About time...
Sep. 28th, 2006 10:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurIt's always neat to see one of my blue-sky ideas come to fruition. (A little frustrating to see that they went and *patented* the damned thing, but that's what I get for not going to the effort myself. If I ever care to invalidate the patent, I can investigate whether I ever really talked about it publically.)
Anyway: one of the points I've been making for, oh, probably six or seven years now is the killer app for Internet to the car: a truly smart navigation system, with up-to-the-minute information. Well, it looks like it's finally happening: the Dash Express is almost exactly the device I designed all those years ago, and have talked about occasionally since then. It's a standard GPS system, but is Internet-connected to their servers. This is key in two ways. First, it uses current traffic information to build its route suggestions -- rather than simply going for the *shortest* route, it will automatically take you around traffic. Second, it uploads and anonymizes the GPS position and speeds from its users to build up seriously accurate traffic info. Once enough people in a given area have the system, it ought to wind up with the most accurate traffic picture out there.
They're apparently in alpha now, but the reviews are starting to trickle in, and it appears to be *very* nearly my ideal device. It fails on only one front: I would have preferred to separate the hardware and software equations. If the front end device was a general-purpose Internet terminal, with the Dash navigation software as just a single app on it, they would have opened up a much bigger (if slightly riskier) opportunity for themselves, to become the cornerstone of a whole new industry. I may yet write to them and suggest that...
Anyway: one of the points I've been making for, oh, probably six or seven years now is the killer app for Internet to the car: a truly smart navigation system, with up-to-the-minute information. Well, it looks like it's finally happening: the Dash Express is almost exactly the device I designed all those years ago, and have talked about occasionally since then. It's a standard GPS system, but is Internet-connected to their servers. This is key in two ways. First, it uses current traffic information to build its route suggestions -- rather than simply going for the *shortest* route, it will automatically take you around traffic. Second, it uploads and anonymizes the GPS position and speeds from its users to build up seriously accurate traffic info. Once enough people in a given area have the system, it ought to wind up with the most accurate traffic picture out there.
They're apparently in alpha now, but the reviews are starting to trickle in, and it appears to be *very* nearly my ideal device. It fails on only one front: I would have preferred to separate the hardware and software equations. If the front end device was a general-purpose Internet terminal, with the Dash navigation software as just a single app on it, they would have opened up a much bigger (if slightly riskier) opportunity for themselves, to become the cornerstone of a whole new industry. I may yet write to them and suggest that...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-28 05:20 pm (UTC)I don't know, and I'm quite curious about that. For all I know, they could even be using something WiMax-ish, if they're really focusing on municipal areas with enough density. There are so many options for wireless broadband now, and none of them are perfect, so it would be interesting to know which tradeoffs they chose.
OTOH, satellite probably can work here, because the info is relatively low bandwidth and latency tolerant.
Does satellite provide 2-way at this point? (Entirely possible -- I haven't been paying attention to that technology for a while.) But yes: this app ought to be able to cope with latencies and bandwidths that would be out of the question for many. (Especially if it's doing smart lookahead and caching.)
I wonder if any of the cellular companies will try to replicate terrestrially with the AWS spectrum they just got?
Good question. I wonder if my father has any info on that. (He's the broadband expert at this point -- he and his wife are basically professional futurists for the home-broadband industry, telling the cable operators what they need to do in order to stay competitive...)