High Tech Travel Tips
A cement truck overturns on I-15, a crane collapses at the I-5/805
merge. These may be traffic nightmares for the rest of us but
they are the bread and butter of Sigalert.com. For $2.95 per
month or $19.95 per year Sigalert.com provides personalized traffic
reports that give each subscriber the fastest route from home
to office. And hopefully a way to avoid the latest thrills and
spills on their next commute. Joel Johnstone, ’88, and Jonathan Berke, ’90, started
their
two-man company in 1998, working nights and weekends. In 2001,
the Carlsbad company where they were employed moved
to the Bay Area and they chose to stay in San Diego and develop
Sigalert.com fulltime.
They pull their data, which includes crash reports from the
CHP and updates from Caltrans’s speed sensors, from the state
agencies, and then process it. “The CHP incident reports
are filled with cryptic codes, acronyms, and abbreviations. We
automatically expand these to make the reports more readable,” says
Berke. “In addition, the Caltrans data actually comes from
multiple sources, which
we aggregate to produce the information we show on our site.”
Although the company was initially conceived
as a call-in service it quickly became web-based. Now their
paid subscribers can
receive text-message alerts.
In the last 2 years, their annual revenues have quadrupled
to $400,000 and they have 10,000 paid subscribers. Last year,
nearly
5 million people visited the site and more than 100,000 signed
up for their two-week free trial. Even though their subscriber
base is growing their major revenue stream still comes from the
millions
of ads they display every month on their site. These range from
21st Century Insurance to truck driving schools to plastic surgeons.
Television stations in San Diego and Los Angeles also
buy the service.
So next time you wake up in a sweat contemplating your
morning mega-muddle at the merge, remember there’s sigalert.
— Marnette Federis, ’06,
Raymond Hardie
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