[IP] more on Finns Find Traffic Jams With Cell Phones

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ 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

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