Chicago Startup CurbNinja Crowdsources Motorcycle Parking

Chicago Startup CurbNinja launched this month aiming to make parking your motorcycle/scooter easier than it usually is for city riders.

CurbNinja founders (and avid motorcyclists) Fred Lebed and Tim Hines were constantly frustrated with finding a decent place to park their rides and like all good entrepreneurs, created a solution to their problem.

“Living in the city, you learn where all of the best places to stash your bike on the street are, especially for free. I found myself taking pictures of my bike in these spots to thwart possible tickets, and then mapping them for personal use. Before I knew it, I had all my favorite spots plotted in a single summer,” said Hines.  “CurbNinja was born out of that mapping idea. We created the ability for users to share these spots with millions of riders across the country in turn saving them the hassles of city parking.”

To get the personal pitch from the founders, check out the video below- more after the jump.

CurbNinja relies on the power of crowdsourcing to find the best parking spots- users open the app, enter their address and CurbNinja finds the best spot nearest the users location tagged by other CurbNinja users. To make sure there isn’t confusion about the parking spot, users also snap a photo to aid in identifying the parking space. “The best part about CurbNinja is it stops riders from getting smacked with parking tickets while simultaneously allowing riders to help other riders out. It’s fun, it’s easy and it’s free,” said Hines, “and we’ve been pretty excited about the reception we’ve been getting from our early users of the app.” CurbNinja is available in Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store as a free download. More info is also avaialable at CurbNinja’s site