August 28, 2009

Watch out, Aha, Waze and TrafficTweet, you are up against a big boy now. Google has gotten into crowd-sourced traffic reporting.

Crowd-sourcing is the hot category in traffic and navigation. A crowdsourced network gathers reports from drivers themselves, which means that even on smaller side roads, where there are no road sensors and where Metro Traffic seldom treads, tie-ups will be reported.

With some apps, like Traffic Tweet, the reports go out only when a driver sends one. In the case of Waze and Google, an anonymous signal from the phone is monitored, providing always-on reporting. Aha is an amalgam of the two, using both passive monitoring while also allowing drivers to record verbal reports that are sent out to the network.

These apps pick up where a company called Dash Navigation left off. Dash made a standalone dash-top GPS that reported traffic jams to other units in its network. The company didn’t get enough subscribers to prove its worth before it stopped selling the boxes. Nokia picked up the gauntlet with the Millennium Project, a plan to create a traffic reporting function for its phones.

But these new apps have sped past Nokia, whose Millennium Project is still in a limited trial phase, and brought the traffic reporting to the phone now.

To use the Google traffic function, just go into Google Maps and set the map mode for “traffic.” You’ll see green lines for streets that are clear, yellow for medium congestion, red for heavy congestion, and a red with black dashes for stop and go.

Source:-http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com