The latest generation of Opticom gear does away with infrared in favor of a combination of cellular radio and Global Positioning System links, which can pinpoint a vehicle's location and speed.

FORBES: Greening the Traffic Lights

"I don't foresee anything changing, " he says, citing emerging data floods from global positioning systems, radio-frequency identification tags and Homeland Security regulations.

FORBES: Data of Reckoning

He recently teamed with troubled Sirius XM Radio and Garmin, maker of global-positioning displays, to beam weather data to automobiles--a potentially large but still nascent market.

FORBES: Magazine Article

In a study published in 2006, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who rode 37 airline flights with a radio-frequency measuring device found emissions from cellphones that could interfere with global-positioning satellite systems.

WSJ: 'Turn Off All Electronic Devices:' And What Happens if You Don't

Each onboard ADS-B set consists of a Global Positioning System satellite navigation unit, two Pentium microprocessors, some software and a radio transmitter-receiver--not much more gear than you would find behind the dash of a new Cadillac.

FORBES: Free flight

The study, the first of its kind to use the satellite-based global positioning system to provide the animals' locations, involved tagging 14 African elephants with sophisticated radio collars and monitoring their movements for several months.

ECONOMIST: Elephant behaviour