Infinite Path

Imagine you’re operating an underground public transport system in one of Europe’s major capitals and you want to develop a website which allows people to track the movement of every train live. Sounds expensive, right? But what if you could get someone to do it for free?

It sounds unlikely, but that’s exactly what Transport for London has done. They set up an applications programming interface (API) which allows third parties to query it for data it hold, and keen developers have done the rest.
Ok, it’s not exactly free, setting up the API would have incurred some expenditure, but it certainly wouldn’t have been as expensive as doing the whole thing in house.

This example, created by Malcolm Summerville, looks to work pretty well, although it’s probably of little practical use and is more proof of concept than anything else.

However, TfL has big plans for its API and among a whole host of information developers will be able to leverage is locations of Oyster ticket shops, stations, and a whole host of live traffic information. Things aren’t limited to the web either as developers can also create smartphone apps using the data.

So what lessons can other firms learn from this? Well, clearly it shows that keeping all your data to yourself isn’t always the best plan. Obviously some things need to be protected, but larger firms would certainly stand to gain if they let developers access the information they need to develop innovative apps and webpages.

As for smaller companies, this is just another example of how taking an innovative approach to the internet can lead to big gains.

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