Wouldn’t it be cool if you had a display on your car’s speedometer that told you what the speed limit is for your current location? Roads could have little wireless transmitters embedded wherever the speed limit changes and your dashboard display would automatically update. In addition, you would see your current speed display in green if you are under the speed limit and in red if you are over it.

More on the car front — in the R&D lab, we’ve often discussed a potential ubiquitous computing scenario in which each car on the road would transmit data about how fast it’s going, as well as have sensors in the tires that could transmit information about road conditions. All of this data could be sent to a centralized database that could monitor traffic and road conditions without relying on helicopters, inspectors, etc.