Picked up today by a spiffy new SUV-taxi outfitted with the controversial GPS system and back-seat TV. Enjoyed watching the GPS lose it’s lock a couple of times in our trip from Time Warner Center to near Madison Square Garden. Urban canyons don’t necessarily enhance the behavior of many GPS system, clearly. Also tried out the spiffy back-seat credit card system. Ah, technology and taxis.
TaxiTV with GPS, originally uploaded by jetrotz.
Unlike back in the day when I was with CNNSI.com, real-time biometric and GPS data on the competitors in the Tour de France is now apparently being published into the public domain. Typolis/Ubilabs have created an amazing mashup between Google Maps and data being published by SRM. Here is the result – realtime tracking of the riders, complete with heartrate, speed and similar metrics. Very slick – and better than what I’ve seen on the ‘big sites’ – including ESPN.com. Too bad we can’t see Lance or his disqualified heirs to the yellow jersey.