Offthegrid's dashboard

Years ago Google bought a company called Zip Dash and that took gps probe data from Nextel phones and formulated traffic data. They have added data from other sources since then.

Its been in the media several times how Google gets their data. They use two vendors plus their own probes from Gmaps mobile users and fuse the data together. Whether they still use Nextel gps probe data through the original ZipDash arrangement is not clear.

The two vendors are TrafficCast which uses data sources similar to Inrix and is also used by TomTom/Yahoo Maps and AirSage which takes cell phone traces from 36 million Sprint phones and soon from 90 million Verizon phones.

Googles coverage is as good or better than anyone else's, number one because Inrix refuses to show what its Traffic Fusion coverage actually is (there is no detailed map on the Inrix website detailing Traffic Fusion coverage just stating 800,000 miles or whether than means one way or if its a doubled up number) and number 2 because outside of that the only other vendors with secondary road coverage at this time Airsage and TrafficCast contribute to the Google data. They clearly have more data sources than Inrix and they give the data results away.

I don't believe an independent study has been made yet on the accuracy of the coverage of these two traffic providers so till then we have only anecdotal evidence.

From my observations the data is usually spot on and the coverage itself is incredible. They road coverage in my area is certainly not 'dismal'. They cover all the primary and secondary roads plus some very small roads.

Obviously this is a threat to a business model that charges for traffic data so this response below was not unexpected. When I had a Dash gps Mistelle stated in an interview that their Dash feed was two way enabling them to use our paid service towards theirs and Dash subsequently denied that and Inrix would not comment further afterwards so I take what he says with a grain of salt.

Bryan Mistele, CEO of the Seattle-based company told GPS Business News in an email: “fundamentally Google is not a traffic company and has demonstrated in the past that it does not understand the complexity of real-time traffic information. Painting colors on a traffic map is easy to do, however at the end of the day, accuracy of the traffic information itself is what really matters. Google’s fusing of location data from Android phones with inaccurate and obsolete historical data from TrafficCast and untested cellular network data from AirSage does not provide accurate information that consumers and businesses can trust to make commuting decisions.” " – Offthegrid, on September 27, 2009 16:52

The new version of Chrome had some extension related changes obviously not too well thought out.

I copied bookmarks, cookies and webdata from Chrome uninstalled it and installed the latest Chromium which isn't crashing.

This is an updater which downloads the latest Chromium.

http://forums.tlokzz.com/downloads.ph...

Just a word of warning, lots of problems with the latest dev update, mine crashed continuously. I went back to Chromium.

This would be why Brian Mistelle blew a gasket when being interviewed and the Google traffic/crowd souring/secondary traffic came up.

I'd love to do it, but INRIX still makes money by selling traffic data to customers - and our high-quality arterial coverage still demands a premium. – Offthegrid, on September 10, 2009 23:09

I installed the latest nightly build for Chromium just now and w/o --enable-extensions downloaded the XMarks extension and it synced up right away. I believe all the dev versions of Chrome will now run extensions out of the box now w/o the instruction to enable also.

Nice work hopefully you can add passwords soon.

Working great here now Thanks

No luck here. The main pop up never says logged in. The app bounces up every once in awhile to say its still working on something. The wizard though does make it look like I have logged in but there is nothing after that.

I have 4.0.206.1 and just installed xmarks and I can't login either.

Last Friday I was able to reverify Twitter and its been cooking ever since, texts have been instantaneous.

I have also solved the Google Calendar reminder problem by creating a filter that forwards any gmail from Gcal to my Live/Hotmail address. I then created a filter that texts me when I receive an email from Gcal. I get the sms text message at the same time I set the calendar event up so there is no delay.

TomTom HD Traffic is only set up to work with Vodafone in the Netherlands at this time as far as I know.