I'm at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. One of the areas I'm spending time at is the automotive section of the show. MSNBC has a great article on CES and autos and Newsweek also covers cars in their article on CES. Key quote from MSNBC:
"The Consumer Electronics Association projects that sales of electronic gear for automobiles will exceed $12 billion this year, having doubled over the last five years."
Navigation and GPS systems are driving (bad pun intended) the growth of auto electronics:
"Music and entertainment technology has made up the bulk of in-car products, but the fastest growth is in GPS and video navigation; 2007 sales are projected to be up 41 percent to seize nearly a quarter of all car technology sales, the CEA said."
Auto electronics are going play a key role in the local web and location based services. Small businesses need to be aware of the growth of navigation systems and their impact on local commerce.
If the automakers want to do something transformational, here's an idea: standardize on a system and put a wireless device in every car that, when active, becomes part of and redistributes a huge mesh network. They could sell capacity and subscriptions, or even use the spare cycles in onboard computers for other distributed computation tasks.
Posted by: Mixotic | January 09, 2008 at 07:37 AM
Take a look at Dash at http://www.dash.net/.
It's not mesh but a first step.
There is a thread going on in the hybrid car world around connnecting parked hybrids and battery operated cars to power grid. This is not mesh computing but a form of mesh energy. Take a look at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/technology/19electric.html
Posted by: steve | January 11, 2008 at 11:15 AM