MSN Autos: The key to Highway
BusinessWeek | at | by Mike
Microsoft's wireless traffic-jam alerts are a little tricky to personalize, but the benefits make that initial effort well worthwhile. Traffic in Los Angeles is sort of like your least favorite relative at a holiday get-together -- always annoying and always there. I've been on the freeway at midnight on Saturday, stuck in traffic that I would normally expect to see only during Friday-afternoon rush hour. And the folks at my local news-radio stations aren't much help. They update the traffic scene every 10 minutes, but they rarely have enough time to report on all the worst tie-ups.
Microsoft has come to the rescue with a series of upgrades to its MSN Autos site, which hosts one of Redmond's earliest forays into Web services. Its My Car service offers real-time traffic alerts for 65 major cities, delivered via text message to any mobile phone, pager, or PDA.