SmartPhlow cellphone app tracks traffic
posted May 4th 2005 3:00AM
Microsoft's Adaptive Systems & Interaction (ASI) reseach group
has cooked up a little app called SmartPhlow that tries to make masses of traffic data usable on a cellphone (see the
bottom of page two of the link below). SmartPhlow currently gets data from the Washington State Department of
Transportation and breaks it up into into more manageable chunks of information that can be viewed on a cellphone
display. To make it usable, the app maps a 3-by-3 grid onto the traffic map, corresponding with your cellphone's
keypad. Press 3 and you'll zoom in on that section; pressing 0 gives you a niftly flyover. It's not commercially
available yet (no surprise there) but it has recently been licenced to Seattle-based tech start-up Inrix.
[Via Pasta and
Vinegar]
And I see Bill Gates' house is right in the center. Glad to see Mercer Island on there though.
Sprint has a similar program on their Vision enabled phones called Rand McNally Traffic ($3.99/month). It looks VerY like the program Microsoft's SmartPhlow. I've been using my traffic guide for several months now, pretty handy. Its very detailed and can be used as sort of a road map when zoomed in to street level.