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more on Finns Find Traffic Jams With Cell Phones
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 20:07:20 -0400
------ Forwarded Message From: "Joseph C. Pistritto" <jcp () jcphome com> Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 16:40:02 -0700 To: dave () farber net Cc: the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow <geoff () iconia com> Subject: Re: [IP] Finns Find Traffic Jams With Cell Phones You know, I helped a bunch of people start a now-dead company (Tsola.Com), which was designed to use road sensors (eventually cell phones, but we were too far from E911 deployment back then to consider that), to turn this into a useful service. Too far ahead of its time. The interesting thing is that *no one else* has done anything with the idea either since then. (We had a website where you typed in your route (or spoke it in over the phone), and it computed your best route and using real time traffic data, predicted your travel time. Then it would take an appointment in your calendar, and "back up" the time you had to leave where you were to get to your next appointment, based on what traffic was doing *right now*). They're a study like this in the bay area but using "Fastrak" tokens as the sensor devices (those are the automatic toll plates that Caltrans hands out for using the special automatic lanes in the toll bridges around the Bay. They even sent me some mylar bags to put my "Fastrak" tokens in if i don't want to participate.) This proved *way* top far ahead of it's time. We did get about $8M into the company, (some of which was my ill gotten gains from another dot bomb venture...) but no carriers were buying... -jcp- ------ End of Forwarded Message ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- more on Finns Find Traffic Jams With Cell Phones Dave Farber (Jul 08)