The Federal government, specifically the Federal Highway Administration, is spending $1.2 billion of your money to nationalize the 511 highway traffic reporting system, replicating what Yahoo, Google, Navteq, and others are already doing. This is a great example of the overreach that is endemic to the Federal government but what is really troubling about it is that they are forcing significant expenditures upon states at a time when states across the country are running cumulative deficits of $145 billion and growing.
This is the kind of initiative that the Federal government should stay out of… $1.2 billion (plus whatever the states will have to spend) may not sound like a lot of money in an age when we throw around “a trillion” without a measure of shock to go with it, but this is real money for which ROI will be difficult to achieve in light of the fact that the private sector is already doing it.
In the same vein:
About Jeff Nolan
My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant.
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About Venture Chronicles
About Venture Chronicles
My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant.
Along the way to becoming a bona fide blogger I started to understand the implications of user generated content. At the time I was a venture capitalist for SAP, the enterprise software company, and in my travels in the enterprise software market it became evident that blogging would be a powerful communication channel for enterprises to use, what we now call social media, and a powerful information collection mechanism for bottom up corporate intelligence. Combined with search technology, social networking software, and wikis, I was witnessing the inception of an entirely new generation of knowledge management software.
I am currently the VP Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction, the simple and effective way to build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. Over 50,000 companies use Get Satisfaction to create a social support experience, build better products, realize SEO benefits, and take advantage of brand loyalty behaviors that results in strong word of mouth marketing experiences in the market.
I can be reached at jnolan-at-gmail-dot-com.
The Federal government, specifically the Federal Highway Administration, is spending $1.2 billion of your money to nationalize the 511 highway traffic reporting system, replicating what Yahoo, Google, Navteq, and others are already doing. This is a great example of the overreach that is endemic to the Federal government but what is really troubling about it is that they are forcing significant expenditures upon states at a time when states across the country are running cumulative deficits of $145 billion and growing.
