Google has launched Open Spot, a new app aimed at helping “driving users” to find and share parking spots.

How does it work? It is very easy: users update a map when they are leaving their parking spots, thus enabling other drivers who are looking for a parking spot in the same area to quickly find one.

You just need to use your phone. The app pulls up a Google map close to the user’s location and displays open parking spots within an area of 1.5km/0.9 mile radius. You could signal as available your parking spot when you are leaving… And when you are hopelessly looking for a spot to get to the shopping mall before the closing or to be on time with your dentist… you can hope that available spots have been signaled in the map by other users!

Spots are differently colored according to how much time has passed since they have been signaled…  You could thereby choose the “fresher” one. However, after twenty minutes they disappear off the map. Indeed, it was already suggested that the system would be even more helpful if there was a way for users to confirm that they have “taken” a spot.

Open Spot is a great idea: a system relying on cooperation to save time and avoiding stress of driving users. It also has a great environmental value as it could help in saving gas and thus reducing pollution.

The only problem is that the contribution of this app to improve the parking process within an area would be really effective only whether the system will gain widespread adoption. Otherwise, if you’re one of the only person in the area who uses the app, it will likely be useless.

Let’s start to download the app and try it.. Then we could convince others to join it!

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• Google Launches App to Help You Find Open Parking (http://mashable.com)

• Google Labs launches Android app for finding open parking spots (openspot.googlelabs.com)

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• Open Spot app helps Android users find parking (reviews.cnet.com)

OLEV is the result of an innovative project carried out by engineers from South Korean’s top-ranked KAIST University, who developed a prototype of an electric vehicle system powered by electro-magnetic induction through strips embedded 30 cm under the road surface. This system allows vehicles to run without emitting pollution from fossil fuels and, at the same time, is said to be a solution to the problems with “classic” electric vehicles.

In fact, providing energy from external conduction could solve the flaws connected with the cost, the weight, the inefficiency and the length in the recharge of the batteries, an age-old trouble for electric vehicles’ designers. With the electro-magnetic strips tested until now, OLEV can pick up energy at the stops or at the traffic lights, and a battery of one fifth the size of the normally used ones can enable the vehicle to run for other 50 miles.

Moreover, researchers seem to have succeeded in shielding users from the radiation of electro-magnetic power, and they are then convinced that once the system will be efficiently linked through infrastructures and power plants, buses and public transports in Seoul and other big cities in the world will finally go through a massive revolution. Test runs will be held next year and the Institute hopes to bring the system into commerce by 2013.

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• TreeHugger’s Best of Green Awards 2010: Awarding Excellence in Sustainability (treehugger.com)