Welcome to the 3rd and final part of this special recording of Technorection – The Edge of Oblivion.
At this point, we’ve listened into an interview style conversation between my business partner Daniel and I. We spoke about the origin of our parking management business Afropark – the highs and lows and where we currently find ourselves – facing our biggest challenge yet sparked off by Covid-19. It feels as though we are standing on the edge of oblivion as a company – is this the end? Or is this the beginning? perhaps it’s both.
This leaves us with the last and most important questions – how and more profoundly, why do we plan to not just navigate this but turn it into an opportunity.
Episode Timeline
Centinel with a C
In 2019 we built a crude prototype of a system that we designed to automate much of how we did our business. it was already in the works but accelerated by Covid. We call it Centinel – spelled with a “C”. Centinel is meant to be the main intervention that drives our turn around.
Honestly, at the moment It’s a Frankensteinish combination of hardware and specialized image recognition software. We are currently in the process of refining it for commercialization and we spoke about the fact that even though automation would lower operational costs significantly, basically creating a new business model – future ready and covid-proof, automating our business is also frustratingly expensive as you’ll hear – with high set up costs per client site and surprisingly high ongoing software costs. Not to mention the costs to support all this new Parking Management Automation technology.
All of this without any sales or guarantee of revenue, like a contract or 100 leases. Building a system without a customer feels a bit like putting the cart before the horse. This really put into question how on earth we would make money on this new system in the short – term.