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Traffic Amigo is a simple service that sends you scheduled traffic accident updates via SMS. It was created by Daniel McOrmond and has won the Twilio SMS contest. Congratulations Daniel! For his efforts, Daniel has won a Kindle 3G, a $50 Amazon gift card and $100 in Twilio credit.
To get started with Traffic Amigo, you provide a phone number, select your city and choose your preferred notification times. If there are any accidents in your region at those times, you’ll get a SMS alert about it! Daniel tells us more about his winning entry.
What is the story behind Traffic Amigo?
DM: One of our co-workers was stuck in traffic one day for so long that she almost peed her pants. She’s a jam-out-to-music kind of gal, rather than the sit-through-the-news-for-the-traffic-update kind. So, that led to the idea. Really, we only want traffic when we’re driving, and most of us have the same schedule each day, so narrowing the times for traffic updates is really as easy as a morning/evening commute. So far, we’ve helped a few users avoid huge traffic delays because of our updates, which means 2 things. First, that it works. Second, how cool is that? The plan is to grow our user base until we can approach paying advertisers to connect to users along with each traffic text.
What technologies are you using for Traffic Amigo?
We’re using traffic data from Mapquest via their API. The rest is just a simple CakePHP & MySQL app that manages subscriptions. A cron job checks every 15 minutes for accidents and sends alerts via Twilio if applicable.
How was the experience of integrating Twilio into your application?
We’ve worked with Twilio in the past. So the integration was quick and seamless. We’re using a little CakePHP datasource put together by aaroninfidel.
How did you get started developing with Twilio?
One of our bosses started a youth football team and wanted SMS reminders and notifications. We stumbled across Twilio and have been hooked ever since!
Want to win a Kindle of your own? For this week’s contest we’re looking for holiday-inspired Twilio apps. Complete details about the contest can be found here.