post Category: Best Practices, Reviews — mike @ 9:17 am — post

trapster Trapster - Speed Trap Sharing System http://www.trapster.com/
This website is an amazing website and an idea that I’ve had since I was young and I am very happy the technology is finally here and that someone made it real. Trapster is an application that you can save spots where police hide, it saves it to an online website, and then it alerts others as they approach the speed traps. It will either work on your cell phone or GPS device.

It has a very impressive feature that learns the credibility of each user. The more a user uploads, and the more people verify that this is an accurate trap, the higher that persons credibility goes. This helps ensure accurate alerts of police traps. This is great for speed traps, red light cameras, and speed cameras.

On the map, green icons represent a suggestion with only 1 vote, where as a red icon represents 5 or more votes. This is a good visual tool that helps people know where are the more accurate/common points that police usually sit.

Unforuntately this only works on Nokia smartphones. This means that my Verizon Wireless regular slider phone will not work with this service.

The bads:
It has an annoying background alert voice prompt.
Also, the commands to use this require a lot of phone keypad usage. This is real bad when driving at 60MPH - never text and drive.

Ideal situation (idea when I was a kid):
Have radar/laser detectors automatically upload a detected police location to a server, that all other detectors are synced up to, so even if the detector cannot physically see the police trap, it will be alerted from users that have already seen it infront of you on the highway. I like to call this the reverse notification because it alerts people behind you of an upcoming trap. Afterall, the only way for someone that is behind you to know there is a cop infront of them, is to have oncoming traffic flash their lights when they see it and have the person behind you see that - not efficient. My thoughts, in order to have this advanced synchronization and backwards notifcation technique in place, a very large and expensive infrastructure would have to be in place, and require a very large number of users actively using this. Of course, this would only work in states that allow these detectors (another reason why MD is superior to VA, haha kidding.)

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • e-mail
  • Fark
  • Live
  • StumbleUpon
  • Slashdot

Sorry, no comments yet.

Write Your Comment

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs will be generated automatically.

You should have a name, right? 
Your email address, I promised I won't tell it to anyone. 
If you have a web site or blog, you can type the URL right here. 
This is where you type your comments. 
Remember my information for the next time I visit.