Pull Over and Park

The university is a place of learning, where scholars do research
and impart their wisdom to students through lectures and courses.
But with all those smart people walking around, sometimes great
ideas emerge from the ivory towers of academia that are quite
unrelated to one’s field of study or area of expertise. And, like
all happy accidents, sometimes those are the best ideas.


Take, for example, the current experience of Professor Manos
Chatzopoulos.  


Manos is Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at LSU.
Like a lot of folks on the LSU campus, Professor Chatzopoulos got
fed up trying to find a parking space. Where you and I might
curse in frustration or even pray for a parking spot before we're
late for our appointment, we're not astrophysicists who
specialize in supercomputer simulations of supernovae and massive
stellar evolution. Manos is. So what did he do? He came up with a
parking app.


Park Zen uses smart crowdsourcing to track and connect users with
available parking in their vicinity— right down to the spot. It’s
like a Waze for parking.


Manos is working on marketing Park Zen to organizations with
heavy traffic and parking needs, like college campuses and
shopping malls. 


Manos is not only making life easier for his colleagues and
students on the car-crowded LSU campus, he's also getting noticed
in the entrepreneurial community. The Park Zen app took first
place in the 2022 Baton Rouge Entrepreneur Week Pitch
competition, which earned Manos $100,000.


David Price is the creator of another driving-related invention:
The Safety Pouch. The Safety Pouch is a high-visibility wallet
that a driver can use to present their identification to police
officers during traffic stops.


The brilliance of the bright orange pouch is that it’s easy for a
driver in a traffic stop to grab off the sun visor, snap it on
the open car window and keep their hands in plain sight.


David brought the pouches to market during the ascendancy of the
Black Lives Matter movement. The Safety Pouch is aimed at
demonstrating cooperation and cutting down on dangerous,
sometimes deadly, misunderstandings.


Entrepreneurially, it was the right idea at the right time and it
took off. In the fall of 2021, David successfully pitched Walmart
on his product, which ordered 15,000 pouches and now sell it in
400 stores - while David was still a college student at Loyola!


Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the
Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Erik Otts at
itsbatonrouge.la.


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