It's fascinating to see where cars are heading at the moment. Major manufacturers such as Audi, Mercedes-Benz and Ford are all racing to lead the integration of mobile technology, apps, APIs and more into their vehicle offerings, with "Chrysler's Uconnect or Audi Connect unveiled at CES this week [accounting] for nearly $7 billion (£4.55 billion) in sales this year, according to the Consumer Electronics Association." (see article linked below)
Now, there's a phrase I hadn't seen myself writing before I'd read the article below: "Car APIs". But it makes complete sense in many ways.
Major industries have been hugely disrupted by technology, especially over the past decade. Publishing, the news media, the music industry, the films industry, the games industry and more have all had their - previously seemingly secure - worlds flipped on their heads and many have lost out in a big way.
The music industry chose to fight "piracy" (which, a smarter person may have seen was a view of just how consumers wanted to consume music), suing anyone who had even heard of the name Napster, let alone downloaded an mp3. The movie industry followed a very similar path, choosing to take the world and his popcorn-munching dog to the cleaners. What happened? Apple decided "hell, if you guys aren't going to realise a trend in consumption habits, we will!" and promptly snaffled billions of dollars a year in revenue by launching iTunes.
Publishing is suffering the same fate, with Amazon and its Kindle offering leading the charge to disruptively innovate their market while they sleep (some efforts of course made by Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, but they are bricks and mortar retailers - Amazon cut them out of the loop long ago).
The news media industry? We all know the story there, with media conglomerates flip-flopping between paywalls, digital editions and anything else they can think of. Again, Apple is the wolf at the door with their apps platform and the media companies are looking increasingly nervous.
The games industry - one very close to my heart - is still to work out the effects of Steam, Valve's now well-established direct-to-consumer digital sales platform. And OnLive - a true surprise entrant (I didn't think it would be real, and certainly not good, but - bugger - it actually is) is not only revolutionising gaming, but also the general software market and "the cloud" to boot. Oh! And also giving the indie market even greater hope. Bang on...
So, then, I doff my cap (I actually don't own a cap, nor have I ever doffed. Least not with ladies present) to the automotive industry who are embracing technologies, creating in-house teams for planning and linking up with industry leaders such as Facebook (not that I personally think that's a great thing on its own).
It's an exciting space in many ways. Many people spend huge amounts of time in their vehicles (in the US especially, where driving for many hours between destinations is very commonplace) and already have connected, app-powered devices with them (laptops, tablets, smart phones). Why not make the leap of combining the vehicle (or mobile home/office for many) with that computational power, convenience and access and selling this as a new wave of purchase options.
What sort of things are being explored?
- Pads with handwriting recognition (for writing emails & other comms)
- Google Earth
- A cutdown version of Facebook, alerting you of nearby friends and businesses, and status updates
- Wikipedia (note that these are custom apps for the car, not just browser windows to the sites)
- Local weather
- Local petrol prices
- Travel info
- News
- The ability for your car to act as a WiFi hotspot for your the devices you have with you (and to shut up/entertain the little darlings)
Check out the video of Audi's Connect system, showing off some of these features:
To sum it up, a line from the below report that I agree with whole-heartedly: "Manufacturers must deliver, or risk irrelevance."
Read the full article, over at Wired, featuring a load more information and insights. Exciting times indeed...
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