august 2009 archives

Monday, August 31, 2009

Crowdsourcing traffic information

What is the crowd in crowdsourcing? Are you asking a crowd of people to contribute to your crowdsourcing initiative, or are their devices contributing without any human intervention? That's more or less the bottom-line of the argument that Waze brings up in its comment on Google's initiative to crowdsource traffic information. Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road.

Last week, Google announced that it's now leveraging the wide adoption of the Google Maps for Mobile application to create traffic information by crowdsourcing. Users simply switch on the application for their mobile phones to anonymously send out its location back to Google. Google processes the data and returns traffic information back to Google Maps and Google Maps for Mobile: there's little effort for each user, but a big benefit for all!

The people versus devices distinction seems a bit like nitpicking to me. Would Last.fm not be a social music website anymore, as it uses Scrobbler to automatically record details of all the songs users listen to online or on iPods? But, hey, what would you do if only 3 weeks after you have released your iPhone app and revamped your website Google enters your area of business?

I'm sure there's more to come as well. Although TrafficCast will supply traffic information to TomTom to kick-start its HD Traffic service, TomTom also makes use of the location information sourced from its connected sat-nav devices, and probably soon from its iPhone application as well. Another one to watch will be RIM of course, who have recently acquired Dash.  permanent link for this entry