I know your face

We designed a lot of the site's functionality back in December last year. Back in those dim, distant days we only had 3,000 members. We've now grown to over 20,000, and we're trying to keep up with the changing ways that the site is being used.

We always welcome suggestions, and he had a particularly good one last week from Alun Andrews:

When looking at the contacts tab it shows a lot of icons for members 'who are sharing your routes'. I think it would be useful to exclude all the site members who do not want to share their details from the page.

This was a great idea, and even better, it was simple enough to implement. Now when you click the Contacts tab, you'll see a wealth of users with their own custom avatars, rather than the sea of anonymous users you had previous.



If you've got a great suggestion for how to improve the site, let us know.

Biker Hordes

Last Thursday's fuel protests caused a stir here at the KeepMoving office.

Hundreds of bikers rode in convoy down the motorway, massively disrupting traffic during the morning rush hour.

But what we loved about it was how we could follow their progress down the motorways on our CCTV page. We read about their travel plans, selected the relevant roads, and watched the event unfold on our computer screens. Here's a selection of our favourite images...

Road Timetable

My Mum called me the other day. She's considering moving house and wanted to know where she could move to while still being within an hour's drive of her current workplace.

She had simply taken a large fold-out map of England, worked out the average distance she could cover in one hour at rush hour, and drawn a circle of that radius centered on her workplace. It's a straightforward method, if a little crude.

But then she remembered that I worked for a traffic information company, and asked if I knew a better way.

I did. We're currently developing a tool which displays how far you can get from a certain starting point in a given time, factoring in the wealth of road and traffic information we amass.

Here's a shot.



Bigger version, click here.


When we've perfected this it'll be one piece of software with a lot of interesting uses:

- You're considering which schools you can drive to in 20 minutes at 8:30am.

- You're looking for new jobs and you want to see which employers are within half an hour's commute.

- You want to see which country pubs you can get to quickly.

We're only in alpha stages at the moment. It takes the traffic computers a lot of time to do all the calculations, so releasing this to our members isn't an option yet. When it's in beta we'll let you know.

Keep your eyes peeled.

Chris

Top gear at Top Gear

Watching the Top Gear presenters tearing round racetracks and exotic countryside is good therapy for us traffic-nuts whose day jobs it is to report the slow crawl of the daily commute.

We at KeepMoving have a long history with Top Gear. It started back when the show had a slightly-awkward magazine format. Those days, we sat and watched it. Later on they starting contacting us to get statistics for their traffic-based segments. And this week we proudly present a joint competition.

Enter the KeepMoving Top Gear competition here!

Yes, now you stand a chance of winning a shiny new iPhone if you answer a series of nine questions.

Sounds simple? Fancy an iPhone? Then enter! (We have.)

Old vs. new routing

Recently we rolled out our new route specific traffic feature on Vodafone 2222. The new feature detects your location and then prompts you to enter the first part of any UK postcode - it then provides you with a journey time and details of any traffic problems on your journey.

This new feature replaced the old route specific feature, where callers would hear details for the route which they had previously set up on the KeepMoving website. The rationale for this was that take-up for the old feature was rather low and the new one would have far broader appeal, which has proven to be the case.

We were very confident that the new feature would also appeal to users of the old one - we added a feature which remembers your previous destinations and then suggests them back to you, based on the time of day of the call.

However, we have registered 6 emails from callers who feel rather passionately about this change. As an interim solution, callers can dial 09003 444999, which is charged at 60p per minute - this has the old feature.

But what do you think? Let us know by posting your comments below or click our online poll to the right of this message.

The KeepMoving Team.

Let's get things started...

Hello and welcome to KeepMoving.

The purpose of this blog is to keep you up to date with all our latest developments on the KeepMoving website and on our telephone traffic service.

All of the team will be chipping in with their contributions from time to time and we'd love to hear any feedback you might have about our services.

Thanks for visiting! Alex