Q: What Is Road-Smarts?

A: It's Smart Information For Less Than .23 Cents A Day!


Frequently Asked Questions

You don't need Road-Smarts. You don't need to brush your teeth either, or tie your shoelaces, or hold the handrail or watch your stock portfolio. Unless, of course, you would like to keep your teeth and live to become a successful investor. Road-Smarts, like paying attention to your investments, gives you an edge. It can give your delivery personnel the edge over the competition. It can get you home quicker. It can get you to meetings on time. It can save you money on fuel. Lots of money, if you have a fleet of vehicles!

Real-time access to traffic condition information as reported by various state and local entities such as DOT, Highway Patrol, local police departments, et al. We parse and edit the content to be delivered to small screen mobile devices in a simple, easy-to-read textual format. New data sources and geographical regions are being added regularly and ease-of-retrieval methods are constantly being reviewed and revised to maximize user efficiency.

Only if brushing your teeth or tying your shoes is difficult. After the initial registration, which requires you to type in a "Username", a "Password" and the "Registration Key", the only efforts consist of scrolling up/down, pressing enter or pressing escape. It takes between 30 seconds to 2 minutes* to pull up data on several areas or road segments that are significant to your route and that's that. More information on using your Road-Smarts can be found in the link Using Road-Smarts.

Note that the registration process is conducted only once upon initial service subscription. Thereafter it might be necessary to type in a "Username" "Password" combination occasionally if the session token is lost for some reason. This is rare.


* Access and response times vary and depend on many factors including your service providers coverage, signal clarity and other network issues.

You don't install it. You subscribe to it. Just like the newspaper. Only it's like a newspaper that gets delivered every two minutes with breaking news stories written to your specifications. We do all the work. Quietly. So, the answer would be "Super Easy".

Commuters, delivery personnel, truck drivers, sales people, and tourists can use Road-Smarts. Anyone with a Web/Internet enabled mobile device such as a cellphone or PDA. I use Road-Smarts because I like real-time statistics and I don't like to be late.

Florida is just the first of many states being developed. We published Florida first mostly because we live here and use Road-Smarts constantly, so Florida was the first logical region to build on, specifically the Tampa Bay area. Another reason is because the traffic issues in cities like Orlando, Tampa-St. Petersburg and the Miami-Dade areas can be pretty horrific and because of the amount of raw data that is becoming available in these areas. Our engineers are developing interfaces for new regions every week and as each new area is added, we will post the additions here.

Because we could. And because we all wanted something like it, but couldn't find it. Road-Smarts came up on the drawing board one day as a "Wouldn't it be cool if..." idea. We went to work on it and the results were inspiring. We actually drove around validating the accidents and road debris as the incidents appeared on our handhelds. The proof was in the pudding. Nothing is cooler than being stuck in a traffic jam that you knew about 5-10 minutes earlier because you were connected. (Well, maybe only if you develop software for that kind of thing)

We don't "support" any platform per se. We publish and format data that can be retrieved and read by devices that have Internet access, have a browser that is xHTML, WML or HTML capable. We have tested Road-Smarts on various devices including the Rim BlackBerry 7520 (TM), Sony, Ericsson, and others. The only issues we have encountered so far were that some devices were easier to use than others. Meaning that some manufacturers make it incredibly difficult to type anything other than numbers and others make it a challenge to find where to enter a URL of your choosing.

We recommend that before you subscribe to Road-Smarts, that you try our test area with your mobile device at http://www.road-smarts.com/demo. Here you will pull up a sample screen with links to demonstration data. If you can read the sample, then you're ready for the real thing. Now, what are you waiting for - Go ahead, get some Road-Smarts

Go to www.Road-Smarts.com. Once there, click on Subscribe to Road-Smarts
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Several reasons. Most likely it means that there are no incidents being reported at this moment for this particular area. It could mean that this particular data source is not publishing any data for whatever reason(s). Again, all of the data we get are from many different repositories all with their own means of data management. Road-Smarts is a content delivery service meaning that we build the engines that find, retrieve, format and present the data. The data itself originates elsewhere. This is the driving force behind our quest to constantly add new sources so that we, as users, will always have some data available when we want it.

Yes you may write us, but...

One of our goals in developing software for users is to build it so that it does not need documentation or support. As odd as this may seem at first, please consider the following:

Think of your toaster. When you buy a toaster, you know instinctively to plug the black cable into the electrical socket, place a slice of bread (not pudding) into the slot, and push the lever down in order to have toast for breakfast. How often do we need to refer to the toaster manual or call the toaster manufacturer to assist or troubleshoot the bread toasting process?

Next, please try to imagine that the soul of your toaster is inextricably tied to the manufacturers Great Toaster Master toaster and all of the other toasters of the same brand. If your toaster doesn't work because of the manufacturers failings, then nobody's toaster works including the owner of the toaster company. You can bet that they have their engineers working feverishly to right their wrongs so that they can use their toasters too.

If, however, your toaster doesn't work because you neglected to pay the electric bill or because you did not plug the black, three-pronged cable into the electric company's network, or 30 minutes ago a thunderstorm took out your entire neighborhood, chances are good that you are not calling the toaster company.

We're all happy that we own toasters that do not require us to languish in a technical support hotline queue several times a week only to have them explain that before we can receive any help with our toast, we must first upgrade to yada-yada-yada...

My toaster is simple and I'm grateful.

Now, think of Road-Smarts as your new toaster. Only faster. And smarter. And more helpful. Just make sure that you plug it in. And pay your bill, of course.