Results from Android Developer Challenge (round one) were announced last week. Here’s a listing of the top 50 applications:

• AndroidScan - Jeffrey Sharkey
• Beetaun - Sergey Gritsyuk and Dmitri Shipilov
• BioWallet - Jose Luis Huertas Fernandez
• BreadCrumbz - Amos Yoffe
• CallACab - Konrad Huebner and Henning Boeger
• City Slikkers - PoroCity Media and Virtual Logic Systems
• Commandro - Alex Pisarev, Andrey Tapekha
• Cooking Capsules - Mary Ann Cotter and Muthuselvam Ramadoss
• Diggin - Daniel Johansson, Aramis Waernbaum, Andreas Hedin
• Dyno - Virachat Boondharigaputra
• e-ventr - Michael Zitzelsberger
• Eco2go - Taneem Talukdar, Gary Pong, Jeff Kao and Robert Lam
• Em-Radar - Jack Kwok
• fingerprint - Robert Mickle
• FreeFamilyWatch - Navee Technologies LLC
• goCart - Rylan Barnes
• GolfPlay - Inizziativa Networks
• gWalk - Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus ten Hagen, Christian Klinger, Marko Modsching, Rene Scholze
• HandWx - Weathertop Consulting LLC
• IMEasy - Yan Shi
• Jigsaw - Mikhail Ksenzov
• JOYity - Zelfi AG
• LifeAware - Gregory Moore, Aaron L. Obrien, Jawad Akhtar
• Locale - Clare Bayley, Christina Wright, Jasper Lin, Carter Jernigan
• LReady Emergency Manager - Chris Hulls, Dilpreet Singh, Luis Carvalho, Phuong Nguyen
• Marvin - Pontier Laurent
• Mobeedo - Sengaro GmbH
• Multiple Facets Instant Messenger - Virgil Dobjanschi
• MyCloset - Mamoru Tokashiki
• PedNav - RouteMe2 Technologies Inc.
• Phonebook 2.0 - Voxmobili
• PicSay - Eric Wijngaard
• PiggyBack - Christophe Petit and Sebastien Petit
• Pocket Journey - Anthony Stevens and Rosie Pongracz
• Rayfarla - Stephen Oldmeadow
• Safety Net - Michael DeJadon
• SocialMonster - Ben Siu-Lung Hui and Tommy Ng
• SplashPlay
• Sustain- Keeping Your Social Network Alive - Niraj Swami
• SynchroSpot - Shaun Terry
• Talkplay - Sung Suh Park
• Teradesk - José Augusto Athayde Ferrarini
• The Weather Channel for Android - The Weather Channel Interactive Inc.
• TuneWiki - TuneWiki Inc.
• Wikitude-the Mobile Travel Guide - Philipp Breuss
• Writing Pad - ShapeWriter Inc

Meanwhile, Tech Crunch has a Sneak Peak at Android apps out of MIT.

A class at MIT built some mobile apps for Google’s Android operating system and presented them last week. CrunchGear’s Doug Aamoth reports on the seven apps—loco, Flare, GeoLife, Re:public, Locale, Kei, and snap—that he saw.

• Loco

Loco is a mobile social network built on top an Android phone’s contact manager, so anyone in your contacts is already your friend, so to speak. You’ll be able to view and track where your friends are located using Google Maps and real-time geolocation.



So, in essence, you can check out the scene at a few places before you commit to going all the way across town. I’m done with “scenes” since I’m now married, but this would have been cool for College Doug. He was a pretty awesome dude.

• Flare

  Flare is a geolocation tracking system aimed at small business owners who want to keep tabs on their employees. The demonstration given was that of a pizza delivery boy who has five pizzas to deliver. If a couple of customers call up to ask why they haven’t gotten their pizza yet, the delivery guy’s manager can use any web-based system to check out the location of his driver.

  What’s more, he can give an ID number and PIN code to the customers, which the customers can then use to track the pizza guy themselves. Thankfully, that PIN code can be set to expire after a certain amount of time and/or each customer’s specific tracking privileges can be cut off by the manager or the driver himself.

• GeoLife

  GeoLife is basically your to-do list on top of Google Maps. When you get within a certain range of something you need to pick up, it alerts you.

  It also works as a traditional to-do list for things that aren’t location-based. The team that put this together is also working on a route-creation system wherein you could pick a few important items from your list and then have a route plotted out for you to follow that day.

  RE:Public

• I thought that RE:Public was a brilliantly funny idea. It’s basically a location-based social networking service for finding new friends once you get tired of your old ones. You connect locally based on a radius that you feed into the program and meet people based on dovetailing interests.

  The real brilliance lies in the fact that you can rate and tag each friend and the system automatically updates each friend’s score based on how much time you spend near each other. So after a while, you can see who your “top friends” are.

  Tags that are given to people on the network can be voted up and down by other users, so if one person tags me as “jerk”, all my real friends can vote that tag far enough down that it eventually disappears. That, or I’ll find out that my friends actually think I’m a jerk and I can start finding new friends. It’s the circle of life!

• Locale (winner of the Android Project - top 50)

  Locale actually just finished in the top 50 applications for Google’s Android Project competition, so congratulations to the team. Nice work, indeed.

  Locale is a dynamic settings manager. You set up different settings for your phone based on time and location. So when you’re at home, you can automatically have all your calls forwarded to your home phone line. When you’re at work, you can have your phone set to silent mode and have your phone’s background screen set to a constantly updating work chart. That kind of stuff.

  There’s already an API available for other developers to tap into Locale to set up profiles and settings for events and itineraries.

• KEI

  KEI has been a dream of mine for some time. It’s basically a Bluetooth key for all your stuff. In this early version, it was demonstrated as an automatic car starter and unlocker so you don’t have to try to find your car keys all the time.

  It’s built so that multiple people can control the same car and/or multiple cars can be controlled by a single phone. Security is handled via 128-bit encryption and there will be an administrative interface so you can cut your ex-lover’s access off when the two of you break up.

• Snap

  Snap is kind of like Digg on a map. People can tag certain places and then other users can vote that particular attraction up or down.

  So if you’re in a new city, you can pull up your current location and find things around you that other people think are interesting.

  If there’s a particular user that’s uploaded a bunch of cool stuff, you can subscribe to his or her stuff. Arrows on the map change color the more popular they get. Very cool.

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BelAir Networks said today that it will use mesh network gear to support fifteen U.S. IndyCar Series races with real-time, race-related data and voice communications. An additional 16 events that comprise the Firestone Indy Lights Series, will also use the system.

The Indy Lights Series, in the U.S. and Japan, will feature the fastest closed-course racing cars in the world. Each course ranges in size and shape from standard ovals to complex street courses that weave between buildings and city parks.

BelAir Networks nodes are being deployed to meet the challenges of the different terrains. The first IndyCar Series race of the 2008 season took place at the Homestead Miami Speedway on March 29th and the final race will take place on September 7th at the Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Illinois.

The mesh network supports multiple applications including enterprise VoIP and high-speed data. Employees communicate work and race-related information such as race times and scoring across the venue and with co-workers at the corporate headquarters in Indianapolis.

The Indy Racing League (IRL) officiates races. Their RFID-based system, called TranX Pro, made by AMB-I.T. of Heemstede, Netherlands, is used by professional sports organizations worldwide to time and score everything from IndyCar racers to the Olympic Games.

Matsport, the official timekeeper of the Tour de France, used the AMB Activ system and FinishLynx photo camera for official race results in 2006.

Two AMB servers, running customized AMB Track Timing TimeGear MultiLoop software, collect the records and update the results.

The Indy Racing League created software retrieves the information and distributes it via the IRL’s Microsoft SQL Server 2003 database application called Indy Racing Information Systems (IRIS). Running on an HP Proliant DL 380 server, IRIS presents real-time lap-by-lap timing and scoring results to IRL race teams, officials and the media, as well as fans via scoreboards around the 750-acre motor sports complex.

ABC Sports uses some 50 cameras to cover the Indianapolis 500 race, including 26 cameras positioned around the track, eight in-car cameras, three booth cameras, a camera on a helicopter to provide aerial shots and 12 additional cameras. A 180-degree pan camera on the cars as well as an ultralight wireless “balloon cam” were introduced recently. Those systems are independent of the BelAir system which is used for ground support.

Wescam spin-off Pictorvision makes gyrostabilized camera mounts for helicopters.

Dario Franchitti, of Scotland, won the 2007 Indianapolis 500 auto race last year, which was stopped after 166 laps because of rain. He collected at least $1.5 million from a total purse of more than $10.5 million.

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From the BBC’s website this morning:

I was beginning to think Twitter - the micro-blogging service that’s all the rage amongst the technorati - was just another fad for people who want to share too much of their rather dull lives. Until this morning.

When I logged on to my desktop Twitter application (sad, I know) it was alive with Tweets about the earthquake in China (Google Map). Most of them were from the celebrated technology blogger Robert Scoble, who is famous, perhaps notorious, for receiving a Twitter message every second of the day.

He is based in California, but thousands of miles away from the quake he was providing breaking news about it, linking to sites like the BBC and the New York Times, even providing a first picture - though how authentic that is remains to be seen. He now claims that Twitter had the breaking news even before the United States Geological Survey, which provides early warnings of seismic events.

More on the Earthquake from Robert Scoble, the New York Times, the BBC, MSNBC, Blog Runner, TechMeme, and Online Journalism Blog.

Applications, GPS, Gadgets, Grass Roots Wireless, Location Services, Newspapers & Magazines, Podcasting, Public Service | No Comments »

To socialize these days, hundreds of millions of people every month turn to social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook. But what if the Web itself worked as a social network, asks the Washington Post.

At the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, Google will launch a new product called “Friend Connect,”, a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.

It’s the third major “open” social architecture announced in nearly as many days, says Techcrunch. MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday and Facebook Connect was announced on Friday.

Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect (the site is still unavailable), will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications.

The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services.

At the core of Friend Connect are three emerging social standards–OpenID, oAuth, and OpenSocial, says C/Net.

“Friend Connect provides wizardlike pages. Webmasters just fill in the information, select social apps, copy code, paste, and save. No coding is required. It passes the ‘easy’ test, and it does something useful,” said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google.

It provides features such as user registration, invitations, member galleries, message posting, and reviews, as well as OpenSocial applications.

Google’s Blog says independent musician Ingrid Michaelson has added music features from iLike with Google Friend Connect and is now able to run the iLike OpenSocial application on her website.

As a result, starting tonight, fans who visit Ingrid’s site can connect with their friends without having to leave the site.

Related Dailywireless articles include Mobile Social Nets Grow.

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Eye-Fi, the company that embedded a tiny WiFi client in a 2Gbyte SD card, today announced three new products, the $79 Eye-Fi Home, a new lower-cost card that only connects to your own computer (not public hotspots), the $99 Eye-Fi Share, essentially a re-branding of the original Eye-Fi card, and the $129 Eye-Fi Explore which automatically adds geotagging to your photos and has an arrangement with WayPort to upload at their public hotspots.

NOTE: This is a correction to an earlier post which incorrectly stated that the $99 Eye-Fi Share included free Wayport access — it does not.

Eye-Fi appears to have a hit with their Eye-Fi Share wireless memory cards ($99) to upload photos. Like the original Eye-Fi card, the the $99 Share card is essentially just rebranded. You need to set the card up by connecting it to a computer.

Eye-Fi also announced a partnership with Skyhook Wireless for the Eye-Fi Explore ($129), a new card. It has two new features:

• It includes free access to any of Wayport’s 10,000+ hotspot locations in the U.S including major hotels, McDonald’s restaurants, and Hertz airport locations. By simply turning on a digital camera in a Wayport location, the card will automatically connect to the Wi-Fi network and begin automatically uploading photos to nearly a dozen photo sharing, blogging or social networking websites, such as Flickr, Facebook or SmugMug or the user’s own PC or Mac.
• It is designed to automatically geotag photos. Latitude and longitude information are incorporated into photos by Skyhook, which has mapped existing Wi-Fi hotspots across the United States and Europe. The Eye-Fi card accesses this database, then stamps images with location data. The images arrive on the user’s computer and online sharing account automatically tagged. [Of course it helps to be within 100 feet of a hotspot when you take the picture]. The 2GB Eye-Fi Explore includes unlimited geotagging

The photographer does not need to have a Wayport account or a laptop. Service availability at Wayport locations is targeted to be available in June. If the card can’t connect to a WiFi access point to grab the info it needs to geotag the photos, it will store a snapshot of the access points it sees and fix it when you get back to your PC or Mac, according to Wired.

The 2GB Eye-Fi Explore includes unlimited Web uploads, unlimited geotagging and one year of hotspot access at Wayport locations. The Eye-Fi Explore (MSRP $129.00) will be available at major online retailers beginning June 6, 2008.

Eye-Fi will notify users via SMS or e-mail messages regarding the progress of the upload session.

It was unveiled at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference, today.

Eye-Fi also introduced a lower priced card called Eye-Fi Home, priced at an MSRP of $79. It enables users to upload photos to their computer through their home Wi-Fi network. It also includes 2GB storage and is PC and Mac compatible.

Point and shoot cameras like the Canon S5IS might work as webcams. Unfortunately, the S5 lacks an intervalometer, even though the S1, S2, and S3 have one. While the native “custom timer” will take multiple photos, you can now hack into the camera using the CHDK intervalometer script, adding an intervalometer, which can also create time lapse videos. CHDK is a firmware add-on for Canon’s compact digital cameras, based on DIGIC II and DIGIC III processors. It’s not authorized by the factory, but you can hack a variety of point and shoots, adding several useful functions.
Add a solar panel — or stuff a camera into a Spy Squirrel.

Make your own nature preserve — open 24/7 via Android phones.

Maybe it could compliment E.O. Wilson’s Encylopedia of Life (video).

Other DailyWireless solar stories include; Solar Man, Solis Solar Powered Hotspots, Solar Powered WiMAX & WiFi, Wireless Camera Adapters, Minneapolis Bridge Collapse & Emergency Communications, Minnesota Solar WiFi, Park City: Solar WiFi, Solar Powered Solstice, Webcasting Concerts, TurtleNet, Meshing Tibet and Solar RoofNet Wiki.

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Sweden has concluded their auction of 2.6 GHz spectrum by the National Post and Telecom Agency (PTS). Auctioning 190 MHz in the in the 2.6 GHz band raised a total of SEK 2.1 billion (USD 346 million).

Five companies won licenses. Intel Capital acquired one block of 50 MHz TDD spectrum for USD 26.2 million. The blocks of FDD frequencies went to Tele2, Telenor, and TeliaSonera, each paying approximately USD 90 million each for 2×20 MHz, and 3G operator HI3G Access AB paid USD 49 million for 2×10 MHz.

The licenses will be technology and service neutral, allowing use for mobile mobile telephone and wireless broadband. according to Analysys Mason, a telecom adviser.

With auctions coming up in other European countries, including the UK, Austria and the Netherlands, the outcome of the Swedish auction provides information on the price that operators will pay for 2.6GHz spectrum throughout Europe.

The Swedish auction concluded at a price of EUR0.13/MHz/pop, with unpaired spectrum going for just below EUR0.04/MHz/pop and paired spectrum for EUR0.16/MHz/pop. The prices achived in the Swedish auction were higher than the recent Norwegian 2.6GHz auction (EUR0.03/MHz/pop).

The competitive situation in Sweden, with four mobile players, may be more representative of the situation in most European countries than the Norwegian two-player market,” says Bart-Jan Sweers, Strategy Consultant at Analysys Mason.

“Some European countries (e.g. the UK and the Netherlands) plan to deviate from the CEPT band plan by using a flexible band plan, in which the split between paired and unpaired spectrum is not fixed but varies according to demand at auction.

The Swedish result suggests that “competition between bidders for paired and unpaired spectrum will be minimal, given that the price fetched for unpaired spectrum was four times lower than for paired spectrum,” says Sweers.

OFCOM expects a summer 2008 auction for the 205MHz of spectrum in the 2010-2025 MHz and 2500-2690 MHz bands. As with previous auctions, the spectrum is being made available on a service-neutral basis - which means bidders are not required to restrict their use of the spectrum to a particular technology or service.

Potential WiMAX providers worry that cellular operators will simply outbid them in the UK, virtually excluding Mobile WiMAX operators from the 2.6 GHz band, leaving them with less ideal 3.5 GHz frequencies. But director of Intel Capital EMEA, Ashish Patel, says “WiMax will cover the UK in 18 to 24 months“.

In the far East, analyst Caroline Gabriel says the Indian regulator TRAI aims to auction 3G bands (in 450MHz, 800MHz and 2.1GHz), but also spectrum in 2.3-2.4GHz, 2.5-2.69GHz, and 3.3-3.6GHz.

India is likely to be the largest short to medium term market for WiMAX, with operators looking to meet fixed broadband targets and leapfrog 3G services. According to an earlier TRAI recommendation to the DoT, BWA spectrum should cost only a fraction of the price of 3G spectrum. For example, a block of BWA spectrum in Mumbai has a reserved price of R10Cr (about $2.5m), while a block of 3G spectrum in the same area has reserved price of R80Cr ($19.5m).

In China, the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has already allocated the 2.6 GHz spectrum to C-band satellite transmission, but the Ministry has separately confirmed that they have dedicated spectrum to 3G mobile services, but they do not plan to extend that spectrum to 2.3–2.5 GHz, and it is unlikely that the government would allocate bandwidth to mobile WiMAX to operate in the same 3G spectrum.

In February 2003, MII auctioned licenses for 3.5 GHz covering 32 cities. There are now many networks in development that utilise the 3.5 GHz band. Among the dozen companies that were awarded licenses, the largest include China Netcom, China Telecom, ChinaComm and Hua Tong Electricity. Intel has been working with companies in several regions to establish trials, and Alvarion has worked with China Telecom since 2004.

There are some 3.3 billion wireless users on Earth but only 350 million broadband subscribers in the world (at the end of 2007), according to Point Topic. DSL has 65% of that number - around 228 million - while cable modem users have a 22% share (76.8 million). FTTx with 37.8 million users, is just under 11% of the global market.

Intel says Mobile WiMAX is the most cost/effective way to deliver broadband. Cellular operators say LTE will prevail as the defacto wireless broadband solution.

The global consumer mobile Internet services market could be worth more than $66 billion/year - today - say WiMAX proponents, but has instead only reached $9.5 billion because of the high cost of cellular services.

Clearwire’s Chief Strategy Officer, Scott Richardson says the key is getting WiMax cards under $50. “When you get into that lower price point, the attach rates go up very high”.

Related DailyWireless stories include; It’s Official: Sprint, Cable & Google Building WiMAX Network, Motorola Mobile WiMAX in Thailand, WiMAX Roundup, Australia Unwired, Intel: $500M for M-Taiwan, Alcatel-Lucent Wins a Couple, Tata WiMAXing 15 Cities in India, KDDI Tight with Airspan Mobile WiMAX, Alvarion: Wave 2, WiMAX World 2007, Urban WiMAX in the UK, Europe Auctions 3.5 GHz, Italy Auctions WiMAX Spectrum, WiMAX Uncloaks FDD,WiMAX Deployment Maps, Urban WiMAX in the UK, BT’s European WiMAX Plan, Nokia WiMAX: UK Tough, U.S. Litigious, Fixed Vrs Mobile WiMAX in UK?, UK Unwires 12 Cities, UK to Auction 215 MHz - for Everything, Towerstream Switches to Alvarion 3.65 GHz, Free 3.65GHz Mapping Service, Bill to Free 2155-2180 Mhz, MuniFi Roundup and OFCOM’s Global Sit Rep.

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Cablevision, the 5th largest cable provider in the USA, announced today that it will build its own municipal wireless network, using Wi-Fi. The announcement came one day after Comcast and Time Warner Cable announced their joint venture with WiMax operators Sprint and Clearwire.

Cablevision, with most of its customers in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and parts of Pennsylvania, plans to build a WiFi network covering its footprint within the next two years. The WiFi infrastructure would cost the company about $100 per customer, according to Chief Operating Officer Tom Rutledge. Cablevision currently has about 3.1 million cable customers on Long Island and in other areas around New York.

Subscribers of its Optimum cable modem service will get to use the wireless network free.

“The primary purpose is a free, value-added service to new or existing customers,” said Phil Solis, an analyst with ABI Research. That’s what sets this network apart from some of the other municipal networks that have failed, he said.

The company is already offering the Wi-Fi services in some areas, said COO Rutledge, speaking on Thursday during a conference call to discuss financial earnings.

The network should be relatively easy for Cablevision to build since the company already has a network of high-speed lines to attach Wi-Fi access points to. Radios like BelAir’s 100S are designed for mounting on existing cable infrastructure.

EarthLink currently operates Wi-Fi networks in a handful of cities, but is now selling its municipal Wi-Fi business unit.

Cable might seem well positioned to take over failing municipal wireless services, but licensed WiMAX frequencies, generating more revenue from mobile voice and data (with reliability, penetration and maintenance advantages), appears to have won over the largest cable operators for now.

Related DailyWireless articles include; FON + T/W Cable = Public Hotspots, Cable WiFi: The Neutron Dance, Scientific Atlanta Meshes with Tropos, Time/Warner Wireless?, Wireless Cable and Cable vs Digital Cities: Championship Fight.

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AT&T’s iPhone website has been updated to reveal that each iPhone plan now includes access to “more than 17,000 Wi-Fi hotspots“, including Starbucks.

Last week AT&T had quietly begun offering iPhone users access to their Wi-Fi hotspots for free. Then the service was abruptly turned off.

AT&T has remained quiet about this new offering, but it’s clear they will be officially delivering this service shortly — perhaps “free” with AT&T’s data plan.

UPDATE: Oops, the iPhone info on AT&T’s website is off again.

The battle between free and paid wireless Internet access is starting to look like a draw. Or more accurately, a third variation is winning — a combination of the two, says the New York Times.

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MySpace has embraced data portability, and partnered With Yahoo, Ebay and Twitter, says TechCrunch. MySpace is announcing data portability standards today, along with data sharing partnerships in a project called MySpace “Data Availability”.

The key goal is to allow users to maintain key personal data at sites like MySpace and not have it be locked up in an island. Previously users could turn much of this data into widgets and add them to third party sites. But that doesn’t bridge the gap between independent, autonomous websites, MySpace says.

MySpace is a partner in Google’s OpenSocial project, but this is being done outside of that framework, says Tech Crunch. MySpace says they’ll adopt the Open Social APIs that evolve around data sharing once they are developed and announced.

A growing number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide are taking online social networking to the streets, according to research conducted by The Nielsen Company.

The findings show that the U.K. leads Europe in mobile social networking on a percentage basis — with the U.S. boasting comparable numbers

In the U.K., approximately 810,000 mobile subscribers, or 1.7 percent of all mobile subscribers in the country, visited social networking websites on their mobile phones in the first quarter of 2008. That reach percentage was twice as high as it was in other major European markets-though similar to the U.S., where 1.6 percent of all mobile subscribers (4.1 million in all) accessed social networks via their phones in December 2007.

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NAVTEQ announced today that Verizon Wireless has selected their Traffic Mobile application to power its new traffic service available today on its newest VZ Navigator (Version 4) service.

Verizon Wireless is the first wireless provider to feature NAVTEQ Traffic Mobile, enabling customers to access live traffic data on their mobile devices in more than 75 cities across the U.S., including visual notification of incidents and congestion that allow drivers to see potential traffic delays and avoid traffic problems.

VZ Navigator (Version 4) is available today for $9.99 for unlimited monthly access or $2.99 for one-day use.

Of course with an open architecture, you can get many services free.

Google Maps now features traffic congestion maps and lets you know how long a drive might take in rush-hour traffic, for a limited set of metropolitan areas.

Traffic congestion maps produce a graphical, realtime or near-realtime representation of traffic flow. They generally utilize loop sensors embedded in the roadways, with the data freely available by a variety of state transportation authorities.

Traffic.com, a NAVTEQ company, is a leading provider of personalized traffic information and has launched JamCast for real-time traffic video in 30 metropolitan areas across the U.S.. JamCast features patented Jam Factor roadway traffic measurements that allow commuters to easily understand the relative congestion level with a number on a scale from 1 to 10.

Traffic.com also offers service to mobile phones and PDAs. Traffic.com also offers text alerts — go to mobi.traffic.com on your mobile web browser, then text your city code.

Google Transit covers some 23 U.S. cities and the national mass transit system of Japan and bigger cities in Australia and Europe. Go to Google Maps. Type in a query for directions.

If your results include a button for “Take Public Transit,” Google Transit will spell out directions to the closest station or bus stop, including schedule information.

Microsoft has a Web-based service that helps users avoid traffic jams. The new service’s software technology, called Clearflow (pdf), was developed at the company’s Research lab and will be freely available as part of the company’s Live.com site (maps.live.com) for 72 cities in the United States.

Related transit connectivity stories on DailyWireless include; Google Transit Maps + WiFi, Passive Cellular Tracking, Navigation by Cell Phone, Fish Net, TomTom Buying Tele Atlas, Tracking Vehicles: Good to Go, Mobilizing WiFi on Trains & Cars, Traffic Mapping, 3-D Traffic/Weather Maps.

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