 NATIONAL NEWS TECHNOLOGY | |||
| Personal Traffic Alerts, With Made-to-Order Data By JACQUES STEINBERG Published: July 5, 2007 | |||
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| For many people, getting away for a holiday means sitting in traffic while listening to staccato radio reports about rubbernecking delays and cascading backups. But during the next few days, as Americans extend their Fourth of July celebrations, tens of thousands of motorists around the country will receive up-to-the minute accident alerts and guidance on end runs around bottlenecks — without ever having to turn on a car radio. In the latest incarnation of traffic reporting, information gleaned from strategically placed cameras, road-top sensors, electronic tollbooths and eyewitnesses is edited in Mission Control-style command rooms and sent using personalized text or voice messages to subscribers' cellphones or BlackBerrys, often at no charge. These advances are part of an effort by private traffic services to bring some science and precision to what, at least until the last few years, was an art form typically practiced by a reporter in a helicopter or an announcer glued to a terminal in a windowless cubicle. While radio stations continue to send traffic copters into the air — including at least three serving New York City alone — their "eye in the sky" observations are now only one of the streams of data at travelers' disposal. The new traffic reports continue to be largely produced by AM and FM stations or their partners, even though the reports may give motorists one less reason to tune in the very station supplying the new alerts, like WINS in New York or WTOP in Washington. "Radio was always about coming out of the dashboard of the car or the clock radio when your alarm goes off," said Mark Mason, executive editor of WINS, an all-news station that, like print and television news outlets, is facing more competition than ever, including from iPods and satellite radio. "While we have to continue to be in our users' ears, we also need to be in the palms of their hands — where they are, whenever they are." David Cary, a commercial real-estate appraiser who drives 500 miles a week in and around Boston, said he was increasingly tuning out a local station's "Traffic on the 3s" report in favor of SmarTraveler, a personalized service offered by a unit of Westwood One, a radio syndicator and a major traffic-watching provider. To find out whether the coast is clear, he can hit *1 on his cellphone and pick from a menu of recorded updates on major roadways. "It told me it was O.K. to head for the Cape," Mr. Cary said by phone from his blue Volvo station wagon on Friday afternoon, as he stopped work for the weekend. "That the bridges weren't backed up. That's what I was checking on." Bill Lowry, senior director of security for Dolphin Stadium in Miami, where the Miami Dolphins play, said he was so impressed with a similar service that he used to navigate from his home in Fort Lauderdale that he was working with Westwood One to develop a game-day service for fans. Believed to be the first of its kind in the N.F.L., the service will send alerts to people as they approach the stadium telling them of accidents, slowdowns and parking availability. Westwood One, which said more than 100,000 people across the country had signed up for personalized alerts in the last year or so, hardly has the field to itself. Traffic.com provides customized bulletins to motorists in more than four dozen cities and estimates its subscriber list at 500,000. It is owned by Navteq, an industry leader in drafting digital maps, including those used in auto-navigation systems that often provide traffic information. Meanwhile, Clear Channel, the radio behemoth, has spurned outside traffic providers like Westwood One in recent years and has developed its own reporting service, which is reached through realtimetraffic.net. The iPhone also provides maps with road conditions. While that might be good news for drivers, it has put the mainstays of the traffic-reporting business somewhat on the defensive, including Joe Nolan, long heard on WPLJ radio and WABC television in New York, and Pete Tauriello of WINS. Mr. Tauriello and Mr. Nolan are employees of Westwood One, which provides most traffic information to broadcasters in the nation's largest metropolitan areas. From his studio in Rutherford, N.J., where three dozen Westwood One cameras were trained on various local roads, Mr. Tauriello defended the old-fashioned radio reports. "Let's say, just for discussion's sake, a car goes off the Brooklyn Bridge here and into the water," he said, pointing to a live image on a monitor. "I'm on the air. I can see that instantaneously. And I'm saying it as I see it." "To get that on the network" of pagers and cellphones, he added, "that has to be inputted into a terminal. It takes time to write that up, and for the equipment to process it and get it to you." After a motorist has that information in hand, there is the challenge of reading it off of a miniature screen while driving. "I think," Mr. Tauriello said with an audible swagger, "I'm a little bit faster on the trigger." | |||
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| Still, a visitor who had signed up for the WINS electronic service on the Web the previous afternoon — it requires little more than entering a starting point and destination, as well as estimated departure time — found that the customized alerts also had their advantages. For one thing, the text messages that periodically arrived with a buzz during a trip from Westchester County to New Jersey referred only to traffic flow along his route and weeded out much of what Mr. Tauriello was describing that morning over the radio in 10-minute intervals, like collisions near Route 684 in Armonk, N.Y., or on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. Those incidents were nowhere nearby, and effectively irrelevant. In pitching its reports, whether on radio or pager, to broadcasters and motorists alike, Westwood One emphasizes its process for checking and rechecking its findings. Its version of Mission Control is in Houston, in a gleaming skyscraper down the road from NASA's. From a room crammed with flat-panel television and computer screens, four fact checkers continually scan databases for outdated information and browbeat affiliates around the country to update drivers. On a recent morning a checker, Rosemary Kurr, who had previously worked as a dog groomer, called a Westwood One office 1,100 miles away in Grand Rapids, Mich. Ms. Kurr wanted to ask why it had not updated drivers on an accident that, as described to motorists in a bulletin, was to have been cleared by 7:39 a.m. It was now nearly 8 a.m., and no new information had been posted. "No answer," Ms. Kurr said to a supervisor with obvious irritation before sending an e-mail query. For all the advances in describing traffic, even those charged with reporting its conditions can still be caught in the occasional jam. Just after 8 a.m. that day a colleague of Ms. Kurr in the Westwood One quality-control unit, Jim Morris, a former engineer on a nuclear submarine, arrived breathless and late. "I'm sorry," he told his supervisor, Jay Trotsky. "There was an 11-car pileup on 45." "Yeah," Mr. Trotsky said. "I know." | |||
sábado, julio 07, 2007
Alertas del estado del tráfico, por celular, emitidas por servidores ASP.
lunes, julio 02, 2007
Impacto del "iphone" en la industria asiática de teléfonos celulares.
BUSINESS/TECHNOLOGY |
| Chasing the iPhone By MARTIN FACKLER Published: July 2, 2007 |
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| SEOUL, South Korea, June 29 — While Americans have been blitzed with news about the iPhone's debut, many in South Korea's and Japan's technology industries initially greeted Apple's flashy new handset with yawns. Cellphones in these technology-saturated countries can already play digital songs and video games and receive satellite television. But now that analysts and industry executives are getting their first good look at the iPhone, many here are concerned that Asian manufacturers may have underestimated the Apple threat. Analysts and executives in South Korea say that the iPhone, with its full-scale Internet browser and distinctive touch screen with colorful icons, is more than just another souped-up cellphone. They fear this Silicon Valley challenger could leap past Asian makers into the age of digital convergence by combining personal computing and mobile technologies as no device has before. "Apple's impact will be bigger than Asian handset makers think," said Kim Yoon-ho, an analyst in Seoul at Prudential Securities. "The iPhone is different from previous mobile phones. It is the prototype of the future of mobile phones." The fear now is that Apple may repeat in wireless communications what it accomplished in portable music with the iPod: changing the industry. And just as when the iPod came out six years ago, big Asian manufacturers like Samsung Electronics and Sony could find themselves wondering what hit them, say analysts and industry executives. Here in South Korea, manufacturers are taking the threat seriously, and are rushing out their own iPhone-like handsets. By the end of the year, Samsung, South Korea's biggest cellphone maker, will unveil its Ultra Smart F700, with a large touch-controlled screen displaying rows of icons, much as the iPhone does. LG Electronics, another large Korean handset maker, has begun selling a smartphone in Italy that can view full-size Web pages. Pantech, which sells most of its phones in the United States under the carriers' brand names, will also unveil its first touch-screen smartphone this fall. Sony Ericsson plans this fall to introduce its latest Walkman phone, the W960i, which will feature a touch screen and memory space for 8,000 songs. Nokia of Finland, whose N95 is probably the closest competitor to the iPhone in the United States, said it also plans a touch-screen cellphone called the Aeon, though the company has not said when it will go on sale. Motorola, based in Schaumburg, Ill., plans to sell this summer the Razr 2, the successor to its once-popular Razr upgraded with a Linux operating system and full-scale Web browser. |
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| "If the iPhone changes the rules in the cellphone market, then we have to adapt as soon as possible," said Yi Seung-soo, a cellphone designer at Pantech. "We can take advantage of being a follower," he said. It's the same method Korean manufacturers have used before — quickly developing similar products that are cheaper but which contain a few more features than Apple, he said. That strategy has not diminished iPod's dominance in the music-player market in the United States, but makers in Asia have fared a bit better in their home markets. For the time being, their concern is over the handset market in the United States, where the iPhone went on sale Friday. Apple will not sell its new phone in Asia until next year, and there are also doubts whether iPhone will catch on in markets like South Korea, where consumers often pay for small, sleek phones packed with functions. Bulkier smartphones and BlackBerrys have so far failed to sell well here. But even if iPhone's success is limited to America, it could be a setback for South Korean electronics companies, which export heavily to the United States. In particular, say analysts, Apple could end up seizing much of the top end of the American cellphone market, where a handset that cost $100 or more offers the highest profit margins. That segment of the American market represents about a quarter of America's 250 million cellphone subscribers, according to Strategy Analytics, a market research firm based in Newton, Mass. In contrast with cellphone users in Asia, more than half of American subscribers paid $50 or less for their cellphones. Apple, whose biggest challenge may be persuading Americans to spend $500 or $600 for an iPhone, has said it wants to have the devices in the hands of 1 percent of the world's cellphone users, or about 10 million people, by the end of next year. For its part, Samsung says it is ready for Apple's challenge, offering a far broader range of high-end products. Some of Samsung's recent products in this segment in the United States include the BlackJack, a $200 smartphone that uses Windows Mobile, and the UpStage, a phone on one side and an MP3 player on the other. |
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| "Samsung is not a one-hit wonder," said Pete Skarzynski, senior vice president of strategy at Samsung Telecommunications America. "We offer many different products, for all different market segments, and not just one blanket product." For a glimpse of what Samsung may offer Americans in the future, step into one of its Anycall cellphone stores in South Korea. One new device, the SCH-B450, fits in the palm of a hand, yet it packs a 2-megapixel camera, MP3 player, satellite TV receiver and an English-Korean dictionary with 330,000 words. Its biggest selling point: Plug it into a TV to turn it into a mini game console, allowing the user to play video games with the phone itself serving as controller. "Oh, it's a phone, too," said Lee Eun-jung, manager at an Anycall cellphone store in the Shinchon neighborhood of Seoul. She said the phone, which costs the equivalent of $700, is popular among college-age Koreans. Ms. Lee herself owns a different model with an additional function that appeals to mothers in education-obsessed Korea. It shows animated fairy tales in four languages, helping children learn not only their native Korean, but also English, Japanese and Chinese. "I use this phone to baby-sit my children," she said. Samsung employees insist, and analysts agree, that Samsung handsets offer better durability and higher performance than the iPhone. But if the iPhone succeeds, the lesson will be that engineering alone is not enough to win consumers, say analysts and others in the industry. Analysts and executives say that Apple is leading the cellphone industry into a new stage, where success depends on features that are outside the phone, such as the ease of downloading music and video content and an easy-to-use operating system. "Tech-wise, the iPhone is not so advanced," said S. Jay Yim, vice president of overseas marketing at Pantech. "But Apple makes up for that in content and software. As handsets look more like PCs, software gets more important." Indeed, Dr. Yim said that riding on Apple's coattails may turn out to be the best business strategy for Pantech, which recently underwent a bank-led revamping. He said the hype around iPhone may open more Americans to the idea of paying more for cellphones, including the function-packed phones that Korean makers excel at building. "In the past, U.S. consumers were unwilling to pay $300 for a phone," Dr. Yim said. "If Apple can change their buying habits, then that would be good for us, too." |
