Items tagged with Traffic
With less than two work days remaining until the start of the long Memorial Day weekend, many minds are turning to thoughts having nothing at all to do with work... loved ones lost to service or currently serving, barbecue, baseball, hanging at the beach or pool, that first donning of white pants and shoes after a long winter in storage... and traffic. One of the most road-traveled weekends of this or any year in the USA, many of those who will be behind the wheel over Memorial Day weekend will go so far as to work out time lost to traffic in their planning. All of which serves to make Google's latest update to Google Maps quite compelling. Yesterday, Google announced...
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The internet is a big place. Nay, a huge place. In fact, it's difficult to wrap your mind around just how vast the global Web is, and how fast it's growing on a daily basis. There's no sign of that steam slowing down, and while Google is a relative newcomer to the Internet as we know it, it has done an exceptional job of taking over. Deepfield is reporting that Google has quietly broken an Internet record in the past few weeks. Based on measurements of end device and user audience share, Google is now bigger than Facebook, Netflix and Twitter combined. In other words, 60% of all Internet end devices/users exchange traffic with Google servers during the course of an average day. This analysis...
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If there's one thing we can all agree on, it's this: there just aren't enough hours in the day. But if there's another, it's this: traffic bites. But as technology matures, it's slowly but surely becoming ever easier to dodge the traffic jams that annoy us so. TomTom had the first major third-party navigation app out on iOS, and today it remains a solid choice -- particularly for those looking for options that work in various countries. This week, the company issued a pretty major update -- version 1.8 -- which brings TomTom HD Traffic compatibility. With the update, iOS navigators will have the ability to reach their destination faster, as TomTom HD Traffic provides the most accurate traffic...
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Need to know exactly where your bus is? Who doesn't, right? Google, in typical fashion, has just made one of life's chores even easier. Starting now, Google Maps for mobile and desktop is capable is telling you when your bus is actually going to arrive, courtesy of live transit updates. The company has partnered with transit agencies to integrate live transit data in four U.S. cities and two European cities: Boston, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, Madrid and Turin. They're already making strides in telling folks when mass transit options are going to be late or on time, and the bus is the next logical piece of the puzzle. When you click on a transit station or plan a transit route with...
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Traffic's a huge pain, is it not? Anyone who has to dodge traffic jams on a daily or weekly basis is undoubtedly tired of it, and so is TomTom. Thankfully, a GPS company wants to work with you on making your life easier. The company has just announced that TomTom HD Traffic Service is now available on every single TomTom LIVE GPS unit. That means that LIVE (a connected GPS unit) owners will receive valuable access to up-to-date traffic information as it happens, enabling their system to dodge upcoming jams and get them to their location more efficiently. Until now, TomTom HD Traffic was only available on the recently released GO 2535 M LIVE, so owners of the other LIVE units have to be celebrating....
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What exactly is IBM, these days? Since dropping the ThinkPad line off at the doorstep of Lenovo, the company has strayed from the consumer realm. These days, they're focusing mostly on services and enterprise, not to mention a little thing by the name of Watson. But the company has made sure to make one thing very clear: they're out to make a smarter planet. And smarter means safer. IBM has joined with Caltrans and UC Berkeley in order to help commuters avoid congested roadways. The collaborative effort aims to help people avoid congestion before they get to it, and to better understand, predict and manage traffic flow. The highlight is a new predictive modeling tool that will let drivers quickly...
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Traffic. Just the mention of the word makes some city folk cringe, and for most everyone, it turns a good day into a bad one. It's a dreadful thing, and it's something that some people have to deal with on a daily basis. But technology has been coming to the rescue lately, with many personal navigation devices adding real-time traffic alerts to keep motorists from falling into nasty log-jams that are near impossible to escape. Google is a bit behind when it comes to that, but when the app is free, who could complain? Google Maps 5.2.1 introduces a killer new feature: real-time traffic alerts. The new version of the app has the ability to route users around traffic, and with over 35 million miles...
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Invest in one of Magellan's new 2010 RoadMate navigators and you'll never have to worry about being caught off guard by a traffic jam again. That's because, for the first time, Magellan is throwing in Free Lifetime Live Traffic, a service that keeps the RoadMate up to date with the latest traffic conditions so you can find an alternate route if need be. Each 2010 MAgellan RoadMate also come with the company's exclusive OneTouch personalization feature allowing you to save favorite destinations, categories, and searches. All units also include spoken street names, 6 million points of interest, QuickSpell for error-free address entry, and multi-destination routing, as well as an Automatic Parking...
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Cydle, one of South Korea's biggest electronics makers, plans to make a big splash at the 2010 CES trade show with the announcement of a portable GPS system that has built-in HD Radio and free HD live traffic updates. The new T43H from Cydle is part of the company's line of wireless digital devices that combine navigation with entertainment, offering GPS, Live HD traffic updates, HD Radio, rich multimedia, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, black box, mobile TV, and more. “The car should be a haven,” said Woody Lee, U.S. director of sales, Cydle. “Whether a driver needs accurate traffic information and alternate routes to get somewhere on time, wants to watch a video of his or her family while on a business trip,...
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Oh great, this again? The awful aftertaste from Comcast's data meddling still hasn't completely vanished, and now we're being hit with yet another cable company attempting to grab hold of customer Internet traffic.As the battle over net neutrality rages on in Washington, Cox Communications has opened the flood gates for criticism by announcing that it will soon be "trying out a new way to keep its subscribers' Internet traffic from jamming up." Which, after being stripped of sugarcoating, translates to "giving priority to certain kinds of Internet traffic." Beginning on February 9th in certain (unlucky) sections of Kansas and Arkansas, Cox will "give priority to Internet traffic it judges to...
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Los Angeles has a love affair with car chases on TV. But delivering traffic cam footage to your cell phone? That's the idea behind FreeTrafficCams.com, which has rolled out its product in a few cities across the country. From the list of their upcoming cities, they're definitely in the "expansion" mode.Starting Tuesday, people with the right phones can download the application, then click and pick from more than 270 cameras aimed at the city's streets and highways to view.By "right phones," by the way, we don't mean the iPhone. That version is coming this summer, 3rd Dimension spokesman Rob Manfredo said. Some of the cameras will show still pictures and update them often, while others will show...
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Pirate Bay has announced plans to Danish ISP Tele2 over their court ordered block of their web site that began in February. Pirate Bay set up a sister site with trackers called The Jesper Bay to prove just how ineffectual the block was, and as a result the block was more or less an exercise in futility.“The court case was initiated by the IFPI - the infamous anti-piracy organization that represents the recording industry. The IFPI later tried to use the “landmark decision” to force Swedish ISPs to do the same, but failed. In fact, it seems that filtering traffic to The Pirate Bay is actually illegal according to European law.”Pirate Bay claims that if they win damages from the case, they...
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In a move that runs counter to the very concept of Net Neutrality - that all data is treated the same - the Associated Press has found, and confirmed with tests, that Comcast blocks attempts by users to share files online.The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent...
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Today Comcast today responded to reports by the blog Torrentfreak, which we posted a few days ago. In that article, it was reported that users were experiencing slowdowns and even dropped transfers, and that Comcast was the culprit. Over the past few days, these claims have been widely circulated throughout the Web. But when I spoke to Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas earlier today, he flat-out denied that the company was filtering or "shaping" any traffic on its network. He said the company doesn't actively look at the applications or content that its customers download over the network. But Comcast does reserve the right to cut off service to customers who abuse the network by using...
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We probably all remember the days when a little program called Kazaa became super popular thanks to its keen ability to find music, movies, and other plunder. In fact, Internet traffic was governed by P2P for four years. However, this year HTTP traffic took the lead and has ended the P2P dominance over Internet traffic. The circle graph in the picture shows HTTP in blue and P2P in red. "Ellacoya Networks, makers of deep packet inspection gear for carriers, has pulled together some statistics on one million broadband users in North America, and its findings show that HTTP traffic accounts for 46 percent of all broadband traffic. P2P applications now account for only 37 percent." Researchers...
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