wahlau's online hut

i was watching the tv a few days ago, and saw this interesting not-so-new news - Tom Tom, the leading navigation system company released a new product/system end of last year. The system is able to process traffic jam information, based on the anonymous mobile phone information collected in different base stations. The press release can be read here.

I personally find the idea good and interesting. If in a city where every driver owns at least 1 cellphone (some already have 2 GSM units running, one in the cellphone, one in their cars), the number of cellphone connected to a specific base station can be a useful information. In similar way Tom Tom developed the system to analyse the density of connected cellphones and then send the analysed information to Tom Tom customers, once traffic jam, for example, took place in certain place. This is theoretically possible - if cellphone movements are slow, it is highly possible that the cars are moving slowly due to a jam. If this can be detected via base station from the traffic control station, other potential drivers should be warned about it so that they can take another route.

From here one can play around with many parameters, once the data can be used without intruding the privacy of cellphone users. As mentioned in the report,  the cellphone data is kept anonymous. The system does not need to know which cellphone belongs to who. And best of all - no one has to pay for sending the information to the base station. The basestation already knew this, actually. So it is nice to manipulate already existed information to enhance usage... good point.

thoughts: is there any data available and meaningful that can be used for context-aware environment? Maybe we already have enough data flowing around, and we do not need to even create new ones in order to make the environment "make sense". It is high time to analyse and understand where this "hidden" data is, and start using them, the legal and unobtrusive way, of couse.