The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘cars’

Man alive, Twitter is blowing up right now at the expense of Real Madrid. That has nothing to do with the following story, but it had to be mentioned

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Iwatani Corp has an electric motor-bike that will never be released

You know the good feeling you get when you think about how your computer is running Folding@home all the time, or that you’ve been careful to clip six-pack rings all your life? Well, soon you might have one more warm fuzzy feeling, if this project underway at Intel Labs Berkeley comes through.

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Your smartphone: future air-quality data point

The big Sony press conference is underway, and as expected, their motion controller is the star of the show. We can’t be there personally this time, but here comes the news anyway (I’m watching a few liveblogs; the pictures are from Kotaku’s ). The motion controller will be called the Move, not the Gem or Arc as suspected, and you can use two of them (or one and a nunchuk-like non-ball-topped controller) simultaneously to, say, box or use a sword and shield.

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GDC 2010: Sony’s motion controller is called Playstation Move

Ruh roh, some Toyota owners are claiming that the little metal shim installed in their pedals haven’t stopped the cars from fits of sudden acceleration. At least seven complaints have been filed in the last two weeks to the NHTSA stating they are still having the problem. This isn’t going to end well if it’s true

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Toyota’s gas pedal fix not working according to some owners

Interesting. For $80, Hammacher Schlemmer will sell you something that you plug into your car’s cigarette lighter to improve your gas mileage “by up to 18%.” There are some caveats, of course

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Increase fuel efficiency with something that plugs into your car’s DC outlet?

What do a trucker, an Israeli entrepreneur, Al Gore and Richard Branson all have in common? Proof that the real goldmines are old, neglected industries.

The name of that proof is GreenRoad. While so many entrepreneurs bang their heads against a Web and social media advertising brick wall, GreenRoad has applied common technology to an industry technology has largely passed by and—voilà—they’ve got a business that’s growing and saving lives, money and the environment.

Driving is the third most deadly profession after deep sea fishing and working in a coal mine. Not only does driving more safely save lives but research shows it can also save 10% on annual fuel costs, and alleviate a good chunk of the $230 billion professional fleets spend on crashes each year. Enter GreenRoad: a system that helps professional drivers drive more safely and as a result save their company a lot of money.

The GreenRoad system looks simple from the outside: There’s a two-inch device on the dashboard that starts the day with a green light. If a driver brakes hard, swerves or turns recklessly, the light turns yellow. If the driver continues to drive erratically the light stays yellow. If it gets worse the light turns red. That’s it. But like a lot of apparently simple ideas, there’s a lot more going on under the hood.

GreenRoad was the brain-child of an Israeli entrepreneur who was run off the road one night by some wild kids. “If only their parents knew how they were driving…” he muttered to himself – and the work on the company began. It morphed over the years from a consumer product to one aimed at commercial fleets. While the device is made up from mostly off-the-shelf products like a GPS chip, accelerometer, a CPU, mashed up with Google maps and a dashboard-like management portal, it took a good three years of hardcore R&D to build.

While you want the system to work well enough that aggressive driving tactics are caught, avoiding false positives are a must if drivers are to trust GreenRoad and accept its results. The algorithms can crunch more than 120 different driving maneuvers and the map on the dashboard helps provide context, both for the driver, and for a supervisor looking at the results later. For instance, a lot of harsh right turns could be the result of a hairpin turn in the road, not carelessness on the part of the driver.

There’s also a good deal of psychology worked into the device. Drivers don’t want to feel spied on, so video and audio surveillance products haven’t been popular. It’s also not a good idea to have something distracting, which is why early models that had icons to describe the offending aggressive move were nixed for the three simple lights. The dashboard, too, helps pull natural competitive levers by showing your performance, relative to your peers. And don’t underestimate things as simple as starting each day with a green light: The key is holding drivers to a high enough standard, while letting them know they can succeed if they work at it and concentrate as well.

GreenRoad has raised less than $40 million to date from Richard Branson’s Virgin Green Fund, Balderton Capital in London, Benchmark and DAG Ventures. On Monday the company will be announcing another $10 million from Generation, a fund started by Al Gore and Goldman Sachs.

Sound like a lot of money? Consider how much the company saves. Fuel savings just from driving less aggressively can save a company some $300 per vehicle per year, and the costs saved from accidents are double that amount. That makes it a very easy ROI sale for a company’s CFO, environmental officer or safety officer.

Now consider how much GreenRoad makes. It has 80 customers so far, and more than one of those customers have installed the technology in 20,000 of their cars. The three-year license goes for $1,000 per car, which the fuel savings alone cover. That’s right: We’re talking about $20 million contracts. And there’s more where that came from. CEO Eric Weiss says there are 80 million professionally driven cars in the US and the EU. That puts GreenRoad in the middle of a $80 billion market. I haven’t seen many companies like these since the good old days of enterprise software. And GreenRoad doesn’t have a lot of competition.

Weiss himself came from the enterprise software and mobile space. At first he wasn’t sure about a tech company in such a weird, forgotten market, but pretty soon he got excited. “There are very few problems left of this size to solve,” he says. “Besides, the world doesn’t need another gadget for my phone or another ERP company.

And he’s right. GreenRoad proves what a lot of smart investors have been saying for a while now—the best tech deals are no longer in a much picked over “tech sector” per se; they’re in applying technology to old-world industries.

Really, Internet? Now you’re being facetious

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Dear Internet: Please grow up re: Toyota zombie ad

Word on the street is that Nintendo is currently working on the DS2.

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Nintendo working on DS2, hands early dev kits to select few: Tilt controls ahoy

Ariel “Sass-master 2000″ Adams has some great shots of the new Panerai monster. This watch, just for reference, costs more than ten of my cars. The watch is made of black ceramic and it uses Panerai’s tourbillon calibre behind a skeletonized face

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I present to you a Panerai Radiomir Tourbillon GMT Ceramica Lo Scientziato Watch

Good for GM.

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GM keeping it all in the country with electric engine manufacturing