Austin, Texas is a wired kinda town: you're nobody if you're not on Four Square, the barmen know as much about Android as they do fixing drinks, and every year it plays host to South By South West Interactive -- a tech conference on a gargantuan scale.
This time 10,741 people have converged for the festival, which is their largest turn out to date, and I have the pleasure of being Wired's ears and viewing spheres. Each day, in a special series of blog posts, I will report on an event that's got me excited.
So, my first day. "Dude, This Is My Car" was a talk hosted by Ford R & D whizz TJ Giuli, and Paddy Srinivasan, founder of cloud computing company Cumulux. With many SXSW-ers plumping for the oversubscribed (and apparently below par) discussion about mobile user experience, Giuli's revelations about his company's plans for networked vehicles was under-attended but intriguing.
The gist: Ford will soon create an "App Store" for cars, allowing developers to build programs that will run on customisable displays even in its cheaper (web-enabled) models. Given that vehicles already collect a vast amount of data about how you drive, combining this information with geosocial networking platforms throw up exciting possibilities.
You could encourage desirable behaviour such as greener driving by creating a game where you get points for, say, driving at less erratic speeds (constant acceleration and breaking is fuel inefficient) and competing against your friends. Or perhaps there would be a tour-guiding app that links your GPS navigation to Wikipedia to make journeys more interesting. "Instead of having points of interest drawn from a stock database, what if you could have POIs your friends have recommended to you?" said Giuli.
More pragmatic applications might include emergency help, as Srinivasan explained. "Say your car is about to blow up" -- "it's not a Ford," interrupted Giuli -- "...you want to find the five friends closest to you to get help".
This is all very well, but couldn't these kinds of applications cause such accidents, especially when in their crudest forms they will just allow drivers to check their twitter feeds?
Giuli is adamant that "managed openness" is the solution to ensuring that apps are safety-conscious, though he refused to be more specific. Another potential pitfall is that if your driver data is exposed on social networks, then third-party ownership of that data is rendered acceptable, which means insurance companies might get hold of it and penalise fast drivers (actually, is that so bad?).
However it works out, the internet of things just got a little more real. Your tweeting plant could soon look positively outmoded.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment