| Operators |  | History of RingGo |
| |||
|
Originally previewed to a select group of local authorities at a Civica user group in May 2004, Cobalt formally launched the RingGo cashless parking suite at Parkex on April 24th 2006 with the announcement of its first major implementation for the First Great Western Railway.
Until that point, although a promising concept, the prospect of providing members of the UK public with the ability to pay for parking time using a mobile phone had been more of a nice idea than a cost justifiable reality.
Before then, there had been three core problems with mobile phone parking:
 |
Previously proposed solutions were clumsy, requiring motorists to pre-register and receive a windscreen based identifying device to place in their windscreen. |
|
The enabling technologies such as text messaging couldn't be regarded as sufficiently mature to support the service and in particular eliminate all possibilities for fraud. |
|
The technology clearly needed to be deployed intelligently to avoid hard pressed parking attendants ending up with more complex and heavy kit to shoulder. |
Having been directly approached by several of the UK's largest authorities, each of which independently had concluded that the emergent market offerings were flawed, Cobalt created RingGo. The success of similar phone parking services in Scandanavia had been promising and during the course of designing RingGo representatives from Cobalt travelled to northern Europe to review several offerings available to the motorists of the Nordic region.
The subsequent success of RingGo speaks for itself. A fully-fledged service offering, RingGo has built on the market presence and warm commercial relations Cobalt already enjoyed in the parking market. Above all else though, RingGo's greatest strength remains that it's a British product designed with the needs of the UK motorist firmly in mind. All involved with the service look forward to extending its reach, value and usability to motorists. Cobalt will continue to announce fresh news of further phone parking deployments as they take place.
|
