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In January, Tomtom bought the company Applied Generics.
From here, nothing turbo-interesting, you say.
Right.

Applied Generics is a Scottish company which developed a technology able to generate, in real time, accurate traffic informations.

How? here it becomes smart :
Analyzing the usage of cell phones and their move from one cell site to another one!
When there's a traffic problem on the motorway for example, the nearest cell should receive an amazing number of requests of connections. When the traffic is normal, connections comes, connections leave...
Add some datamining, and it becomes possible.

This technology can provide traffic data of high quality and at very low cost, since they use already existing infrastructures.


source : PR Newswire, January

for those which do not know :
- TomTom is a company that sells Portable Navigation Devices (PND) : TomTom Go, TomTom Rider, TomTom Navigator for PDAs, etc.)
- A cellular network is a radio network made up of a number of radio cells (or just cells) each served by a fixed transmitter, known as a cell site or base station. These cells are used to cover different areas in order to provide radio coverage over a wider area than the area of one cell. Cellular networks are inherently asymmetric with a set of fixed main transceivers each serving a cell and a set of distributed (generally, but not always, mobile) transceivers which provide services to the network's users.