Thread: CES 2009 Car Computers and telematics Discussions

CES 2009 is under way. We are in Las Vegas to tell you all about it. Check out our blogs and video throughout the week.

As of late December, the organizers of CES expect an 8% drop in attendance. I think it might be more like a 20% drop. It seems like we are in for one of the slowest CESs in memorable history. My direct flight out here was only 60% full. The airport was a ghost town at only 9.30 pm yesterday. We’ll keep you posted as the week progresses.

Is there some tech here that you want us to investigate? Give us feedback and get involved on our forums.

Today we are on the ground in Las Vegas getting ready to kick off our video coverage of CES. While the CES vendors setup their booths.

We were invited to attend Telematics seminar about 17 miles outside of the city which has round tables, panels and debating the future of communications and technology in cars. We have already heard some interesting things today that I will write about more as the day progresses.
The hottest debate of the morning, as it always has been, is what role can carmakers play in Telematics? How can carmakers play with rapidly evolving consumer electronics products driven by massive economies of scale and a tremendous selection of features and vendors.

What value-add do carmakers really bring to car technology? Should they just have core safety features, vehicle data outputs, input devices and get out of the way for aftermarket devices?


Talk about the Telematics seminar and CES on our forums.

CES 2009 - Where are the Car Computing software and HMI companies?

Centrafuse has four locations at CES.

• Gracenote’s Booth demonstrating a flash integrated demo of Gracenote integrated with Centrafuse.
• Dashboard Devices –
• Tememetria
• Azentek’s Booth

Streetdeck – No formal announcement - from their website:

• “StreetDeck will be at the 2009 CES show in Las Vegas Nevada. We will not have our own booth, but we will be wandering the show floor on January 8th and 9th.”

RoadRunner – No response
Imobile – No Response, no press releases since 2006

Talk about CES 2009, Car Computing, and telematics on our forums

We expect to see lots of Intel based car computers at CES this year. VIA always has embedded platforms which can be modified to for the car, but other than the embedded products it seems like they have disappeared from the car-computing world now that Infill has died. The Guru units and its close cousin the Azentek cpc will be in at least 6 cars this year. Intel's new series of Mini-itx based boards has been a huge hit for prototypers, telematics labs, and hackers. We even based our telematics lab bundle of this line a few months ago.

At the telematics seminar today we had a discussion with the director of Intel’s IVI director Staci Palmer. There are no car computing or Telematics PR events planned this year for CES. They do however have a dashboard mock up in the Intel booth, which we will report more on later. From our discussions it also seems like Intel is going to be putting more effort behind their in vehicle version of moblin. An open source active in vehicle linux app would do wonders for in car technology.

The biggest barrier to entry I see for Linux in the car for things like moblin is a navigation solution. How can anyone put linux in their car without nav? I guess you could use virtual machine for your navigation…or buy a pnd? That’s what I call a speed bump.

Talk about this and CES 2009 on our forums here.

Any word on multitouch in-car screens?

Originally Posted by SFiorito

Any word on multitouch in-car screens?

That would be really cool. But how would that work when you are driving? If you find a company that has that give us a booth number and we will go by and blog about it.

Well, really what I meant was capacitive screens. But multi touch would still be useful for things like zooming in/out of the nav screen with thumb and index finger, like on the ipod. Minimizing the amount of icons and buttons cluttering the front end UI.

I've got it from a trusted source that Azentek is unveiling a new, audiophile-grade in-dash double-DIN PC.

Details pleeeeeease!!!

I'm sure you know at least a lil about this, because CentraFuse is their front-end of choice

Make sure you go pick the brains of the Blaupunkt and miRoamer guys:

"Blaupunkt and miRoamer will announce a partnership at CES that will put internet radio into car dashboards for the first time" - Wired Magazine

And get all the dirt on the ENV:

"Dashboard Devices' double-DIN computer will run for $2,700 and will be called the ENV. It will be sold through computer resellers at first, and it will then be made available to car shops." - Wired Magazine