An interesting story via the O’reilly Radar touching on the City of Boston and how the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) made real time data available to the public (and perhaps more important, to developers), spurring a ton of innovation from mobile app developers as is evident from the MBTA application showcase page at http://www.mbta.com/rider_tools/apps/ – see also the Mass Transit app from Sparkfish creative. For more on the story of open transit data in Boston see the article Boston’s real-time transit data: “Better than winning the World Series“