I was walking the kids to school the other morning when I saw a few cars driving faster than they should’ve been driving through the school zone. It made me wonder if anyone has written a smartphone app that can calculate the speed at which a car is traveling via the smartphone’s video camera.

Another app I thought would be useful (or not) is an app which uses the internal gyros, accelerometers, and/or GPS to detect when the phone is in a moving vehicle. It could then either activate “car mode” or, to become more restrictive: locking the keypad so that texting could not be done while driving.

The latter app would’ve been useful had it been on the phone of a driver in front of me on Wade Avenue this morning!