We are very pleased to announce today that we have received a round of financing from BMW through their new venture fund BMW i ventures.

We are delighted to have the backing of BMW, and this strategic investment represents not just a huge vote of confidence in the business model, but also marks the culmination of five years of hard work and dedication to take the seed of an idea and turn it into a successful business.

With the support, advice and expertise that the BMW team can bring to the table, we have a global partner who can help us achieve our long term ambitions as we look to build on the successes achieved in the UK and expand into new territories.

We were also fortunate enough to involve Hugh Chappell in the investment round who has joined us as a director. Hugh has worked in the IT industry since 1976 and was honoured to work with Apple Computer in the UK from 1979 when the PC industry was in its infancy. He has sold two companies and currently has investments in a number of UK technology start-ups. Welcome to the team Hugh.

Alongside Hugh, we have also hired a new CTO. Rich Taylor is joining us from IPC media where he served as lead developer and will be heading up the technology side of the business. We’re really excited about these two new appointments and will hopefully announce some more appointments over the coming months.

Our mission with ParkatmyHouse is to become the leading online parking website in the world enabling home and business owners to benefit from their underutilised parking spaces and for drivers to be able to find a low cost and convenient parking space wherever they happen to be going.

This investment begins what is looking like a very exciting time for ParkatmyHouse and we look forward to sharing it with you.

For more information, please read our press release about this announcement.

Using Balsamiq Mockups to create some handy wireframes

I had realised for a while that Parkatmyhouse was in need of a fresh coat of paint and that although much of the functionality was in place, extending it and explaining what tools were available was proving rather more difficult. After easily spending a couple of years coding and developing Parkatmyhouse using a mixture of trial and error and guess work, I was able to build the first version of the website.

So much time was wasted due to a lack of pre-planning and something that is known as wireframing. I therefore felt extremely relieved to have come across Balsamiq Mockups.

The need for mockups

Let me first talk a bit on the benefits of doing mockups. I would compare this to writing an essay or building a house: you don’t simply start writing when you enter an exam hall or start buying the furniture before the floor plans and colour schemes have been decided.

To us, building a website or online product is the same.

Prototypes in Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks, etc. are good and provide a visually appealing graphic to share and comment on, but they tend to take a long time to create. What is required is a very simple way to drag and drop elements on to a page, work out what each input box, paragraph and label represents and how much screen real estate is available.

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“The Smarta 100 is a collection of the most exciting, promising and disruptive new businesses in Britain, and the 2010 list has just been announced today.”

Parkatmyhouse has been named as one of the 100, as selected by judges Deborah Meaden, of Dragons’ Den, Bebo co-founder Michael Birch, Smarta CEO Shaa Waasmund, plumbing magnate Charlie Mullins, and Coffee Republic co-founder Sahar Hasemi.

You can access a full list of the winners and some additional background information by visiting the Smarta Top 100 website.

Also a big congratulations to all the other 99 companies!

This is not a proper blog post, but more of a status update.

While we prepare to show off some of the new features we have been busy building over the past few months, I wanted to reassure you all that we are still promoting Parkatmyhouse both online and offline (including a great article in the Daily Telegraph’s travel section yesterday.)

More information to follow soon… I promise!

I don’t normally write in depth technical information on this blog but I thought now was the perfect opportunity to document a list of changes that have recently been made to the way the ParkatmyHouse website operates.

For the past three years I have been promoting ParkatmyHouse.com rather than just ParkatmyHouse for the simple reason that we didn’t actually own the parkatmyhouse.co.uk domain. Someone had registered it just a month before I thought of the name and I was under the naive impression that I could offer a token amount to acquire the domain in the future.

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Over the past couple of years, reading the feedback exchanged between ParkatmyHouse.com members has provided an interesting insight in to the relationships between drivers and parking space owners.

“This was my first experience of ParkAtMyHouse, and it was a very good, very easy one. The owner of the land was available, friendly and helpful – AND I got prayed for. Excellent! Thanks” – Parked near Kings Cross

Definitely one of the benefits of parking in a church car park!

“really excellent, would def book again if i’m up that way. VERY helpful! told us quickest way to get to stadium and let us use toilet before and after the concert.” - Parked near Wembley Stadium

This is a great example of how adding some additional facilities and advice can make the difference between a happy customer who would go out of their way to leave positive feedback over another who may not be willing to take the time to leave a comment.

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