Interesting note at today’s keynotes at the Telematics Update 2011 Show in Detroit…

David Strickland, Administrator for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, made it very clear to the telematics/auto industry conference that technology curbs will be explored to prevent distracted driving.  This comes despite a March 2011 move for additional study on the problem of distracted driving before government action.

Perhaps his most clear statement in regards to the NHTSA’s focus on safety relating to distracted driving was:

“A car is not a mobile device. A car is a car."

This reminded me a story that I heard from an active US observer with the German auto industry.  The story goes that many German automotive engineers refused to put cup holders in their luxury cars.  “Cars are for driving and not for drinking” was the stance from those German engineers.  The US observer asked those same engineers “Do you want to sell cars in the US or stand by your position on cup holders?”  Today, my German car has very nice cup holders…

Administrator Strickland… you might want to tell your boss, Secretary LaHood, this story about markets…. Also, it might help to toss in a couple of stories about iPhone “jail breaking” and estimate exactly how long any hardware/software regulation would last in the face of a determined hacker community.

Would you risk “jail breaking” your wireless device to use if there was a regulation against it? Would you accept the regulation?

Post your comments below or email (John.Myers@BlueBuffaloGroup.com) / twitter (@BlueBuffaloGrp) me directly.

Just got out of an interesting session with Garmin at the Telematics Update show.

Garmin said that fine detail analysis of a car's behavior including speed of acceleration; speed of braking; and avoiding hills could dramatically increase the range of an electric vehicle (EV)... or reduce the carbon footprint of a gas vehicle. This is over and above traditional information like speed and distance. It was, quite frankly, an implementation of geospatial analysis I hadn't thought of.... That is until the business/green aspects were provided to me...

Since EVs currently only have so many charging locations, you don't want to get stuck down the wrong road or halfway up the wrong hill.... ;)

The question will be how well an organization can integrate the various telematic information to create that analysis:

• Dynamic EV information like battery charge
• Fluid external information like traffic density
• Static external information like rise and fall of streets; as well as charging station location

to provide an EV’s driver with the "operational BI" on how/where to drive.

Other than shortest distance or shortest time how many elements due you think the average driver can process or agree to process from a navigation system?

Or does it depend on training associated with running out of "juice" on the wrong side of a hill from the charging station? ;)

Post your comments below or email (John.Myers@BlueBuffaloGroup.com) / twitter (@BlueBuffaloGrp) me directly.

Back at the Telematics Update 2011 show in Detroit.  Just left a presentation from Ericsson and Cybercom on making the car social via telematics.

The packed room heard how Ericsson and Cybercom are attempting to bridge the gap between the telecom industry and the auto/telematics industry. It appears that the telematics/auto industry is attempting to re-invent the wheel (pardon the pun) that Apple and Google have been building quite effectively recently.

In particular, Apple's recent iCloud announcement seems to put many of the content delivery aspects of the telematics industry to rest....or at least in my humble opinion.

There are still significant issues associated with distracted driving and bandwidth to deliver this content. However, these are issues that auto industry appears to be tackling with vigor and great interest.

What do you think of iCloud as an infotainment platform?

Can a car truly be a social platform?

Post your comments below or email (John.Myers@BlueBuffaloGroup.com) / twitter (@BlueBuffaloGrp) me directly.

Starting the day at the Telematics Update 2011 Detroit show. It will be interesting to see how this "telecom yankee" does in the Motor City.

Check out the information on their website.

As well as my past telematics blog postings.

As always, you can track my live updates on twitter (@BlueBuffaloGrp).

Post your comments below or email (John.Myers@BlueBuffaloGroup.com) / twitter (@BlueBuffaloGrp) me directly.

In the last 24 months, there has been a trend toward the acquisition of analytical databases to augment an established DBMS’ existing product line.  For example, the following mergers and acquisitions were compiled by Doug Henschen in April:

• EMC buys Greenplum July 2010
• IBM buys Netezza November 2010
• Hewlett-Packard buys Vertica March 2011
• Teradata buys Aster Data April 2011

Many of these acquisitions were driven by the reality that you really need to use the correct DBMS architecture for the right job rather than taking a one size fits all approach.  However the question then becomes how do you bring that data together once it resides on those separate platforms?  One solution is to use the concept of

This week Composite will release its next generation platform for data virtualization: Composite Information Server 6.0.  This platform allows organizations to make data decisions based on the best platform for the job rather than pushing all data to a particular platform.

Bring Big Data into the Fold

One of the best uses of the enhanced platform is the ability to virtualize big data sources like Hadoop, Netezza and SAP into a seamless environment.

Using the Composite “optimizer” functionality, organizations can take advantage of the relatively new big-data processing environments without delaying the “time to value” of those new data sources into existing implementations. This will be particularly important as organizations begin to ingest data sets like social media interactions; RFID sensor information; and other big-data sources that haven’t matured sufficiently to including in existing data environments, but still have excellent value to the organization.

Telecom Take: Use the Right Tool

As telecom organizations make moves to integrate multiple data sources to enable their “single view of the customer” associated with customer experience management as well as spreading customer support to centralized call centers; telecoms will need a much more robust ability to have consistent and timely data spread across those locations.

For customer experience management, telecoms will need to have proper data virtualization to avoid the age old question from calls to the call center:

“Shouldn’t you already know about my orders and account information?”

For call centers, to provide flexible access to similar data sets across operational (ie billing), analytical (ie fraud management) and external data sources (ie credit reports); a robust virtualization environment will allow for flexible scheduling of call center resources not only in one location but across many without customers having to hear:

“Sorry I don’t have that in my system…”

All in all, I believe that the continued advances in the Composite virtualization suite make it one of the better options for telecoms to overcome the legacy (network, billing) and ‘next generation’ (social, geo-spatial) data silos that seem to impact telecom organizations more than others.