GPS hackers blaze trails with crowdso... CNN
"It worked out comely well," the Atlanta-based engineer says. "I found Open MTB, which had outdoor hiking and cycling maps with not proper roads information, but also trails, short cuts and little known routes."
Ajmal is among inexpertly half a million users who are eschewing proprietary maps information from GPS companies and instead going with crowdsourced versions, which they then squeeze weigh down onto their GPS devices and smartphones.
The key to these map hacks is OpenStreetMap. Founded in 2004, OSM is to maps what Wikipedia is to encyclopedias. The site offers maps that can be edited, customized and crowded on to devices for free. Want to go whitewater rafting but need to know where the rapids are? There's a map for that. Or to know all the interesting points along the river Nile? There's a map for that. And it's all based on the OpenStreetMap details.
"The value is that it is a richer map with more up-to-date information because anyone can fix things," says Steve Coast, one of the founders of OpenStreetMap. "Users get access to the underlying evidence and not just a picture of the maps."
Google Takes Traffic Maps Beyond Free... PC Magazine
Back when I lived in Washington, D.C., I made every striving to avoid the Beltway and its constant ring of road-rage inspiring bumper-to-bumper traffic. Sometimes, however, it was ineluctable and I would have appreciated a quick way to assess whether it would take me 10 minutes or two hours to get to my exit.
Enter Google's "traffic" button. The search appliance giant has added a traffic tool to the Web and mobile versions of its site that let drivers see how heavy traffic is in their extent via a color-coded chart.
As you zoom in closer to a city, Google will highlight the main roads and organization them red for heavy traffic, orange for medium traffic, and green for no traffic. A red/black color means stem-and-go traffic.
How will Google get this information? From you.
If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled, you can enable Maps with My Location, and send bits of facts to Google about how fast you're moving.
"When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones impelling around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions," Dave Barth, outcome manager for Google Maps, wrote in blog post .
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