July 16, 2008
Your iPhone Knows When the Next Bus is Coming
Is there anything the iPhone can't do? The latest useful tool for Austin iPhone-iacs is Me2Bus, which lets you track Austin Capital Metro buses.
Right now, Me2Bus is a website optimized for your iPhone, but founder John Erdner of Nfomedia says his company expects to soon have Me2Bus set up as an application that can be installed.
In an email announcing the release, Erdner said, "This began as a quick project for us, then we decided to finish and share with the public."
Nfomedia is a course management system and social networking application designed to enable interaction outside of the classroom for higher education courses.
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i think it's a little odd that this is being promoted as just for iphones... it's really just a webpage, so you can use it from anything that can access the internet. even my crappy old cell phone. yay!!
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Yeah, Jesus phone not needed. Local Austin startup dadnab.com offer a great service via txt messages and web site for many major cities and have for years.
See http://www.dadnab.com - you just send them a txt msg with your current cross street, and the x-street where you want to go and you get a txt msg back with the next nearbye bus. Works great, no Jesus phone required.
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It will work on other mobile devices as a web page but the site your looking at was submitted to run specifically as an application that will be down loadable from the apple itunes store.
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I assume (yeah, I know. Me and umption.) that this is just a front-end for bus schedule data. And therefore, no better (and in some ways worse) than either the Go Line (voice recognition bus schedules) or the Cap Metro website's trip finder. When it tells you "Next bus in 3 minutes" I am pretty sure it means "Next bus SCHEDULED to appear in 3 minutes" which is realistic from a data perspective, but unrealistic in terms of its utility.
Also, for me, this is completely useless. The bus I take, 142 the Metric Flyer, is not listed.
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Correct; there's no true "next bus" capability at Capital Metro. No GPS or anything like that.
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Interesting: Over at the Cap Metro blog they say that ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) which will allow this and similar apps to use real time location data is coming "soon". cool!
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Just taking some company's press release and repeating it isn't very valuable to Austinist readers. Maybe add some value by pointing out how this differs - or does not - from google maps public trans info, dadnab or any of the other interfaces to capmetro schedule data?
Unless of course the press release is about an app that actually uses GPS and real time bus locations. Then I'll let the copy/paste journalism slide.