A Taiwanese company, Asia Pacific Broadband Wireless Communications, today launched a service enabling subscribers to watch a live video stream of traffic congestion, from an initial forty two cameras, on their mobile phone.

We’re assuming this isn’t for some strange realityTV-type entertainment but to check the density of traffic levels before travelling. Clearly it grabs headlines, but the video alone sound like a bit of a novelty as it’s pretty hard to judge the actual speed of traffic. We think the ideal would be to display the average speed to the traffic at your particular motorway junction on your mobile.

Funnily enough Dan Kemp, lead programmer at Live Information Systems, has created a Quick’n'Dirty system (his own description) to do just that - he’s call it mTraffic. It scrapes the information from the UK Highways Agency site repackages it for PDA/Smartphone, WAP and an XML feed - very neat.

On this day, years gone by ...

• Opera Lands O2 Germany Mobile Deal - 2008
• iPhone "Kill Switch" Storm - 2008
• GoGo WiFi Across All Delta Airlines Planes - 2008
• Vodafone Keeps Verizon Wireless Options - 2007
• New Apple Keyboards: Stunning - 2007
• LG-SC330: LG Lines Up The Ladies - 2007
• New iMac launched - 2007
• MySpace To Hit 100 Million Accounts - 2006
• Apple Mac Pro Announced - 2006
• Sony Mylo Wi-Fi Media Player Introduced - 2006