Well timed with our trip to the Intel Developer Forum Taipei, a reader tipped us to a new MIT Research project in Denmark called CopenCycle that features SmartBiking
a novel self-organizing smart-tag system that will allow the city’s residents to exchange basic information and share their relative positioning with each other.
That means bikes are tagged and sharing data, including a “I crossed your Path” Facebook app. This convergence of tech and bikes is inevitable as mobile technologies becomes more available and reliable. At the Taipei Blogger Party, I asked Pankaj Kedia, a Director with Intel’s Mobile Internet Device Group, about a weather-proof MID and he replied that Toshiba had one (we’re looking for it). Just last week, we had a Purple Pedals bike at Hugga HQ and at we’ve talked at length with Dahon about enabling mobile technologies with their bikes.
I’d like to see an app that shows me where my cycling buddies are on a Google Map — a cycling cluster with ambient informatics, like how fast they’re coming or going.
Readers,
What mobile technologies do you think would help cycling and cyclists? Real-time safe commuter routes?
Positives: it’d give city transit planning folk plenty of data on how to properly develop areas which are sensitive to cycling and routes which eases urban planning and rehabilitation.
Negatives: i don’t trust American city governments to ‘police’ cyclists yet. Licensing and other crap that I constantly hear of crack-downs on ‘cycling idiots’ to mothers and kids who ride their bikes in the streets.
bummer. but it’s cool.
The MIT sites I linked to are confusing and I can’t tell if this project is wishful thinking, but it reads convoluted. Note, not buzzkilling it, I mean, cool, but probably better to simplify it to a community website for commuters.
I’d like it if when cyclist is traveling uphill or into a headwind the lights turned green. It’s especially frustrating to be hammering along Alaskan way into a headwind, only to have a light turn red on you and there’s not a car nor pedestrian in sight.