Scosche has a simple plug-and-play solution to help curb smartphone activities while driving. Users insert the $ 129 CellControl in to their vehicle’s OBD-II interface — a standard port on cars produced after 1996 — which pairs with the CellControl app on a smartphone. When the module detects the vehicle is in motion, all handset activities are disabled, with the exception of hands-free functions.

Texting, phone calls, email and apps are generally shut down while driving with the CellControl and attempts to remove or tamper with the module can be automatically reported to a device admin. That’s handy if the kids try to circumvent the system, for example. Music libraries are still available for use on the car’s receiver and calls taken through a Bluetooth headset or an auto’s integrated wireless system are still allowed with the system.

This is a smart method to help cut down on distracted driving because of cellphones; smarter in my opinion than legislation to accomplish similar results. Laws that dictate no handset use in vehicles can limit the use of valuable smartphone functions such as location services, emergency calls and integrated apps for us in a car. Granted, not everyone can afford the $ 129 CellControl, but it’s a viable option that uses technology to improve safety.

For now, Scosche’s software is supported on Android and BlackBerry handsets as well as older Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 devices. I don’t expect to see the CallControl gain iOS support as apps that control and iPhone’s core functionality generally aren’t approved by Apple. Perhaps Cupertino would make an exception or consider a licensing agreement with Scosche, given how distracting it can be to use a phone while driving.

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The National Transportation Safety Board recommended on Tuesday that states ban all driver use of cell phones and other portable electronic devices, except in emergencies. The recommendation doesn’t have the weight of law, but could have policy repercussions in the states and municipalities leading to stricter laws about cell phone use on the road. Heck, and while they’re at it, perhaps they can stop those ladies putting on makeup, people reading or eating messy foods while trying to navigate our roadways?

Cell phone bans have been a hot topic for years as cities tried to create guidelines that allowed people to talk but required them use a headset. Texting while driving became a hot topic in 2009, especially after the New York Times  decided to make it a national deal with a series of articles and exposés on the traffic accidents caused by the practice. And who among us can say they haven’t been behind a particularly inattentive driver only to see them glancing down at their phone? Of course, given that in 2010 one in four people admitted to texting while driving, clearly this epidemic of messaging from the driver’s seat is pretty widespread.

But, as someone who regularly relies on my phone for directions (yes, I set them in advance or pull over to get them started), I’m hoping we can create some reasonable rules for what are some very multifunctional devices. How many of you tune into Pandora on your phone while in the car? Or dial up a podcast? Of course, as cars themselves become connected, the recommendation may become a boon for the cell phone companies providing the connections for in-car infotainment products, because they’d get double the subscription revenue from folks paying for a handset connection and a car connection.

The CTIA has come out on Tuesday stating it has no issue with the recommendation that bans manual texting (emphasis mine) while driving and pretty much saying it will defer to local laws in the case of rules associated with talking while driving. The industry may want people to use its products, but it doesn’t want to be the reason for a 12-car pileup or unnecessary deaths. Plus, it may be able to sell people tools that turn off texting or reroute calls while people are on the road.

Of course, no matter what the NTSB recommends and even what laws are passed there will always be people who are sure that the law doesn’t apply to them, and I can’t really see police getting aggressive about enforcement. Plus, enforcing such bans would be a challenge without giving the police easy access to data on our cell phones, something many people would rather not share with their federal or local law enforcement at a routine traffic stop. Sadly, asking people to be responsible and safety conscious when piloting a multi-ton vehicle doesn’t seem to work.

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Yeah, we’ve test driven a lot of electric cars on the Green Overdrive show, but we don’t usually get to spend all that long driving the cars. Most of the time it’s just around the block or a few minutes on the driving track. But for our latest episode, we took Mitsubishi’s all-electric i MiEV out for a full day of driving, running it through its paces on the highway, in the city, parallel parking, looking for a charge, and packing it with people (and stuff). Here are our impressions:

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Smartphones are increasingly becoming the remote controls of our lives. They allow people to program their homes’ lighting fixtures and thermostats and track energy use. Some car owners can use theirs to check on the battery levels and adjust the climate control system. At MIT, researchers have been thinking about expanding the role of smartphones to help drivers save gas (or electricity).

The project, called SignalGuru, involves using many smartphones mounted on the dashboards to take images of traffic signals to figure out the frequency of the green and red lights at various intersections. The data, collected through crowdsourcing, will then be analyzed to predict how quickly the lights will change. The phone will then tell the drivers when to slow down so that they can avoid having to stop and start the car when the traffic signal goes from red to green.

The idling and accelerating of a car requires energy, or course, and that energy adds up over time. In fact, minimizing this stop-and-start move has shown to reduce fuel use by as much as 20 percent, the researchers claim.

An inconvenient truth

Designing fuel-efficient cars is something carmakers can’t avoid. Federal regulation requires the average fuel economy to reach 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The transportation sector accounts for about 33 percent of the emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the country, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Cutting fossil fuel use will save both money and the environment.

Emmanouil Koukoumidis, a visiting professor from Princeton and the leader of the SignalGuru project, sought to take advantage of the growing number of people who use their smartphones as navigation devices. By combining the image-capture and analysis features, the smartphones used in the project would display a recommended speed to help the drivers avoid stopping at the next red light. Koukoumidis and other researchers have run field trials in Cambridge, Mass., and Singapore.

To keep the drivers’ eyes on the road, however, the researchers believe the recommended speed should be conveyed by voice, much like what stand-alone navigation devices do. Better yet, the two can combine their functions so that one device will tell the driver to slow down or take an alternative route to achieve the best fuel efficiency, Koukoumidis said in a press release. Other potential uses of a SignalGuru device include snapping photos of parking lots to determine the availability of parking spots.

Working with frenemies

Carmakers also have been working on marrying GPS with other communication tools for a variety of uses, from avoiding accidents to cutting fuel costs. Ford is working on technologies that will allow cars to talk to one another. Toyota and Microsoft, meanwhile, are developing mobile apps and other software and hardware to make it possible for cars to communicate with homes and the electric grid to accomplish tasks such as figuring out the best time to charge cars.

General Motors announced on Thursday that it will work with LG to design electric cars, and one of its plans is to make use of LG’s expertise in consumer electronics and communication equipment designs and manufacturing for creating telematics systems inside the car.

Many of these projects are in the early stages of development, and consumers won’t find those technologies inside their cars for many more years. Already, the idea that future cars will come with a built-in and sophisticated communications network has prompted concerns about security breaches. But without a doubt, using technology to reduce our energy use will always be a good thing.

Images courtesy of MIT and General Motors

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When Apple released its third-quarter 2011 earnings results today the numbers were, as is becoming almost customary for the Cupertino crew lately, a huge blow-out. Success was spread over many parts of the business, particularly the company’s flagship products, the iPhone and the Mac. Both are growing and show that Apple is on a tear with the entirety of its business. But those iPad results? Those were fairly stunning.

While Android phones are outpacing the iPhone in market share, it’s clear that Apple is not anywhere close to giving up its lead in the tablet race. And despite the seemingly endless train of new tablets popping up, Apple is putting more space between its tablet and the rest of the field.

Here are the most important numbers from Apple’s earnings that show that the iPad is seemingly unstoppable, and clearly Apple’s most important product.

$ 6 billion: That’s how much money Apple made from the iPad just in April, May, and June of this year. The key is that Apple now makes more money off the iPad, a slightly more than a year old product, than its Mac lineup. Apple pulled in just under $ 5 billion in revenue from Mac desktops and notebooks during the same quarter.

The people scooping up iPads are not just gadget hounds and consumers with expendable income. Buyers include large corporations who are handing them out to employees to help them do their job, something Apple has been actively pushing for a while. But Apple is also getting a boost in iPad sales even from sources the company didn’t anticipate.

“We sold more iPads to K-12 [schools] than we did Macs, which is absolutely shocking,” said Apple COO Tim Cook on a conference call with analysts today. “We never would have predicted that.”

“Shocking,” perhaps. But probably not unwelcome. Apple very likely doesn’t mind getting kids used to working on iPads in elementary school.

9.25 million: That’s how many iPads Apple sold during the quarter. That blows away what Apple sold a year ago, just 3.3 million iPads, or a 183 percent bump. So what’s changed in the last quarter? Apple’s obviously had more than a year to advertise the product and build a customer base. But an important step is that Apple’s gotten its iPad supply-chain act together. If you’ll recall the situation a year ago, the original iPad was extremely hard to find. Last year Apple didn’t catch up on the seemingly insatiable demand for the original iPad until later in the summer.

Apple admitted earlier this year it couldn’t make iPad 2s fast enough to keep up with demand. Now, Apple is still selling “every iPad 2 it makes,” but also said it was able to make more iPads 2s during the most recent quarter than it did in the same period a year ago. So while demand is still ahead of supply (“Sales of the iPad 2 have been absolutely a frenzy,” said Cook), they’re getting closer to meeting it. Cook went as far as to say that in some markets they had actually caught up and were able to be in some sort of an equilibrium with demand and supply. He did not, however, expand on which markets.

14 percent: That’s actually not an iPad number. That’s how much Mac sales grew durng this most recent quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago. While iPads are outgrowing Macs, they’re doing it without significantly affecting the Mac business.

Sure, Cook allowed, “we do believe that some customers chose ot purchase an iPad instead of a new Mac during the quarter. But we also believe that even more customers purchased n iPad over a Windows PC. There’s a lot more of the PC business to cannibalize over the Mac.”

Apple has been banging the “post-PC” drum pretty hard since it introduced the iPad, and at least some of its tablet competitors are selling the tablet as a PC in a different form factor. Surging iPad sales in addition to steadily growing Mac sales could mean that Apple customers are buying into Apple’s view of the computing world too.

222 million: That’s the total number of iOS-based devices that are floating around in people’s pockets, purses, and briefcases: iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. That’s compared to 130 million Android devices that Google recently announced. While the iPhone has a three-year headstart on the iPad, it’s clear that Apple’s tablet is pushing those numbers up.

$ 2.5 billion: Money Apple paid back to developers whose apps sold through its store so far. That, along with the previous iOS device tally, are really meant to be siren calls for developers.

The number of iOS devices, representing the continued viability of the iPhone as a platform for selling your apps and the growth of the iPad, are numbers Apple likes to remind app makers of regularly. It’s a strategy to let those who are or might be attracted to the growing number of Android gadgets floating around that not only is iOS continuing to grow, it’s also good for business.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user William Hook

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Mobile hardware is progressing at a blistering pace. Displays continue to increase in size, color quality and resolution, while advancements such as glasses-free 3-D offer the promise of novel user experiences. Processors are adding cores and clock speed faster than ever before, and 4G radios have brought broadband data speeds to mobile devices. These unprecedented hardware innovations have set the stage for a brave new world of mobile computing in which nearly anything is possible on hand-held devices. However, they account for only part of the equation.

In order to deliver the type of user experiences enabled by these innovations software must keep pace – otherwise we will fall painfully short of capitalizing on the opportunities presented by these hardware achievements. This goes beyond the need for innovations in OSes and applications, to the underlying software that ties everything together. It’s the next great challenge faced by the mobile industry.

Software as the Connective Tissue of the Phone

When it comes to mobile software, the importance of operating systems and applications is well understood. The battle for smartphone OS market share evokes a feverish MLB pennant race, and the fact that we’re all hopelessly addicted to Angry Birds proves that mobile apps have thoroughly permeated the mainstream.

Less understood, however, is the importance of the underlying software layer; the connective tissue that ties hardware to software, such as optimizations between OS and chipset, performance advancements in web technology, and enhanced app performance. Without these efforts, gigahertz, cores and megabytes of RAM are nothing more than points on a spec sheet. In order to deliver the best possible mobile experiences, hardware and software cannot be viewed separately. They are attached at the hip, and integrating them to work in perfect unison is the key to driving mobile innovation forward.

Immediate benefits of intelligent integration include better graphical frame rates in games, faster web page downloads and smoother rendering and scrolling. These are just a sampling of the user experience improvements that will help mobile devices keep up with ever-increasing consumer expectations.

Innovating for the Future of the Mobile Web

All too often, the primary focus is on what the consumer wants today. It is our job to anticipate what the consumer will want tomorrow and innovate accordingly.

While today’s consumers are still largely enamored with the simple inclusion of mobile browsers, tomorrow’s expectations will include desktop-level browser performance, Web pages and apps running on par with native apps and smooth HD multimedia streaming like the desktop equivalent. This is possible via complex but informed optimizations to the HTTP networking layer, HTML5 browser core, and JavaScript engine. While powerful processors will strongly influence robust Web experiences, the mobile software layer is significantly impacting how we get the most out of mobile hardware and continue to innovate on behalf of the consumer experience.

While HTML5 will play an important role in the evolution of the mobile Web, it won’t come to fruition until mobile devices support the specification fully, from web and enterprise apps to entertainment and browsing. Forward-thinking developers making the transition to HTML5-based web apps stand to reap the benefits. The HTML5 family of standards runs faster, more efficiently and with greater capabilities when the hardware and software have been tightly integrated.

The biggest remaining hurdle is ensuring that the same array of device capabilities, such as camera access, is available to Web apps as their native counterparts. To this end, companies like Qualcomm are enabling a rich set of device APIs within the browser so that Web apps have that same detailed control and usage of the device’s hardware.

Collaboration Is Key

The mobile industry is built on partnerships within the diverse lines of business that make up the ecosystem and we must continue to work closely together to make these advancements a reality — from ensuring common device APIs are defined, implemented, and utilized to working hand in hand across the mobile ecosystem to deliver web experiences that go beyond what we ever experienced on a PC. All stand to benefit greatly by software’s ongoing impact on mobile, and efficient collaboration will expedite that process. Ultimately, intelligent and tight OS integration within the chip provides time to market advantages for OEMs who will see their devices running faster, smoother and more efficiently.

Enhancing mobile software is not a trickle down process. It starts with the seamless hardware integration and ends with developers bringing the experience to life. If we are serious about a future where mobile phones are responsible for tasks currently held by computers we need to embrace the role of software in overall mobile performance and continue strongly supporting the software developers that are driving innovation.

Rob Chandhok is president of Qualcomm Internet Services and helps drive software strategy for Qualcomm’s client and server platforms. He and other mobile industry thought leaders will be discussing these topics and more June 1-2 at Uplinq 2011 in San Diego.

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EBay is buying location-based service and ad network WHERE in a deal that gives it added ability to drive more local and offline commerce. The company said the pick-up will add important talent and technology to eBay and PayPal as those businesses aim to become more local and relevant to users. And it builds off eBay and PayPal’s growing focus on mobile, which is driving a lot of the growth in local commerce.

Where is a good acquisition for eBay, which will now have to show it won’t screw up this purchase like it did with StumbleUpon or Skype. The Boston-based location company offers mobile apps that help people discover local places to go nearby and provides deals on local products and services. The company also runs a fast-growing ad network that only serves up localized mobile ads. And it recently bought LocalGinger, a daily deals group buying site that it converted into a product called WhereBuys.

“Local commerce companies like Where are blurring the lines between in-store and online shopping. By giving people hyper-local, relevant retailer information and deals on their mobile phones, we see a huge opportunity for local merchants to reach more buyers, and for consumers to get more choice and value when they shop,” wrote Amanda Pires, PayPal’s senior director of global communications, brand, experiential marketing, in a blog post. 

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but eBay said it expects the acquisition to close by the end of this quarter. Pires said the first step will be to integrate PayPal into the WHERE app so users can pay for local offers. But eBay and PayPal see much more opportunity in expanding into local deals. The company paid $ 75 million for Milo, a local shopping engine that provides real-time, nearby store inventory and pricing.

“Since we don’t compete with our merchants, we are in a unique position to partner with retailers of all sizes and help people shop and pay anytime, anywhere and in any way they want,” Pires wrote.

I’ve talked to WHERE on a few occasions. and they have some great ideas about tapping the local market and using data to improve its performance. They’re seeing great results on their location-based ads, which leverage the company’s sophisticated location-targeting technology. About 120,000 advertisers, mostly local retailers and merchants, are using the network to help drive local traffic into their stores. The company employs a big data team of 12 people, including 8 Ph.D.s, who help tune the company’s location-based ads and also help provide relevant local recommendations for its mobile apps, which have about 4 million active users.

The WHERE pick-up is also about the company’s intellectual property, including a pivotal patent it was awarded late last year on serving up local coupons and offers through geo-fencing. WHERE CEO Walter Doyle called it the “mother of all geo-fencing patents,” at the time, in part because it can conceivably cover any type of local alerts and tailored information based on a person’s movements. Though WHERE executives said the patent was more defensive, it could certainly prove valuable to eBay as it looks to get more local.

This is the second purchase of a location-based service this week, after Groupon bought Pelago, maker of Whrrl. It shows bigger commerce companies are looking to get more hyper-local and mobile and compete for the marketing budgets of merchants. It also raises the question of what other location-based services may be next. It’s hard competing against Foursquare, and increasingly Facebook, as WHERE and Whrrl found out, but the work these location companies is interesting and perhaps more importantly, the data they’re gathering, is very valuable. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more location-based companies get acquired.

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America’s No. 1 travel and map software for 11 years straight,1 Microsoft Streets & Trips is a great travel companion and easy-to-use laptop accessory.
Microsoft PressPass, Information for Journalists – Press Releases

At this week’s 18th annual ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, one of the submissions from Microsoft Research may provide better driving directions for Bing Maps, by following taxis to learn the best routes around a particular city.

Beijing taxi routes from MSR, via Technology Review

At the conference, Yu Zheng from MSR and a team of researchers presented their findings of the project, which followed taxicab routes in Beijing, China by analyzing GPS data from 33,000 Beijing taxis.  The results from T-Drive showed better results than 60% of similar directions from either Bing or Google maps (which came in about the same for trip times), shaving some 16% off the time of a trip.

An article in MIT’s Technology Review highlights T-Drive as one of a number of research projects that are taking a look at how to improve drive time estimations and routes in online maps, which currently only estimate the length of the road and posted speed limits.

Traffic information is becoming a hot topic in mapping technology lately as mobile devices not only allow us to ask for the latest information, but can actually add to the knowledge set via GPS and other information. 

LiveSide.net

The U.S. will next year join Japan in the $ 1 billion mobile advertising club and is expected to generate five times that figure by 2015. Due to the relatively larger population compared to most European nations, U.S. mobile ad spending is several magnitudes higher than in Europe on a per campaign basis, topping $ 100,000 for the average ad effort. Datapoints such as these are the focus of a free whitepaper available today from Smaato, a privately held mobile ad network based in Redwood Shores, California, with additional analysis from research firm mobileSquared.

What’s driving the uptick in the U.S. market? Smartphone adoption (and the generally required data plans that go with them), plain and simple. It’s expected that 50 percent of Americans, or roughly 150 million people, will own a smartphone by the end of 2011, for example. And with Neilsen today reporting that 28 percent of the U.S. population already carries one, the halfway point of adoption could come even sooner.

So the flow of mobile ad money is is increasing as richer activities more suited to smartphones vs feature phones proliferate: 51 percent of the 2010 ad dollars are being spent on search, apps and digital media activities that favor smartphones with fast wireless network connections.

Other key datapoints from the Smaato / mobileSquared report:

• More than half of U.S. mobile users (53 percent) haven’t yet seen an ad on their handset, indicating that there’s still a large potential audience to capture: approximately 160 million consumers.
• Of the 49 million who have already engaged with a mobile ad, 25 percent clicked and made a purchase, while 59 percent clicked but didn’t buy. The remaining 16 percent clicked an ad and completed the product transaction on a computer: more of the engaged consumers took positive and more immediate action on the handset.
• For all of the prior and expected future growth, the mobile ad market still only accounts for one percent of the total advertising revenues in the U.S., suggesting huge potential going foward.

Notable to me is the flow of ad dollars in search: Apple with iAds and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Ad Service are solid investments for the future, but Google’s search dominance is still grabbing the bulk of  mobile ad dollars. With the Android Market at 100,000 apps and counting, Google has a foot in the application department when it comes to mobile ads. And earlier this month, Google reported that display ads on YouTube increased 50 percent in the past year, giving it a rich mobile content play as well.

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