Today, Ford announced AppLink, the in-car application that will reside on the Sync system and enable developers to take advantage of voice and hard-button controls to interact with applications on Android and Blackberry smartphones.
We’ve already covered the Sync Apps and APIs extensively so click through to the original post to read more.
You can also check [...]
Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Ford Announces AppLink
April 20th, 2010
Jeff Shariat Driver Distraction Series Earns Pulitzer Prize
April 19th, 2010
Jeff Shariat If you haven’t been keeping up with Matt Richtel’s New York Times series of articles on driver distraction now would probably be a good time to start. The Pulitzer Prize committee (it’s a committee, right?) has awarded a Pulitzer Prize to:
Matt Richtel and members of The New York Times Staff for incisive work, in print and [...]
Eric Schmidt Says, “Mobile Is The Future”
April 16th, 2010
Jeff Shariat Google’s Eric Schmidt has been on the campaign trail for mobile technology for I don’t know how long. His talk at Atmosphere (Google’s come-to-cloud-computing conference) was about mobile and the future of technology. He didn’t talk about it’s impact on automotive, but we will.
“We understand that the new rule is mobile first,” Schmidt said. [...]
RIM Buys QNX
April 14th, 2010
Jeff Shariat Great writeup from Roger Lanctot of Strategy Analytics on the recent RIM purchase of QNX.
It’s a big move towards automotive from one of the leaders in smartphones (even if it is still more business oriented).
While QNX’s partnership with Alcatel-Lucent promises to target the complete spectrum of in-vehicle connectivity, a partnership with RIM opens up wider [...]
Pearl Mobile DTV Is A Big Deal For Mobile TV
April 14th, 2010
Jeff Shariat Belo Corp., Cox Media Group, E.W. Scripps Co., Fox, Gannett Broadcasting, Hearst Television Inc., ION Television, Media General Inc., Meredith Corp., NBC, Post-Newsweek Stations Inc. and Raycom Media today announced plans to form a standalone joint venture to develop a new national mobile content service.
I don’t have much news other than what is in the [...]
Rear-Seat Entertainment Sales to Double by 2015
April 13th, 2010
Jeff Shariat iSuppli is forecasting that by 2015 worldwide sales of rear-seat entertainment systems will almost double their 2009 level (of 3.1 million units) reaching 5.6million units (with the US accounting for ~50%).
With the oncoming proliferation of apps and advanced connected applications the RSE market is a huge opportunity. I’ve already spent some time talking about how [...]
Making Foursquare Work for Business. Could Dealerships Learn Something?
April 7th, 2010
Jeff Shariat Mashable.com has 5 ways brands are using Foursquare to boost their business.
The article talks about how the Wynn Las Vegas, City of Chicago, Lucky Magazine, Tasti D-Lite, and Starbucks are using Foursquare to increase customer engagement, loyalty and satisfaction within the check-in and badges framework of the location based application.
Maybe this type of brand integration [...]
App Downloads Will Near 6Billion in 2010
April 7th, 2010
Jeff Shariat ABI Research reports they expect just under 6 billion mobile application downloads in 2010 (more than double 2009 volume). To be clear, this is a forecast of downloads, not the total number of applications that will be available. The iPhone is expected to continue leading the charge (> 3Billion downloads) by a large margin with [...]
Smartphones and Embedded Systems
March 24th, 2010
Jeff Shariat We know that apps are coming to the car and that movement is no doubt led by smartphones like the iPhone and Nexus One. Over at Telematics Update Andrew Tolve discusses, ‘The Smartphone: Friend or Foe of In-car Infotainment?” My take away from the article is that the answer is, it’s both…and I would tend [...]
inTELEMATICStoday.com Weekly Round-Up
March 19th, 2010
Jeff Shariat In the grand American tradition of not working to hard on Friday inTELEMATICStoday.com brings you the weekly roundup. We know sometimes it can be difficult to click all those buttons to read the site every day of the week so not only do we offer you the option of having each weeks articles delivered directly to your [...]
Application Spotlight: Aha Mobile
March 18th, 2010
Jeff Shariat Aha Mobile bills itself as interactive personalized radio and aims to deliver a customized ‘radio station’ of streaming audio content created from web and local information relevant to the user. That is, Aha Mobile will give you a customized traffic report, your facebook / twitter updates, yelp reviews and move all based on your preferences [...]
Driving Distracted (With a Badge?)
March 16th, 2010
Jeff Shariat Matt Richtel at the The New York Times talks about the ever growing number of police, fire fighters, paramedics, etc that are weaving through traffic at high speeds while talking on a cell phone or radio and typing on a laptop or navigation system.
Ambulances and police cars are becoming increasingly wired. Some 75 percent of [...]
Telenav’s Top 10 Most Searched
March 16th, 2010
Jeff Shariat The Telenav Blog posted top 10 usage statistics of their users and there are some noteworthy items…
Los Angeles tops the list of cities where users are more likely to use GPS to reroute around traffic which is in line with Inrix’s Traffic Scorecard which placed LA as the most congested city in 2009. LA was [...]
Twitter, Now With Geo-Location
March 15th, 2010
Jeff Shariat Last year Twitter acquired Mixer Labs and the Geo API in an effort to continue boosting their location based functionality. Twitter added a ‘local trend’ feature that allows users to see tweets based in a certain area, but the location was manually set by the user. Now Twitter has announced the addition of a more [...]
inTELEMATICStoday.com Weekly Round-Up
March 12th, 2010
Jeff Shariat In the grand American tradition of not working to hard on Friday inTELEMATICStoday.com brings you the weekly roundup. We know sometimes it can be difficult to click all those buttons to read the site every day of the week so not only do we offer you the option of having each weeks articles delivered [...]
Google In Position to Control Mobile Future
March 11th, 2010
Jeff Shariat Jagdish Rebello of iSuppli talks about how Google is using it’s classic strategy of giving things away for free to turn the mobile advertising and search markets to their favor.
By pursuing a strategy of working with the mobile chain rather than against it, Google Inc. has a strong chance of success in its bid to [...]
inTELEMATICStoday.com Weekly Round-Up
March 5th, 2010
Jeff Shariat Check out what inTELEMATICStoday.com had to say this week…
Apps and the Future of Telematics – Jeff Shariat comments on the growth of the application marketplace in smartphones and the importance of capitalizing on that trend for the future of telematics.
Social Networking and Phone Apps Enable Smarter Carpooling – A great article by Kevin Shannon takes [...]
Challenges with Telematics Adoption
March 4th, 2010
Jeff Shariat We’ve previously discussed some issues with the telematics business case and while its clear to many that the market is there someone does have to make the numbers work before any feature can be broadly adopted.
On Telematics Update, Andrew Tolve highlights that CES this year marked the first time OEMs were perceived to be ready [...]

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