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Have you ever been stuck circling the block waiting for a parking space to open up? The new ParkCirca space-sharing service might make that a thing of the past. Co-founder and CEO Chadwick Meyer told me how he was fruitlessly hunting for a space when he noticed how many private driveways had no cars in them. Why not let the driveway owners make some money from them, and save stress (and gas) for the drivers at the same time?

That's exactly what ParkCirca sets out to do. Driveway owners register when their space will be free and how much they want to charge. Drivers can then use an iPhone application to find available spots near their destination, and book them for the time they need. A typical charge might be $2 an hour, in which case an owner with a space available for just eight hours every week day could make up to $320 a month, without losing a place to park in the evenings or weekends.

Mike Kuniavsky from ThingM Corporation spoke this morning at ETech about merging machine-readable identification with pervasive networking. Kuniavsky said that when a digital representation of an object is accessed through a unique ID, it is the object's "information shadow". Nowadays, he said, these information shadows are attached to just about everything. One of the consequences of this is that the physical object changes to a service. This is another manifestation of the bigger trend of internet connected objects. Kuniavsky outlined a couple of examples of objects as a service in his presentation.