT), that applies new technology and demand-based pricing to increase the availability of limited parking spaces, relieve traffic congestion and reduce air pollution.

Many people have discussed the move to the Post PC era over the past two years. Typically, this digresses into a debate on how rapidly smartphones and tablets will replace PCs. While this is an interesting discussion, it misses the essence of the transformation. What’s actually different about a post PC era?

The Argentinian capital isn’t ranked as one of the world’s most advanced cities. But recent projects show it’s working hard and offering a path for other cash-strapped cities to still become smarter.

The statistics on parking are beyond depressing: People spend an average of 18 to 20 minutes worldwide looking for parking and 30% of congestion is due to people looking for parking. And the parking meter? It hasn’t had any dramatic upgrades since it was introduced in 1935 (with the exception of digital readings and pay by credit card). All that congestion leads to aggravated drivers, businesses missing out on potential customers who drive away in frustration, and lots of air pollution. Streetline, a startup that we last covered in 2010, wants to make it so that the next generation laughs when we tell them about the hours we spent on a weekly basis searching for parking.

Electric vehicle owners will have a new place to charge and park their cars in Boston. Boston real estate developer Dinosaur Capital Partners LLC said Wednesday it will revamp an old gas station in Boston’s Bulfinch Triangle and turn it into Green Park & Charge.

Boston Red Sox fans will soon have an easier way to go green on their way to the Green Monster, and they’ll have a company whose offices overlook the picturesque Peninsula lagoons to thank for it. Foster City-based Streetline Inc. announced today that it’s partnering with Dinosaur Capital Partners, a Boston real estate development firm, to deploy its smart parking technology at a fully dedicated parking and charging facility (“Green Park & Charge”).

Earlier this month, Citi and IBM, both NLC Corporate Partners, as well as Streetline announced a $25 million Citi credit facility to fund innovation in parking and help transform cities for the future. Citi is joining the collaboration between Streetline and IBM as they work closer with municipal chief financial officers in considering innovative ways to optimize parking revenue and deploy new smart parking solutions.

Citigroup said it has extended a $25 million credit facility to Streetline in collaboration with IBM to fund new parking technology for cities around the world. Streetline’s platform detects the presence of cars in parking spaces through a network of low-power wireless sensors. This information is then made available to municipal authorities as well as consumers, via the company’s Parker application.

The Great Recession has not been particularly kind to American cities. Unemployment is still painfully high, while tax revenue — including sales, property, income and corporate tax revenue — is woefully low. As many major cities wrestle with budget shortfalls, critical infrastructure investments have been postponed or abandoned altogether. The upshot for many urban dwellers is that the quality of life is deteriorating. And if it hasn’t yet, it will.

Smart parking startup Streetline this morning received a $25 million line of credit from Citi to bring its sensor-laden technology to city streets across the United States. The Foster City, Calif.-based company – which is funded by Sutter Hill Ventures, RockPort Capital Partners, and Bill Ford’s Fontinalis Partners – will give it the ability to bring its technology to cities without an upfront cost (presumably for a share of the revenue, though Streetline describes it as “pay-as-you-go”).

Listen to Streetline CEO Zia Yusuf as he’s interviewed on how Smart Parking is helping motorists and cities alike, from finding a space to managing these pieces of real estate throughout cities.

Connected devices have given us the data we want and need wherever we are, making many aspects of our lives easier. For instance, M2M (machine-to-machine)-enabled devices have changed the way we read, thanks to dedicated ereading devices; the way we work out, thanks to connected-fitness devices; and the way we drive, thanks to in-vehicle telematics systems. Now, M2M technology is even changing the way we park.

Cities across the country are implementing innovative parking strategies using new technologies in an effort to improve parking experiences for citizens as well as make parking fee systems more cost effective. From California to Washington, D.C., mobile apps and other technologies are revolutionizing the parking industry. And government leaders are partnering with private industry in metropolitan areas to tailor new parking innovation to their unique needs.

They’re in the ground all over the country, in parking lots and city streets. They’re small and unobtrusive little guys, like small discs flat on the ground or like the reflector bumps you might drive over when crossing lanes. These are simple devices with a straightforward task, and they’re about to have a huge impact on the way drivers in cities park, just by knowing when cars are parked over them and when they’re not.

Half the global population is in cities, and it’s going to be 70%. Three billion will join the middle class over the next 20-25 years, and they aspire to live like Americans. If they drive cars and burn energy the way we do, we’re going to have a sustainability challenge. How do you see this shift unfolding?

Yellow curb, red curb, white curb, blue curb — figuring out where to park, especially in a big city, can make you feel like you’re in a zany Dr. Seuss story. And when you do snag a sweet street spot, it can feel like a mini moment of glory. In cities, parking signs contradict each other. There’s 7 a.m. street cleaning and odd hours when you cannot park your car (only until 2 a.m. in some places). If you live in a crowded metropolis, then finding a parking spot is likely a task you’d like to see made easier.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon family of chipsets have become almost ubiquitous in the mobile device and equipment arena, but the company has been looking to leverage that success into other areas such as machine to machine (M2M) and the so called ‘Internet of everything’. Qualcomm’s Kanwalinder Singh, Senior VP, Business Development, tells Wireless that in the M2M world it has two key areas of industry focus: automotive and energy.

Forget capture the flag. Startup campers at IBM’s SmartCamp play nab the investment dollar. Designed to encourage global innovation, SmartCamp connects the hottest startups around the world with not only resources and advice, but personal handshakes and a listening ear from some of the top venture capitalists in the business. Last year, those handshakes amounted to more than $50 million in VC and angel funding awarded to finalists.

With the automotive industry on the verge of major changes due to rising oil prices and increasing emissions restrictions, the Stanford Energy Club’s Energy 360° program brought together experts and executives Monday evening for a holistic discussion about the industry’s future. “We do a deep dive into energy topics,” said Karim Farhat, president of the Stanford Energy Club. Energy 360° is a quarterly interdisciplinary program that tries to address all aspects of predominant energy issues, including the technology, policy and business perspectives.

The City 2.0 is under construction. As the winner of the 2012 TED Prize–the first to be awarded to an idea rather than a person–TED unveiled its $100,000 “wish” Wednesday evening at its flagship conference in Long Beach, California. “Imagine a platform that brings you together, locally and globally,” explained a short animated film screened during the conference. “Combine the reach of the cloud with the power of the crowd. Connect leaders, experts, companies, organizations and citizens. Share your tools, data, designs, successes, and ideas. Turn them into action.”

The TED Prize is awarded annually to an exceptional individual who receives $100,000 and “One Wish to Change the World.” The goal is to help the individual who wins turn their idea into inspiring action. This year for the first time ever the prize was awarded not to a person but to an idea: The City 2.0. The TED conference organizers convened about 30 leaders in thinking about cities to come up with a proposal.

Indianapolis city officials today unveiled a new working app designed to make parking a snap. ParkIndy has installed almost 600 sensors in parking spots around Monument Circle, Mass Avenue and in Broad Ripple. The sensors are monitored by the smartphone app called Parker. Parker is the brainchild of San Francisco-based Streetline Inc. The free app is a GPS-like creation that reveals all available parking spaces. It allows drivers to click on the spaces and pay for parking in that spot.

More than a decade ago, IBM spent the dot-com boom making sure it made money selling to start-ups. In the current tech boom, it says there’s more to gain from partnering with the start-ups than just selling to them. In those days the Armonk, N.Y.-based computing giant scrambled to release a rack-mountable server that would meet the needs of dot-com companies, said Jim Corgel, who was then the general manager of IBM’s Net Generation business but now manages its relationships with independent software vendors and developers.

BMW iVentures officially opened the doors to its New York office this week, and inaugurated their new space with a panel discussion on digital technology and mobility. The $100 million fund has already seeded UK-based Parkatmyhouse.com and MyCityWay, which will lease space in BMW’s trendy West Village office. The firm plans to invest primarily in urban mobility technologies to solve the transportation needs of the future. But the hot topic of the evening was, of all things, parking.

I was in attendance at last night’s launch party for BMW i Ventures in Manhattan’s West Village. You can get a good idea of how serious this auto maker is in their new venture fund and startup incubator from their … hor d’oeuvres. There were at least 4 different pesto spreads–artichoke, basil, and a purplish beet mixture–which were documented with little cards. BMW understands Manhattan food culture, clearly. And based on the speakers, they definitely grok its number one gripe … parking and traffic.

NYC DOT is partnering with three tech firms – including Streetline, Inc. – to launch the Parking Availability Technology pilot, testing state-of-the-art equipment that will wirelessly transmit real–time parking information to users. DOT is embedding sensors in 177 parking spots along Arthur Avenue and East 187th Street in the Bronx that can detect whether a parking space is vacant. If successful, the pilot has the potential to ease congestion by giving information on how many spaces are available on a particular block, reducing the amount of time spent cruising for a spot.

Drivers hunting for elusive street parking soon will have instant access to a map showing availability in some parts of Downtown Indianapolis and Broad Ripple. The free application is called Parker — and sensors recently installed in nearly 500 parking spots that can pick up the app should go live by the end of January.

By 2050, the world’s population is projected to be more than 9 billion, with roughly 70% of people residing in urban areas. With more people flocking to cities, there is an urgent demand for smarter, more sustainable cities.