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In-car GPS vendors are starting to integrate real-time traffic data into their route finding/planning — rather than taking the shortest route, the GSP tries to take traffic into account.  In the US, many cities, counties, & states now collect traffic data, and display this data on their own websites.  But for GPS companies, hooking into all these various sources is initally expensive, and then continues to be expensive to maintain.  And where the city/state/county does not collect this data, there is simply no source of traffic information.

TomTom is trying out an interesting new source of traffic data — partner with a cell phone company (Vodaphone) to get anonymous phone usage statistics.  If the phone company sees an unusually large number of cell phones near freeways, that's a good indicator of unusually bad traffic.  By partnering with Vodaphone, TomTom can get these anonymous stats from Vodaphone to make better route suggestions.  TomTom is calling this service "High Definition Traffic (HD Traffic)".

This is intially a trial in the Netherlands only.  If it works well, they will try more Eurpoean countries, and then try to partner with US cell phone companies.  If this works, it gives TomTom fewer different sources to integrate with — only once per cell phone company, rather than once per city/county/state.  It will also work in areas where the city/county/state does not collect real-time traffic data, or else does not make that data available.

I just uploaded a Greasemonkey script for Firefox to add "missing" links to Netflix pages to include or exclude rated or added movies. Give it a try. Leave comments on the the userscripts.org page, or send me an email.

Web-sites like Amazon and Wikipedia have been leveraging the value of community-provide content for years. With all the GPS devices on the road, it seems like map data providers could find a way to collect community-provided map updates from these users.

It looks like TomTom & TeleAtlas "get it" around community-provided map data. TomTom's recently announced "Map Share" system and their proposed acquisition of TeleAtlas will be a powerful combination.

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Below is an excerpt from a Slashdot comment on a July 18 thread about Comcast:

The key to working with Comcast is to have some basic technical knowledge of cable internet. Once you show you know the lingo and you know the basic technical aspects, you'll either get the support person to "talk up" to your level immediately or switch you to someone that knows. Most support people have at least heard some of the terminology, usually enough to know if they're in over their head and need to route you to someone else.

For example, if you buy your own modem, NEVER say "I need my new modem INSTALLED." Say "I need my new modem PROVISIONED". 95% of the support people will know right away what you need and won't bother asking you about Windows and you'll be online 15 minutes later.

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(from ACM TechNews, July 11 2007)

Carnegie Mellon University computer graphics researchers have developed systems for editing and altering photographs that automatically find images that fit with the original photo. The systems create well-blended images with minimal user skills, unlike traditional photo editing that can require a significant amount of skill. "We are able to leverage the huge amounts of visual information available on the Internet to find images that make the best fit," says assistant professor of computer science and robotics Alexei A. Efros. "It's not applicable for all photo editing, such as when an image of a specific object or person is added to a photo. But it's good enough in many cases." One system, called Photo Clip Art, uses images from the Web site LabelMe, which has thousands of labeled images, to add images to photos. For example, a picture of an empty street may be filled with images of people, vehicles, and even parking meters. To make the resulting picture as realistic as possible, the image analyzes the original photo to determine camera angle and lighting conditions. Then the system looks in the clip art library for appropriate images that fit the dimensions. The other system, called Scene Completion, uses millions of photos from the Web site Flickr to fill in holes in photos. Frequently, photo editors try to fill in the hole with a section from the same picture, but Efros says a better match can be found in a different photo. Efros and his colleagues will present papers on the two systems at the ACM SIGGRAPH annual conference, Aug. 5-9 in San Diego.