There has been a lot of discussion about community generated maps. Cloudmade and openstreetmap have made immense progress, but their big drawback is that it required active user input to have the data be routable or reliable. Teleatlas has jumpstarted community generated maps by releasing a paid passively generated database that has been created and augmented by free passive user inputs. (teleatlas press release )
In this Youtube interview Rik Temmink boasts 7 million reports in 18 months which have generated 1 trillion gps measurements on the road network. He describes the beauty of passive user inputs.
The big drawback here is that Teletlas is now charging for these maps generated by their users. Why can't we hack our PDAs, phones, and other devices to create free maps? Most people don't think about the super high costs of map data. Hopefully the community can unite:
Collecting and sharing GPS data
Writing an algorithm to process this data into routable and usable information
Cleaning up open source algorithms to use this new data
Back in march VIA announced the new automotive ivp-7500 (press release ). The announcement got some press from slashgear , crunchgear and has spurred discussions on our forums .Via claims onboard support for Bluetooth and GPS, which in all reality appear to just be add on modules.It seems like VIA took an off the shelf board, slapped on a few modules and rebranded old tech to create the appearance of an automotive solution. This might be perfect for a hobbyist or an R&D lab but you can forget about auto provider shipping silicone with a 0c-60c spec.If someone from VIA would like to explain the press release in more details, please post on the forums or e-mail us. We would be happy to write some revised commentary if there is something we are missing. Talk about this Blog post on our forums.
Some intelligent forward thinking researchers over at Hitachi, Xanavi, and Nissan have collected some data on ecological green routing that claims a 9% fuel cost savings on a test route. This technology is still in its infancy, but this is a perfect example of where a car computer can be used to accelerate development and deployment of technology. Implementing ecorouting will require Intense processing on the client or cloud for the complicated routing algorithms that factor in all the newly available data points:
· Traffic & Flow speeds · Elevation changes and altitude · Road quality (smooth vs. rough) · Wind (eventually)
The cloud or development computer can also be used to coach the driver into more efficient acceleration and braking techniques which a lot of hyper milers are already using. Eventually I imagine this type of data would help local governments prioritize road resurfacings and traffic control timings to help their citizenry become greener.
It seems like one of the key pieces to making this work would be accurate elevation Data. The paper I mentioned above used 50m resolution data from the government. One of the key data providers for elevation data seems to be intermap with 5m horizontal resolution and +/1 1m vertical. Check out their comparison chart to NASA data.
Check out the DEM Resolution and Nissan data sheets over at the forums
"Interestingly enough what we’re seeing is, you know the cloud is maturing really, really quickly and especially in the space of startups where you see all these great innovations happening. Cloud is making life much easier for new companies to come in and provide services, so especially in the mobile space where it’s again a budding technology where there’s a lot of these services that are possible."
- Angelo Rajadurai
... To read the entire transcript visit our forums
Hi my name is Robert Wray from Mp3car. Throughout the summer we are going to dive deeper into the future of mobile computing, car computing and telematics with a series of video blogs exploring new technology and interviews with leaders in the space.
Based on our activity in the community, our work with automakers, aftermarket, communications and telematics companies, we believe consumers will demand a bunch of new features all seamlessly integrated into a replicable, flexible UI and accessible from many devices of varying power, age, screen size, and interfaces.
The feature list will include. • Connected navigation (Internet POI, Real time traffic, regular map updates) • Media & entertainment from the internet or internet connected devices • Interfacing with other technology (engines or batteries, GPS and other location indicators, other sensor hardware) • Extensible developer interfaces to allow rapid add ons and integrations with existing features • Demand for skinable and user customizable interfaces • Occasionally connected devices (wireless, USB, WIFI, sneaker net) • Demand for flexible audio and visual prioritization • Flexible Security & Personal privacy awareness & settings • Task aware user interface, for example - user taking a bus, driving, walking, sitting down • All of the above components, including the UI should be modular and replaceable at any time to make way for new innovations.
Through our video blogging and interviews we plan to find out what it is going to take to make these features a reality and follow the activity of our community members as these bleeding edge features get implemented.
Date: Sunday, April 26, 2009 Time: Noon (12:00) to 3:00ish What: Mp3Car BBQ, Meetup and Moderator Mow down - BBQ on the grassy part of Fort McHenry – Bring your tricked out hunk of steel (or carbon fiber). If you don’t have one, bring your Frisbee, a chair, a blanket and an appetite for mind blowing geekery. We will probably stream some video from our new Qik account
Mp3car’s Robert Wray, interviewed Mathieu Monney, creator of iphone navigation application XGPS. We talk about his turn by turn navigation application which has been downloaded almost 589,000+ times in the two months since it left beta. Don’t get out your calculator, that is about 10,000 times per day!
We expect the interview to be transcribed within the next couple of days.
A blast of e-mail was sent out on Monday to all the car computer and telematics stores around the globe by some former employees of the now defunct Infill and Maxan. Apparently they have formed a new company called HTS. The e-mail states they are accepting advanced orders on their FunDi G7. There are lots of concerns, but maybe it is just because they are still in stealth mode.
*As of Monday 3/23/2009 their domain carpcmall.com points to a parked website.
*Their PDF looks like CAD rendered image
*“Accepting advanced orders” Hmm. Have we heard that before in the car PC world?
See the marketing brochure and talk about this on our forums here.
In this video blog we test out Dash Command Lite
– an innovative way of displaying OBD-II data. Talk about this on our
forums in our blog talk section . If you like the video, buy dash command lite here and get 10$ off the final version when it comes out in late spring or early summer.
How to build your own wireless USB monitor - We took an IOGear wireless VGA device (GUC2015V), an M2-ATX, a Lilliput 8” monitor and a laptop battery to make a super hacked wireless monitor. If you spent more than an hour on this you could really make this hack usable. We couldn’t get more than 15’ of range out of this with line of sight, but it was fun to try. Based on the amperage of the devices, we could theoretically get a few hours out of this per charge.
The PND (Personal Navigation Device) and the Car computer are dead (pretty
soon they will be). Get the details on how we made this movie and
help us kill them in our in car mobile device meshing forum.
mp3Car.com is running a contest to see who can deliver the best technical documentation or video covering topics of interest to the community. This is the first contest and we hope there will be many more to come! On this contest we are giving away over $1,000 dollars worth of prizes. Check out the details on our forums.
Tom Berry, known on our forums as Bugbyte writes a long interesting
report about his thoughts on CES and the future of car computing.
See his report and talk about CES on our forums here:
Tom has contributed almost 5,000 posts to the Mp3car community. He
traveled with Robert Wray to CES 2009 to video hot new technology for
the mp3car community. Thank you Tom! See the full collection of MP3car CES coverage on Vimeo
We were ambushed by this company’s PR team in the central hall of CES 2009. We thought the last thing we need to do is talk about yet ANOHER iPod accessory. We saw the product again in the Sands show case and decide this was worthy of a story. It would be great to test one of these guys. Let us know if you have tried one.
This forum is going to be a lot more than just connecting. This is
going to be the place to talk about hacking and meshing your mobile
computing devices into the car. If we can find a way to connect
Iphones and smart phones into existing in vehicle displays and
controls, this will be a wonderful benefit for those of us who just
want to carry one device and developers trying to prove out connected
car concepts.
Same of the challenges we need to work on:
Phone user interface retooling and modifications for the driver
Connecting your smart phone to the car
Connecting accessories to the above (hard drives, flash memory, GPS, engine diagnostics, tracking)
Mirroring your built in phone display with the display in the car.
We have also created a specific iphone section to talk about some of
the early progress already being made to mirror the video content of
the iphone with external displays - an excellent start to phone phone
car meshing.
We talk with Business Development manager of Intel's NAND group, Robert Allshouse. He talks about Intel’s SSDs which are now hitting mass production. The products are guaranteed to work from 0c-70c. They use less power and take far more of a beating than their disk and cheaper flash counterparts. Just get ready to unload your wallet.
We have been working with ICO for about 2 years to build out the in vehicle user interface for the satellite they launched late last summer. We built a new custom UI based on StreetDeck, integrated with their satellite modems, added data services and even implemented a program listings interface. We are a bit biased but this looks like it is going to blow away cruise cast with a small antenna, a great price point and an array of bi-directional data services all augmenting their 10-15 channels of high quality video.
There has been a lot of discussion about community generated maps. Cloudmade and openstreetmap have made immense progress, but their big drawback is that it required active user input to have the data be routable or reliable. Teleatlas has jumpstarted community generated maps by releasing a paid passively generated database that has been created and augmented by free passive user inputs. (teleatlas press release )
Mp3car’s Robert Wray, interviewed Mathieu Monney, creator of iphone navigation application XGPS. We talk about his turn by turn navigation application which has been downloaded almost 589,000+ times in the two months since it left beta. Don’t get out your calculator, that is about 10,000 times per day!
Tom Berry, known on our forums as Bugbyte writes a long interesting
report about his thoughts on CES and the future of car computing.
See his report and talk about CES on 
