Ford’s Product Manager for Traffic, Directions and Information Services (TDI) David Gersabeck, sat with me last week at Ford’s headquarters in a brand new burgundy 2011 Ford Edge. In the front row, we played — and played. I spent time learning about their integrated mapping features, sweet (and easy) navigation of music, their new flattened command structure for getting what you need in a hands-free environment and more.
The flattened voice recognition tree structure allows you to get the same result using different commands, including music. For example, you can say radio station 98.7 or My Music, or Play Artist U2 and so on. Their integrated directions and traffic system allows you to set directions from Mapquest on your home PC and then access those directions from your car navigation system when you’re ready to leave home. Below David Gersabeck tells me more as we explore the new 2011 Edge together.
Below is an interview I did with Gary Jablonski, Product Development Manager for Infotainment systems at Ford last week in Dearborn Michigan. We’re in a red 2011 Ford Edge Sport and he’s showing me the latest new features and updates, including speech recognition and improved infotainment navigation.
Below are Fred Wilson’s insights from his keynote this past week at the Geo-Loco Conference in San Francisco. Immediately below them is a wrap-up summary on video from Robert Scoble.
“You should be able to give permission for how your information is used. An issue with large companies like Google is that they just may not be that capable of building private location-based services because their social graphs are not tuned for this kind of activity. When people start revealing their data, they want to know on day one that they get to define the terms and what they want to share and with who. There’s an advantage for start-ups and the entrepreneurs over the big companies, because the big companies have to roll back and undo the permissions you may have already granted.”
“How do you turn these services into businesses? Knowing where someone is in real-time right now if you have context about that, is an incredibly valuable marketing opportunity: it’s the holy grail for a merchant. If a merchant knows you’re nearby, they can make an offer or offer a coupon at the time when they’re highly incentivized to do so.
Revenue models around these businesses are fairly straight forward. There will be resellers and aggregators who create value for these services. I’m not worried about how you make money with these services, because those problems pale in my mind compared to the challenges around privacy, incentivizing user behavior and creating value for people for sharing that data.”
“What excites me is this: What if all the world history books were archived and integrated with a service like outside in and I could see what happened right here at the point where I’m standing in Rome 500 years ago?
When I go to a museum, there’s always a guided tour of the museum, but it’s the museum’s curated tour. What I’d love to be able to do is get Lou Reed’s private tour and another day, someone else’s private tour of a museum, or a walking tour of London. There are a lot of opportunities combining audio and mobile, as well as geo-tagging to create highly personalized curated experiences at places like museums.”
“I love the idea of open APIs but open APIs should also come with monetization – they go hand in hand. The API should monetize in the same way a site monetizes. You can’t just have an open API and not have it make money. Don’t try to hoard the data; use the data to get the monetization out into the marketplace.”
“The checkin will be a commodity if it isn’t already. You can get a Twitter style update on Yammer and Facebook, but that hasn’t stopped Twitter from being a large network that continues to grow and become more and more interesting every day. The same thing is true with checkins — you’ll get checks in Yelp and Facebook, but it doesn’t mean that the checkin services are in danger of not being monetized. What really matters is what’s behind the checkin. Can I protect my data, can I get valuable offers from doing this, where are my friends checking in? It’s all the other stuff that’s behind the checkin that creates the value to the consumers and to the brands. The tweet or checkin gets invented, the social bookmark gets invented — ALL of these social gestures get invented AND they get copied by everyone, but the innovator of that social gesture has gone on to build a really good business on the back of it. Commoditizing these “copying of social gestures” will not take the value of these gestures themselves.”
At the Geo-Loco Conference this week in San Francisco, John Battelle interviewed VC Fred Wilson on stage, including the ‘word game’ – see results below:
JB: Research in motion – FW: Not good
JB: Facebook – FW: Juggernaut
JB: Gowalla – FW: It’s tough being the second fiddle
JB: Hewlett Packard – FW: Great company
JB: HP Palm – FW: Great acquisition
JB: Microsoft – FW: Dinosaur
JB: Apple – FW: Evil
JB: Boxee – FW: Promise
JB: Google – FW: Challenged (John asks: does Google have the DNA as a company or should they let someone else light it up for them? And on what they should do? Fred says they should buy Facebook.
Below are three videos of the interview in nearly all its entirety.
Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson did the keynote at today’s Geo-Loco Conference in San Francisco. Fred addressed current trends across the geo-location landscape and what the future will hold for LBS. He also shared his investment perspectives as well as where he sees opportunities going and why based on the way the market is currently evolving.
There are not only tests you can do to improve energy efficiency in your home but by becoming more conscious in the way you install new products, services and tools, you can save money AND help save the planet. If you can save money over the long haul, why not help move the idea of sustainable living further along?
This video explores one side of the coin and perhaps gets us to ask the following question and more: how do you know if the ducts in your house are leaking air and if so what you should do about it?
I had an opportunity to connect with the COO of Sportypal Tode Bucevski, who was over from Macedonia for the recent MobileBeat Conference in San Francisco. Sportypal is an intuitive application for your mobile phone, which activates when you start exercising – running, cycling, walking, rollerblading or a similar exercise. In two simple clicks it will start to log and map your position, movement, distance, tempo and calories burned. It will not affect normal operation of your mobile phone, so you can still listen to music, receive and initiate calls and messages.
Below is a short interview with Tode who also shows us a demo of the app on his mobile phone.
Matt Marshall of VentureBeat interviewed Facebook’s Head of Mobile Products at Facebook Erick Tseng at the MobileBeat Conference in San Francisco yesterday. Tseng talked about Facebook’s mobile strategy and encouraged companies to think about leading with mobile rather than building mobile apps as an after thought.
They show what state-of-the-art robot PR2 has accomplished in the past couple of months as well as a glimpse of the future. The video include interviews with both Willow Garage’s CEO Steve Cousins and Keenan Wyrobek, Co-Director of the Personal Robotics Program, the very same program that is responsible for giving away 11 PR2 robots to universities worldwide.
At Willow Garage, they have various hackathons, designed to program a PR2 robot to doing something useful, cool, fun, productive, interesting or innovative. A recent one held only a few weeks ago resulted in getting PR2 to play pool, in many cases more accurately than his human programmers.
In their third summer hackathon, the Willow Garage “beer hackathon team” started on a Monday and finished on Friday with the goal of having PR2 zip off to the fridge, grab a beer of your choice using object recognition and then having the robot deliver it to you without you having to move from your seat. PR2 was even programmed to pop the cap off the bottle of beer in case you didn’t happen to have one handy.
They’re calling it the “Beer Me web application.” In this web app, the user is presented with a menu of ice cold beers and ciders, and a pull-down menu specifying the office for delivery. Once the user hits the enticing Beer Me button, it’s the robot’s job to make that magic happen. Take a look at the video below that captures the team’s results.
