The Digital Car and Harman's acquisition of Aha Mobile

 

Harman today announced its acquisition of Aha Mobile, a Venrock portfolio company.  We are quite excited about all the possibilities for Aha to leverage Harman's massive footprint and for Harman to provide a completely new set of differentiated experiences to its customers.  We wish the whole Aha team, including Robert, Max, Rafael, Ryan and Jason the best of luck as they bring Aha's innovative digital car services to millions of cars in the future.  Here's the press release.

I remember thinking about this idea while driving up and down the I-280 from San Francisco to Palo Alto and back everyday in 2007.  I was (very) bored with my car's radio channels as well as frustrated with not being able to access (safely) my own personalized web content while driving.  So I thought, how about an in-car user experience that brings me all sorts of web content, such as my own personalized road traffic report or email or other social feeds?  Out of this was borne the idea for Aha Mobile (the name came later).

Aha's CEO Robert, along with his colleagues, developed this idea further to incorporate a completely audio-based experience; content personalized based on location; interactivity to allow the user to say something that posts back to Facebook, the road traffic feed, etc,; and a back-end platform to aggregate data from across the Web.  I still believe that this is a truly innovative approach to in-car web services.

Our thesis: the digital car

We continue to look to partner with superstar entrepreneurs to drive the digital car forward (no pun intended!).  We are investors in INRIX and Where.  INRIX provides highly accurate traffic services to automotive OEMs, navigation software companies, online map providers, GPS/PND device makers, the public sector and others. Where is a mobile location-based search and advertising company. 

We developed a thesis on investing in the digital car, a megatrend that I believe will play out over the next decade at many levels of the value-chain.  The digital car leverages other megatrends such as pervasive broadband access, smartphone saturation, location and general user addiction to personalized web services.  At that time, in 2007/2008, some of the areas that we found interesting to prospect into included: new map databases, consumer voice apps, voice recognition engines, connected PNDs, location-based services, off-board navigation, connected media services, app stores for the car, and data aggregation.  We believed that some other areas of the digital car had already matured and were therefore not necessarily the right place to invest - these included: PNDs, in-dash operating systems, locationing technologies, broadband connectivity providers, enterprise telematics, and POI data.  Many of these elements are different in other markets, such as China, India, SE Asia, and similar in the EU.

Since then, many, if not all, of these areas have changed quite dramatically, showing how difficult, if not impossible, it is to try and predict the future in tech.  Some of the changes since 2007/2008 that impact the digital car have included: 

• the rise of smartphones (iPhone had just launched and Android was a theory) and app stores
• the rapid growth of Pandora and streaming mobile media in general
• the dramatic price reduction in mobile navigation solutions driven by Google
• the financial crisis and resultant slowdown in automotive sales
• a change in mindset of auto OEMs from telematics (essentially call-center based services such as OnStar) to connected services (such as Ford's Sync service and BMW's ConnectedDrive)
• the peaking of the PND market
• the sales of Navteq and TeleAtlas to device OEMs (Nokia and TomTom, respectively) and the rise of other map databases such as OpenStreetMap and Google's own map database
• the exponential growth in open data access through APIs such as for Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and several databases

There are also some constant themes and frustrations when it comes to the digital car:

• Business model differences between consumer web services and automotive OEMs
• Impedance mismatch between automotive OEMs and consumer web services in terms of iterating on new technologies
• The gap between the promise of voice recognition and its actual performance in the noisy environment of the car
• Slow emergence of standard interfaces and protocols in the car to connected with mobile devices or the Web (I would call the 12V plug as well as auxiliary jack for iPods standard interfaces)

And finally, there are some user-interface concepts that I outlined in these slides that I believe still apply for any in-car experience:

9 Questions for Digital Car Application Developers

View more presentations from Dev Khare.

Comments

[Connectedcar]

Great posting on trends, challenges and needs moving forward. I even like the neat slides! As I note in my twitter profile - convergence, integration and innovation.