(Photo by Mark Stosberg)
The current edition of The Economist has a nice article, including some thoughts from yours truly, on the Connected Car. There are a bunch of interesting trends converging in the new few years that you should try out (safely!) - in-car navigation, car-to-car connectivity, traffic data availability, pay-as-you-go insurance, new ways of creating digital maps, asset tracking, wireless diagnostics, local search, electric vehicles etc. And many of these ideas are available today, including some from Venrock portfolio companies INRIX, uLocate and Aha Mobile. Some ideas, such as vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity for driving safety are a decade or more out, in my opinion (see my post on Smart Intersections from a few months ago). Additionally, the auto industry (now that it is reinventing itself) should not forget that mobile phones/devices are going to be an integral part of the in-car experience.
Coincidentally, just a few weeks ago, I met with Rahul Mangharam (mentioned in the Economist article) at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennylvania, my alma mater. He's conducting very interesting research into traffic congestion, predictive traffic, automotive safety and next-generation automotive electronics. Also mentioned in the article is the Stanford CarLab (Cliff Nass and Sven Beiker) which we know well. They're doing some exciting work on human-machine interfaces in the car.
An area that I am particularly interested in currently is the idea of using field-generated and user-inputted data (both explicitly-inputted and implicitly-generated) or crowdsourcing for building geographically-defined databases that can then benefit all stationary and mobile users - examples include traffic, maps, points-of-interest, photos, reviews, retail activity etc.
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