Hey everybody, thanks for helping me get home so fast--the service everyone helps provide!

Here's a cool new consumer product based on state-of-the-art technology.

A few weeks ago I decided to replace the GPS system in my vehicle and was--by the Best Buy sale price going on at the time--able to buy a Garmin GPS unit that boasted traffic control for what I considered to be a very reasonable premium.  This model--the package claimed and the sales assistant verified--was one that ostensibly offered to automatically alert me to where and when traffic jams occurred--and then, if you were prepared to believe it--re-route me to a different road that would save me time and hassle of being stuck in a slow moving parking lot.  

Wow, I thought...how cool is that!  So I bought the new device, but wondered all the while how Garmin--and Garmin's nifty little device--was able to, first determine--anywhere I might be driving--exactly where there's a traffic problem and, then, alert me in good time how to avoid it, and, finally, re-direct me to a alternate route that circumvented the problem in the first place.  

How does it know what's ahead down the road?  

I wondered if they had electronic devices everywhere I went?  Helicopters that hovered overhead?  Hose meters that ran across all the roads I traveled?  Little people who hid in the bushes?  Well, I sort of knew that none of those theories actually explained how the technology functioned, but it wasn't until someone told me that I learned how it worked.  And that's when I learned that was you--yes you the reader--who made the device I bought at Best Buy work so ingeniously for me--and [are you ready for this?] I'm the one who makes the device you have in your car work for you! 

The technique is called crowdsourcing, and here's how the traffic service on my Garmin GPS is so "smart": in a very literal sense, the GPS traffic system doesn't keep track of the speed of cars moving--or in the case of a traffic jam, not moving--down the freeway to determine if traffic has come to a slow-down or halt.  Instead, it gauges the speed of cell phones moving down the road; yes, cell phones!  

It's both easier and more complicated that I suspected.

Here's how that works:  All cell phones in the world that are turned on are in constant contact with at least two relay towers and, thus, a cell phone is constantly approaching one tower and leaving behind another, permitting an algorithmic approach that continuously calculates the "speed" of each car--I mean cell phone--as it moves down the road, anytime, anywhere in the world!  Collected in anonymous aggregation, the data from these signals allows entirely new technology-based enterprises to collect, package, and then sell this information to Garmin GPS owners, Google customers, other cell phone users and businesses!  Thus, in a technical sense, traffic is measured continuously in real-time, not so much in terms of how fast--or slow--cars are traveling or stalled, but cell phones traveling--or not--down the highway!

It turns out that today there are an increasing number of traffic information services, one of which would be Intrix, a company that provides crowdsourcing-based information to businesses and consumers.  Obviously, cell phone service providers are the repositories of the source data, but other firms are needed to take that data and turn it into usable forms for end-users--drivers like you, me, and traffic-based businesses. With the right technology, you and I can know--while we're driving--what the traffic is like ahead and where it's better if trouble is shown by the current speed of cars--I mean, cell phones--just beyond where we might be!

If you think about it, crowdsourcing is all around us.  

You might be familiar with other more common and less complex forms of crowdsourcing, like those associated with product review ratings [think Best Buy], movie recommendations [think Netflix], youtube.com [think star ratings], wikipedia, and book referrals [think Amazon].  But in each of those instances, individual must consciously offer their input; but in the case of traffic data, it's all implicit and involuntary--and that's what I'm appreciate of...you're making it possible for the little nifty Garmin device in my auto to help make it possible for me to each day get to the office and home again with a minimum of aggravation. 

If your interested...here's a three-minute primer on the background and implications of other aspects of crowdsourcing in business today--some of which you'll immediate recognize as having been a part of.  

And by the way...thanks for helping to make my driving experiences more pleasant.  I'll return the favor to you...by keeping my cell phone on for you as well!

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