Seth Goldin has a fantastic idea for a killer iPhone app that is just itching to be made. It’s a very simple idea, but it would be very tricky to do on anything other than an iPhone. Basically the idea is to have a program that will tell you exactly the route you should take by monitoring the traffic jams and such that other users are observing.

Creating a service using a traditional traffic monitoring system where you would pay for people or contractors would be prohibitavely expensive. Thus, most systems that track traffic end up being not terribly responsive or accurate. Using the power of crowds could really provide excellent data to build a system from and the way that Seth has thought about it is really right on. The iPhone could just send its GPS data back to the server every so often when driving as its giving directions and that would give the server enough data to monitor the traffic. (more…)