By Michael Steen, FT Netherlands Correspondent

You’re sitting in a traffic jam, late for a meeting, watching the estimated time of arrival on your satnav’s display creep later and later as it takes account of the fact that, right now, you’re not going anywhere. Do you cancel, try another route, or wait it out?

TomTom, the Dutch maker of navigation devices, is claiming to put an end to this kind of dilemma with a new service it launched today in the Netherlands, dubbed High Definition Traffic. It tracks the paths of about 4 million Vodafone mobile phone users to expand the amount of traffic information available.

Traffic information on satnav devices is not exactly new, but they tend to depend on patchy data compiled by sparse roadside cameras and traffic detectors.

Vodafone can track the whereabouts of each phone to within 500 metres and monitor its movement, says Luciën Groenhuijzen, managing director for TomTom Mobility Solutions. He is quick to point out that the data is not linked to the phone users.

The tracking element allows TomTom to strip out pedestrians and people travelling on trains that run alongside motorways. Each user is tracked for one hour before being re-assigned with a new random number.

"We introduced that [the one hour limit] so that we can’t follow someone, even if we don’t know who they are, for a whole day," Mr Groenhuijzen says.

TomTom blends the data collected from Vodafone with existing sources and sends updates to one of its new, €399 units every three minutes. (TomTom includes a year’s traffic information in the price after which it will charge €9.95 a month.)

So does it work? A test of the gadget at the height of Monday morning rush hour in the congested Randstad area around Amsterdam seemed to suggest it does.

Driving from the coast towards Amsterdam, the navigation device shows an accident has closed a lane on the motorway and a parallel main road is also clogged up. The gadget sends our car under the motorway, along a canal and through a village that looks onto fields near Schiphol airport. One feels a little smug.

What happens if everyone buys the gadget? Don’t you lose your edge? Mr Groenhuijzen claims not. The system is so fast at updating, he says, that the TomToms stuck to people’s windscreens would not send them all haring down a B-road into the same village to create a new traffic jam.

More on the on-again, off-again acquisition talks between Yahoo and Facebook. According to TechCrunch this morning, Yahoo offered $1bn for the social networking site earlier this year and was prepared to pay up to $1.62bn before talks lapsed.

Most intriguingly, TechCrunch appears to have got hold of internal Yahoo documents estimating FaceBook revenues this year will be $50m and projecting that the site will achieve earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of $1bn by 2015.

Mind you, 2015 is a long way off and all sorts of things could happen before then in the febrile world of social networking. There is probably a social network for five-year-olds starting up soon that could be a power in the land by then . . .

The semiconductor revolution looks like rolling on as scientists find new materials to combat the fact that the laws of physics are closing in on silicon and threatening to put an end to relentless miniaturisation.

In the latest development, MIT engineers have developed chips using a material called indium gallium arsenide, a semiconductor which allows electrons to travel many times faster than in silicon. The prototypes will be shown at an international electronics meeting today and tomorrow.

The InGaAs chips carry 2.5 times more current than today’s state of the art silicon while each InGaAs transistor is only 60 billionth of a metre in size, equivalent to the best of today’s silicon technology.In the future, these chips will replace silicon, the experts think. So let’s hear it  for Indium Gallium Arsenide Valley… No? perhaps it loses something in the translation.

Alan Cane, London.

That mighty rushing sound you just heard could well have been the global mobile phone industry letting out a collective sigh of relief. A Danish study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute today seems to show conclusively that cell phone use is not associated with a higher risk of cancer or any other disease.

The researchers studied the medical histories of  420,095 individuals  who had been using cell phones for at least 10 years and found no association between long or short term cell phone use with brain tumours, salivary gland tumours, eye tumours or leukaemia.

(more…)

Wall Street is attracting a growing number of blogs tracking the antics of traders and brokers. They include Under The Counter and DealBreaker. The latter was founded by Elizabeth Spiers, a refugee from Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire.

Now video blogging has come to Wall Street. Wallstrip, a financial site tracking various stocks is a mostly worthy affair. But it also takes a cue from Rocketboom in featuring an easy-on-the-eye young woman presenting a daily bulletin. Rocketboom made Amanda Congdon famous and now Wallstrip threatens to do the same for Lindsay Campbell.

And she is funny too.

To the Morgan Library in Manhattan to hear about how the Wall Street Journal is slimming down and putting more news online. Like other newspapers in a troubled industry, the Journal is slimming itself down to save money. By trimming a column from its page width from January 2, it will save $18m annually in newsprint costs.

The Journal is making the best of it by redesigning the paper to make it easier to read. It will shorten some stories although it insists that it remains committed to long-form journalism. Paul Steiger, its managing editor, said it intends to carry more breaking news on its website.

The Journal stands out from other newspapers in having a subscription-only internet presence and now claims 800,000 subscribers. But it is making one concession to free content. It is launching a free financial data service, combining content from Dow Jones Newswires and MarketWatch.

Update: Here is Jeff Jarvis’s view

Everybody knows  that the $250bn plus global semiconductor market is being driven these days by the whims and fancies of a 17-year-old girl.  Well, a universe of 17-year-old girls, as consumer products of all kinds raid the chip shop for novelty and new features.  That said, the semiconductor industry looks as if it is heading for a period of slower growth with TSMC, the Taiwan-based manufacturer that is the world’s leading silicon foundry, predicting  only single figure sales  growth - admittedly high single figure sales growth - next year compared with the high teens it enjoyed in 2006.  Loss of momentum in the fixed and mobile phone and personal computer businesses are being blamed.  The industry remains cyclical but not perhaps as cyclical as before, old hands reckon.

Nevertheless, the growing influence of fashion and the desire for trendiness in the consumer space is  being reflected in the fact that a two-year chip manufacturing cycle is being squeezed into 12 months as the market demands new features and applications at ever shorter times to market.  The trend to greater complexity is remorseless.  TSMC manufactures to order chips designed by its customers - over  7bn eight inch wafers or their equivalent this year alone. It has been tuning up its two lines capable of handling giant 12 inch wafers, the silicon platters on which individual chips are inscribed. 

And here’s the killer: several start-up companies whose designs are to be manufactured by TSMC next year will go straight to the industry’s most advanced technology - 65 nanometre - rather than starting in traditional fashion with a less taxing regime (say, 1.3 micron) and then moving up.  This is a dramatic change, brought about by the pressure to deliver, and deliver rapidly. 

But unless you’re thinking big, don’t bother starting this small.  You’ll need an estimated $250m a year in sales to justify the cost of design, prototyping and fabricating a chip in 65 nanometre technology.

- London

The British music industry’s feathers have already been ruffled by leaks from the soon-to-be released Gowers review of intellectual property  in the UK indicating that it will not, despite the pleading of cash-strapped stars like the millionaire Sir Cliff Richard, extend copyright on music beyond the existing 50 years.  Sir Cliff’s first hits were in the ’50s.

Meanwhile, fears are growing that not only the copyright system but the internet itself could "implode" under the strain of dealing with digital developments. Prof. Roger Wallis of the Stockholm technical university who has been researching this topic for years, told an invited audience in London on Thursday that if measures to prevent illegal down and up loading  under the EU’s i2010 strategy were implemented rigorously, Google, all peer-to-peer networks and every email system would have to be shut down: "In other words" he said "The Net would grind to a halt."  Wallis, a composer himself, believes that if you want creativity in a society sometimes you have to be a bit illegal.  He should know: years ago he co-wrote the winner of the Eurovision song contest.

Alan Cane, London.

Salesforce.com is planning to install server farms in Europe and Asia to underpin its runaway growth.  The web-based applications software group is continuing to gnaw away at the heart of the traditional software business with a business model which will seem a touch familiar to those with long memories.  It operates, at present, only customer relationship management, which it provides as a service to more than 550,000 customers daily.  Customers need neither hardware nor software. They  despatch CRM queries over the web: Salesforce sends back the processed results.   Yes, it’s basically a computer bureau service brought up to date with the web supplanting those fleets of vans which used to scuttle between customers and bureaux carrying cans of magnetic tape. 

The dramatic growth of Salesforce - it’s worth $5bn right now - confirms, for me at any rate, that a subtle blend of cost and competition are driving a cycle in which  applications move from the centre of the network to the edge and back again.  Traditional bureaux saw applications firmly at the centre. Fat clients saw them move to the edge. With client-server computing, the cycle turned again and Salesforce seems to be completing the process. 

How long will it hold sway?  Who knows.  My bet, however, is that a combination of ubiquitous computing power at near zero cost and super simple software tools which will encourage the creation of competitive edge software will spin the wheel one more time.

- Alan Cane, London