Yanosik

Summer holiday season ends tomorrow. As usual I have traveled a lot in a car recently. The roads down here in Poland are very crowded, so more often than ever I tried to depart as early as possible, like 3AM in the morning. By the way this pattern reminds me the early days of the Internet, when the only way to get decent download speed was to get up at 3AM and log on to a computer...

This time a year ago I posted on predictive mobile navigation, a system utilizing a feedback from GPS devices, even as early as users plan their journeys... A year later and there is a GPS device with bi - directional communications. But it has been introduced to the market for quite a different reason... Yanosik bears its name after Juraj Jánošík, the legendary outlaw who robbed nobles and gave the loot to the poor and has always been a symbol of resistance. This time it is the resistance against police highway patrol and speed cameras, but if properly developed can have many more implications in future.

Technically Yanosik is a dedicated portable computer, using a few pushbuttons as inputs and synthesized voice as output. It has a GPS receiver (so it always knows its position and derivatives, like speed and direction of movement) and a GPRS modem built in. Yanosik maintains connection with servers, fetching road information related to its position. The servers maintain a static (updated periodically) database of stationary speed cameras. When you approach such a camera, it warns you twice with synthesized voice and series of beeps. Up to this moment the feature set would be quite typical, could be even implemented without data connection, by caching the entire speed camera database inside the unit.

But Yanosik goes further. It allows you to interactively report all inconsistencies within the database. Should Yanosik warn you about a speed camera that does not exist, you may press a "cancel" button to remove it from the database. When confirmed by other users (the exact algorithm is not unveiled by the company) the record is removed. You may also interactively report other situations. There are simple, dedicated buttons for "highway patrol", "accident", "traffic jam" and "truck inspection".

Of course Yanosik is being marketed as a digital replacement to the analog cb-radio, drivers use to inform themselves about various threats along the way, especially about police highway patrols. Its undoubted strength is ease of use - just nine dedicated buttons. It is a breakthrough in terms of using mobile data, where it resembles Amazon's Kindle a little - it comes with mobile data "built in" - you even don't know what carrier they use, you just pay 10PLN (~$3.50) a month and you are covered.

As always the success of Yanosik depends on how quickly it will be able to build a critical mass of users. And how far out the vision of the company stretches, as with smart server - side algorithms they are able do deliver many different services, derived on the real - time data they have access to. Unfortunately they do not seem to be utilizing the power of virtual communities we have at the moment - no trace of Yanosik on Facebook nor on Twitter. And without properly planned viral campaign, the idea may take long time to catch on...