Yahoo Maps To Add Traffic Updates and Reports
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Yahoo Maps To Add Traffic Updates and Reports  Yahoo is not only becoming the goto place for multimedia search and online entertainment, it's also now offering a new service for monitoring traffic conditions online. Yahoo's offering of traffic updates lets users plan their daily travel routes around slowdowns like constructon or ...
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Internet media company Yahoo Inc   said on Tuesday it is adding media-playing features,  large file transfers, new languages and other tools to its  instant messaging service.
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(InfoWorld) - While drivers are accustomed to using traffic reports to assess road conditions, pedestrians who navigate cities are typically left without aid to determine the best route. But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using wikis and the Semantic Web look to change the way people map and navigate their cities. The Wiki City project, run by MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory, aims to apply wiki technology to the mapmaking process. The project's ultimate product will permit anyone to upload content to a map and utilize Semantic Web principles to cross search multiple layers of information. Wiki City Rome, an early incarnation of the project's user-generated maps, used GPS and cell phone data to produce a real-time map during an all-night festival held in the city on Sept. 8. A Web site featuring a satellite image of Rome displayed event locations and the position of buses and pedestrian traffic in real time. Buses equipped with GPS devices fed their locations to the project every minute, while cell phone data was constantly received to show how crowds were moving around the city. An image of the map was also projected in one of Rome's main squares. "If people know about the state of their environment in real time (as opposed to a static map), they can make better informed decisions about how to move about in the city which in term increases efficiency," Kristian Kloeckl, one of Wiki City Rome's team leaders, wrote in an e-mail interview. Wiki City Rome served as an initial step in the Wiki City project. Future projects involve introducing the wiki city concept to other cities that have partnered with the SENSEable City Laboratory. The list currently includes only European cities because their public transportation networks and outdoor spaces correspond with the project's aim of studying how people react and move about in public spaces, Kloeckl said. But the project is applicable to non-European cities, he said. He mentioned that a Boston-area furniture company is interested in placing displays in their products that would show a wiki city map. Wiki City reseachers ultimately want to introduce full wiki concepts to the project and allow any person or business to upload information to a map, Kloeckl said. The wiki method of permitting anyone to add any information lends itself to fraudsters. One possible resolution involves introducing a ranking system similar to the one eBayÂ uses with sellers. "Users supply the rankings. The system is completely independent. People gradually acquire reliability. This approach would be the most coherent for this type of structure," Kloeckl said in a telephone interview. Wiki City wants to combine different levels of data that, when searched, provide an answer incorporating each level of data. In Kloeckl's vision of a person using a full-featured wiki city map, a runner would use the map to search for a jogging course based on a city's traffic and air quality as well as the runner's health. "Now making these layers intersect in a meaningful way should give you a proposal of a jogging path that corresponds to your combined query," Kloeckl wrote. Kloeckl also provided another example in which a person would use a map to locate a store with a specific bottle of wine and plot a course from the store to a friend's home. Some challenges remain before a real-time map helps people navigate their cities. While obvious devices to display a wiki city map include cell phones, PDAs, and smartphones, Kloeckl also wants more utilitarian structures, such as bus stops, to offer access to the maps. "Everyone is familiar with a bus stop," he said. "So it's using the data with objects people are familiar with." User interface issues also require additional thought, Kloeckl said. While users need to access the information with ease, uploading that data to the wiki also requires a simple method, Kloeckl said. He noted that the upload system must require little time and effort since some of the content will come from people who are moving around a city. Finally, the data layers need to be arranged in such a way that a search produces pertinent results. Solving this problem involves further developments in the Semantic Web, an evolving component of the Web being developed by the Worldwide Web Consortium. The Semantic Web aims to take data and apply standards that allow computers to play a greater role in locating, finding, and presenting information. This will permit computers to understand the standards and produce more contextual search results. "We need information that is time and place relevant so it can be queried on a semantic structure," Kloeckl said. "We need a way to structure data so that it can be cross-queried." Pedestrians may eventually turn to interactive maps to avoid the masses or catch a bus, at the same time that their movements become part of the map's display.
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TomTomâs new Map Share software combines cartography with community to allow users to update maps on the go â and later share the results with others.
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Internet media company Yahoo Inc said on Tuesday it is adding media-playing features, large file transfers, new languages and other tools to its instant messaging service.
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As part of an effort to expand local content, Internet portal company Yahoo! Wednesday night began offering Web surfers information about current traffic conditions for the largest US metro areas.
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Yahoo began testing a new travel search engine Tuesday night that can be used to book flights, hotels and cars from more than 50 travel sites.
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Yahoo! delivers more bad news to shake up the Street.
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Networks of low-res cameras and sensors could monitor urban environments for diverse data -- traffic flow, pollutants, structural integrity -- online. By the Associated Press.
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Yahoo Inc. for the first time is letting mobile phone users query its search engine, giving them access to conventional Web results, local business listings and related information, as well as images, such as pictures and maps, the company said Wednesday.
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Yesterday webmasters began noticing shifting and changing within Yahoo Search results. Usually, before such changes occur, Yahoo posts a Weather Report on the Yahoo Search Blog.  No posting on the YSearchBlog as of yet, but Barry Schwartz did notice that Yahoo Tim Mayer did comment at WebmasterWorld: There will be more changes tomorrow. Things should settle [...]
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Blog: New Google Maps feature lets people create customized maps with content from different mashup sites
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo Inc. has launched a service called Pipes designed to let regular users mix different RSS and Atom feeds and create data "mashups," a process that so far has required programming knowledge. Pipes features a drag-and-drop interface that the company hopes non-technical users will find simple and intuitive as they manipulate content syndication feeds to combine data in new and useful ways. An example of a Pipe is this one , which meshes listings from Craigslist with data from Yahoo's local search engine to display apartments for rent near any business, Yahoo said. Another one collates news about topics chosen by the user from a variety of sources. "Pipes' initial set of modules lets you assemble personalized information sources out of existing Web services and data feeds. Pipes outputs standard RSS 2.0, so you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. You can also create pipes that accept user input and run them on our servers as a kind of miniature Web application," reads Yahoo's description of the service , posted Wednesday night. While Pipes today lets users mix data from RSS and Atom feeds, Yahoo hopes to extend the service to support other data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings, Yahoo said. For example, Yahoo will open up access to the Pipes engine to programmers and add support for the KML data source, which is used to display geographic data in Google Inc.'s popular Google Earth mapping application and Google Maps Web site. The initial response from observers has been enthusiastic. "Yahoo's new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the Internet," Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of computer book publisher O'Reilly Media Inc., wrote on his blog . "While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the Web into a programmable environment for everyone." The Pipes Web site, available throughout this morning, was nonetheless down at press time, displaying the message: "Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!"
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New widgets help personalize maps with dynamic content from diverse sources.
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Yahoo Inc. said on Tuesday it would  introduce later this week a faster, enhanced version of its  Internet services for U.S. mobile phone users, while expanding  into key markets in Asia, Canada and Europe.
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Google said Wednesday it had updated its Maps service in more than 30 major United States cities to include real-time traffic information. A new "Traffic" button joins the Map, Satellite and Hybrid options already available, overlaying road conditions with green, yellow and red colors.
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Driving directions redux Youâll never use MapQuest again. With a new addition to its Google Maps service, Google has completely reinvented the notion of online driving directions, letting you adjust routes in with a simple drag and drop.â¦