Everyone knows the expression “time is money.” Starting in a few weeks, Fare/Share will be helping New Yorkers save a lot of both, launching a new mobile application that helps taxi riders in close proximity share a cab in the city. The new technology is free and should hit Apple’s app store in a few weeks.
According to Fare/Share's analysis of numbers provided by the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission, 69% of cab rides transport single patrons, while one in four cab rides within the city could potentially be shared. For increased safety, Fare/Share allows users to rate travelling companions after each trip (dubbed “Fareness”) and offers gender-specific riding requests.
Additionally, the technology helps divide the cab cost based on the distance travelled by each rider, suggesting payment amounts that make sure riders don’t end up paying for the few extra blocks travelled by their companions.
(If you’re like me, and immediately longed for similar technology that could simplify splitting the bill at dinner—again saving time and money—then great news: there’s an app for that too!)
Ever see a pothole or a tree that's fallen in the road and think, "Someone ought to fix that"?
Well, if you're in Washington, DC, you're in luck. All you need to do is snap a photo with your PDA and using the city's DC 311 mobile app, pair it with a GPS location. You then upload it into a local government database. This also works for graffiti, broken parking meters and any other public nuisance.
Other cities from New York to San Francisco have also moved to harness the power of mobile consumers. The practical result, as CNN reports is that:
[T]ech geeks transform banal local government spreadsheets about train schedules, complaint systems, potholes, street lamp repairs and city garbage into useful applications for mobile phones and the Web. The aim is to let citizens report problems to their governments more easily and accurately; and to put public information, which otherwise may be buried in file cabinets and Excel files, at the fingertips of taxpayers.
San Francisco and other cities are trying to develop a national standard for municipal government data. That way, a mobile app that tracks, say, bus service in San Francisco could also be used in any other city. That could enable cities that cannot afford to develop their own mobile apps to benefit.
According to a Reuters story this week, three weeks ago, New Yorker Carol Kasyjanski became the world's first recipient of a wireless pacemaker. The device communicates at least daily with a home monitoring system that
routes vital signs to her doctor. The result:
"When Kasyjanski heads to St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, New York, for a routine check-up, about 90 percent of the work has already been done because her doctor logged into his computer and learned most of what he needed to know about his patient."
As remarkable as this technology is, the real advantage will be when the use of wireless technology expands to include monitoring of other diseases. As Ms. Kasyjanski's doctor told Reuters: "There are literally dozens of physiological parameters that now, with this wireless technology, we can leverage for the future of monitoring. So it is not just a rhythm monitor but a disease monitor."
With Congress and the White House debating improvements to our healthcare system, examples such as Ms. Kasyjanski's show how wireless technology not only improves healthcare quality but also its efficiency.
A coalition of
state and national officials including New York City Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg, has devised a way for New
York City to cut taxpayer costs, stimulate the local
economy, and create jobs. The group says the implementation of new technology
will allow water meters to be read wirelessly and will help individuals and
businesses save millions of dollars each year simply by raising customer
awareness.
Wireless water
meters will enable more frequent and accurate readings of water usage, allowing
customers to identify and cut out any wasted spending. Experts hope that the
estimated 90 million dollar a year savings, based on a ‘modest 5-10 percent
reduction in water use' will be recycled into the local economy.
"This program is
the first in a series of initiatives leveraging this state-of-the-art network
on a citywide scale, creating significant cost savings for taxpayers and
agencies alike." - Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication
Commissioner Paul J. Cosgrave
The new
technology will use radio signals to report water use every six hours. Usage
and costs can be tracked by individuals or businesses online, helping to
identify leaks and waste more readily. The switch over to wireless water meters
will cost the city an estimated $250 million dollars, and the installation will
be free of charge to property owners.
While New York City
is currently the largest city in the world to embrace this technology other
cities like Tallahassee
are also using smart-metering programs for utility customers. If
successful, it is likely more cities will be implementing similar digital
monitoring systems
Robert Scoble recently blogged about his take-aways from SXSW 2009. South by Southwest Interactive is a yearly "festival" for tech enthusiasts and bloggers to network, share best practices, and discuss what is hot in the interactive sector. In Scoble's opinion, it was all about SMS and location this year.
Some folks are probably wondering why I'm covering this news or what's the big deal about these perspectives from Austin. Well, two years ago, a little micro-blogging service called Twitter essentially took off after the festival. I was covering a telecom conference shortly after SXSW and all the buzz was about Twitter. Accordingly, I joined the service back then. Fast forward to today and almost everyone's on it and it is the social network with the most impressive acceleration in growth.
With that in mind, I see huge growth opportunities in the mobile space as we move from navigation to awareness. In some cases, some mobile applications are incorporating location into their products. For instance, when I live stream with Qik, I have the immediate option to opt-in my location for other Qik users to know where I am and Google maps has now synced in Latitute. Scoble mentioned Foursquare being the hot product at SXSW but I haven't had the opportunity to demo it. Specifically, Foursquare is an application "that helps you keep up with your friends, but exposes you to new things and challenges you to explore cities in different ways."
In any case, I look forward to exploring more apps and products in this space. I believe that Scoble's insights from Austin are on the mark and this sector is going to get really hot.
It is hard to believe but another CTIA show is around the corner. As always, I'm excited to attend this year's show and demo the latest in mobile technology in Las Vegas.
As you know, we are very excited about all of the apps and ways you can share your life with your family and friends via mobile. Some of these applications require not only stronger networks but the capacity to deliver the experience that consumers want when utilizing such a service (for instance, live streaming via wireless). Accordingly, future spectrum policy is going to be extremely vital and the government must make sure that adequate spectrum is in the pipeline for service providers to be able to handle adoption of these unique applications that are here and on the horizon.
With that in mind, here's one panel at the seminar that looks to address and discuss the demand for more spectrum:
Panel IV: Satisfying Demand: Sources for More Spectrum and Processes for Obtaining
4:15 pm – 5:20 pm
This panel will discuss likely sources for more commercial mobile
spectrum in the United States, the types of formal and informal
processes that can help identify and then make such spectrum available
for commercial use, lessons learned from the AWS clearing process and
other issues that must be considered to expedite the process and avoid
another 12 year gap in spectrum allocation.
Panelists:
Julius Knapp, Office of Engineering and Technology, Federal Communications Commission (Invited) Larry Irving, President, Irving Information Group Dale Hatfield, Adjunct Professor, Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder David Taylor, CEO, Capitol Solutions Michael Calabrese, Director, Wireless Futures Program, New America Foundation Ambassador Janice Obuchowski, Founder, Freedom Technologies
Look forward to seeing you in Vegas and stayed tuned for some more 411 about the show!
Thanks to mobile technology, personal safety on one college campus is taking a large step forward:
Next semester, college students in Oswego will be the first in the state university system to try out a new security tool that can connect them to university police with the touch of a button on their cell phones.
In November, the State University College at Oswego unveiled the first phase of Rave Guardian. Cynthia Adam, the chief of university police at Oswego State, said the response from students has been overwhelming. "Ninety-eight percent of our students and about the same number of faculty, carry cell phones, so, for us, it made much more sense to use that technology as a personal safety device."
The new system lets students input their photo, mobile phone number and other personal information on a secure website. That information is then immediately accessible to campus police when a student speeddials into the office.
Beginning next year, SUNY hopes to expand this system to include GPS data, which would help find the emergency location.
So, is your college or university doing something similar? Drop us an email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) or send us a link. We're interested.
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Tags: Applications, Smartphone, Wireless Innovation, NY