Thursday, November 5, 2009

Cloudy Skies Ahead

No, this post isn't about weather forecasting.  In fact, the cloud referenced in the title is all about information and entertainment.  In your car.  Soon.  All from a system that hosts all of your information and entertainment choices in a cloud.

Wired.com is always good for scaring the digital bits and bites out of ya...so to speak.

Automobiles will soon be linking up with servers in the cloud to enable everything from crowdsourced pothole detection, personalized radio stations, video selections that include YouTube and even video streams from the front windows of other cars.

Yeah, but how fast will it be? 
a high speed LTE internet connection that promises to make 3G feel like dial-up.
The cloud will do a lot of the heavy lifting thus reducing the installed hardware needed in each car; potentially keeping costs within reach of the average buyer.  
“Once you assume constant connectivity, the whole mindset changes of where you partition what’s in the car and what’s out in the cloud,” said Dodge. “Other than this nice, rich touch screen, a lot of the computing power has been moved onto the cloud, so the car of the future may be physically cheaper to build.”
 Of course they have to mention radio in more detail...
The losers in all of this: satellite navigation and radio. They appear to have about three years, tops, before personalized applications and cloud computing make them look as outdated as black-and-white television.
Thanks for that!

Look, we already knew this was coming.  No surprise here.  Surely audio streaming will be part of the plan for these systems and they probably will still provide traditional radio tuners as well--so we'll still be in the game. 

Like now, how good we are will determine how well we do.

How well will you do when your competition is 40,000 competitors vs. the 30 or 40 radio stations in your market now? 

Read the full article here