<Just thought you'd like to know that one of your comments about GMGC was just quoted on CNBC.
Cheers.
Kurt>
Kurt, you've peaked my curiosity. What comment did I make that was quoted on CNBC?
I was at the Consumer Electronics Show this week and didn't see anything on TV.
By the way, there was a pretty big showing of car computers at the show. Most notable were from Clarion, Visteon (Ford) and Delphi. The Clarion products look the most interesting being an open system using Win CE running a specialty Intel auto PII 166. Intel created a specialty chip that has even greater environmental qualities than a mobile Pentium used in laptops.
The systems are still a long way off from adoption because they don't have total car system interface, and the Internet connection is too slow. So, you see mostly glorified car stereos. They try to do onboard ASR and TTS. Delphi was the only one showing a built in WAP interface. They say this will be available in Europe very soon as the WAP infrastructure is way ahead over there.
These computers all cost about $2000 to $4000. They have a lot of add on costs if you want to include back seat displays, etc.
They are trying to build in good navigation, which will give turn-by-turn instructions. There's a lot of trouble with screens and driving. They need to sort out laws about what can be displayed while the vehicle is in motion. Take the displays away, and again you have a pretty minimal system. They try to do onboard TTS to read e-mail, but like all these systems it is very painful to the ear. I still believe that poor TTS is a great block to the adoption of these products.
There are a lot of DVD and game systems at the show. Here they put screens in the back of front seat headrests. Then kids control movies and play games from the likes of Sega's Dreamcast. All the car computers want to include these services. In fact, they really are more capable of doing these functions than truly interesting computer functions.
Some of the car computers are trying to build in Bluetooth interfaces, but again this is all too new to base any product. Clarion has a removable Compact Flash card for data input. They support MP3 music also.
Microsoft had a lot of support for the automotive computer, as did Intel. Both had great booths for all their partners. I asked everyone about GMGC and what ever happened to last years demo. I got a mix of responses. Easily half the people never heard of GMGC. Others new them, but didn't have much current info on what they were doing. The head of MSFT's auto group said very quickly that they were still working with GMGC and so were Clarion. The Delphi people didn't know much, but clearly they are disconnected from Onstar.
I never met anyone from Onstar. I did speak to people who new details of last years demo. They said it was real, but non-standard technology. A voice search would create specialty e-mail with some program instructions that passed on command instructions. It was never likely to work for anything but a special demo. Anyway, they feel the customer demand isn't there to do the work developing it further.
Mysphere is ready, and will be available soon. I meet some people from Lucent who talked about Lucent preparing a car computer with Portico like function. They were aware of GMGC and said the product was very high quality.
Cars at the show had voice command ability, but it almost never worked. They had microphones attached to the ceiling for normal use. There were also bigger array based microphones available from Andrea, which attached to sun visors. I think these are really the only choice, but again they hardly ever worked. The claim was it's actually quieter in a car than at the show??? IMO, until they get 99% accuracy with even simple commands like changing FM stations, the systems will never be accepted.
Spoke to the people at MOT about Mysphere. They agree that GUI WAP based products just are not as good as those that include a voice interface. Clearly Phone.com has done the right thing adding @Motion to their product capability. I still hope GMGC can be aligned with, or purchased by a strong player like a Nokia to enhance a WAP browser. I believe this is essential to their success. As much as building in services with Onstar is good, seeing WAP browsers built into car computers is again a repeat of the trouble we are seeing in cell phones.
Onstar was not at CES, but I believe this was because their product is really a service that isn?t based on hardware. They could have shown something, but chose not to. There were Onstar functions in some of the display cars, but they were turned off.
My final impression was that GMGC has not been out there working with people in this business. There are some few people involved who know GMGC and they seem to all agree that GMGC has some good products, but clearly their products have not captured the imagination of people. I saw nothing at CES pointing to any immediate development that will help GMGC in the near term.
I think GMGC needs to be more involved with these groups, doing white papers for various industry publications, and they need to make all these reporters aware of their products because we often see IVR product reviews, but they rarely mention GMGC. If GMGC is a leading innovator, they should be doing more to get peoples attention. By the way, there was a speech technology pavilion, but not many companies decided to show.
Conclusion, the show was both encouraging and discouraging. I'm not sure what to think. I'm glad GMGC is going up, but I can't find anything to explain it.
Regards,
Mark |
