Verizon’s ambition to connect more than homes and phones just zeroed in on the automotive market. It announced on Friday it is buying Hughes Telematics for $612 million in cash, gaining the company’s crop of machine-to-machine (M2M) connected car technologies and services.
State Farm is sidestepping some of the actuarial science that goes into calculating your auto insurance premiums. Instead of determining through statistical analysis how much someone of your age, gender and residence typically drives, State Farm wants to go to the source: your car.
Want to know what’s going to happen at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week? Why not ask the organizers? I got on the phone with the GSMA, and here’s what they told me to expect: connectivity in everything, NFC and, of course, LTE.
This is the year of the electric vehicle rollout. Offerings in the EV space will explode with everything from a long-awaited plug-in Prius to the first all-electric SUV, from Tesla. And the most innovative aspect of this flurry may not be that the vehicles are electric but that they are ushering in the era of the connected car and an entirely new relationship between a driver and his vehicle.
Verizon is putting LTE chips in TouchTunes’ new digital karaoke machines, but that’s not all. At CES, Verizon seemed determined to embed its latest wireless network technology into anything that could conceivably need an Internet connection, including ATM machines, robots and photo booths.
Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas has worked for the company for three decades and has seen the car become an electronics powerhouse, packed with chips that control everything from fuel injection to the chassis alignment. And that is only the beginning, he says in this video interview.
Car companies are trying to get social, and 2011 could be the year of the car as a major platform for social and other types of apps. A new GigaOM Pro report examines the in-vehicle app landscape and analyzes individual carmakers’ efforts and models.
Freescale Semiconductor and Fuji Electric Systems are forming a new partnership focused on hybrid and electric vehicle tech. The two companies announced plans to collaborate on a type of power semiconductor for electronic powertrains, as well as other products for green cars down the road.
Move over cell phone firms, car companies are the new mobility leaders. “BMW is a mobile company, and everything we’ve done and do is about mobility,” Edward Robinson, President of BMW’s recently launched $100 million venture fund i Ventures, told me in an interview.
