Nice profile in Comstock’s Magazine of local startup and BigBang winner Japa and its founder Mathew Magno. It’s not the first parking app (hence the name, Just Another Parking App), but a good lesson for anyone getting started that the key isn’t revolutionary tech. More important is a vision of the ultimate network and the drive to start building it.

The vision:

“Smart cities are coming, from smart streetlights to citywide wifi to smart trash cans,” Magno says. “We already have smart parking meters where you can pay through an app. With Japa, we can take any third-party data, put it into one app and have the whole bird’s eye view of the transportation industry in a futuristic way.”

So far, Japa has sensors installed at UC Berkeley and in Walnut Creek (and soon at the UC Davis Med Center). https://buff.ly/2FpGjPo