Following my previous story on the grassroots movements, here are some of another developments.

Car Activities in Tohoku on Google Map: Google, Honda and Pioneer visualize car activities in Tohoku by using gathered data from communication-enabled car navigation systems.

Blue lines stand for routes on which one or more motor vehicles have run on the previous day.  On gray lines, no vehicle has run during the period.  This helps you find which routes are available.

This website was launched on DropBox and shows you realtime public transit-related tweets sorted by railway operator and line.   Working on a keyword basis, this could be a better option as to learn which lines are out of service more quickly than the operator's official announcements.

Area Map of Scheduled Power Outages[J]: This website shows you which rotation group your area belongs to at a glance and helps you find which hours of the day  your area will be out of power.  It's based on the announcements by Tokyo Electric Power Company and tweets from the region.

Cookpad, a social network specializing in sharing meal ideas online, shows recipes for disaster survivors with limited foodstuffs[J].

ThumbApps scraps fee for their iPhone app (Tsubueki) that aggregates transit-related tweets. (original price: 230 yen)   This helps you find better routes and avoid traffic confusion.

More news to come.

Author Information  Masaru IKEDA has co-founded several system integration companies and consulting firms in Tokyo. He has been contributing serial columns to nationwide newspapers and IT periodicals, also he's currently serving as tech consultant for several web companies. His biography is here. His private blog is here.

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