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October 22, 2004
Always-On In Your Car
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
At first glance Microsoft's latest "big idea," Windows Mobile, sounds a little like, well, Bob.
Better yet, it turns Jerry Van Dyke (pictured, from his show "My Mother the Car,") into Arthur C. Clarke.
I mean, really. An underpowered PC in your Hummer, with Bluetooth and a GPS receiver? Peter Wengert of Microsoft told News.Com about applications like finding cheap gas, because the GPS receiver would have your location.
But if you just look under the hood here, you're going to find something really cool.
- In the Windows car it's not the OS that's the platform. It's the Bluetooth network that's the platform.
- The Windows Car is based on a spoken interface, not on the point-and-click of a mouse.
- To work you have to authenticate the authorized users' voices (so the kids can't make the car stop).
- You have to translate voice commands to text and then into PC commands.
What you have, in other words, is a mini-version of the Always On environment.
The only difference between the Windows Car and what I've been talking about here as Always-On lies in the range of the network. If your platform is an 802.11 network that exists all over your property, your range of commands grows. So do your sources of data. So does the application space.
The Windows Car is so close to Always-On I can taste it. Can Microsoft?
Comments (1)
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Jesse Kopelman on October 22, 2004 03:58 PM writes...
Is finding cheap gas a realistic application? Even if you have monster SUV, I can't believe you can save more than $1 without having to drive more than 15 minutes out of your way (at which point you just used $1 worth of gas, anyway). Finding cheap parking in the city, now that sounds more usable to me. The problem with location based services in general is that they are really only useful if one is in an unfamiliar place, which for large portions of the populace isn't that common an occurance. People will be happy when they get this for free with their car / mobile device, but don't expect too many to want to pay extra for it. This may be the type of thing who's usefulness grows on one over time however -- then comes the money.
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