Dash Wants To Bring Web Mashups To Your Car

October 19th, 2007 at 6:38 am

This would be an awesome thing for integrating a site like GasBuddy.com. Then you could find the cheapest gas station near you while you drive!

October 19th, 2007 at 7:02 am

That’s cool. Here’s what I want to see: GPS devices should look at the aggregate choices its owners make and adjust directions accordingly. If 90% of the devices’ owners take a surface street through a certain area rather than the highway suggested by the device, the GPS devices should “learn” from this and start suggesting the more popular route. Over time, the GPS device would route people around bad construction, for example, and then return to the main route when construction is over. Out of towners would have all the advantages of local driver knowledge.

I don’t know if this is feasible with current technology but I think it would be a definite improvement over the current static system.

October 19th, 2007 at 7:34 am

Considering the possibilities of this device. I would like to see an open standard for the device to make sure that my wife or others are unable to check where I have been;o). I have allready suggested to the openmoko GPS project to add a similar feature to there “IPHONE”. What you could also do is just let the users create the maps and edit them afterwards if wished with streetnames or special places. Where someone drives must be a road. Speed and location from all participants are the only two informations the system needs to calculate the best route for the time beeing. You could also add a warning function into the system telling you that someone in front of you had just reduced his speed heavily (accident?).
Or think about a virtual Taxi company. All participants could use there openmoko to call a taxi saying where they want to go. If you are a user (whether a professional taxi driver or not) you get the information that someone on your current route needs a lift. You see his profile in form of recommendations and decide if you want to give him a lift. He sees your profile as well and coan also reject your offer. Payment is via a pointsystem.

October 19th, 2007 at 8:30 am

How can it connect to the cellular network for real-time information? It has a embedded modem? or..users must have additional USB or PCICARD modem? If it has a embedded modem inside, I think it is very gorgeous product.

October 19th, 2007 at 8:51 am

Okay, do I get a prize for noticing the name of the street is Figueroa?

Oh Richard, you will live in infamy.

October 19th, 2007 at 9:59 am

If any silicon valley companies want a device with similar functionality, we can do it. We can do it with ARM compiled Linux on very low spec parts. We can help you find a CAD firm and help you plan the manufacturing process.

Use the time honored Silicon Valley logic: “Look they did it, let’s do it too before it’s too late”

Let’s face it, you can’t program embedded devices. Can you? Hire us, we’ll do it. You’ll have to pay to license the maps only. BTW, it won’t be cheap, but it will be cheaper than everybody else.

October 19th, 2007 at 10:41 am

this would require quite a lot of market penetration before becoming useful if the data is coming from other Dash users/providers of data. If you are driving around town and there’s only a handful of users then the data will be irrelevent.

October 19th, 2007 at 10:58 am

Hi everyone, this is Mark Williamson from Dash. Great set of comments and questions here, and I thought I should hop into the conversation. At Dash we are focused on getting the important and relevant information to consumers in their car, and today’s announcement was all about getting the web information you love into the car in a relevant way. We are supporting GeoRSS and KML (both open standards that allow for geographic content syndication) as well as API level integration like we demonstrated today (Zillow, Upcoming.org).

Now let me try and address the individual comments / questions:

@Grinn.net - we already have gas prices on the device which we provide to every dash user. If you think GasBuddy’s data is more relevant to you you can add the GeoRSS/KML feed to your device.

@Max - Harnessing the collective intelligence of Dash drivers is something we think a lot about. Nothing to announce… yet.

@MFTMike - I am happy to say that we will be pricing the service well below $20 a month (think Satellite radio pricing).

@my2pac - Yes, we have a GPRS modem in the device, so that is how we connect to the cellular network.

@Jessica Mah - Glad you are excited about the product!

@doubtful - We send down traffic information from two sources. One is Inrix who provides us traffic data for every major metro in the United States. This means that if you are the first driver in a metro with a Dash unit you are still getting live data. The other source is Dash devices.

Mark

October 19th, 2007 at 11:03 am

By P2P, I obviously mean users tagging traffic data to a server and the server dispatching the data to other users. Not IP to IP P2P such as bit torrent.

October 19th, 2007 at 11:41 am

“Historical data cannot predict accidents or non-recurring congestion - the kind of traffic that kills drivers!”

All they would have to do is have another vertical column of color-coded buttons where users could press

A - Heavy Traffic
B - Light Traffic
C - Accident
D - Detour
E - Free Flowing

The actual users of the device could press the buttons anytime to report traffic and the server could use an algorithm to prevent spoofing based on votes. This would be so easy. But people who make hardware devices RARELY innovate. They are the most un-dynamic of programmers. I know a lot of them. If web programmers could program devices, it would be mania. Unfortunately it’s above their talents.

We could bring some of the great things that happened in Web 2.0 and integrate them into a device. Things such as tagging and other stuff. We do systems programming here as well.

October 19th, 2007 at 12:04 pm

Grr. That was my idea! Too bad I didn’t/couldn’t execute on it.

October 19th, 2007 at 12:42 pm

TomTom 910 does this kind of stuff already. It connects to the internet through your cell phone via bluetooth and downloads Points Of Interest, and traffc data

October 19th, 2007 at 5:04 pm

Does anyone in the web 2.0 community even consider the fact (almost universally accepted by scientists and geologists) that Peak Oil is on us, the days of “happy motoring” are about to end?

Oil is now over $90 a barrel. Supply is down, demand is up. It won’t be long now, before only the very wealthy will be driving, some say within the next 5 years or so. Maybe sooner if Bush bombs Iran and they close the Straits of Hormuz. Does investing this much time and money into a dying technology (the automobile) seem like a good idea?

I think the tech/web 2.0 community is in huge denial. Google “Peak Oil”, read “The Long Emergency”, do some research. It might make you rethink where you are spending your time and investments.

October 20th, 2007 at 1:42 am

this should help the car pool lanes…. the need for a navigator/media reader, or else someone to pay attention to the road whilst the driver is dealing with the flood of info will increase the passenger count per vehicle… you think cellphone talker/drivers are a hazard, just wait… lol

October 20th, 2007 at 5:05 pm

seems like a messy, hopefully i don’t have to sort out all those data services…
glad someone is bringing some floating vehicle data to the US.

honda has the internavi premium club in japan that sounds a whole lot like what dash is trying to do.

October 21st, 2007 at 5:27 pm

Dash is toast. For two reasons:

1. no way to get to the critical mass needed to have differentiated proprietary traffic data generated from the Dash customers (we’re talking a million units nationwide to have something truly different and interesting);
2. no way to compete in terms of price point with TomTom, Mio, Garmin, Google free traffic on phone, or Nokia phone.

The PND market is brutal in terms of BOM and its going to get worse with everything that is going to end up the phone (thanks Nokia/Navteq!).

Dash’s only hope is that automotive or PND people license software to run Dash on other devices but that’s going to be hard as the PND and automotive folks are so scared to add cost to their devices.

I’ve loved these guys for four years but there is just no way this pig flies, no matter what Kleiner puts into it.

November 10th, 2007 at 5:30 pm

The Dash Express does not need to compete on price at this point because the device is so far advanced over anything on the market right now. However at $500 to $600 the device will be priced well below Garmins top units which are upwards of $1,000 and price competitive with the TomTom high end.

$10-$15 per month for the service which includes map updates, poi updates, real time traffic, historical traffic and cellular internet access for whatever you can think (within the bounds of the device) of thanks to some open thinking is more than competitive with the price of map upgrades and traffic from other gps manufacturers. Especially so when you consider the problems inherent with TMC-RDS.

The value of historical traffic, for me, would be in planning ahead for a departure time or in seeing that say on a trip to NYC that while traffic looks good now three hours from now historically I should take a different route.

Most likely any map mashup available for Google Maps or Yahoo! Pipes geo mashup could be used with the Dash Express.

Maybe TomTom or Garmin will come out with something similar but Garmin would be charging $1,500 for this and TomTom is going backwards towards TMC-RDS rather than move forward from bluetooth to embedded cell modem.

I can’t wait. This is the product of the decade.