Wade Roush, reporting for Xconomy:
Google’s leadership has opened up space for a whole ecosystem of transit-app startups. It’s not as if Google invented the idea of putting transit data online—that’s been going on since at least 1998, when a pair of University of California students created a website called Transitinfo.org to tie together data from 26 transit agencies around the Bay Area. (It’s now called 511 Transit.) But the emergence of a common standard for publishing transit schedules has enabled independent developers who started out building apps tailored to their local systems to think much bigger.