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SmartLink Adds Retroactive Connectivity To 2010-16 Ford And Lincoln Vehicles

January 30, 2017 by Doug Newcomb Leave a Comment

Ford SmartLink Logo

Starting with its Sync system a decade ago, Ford was ahead of the curve with connecting cars to the cloud. But only with a tethered phone, and the automaker was slow to add embedded connectivity via an in-car modem, only doing so across most of its models just over a year ago.

But owners of Ford and Lincoln vehicles from the 2010 to 2016 model years will soon be able to retroactively add connectivity using a smartphone app or the Web via a new system called SmartLink to access a range of features that weren’t available when they bought their car, truck or SUV . These include remote door locking and unlocking, engine starting, vehicle location, maintenance notifications and security alerts. SmartLink will also provide an in-car Wi-Fi hot spot that can support up to eight devices.

To bring this connectivity to older vehicles, Ford is partnering with Verizon Telematics and Delphi Automotive, and taking a page out of the playbook of suppliers of aftermarket ODB-II “dongles” such as Vinli and Verizon’s own Hum product. SmartLink consists of a 4G LTE-enabled dongle that plugs into a car’s OBD-II port that allows a car’s onboard computer to connect to diagnostic equipment for service.

While ODB-II dongles have created an entire aftermarket connected car cottage industry and SmartLink-like features are available on many new vehicles, Ford is the first major automaker to offer retroactive connectivity to its customers. SmartLink will be available through Ford and Lincoln dealers and has the ability to schedule service through dealerships. SmartLink will be available starting this summer, with pricing to be announced closer to launch, according to Ford.

“Offering [SmartLink] through our dealerships is another way to keep us connected with our customers and earn their loyalty,” Stephen Odell, executive vice president of Global Marketing, Sales and Service for Ford, said in a statement. And it also allows Ford to amass a larger pool of connected cars and potentially more revenue and keep dealers happy by giving them a slice of the pie.

Filed Under: Connected Car Tagged With: 4G, Delphi, Ford, Lincoln, LTE, ODB-II, Verizon Wireless, Vinli

C3 Connected Mobility Summit Video Highlights

November 4, 2016 by Doug Newcomb Leave a Comment

The C3 Group’s 2016 Connected Mobility Summit at Dogpatch Studios on October 20 in San Francisco gathered the top thought leaders and stakeholders in connected mobility, and also attracted high-level media for a series of engaging presentations and panel discussions. Cutting-edge technology demos were on display that shed new insight into the monumental paradigm shift occurring in transportation and mobility.

Here’s a video highlight of the event. The C3 Group would like to thank our sponsors for their support, including Hyundai, Ford, Pioneer, HERE, Continental, AAA, Kelley Blue Book, Vinli, Gracenote, Bosch, QNX, INRIX and GetGeeked.

Filed Under: Events and Conferences, featured story Tagged With: AAA, Bosch, C3 Group, Continental, Ford, Gracenote, HERE, Hyundai, INRIX, Kelley Blue Book, Pioneer, QNX, San Francisco, Vinli

Highlights from the 2016 C3 Connected Mobility Summit in San Francisco

October 26, 2016 by c3admin Leave a Comment

overview

The C3 Group’s 2016 Connected Mobility Summit at Dogpatch Studios on October 20 in San Francisco was a resounding success. The event gathered the top thought leaders and stakeholders in connected mobility and attracted high-level media and other attendees for a series of engaging presentations and panel discussions and cutting-edge technology demos that shed new insight into the monumental paradigm shift occurring in transportation and mobility.

C3 Group President and Cofounder Doug Newcomb kicked off the event by stating that “technology is transforming transportation in the same way it’s transformed media, music and other industries.”

opening-remarks

This was followed by Ford’s Sudipto Aich sharing the automaker’s  vision for Driving City Solutions as part of its ambitious Smart Mobility initiative. Aich’s presentation preceded the opening panel, moderated by San Francisco Associate Transportation Planner Danielle Harris, that focused on Making Cities and Urban Mobility Smarter. Panelists shared their ideas on how technology will help shape transportation and the cities of the future.

first-panel

The next panel, Which Transportation Start-Ups Have Staying Power, centered on the rapid growth of venture capital investing in the mobility space and featured some of Silicon Valley’s top VC firms.  Panel Moderator Jeffrey Schox of Trucks Venture Capital and a Stanford Associate Professor, posited the concept of companies emerging as the “Dell of car manufacturers,” with consumers going online and piecing together the features and technology they look for in a car, resulting in a custom built, made-to-order vehicle. Panelist also made predictions about the future of ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft.

second-panel

C3’s Doug Newcomb moderated the third panel, The Next-Generation of In-Dash Technology and Content. Topics covered included the importance of display technology given the amount of information drivers are now presented with, and how the aftermarket fits into the new transportation environment. Ted Cardenas of Pioneer Electronics suggested that the aftermarket is essential to the transition to help today’s cars share the road with vehicles of the future.

third-panel

Karl Brauer of Cox Automotive kicked off the final panel with an eye-opening presentation on technological realities vs. consumer perception of self-driving cars, followed by the final panel discussion, that fielded tough questions around the unintended consequences of autonomous cars. C3 Group’s CEO David Robinson led the lively panel including Avery Ash of INRIX , Dawn Manley of Samsung, Ryan Hilton of Quid, and Cox’s Karl Brauer who noted, “We are in the early stages of a paradigm shift in transportation technology.”

fourth-panel2

During a networking break and closing reception, attendees had the opportunity to check out tech exhibits such as Hyundai’s highly-anticipated new IONIQ hybrid, Ford’s Chariot vans and GoBikes, HERE’s 3-D scale model of San Francisco showing the company’s location intelligence technology in action and Pioneer’s aftermarket solutions that bring consumers’ digital lifestyle into any car’s dashboard.

here-display2

Brauer summed up one of the key takeaways from the evening, focusing on how technology and consumer choices are driving disruption in urban mobility, by concluding that, “The reality is that for the next 10 years, autonomous vehicles will be sharing the road with older, driven vehicles and creating a unique situation, that will be phased out with time.”

Grant Courville, Senior Director of Product Management for Automotive and General at‎ BlackBerry and a panelist,  noted that his favorite part of the event was the networking, which is always an important and valuable staple of C3 events. The evolution and development of the transportation disruption “cannot be proprietary,” Courville added, and “events like this are imperative” to everyone’s success.

The C3 Group would like to thank our sponsors for their support, including Hyundai, Ford, Pioneer, HERE, Continental, AAA, Kelley Blue Book, Vinli, Gracenote, Bosch, QNX, INRIX and GetGeeked.

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Filed Under: Events and Conferences, featured story Tagged With: AAA, Blackberry, Bosch, C3 Group, Continental, Cox, Ford, Gracenote, HERE, Hyundai, Pioneer, QNX, Stanford, Vinli

Via Recent Partnerships, Vinli Strives to Make Connected Cars Mainstream

September 26, 2016 by Doug Newcomb Leave a Comment

vinli-announces-partnership-with-meineke-and-cox-automotive

Thousands of new connected cars roll off assembly lines each day. But there are still millions of other and also older vehicles that remain unconnected even though aftermarket solutions – Internet-enabled “dongles” that plug into the onboard diagnostic (OBD) port of any car made since 1996 – have been around for a few years now.

While several platforms and products have been vying for the lead in add-on connectivity and have substantial VC backing, none have reached critical mass. But recent announcements by Vinli could help distance the Dallas-based start-up from competitors and achieve its goal of becoming a prevalent connected car platform.

The company has inked a deal with Cox Automotive to offer Vinli’s product and platform through the organization’s network of 40,000 dealers as part of a Connected Dealership Program. The installed Vinli dongle will allow Cox dealerships to keep tabs on a vehicle’s location in real time, manage maintenance and compile a driving history while it’s on the lot.

Then the dongle can do double duty after someone buys a vehicle with it installed by giving drivers access to a range of services, including in-­car Wi-Fi, apps and telematics services via 4G LTE wireless service from T-Mobile. The Vinli dongle typically retails for $199, including a two-year data plan. But when Cox sells a Vinli-equipped vehicle, the device and services could be offered as standard equipment or bundled into a monthly payment.

Since Cox Automotive is involved in “three out of four vehicle transactions in some way,” president Sandy Schwartz said in a recent interview with Automotive News, the partnership with Cox could significantly expand Vinli’s footprint. And it fits well with the company’s recent pivot to primarily become a software platform, as opposed to providing an OBD dongle for only vehicle diagnostics and other connected services.

This potential for growth could also make Vinli’s platform more attractive to third-party developers who want to target a variety of vehicles models. In conjunction with the Cox announcement Vinli verified it now has the largest number of applications of any connected car platform, according to a Frost & Sullivan report. Almost 50 apps have been published on the Vinli platform this year and the company said that another 100-plus are in the pipeline.

Vinli also simultaneously announced a partnership with Meineke to make its connected car platform part of a service package provided to Meineke Rewards members starting in October. This will allow both retail and fleet customers who opt-in to get oil change reminders and the ability to schedule an appointment at the nearest Meineke location, as well as vehicle diagnostics info.

“The automotive industry is going through its most transformational phase right now,” Vinli founder and CEO Mark Haidar, said in an email, “and the cloud is going to be an important piece in this. Our focus is on Vinli to be the trusted layer in the cloud for the car. We have designed a platform that can process trillions of messages, and then quickly and securely deliver relevant vehicle data to individual drivers and businesses through our open app ecosystem. Together, with our partners, we are bringing connectivity in the car to the mainstream.”

Originally published by Forbes.com

Filed Under: Connected Car Tagged With: connected car, Cox, Vinli

Record Crowd at Fourth-Annual C3 Connected Mobility Conference

June 30, 2016 by c3admin Leave a Comment

IMG_4484

Akshay Anand, Manager of Commercial Insights for Kelley Blue Book, kicked off C3’s fourth-annual Connected Mobility Conference at CE Week with a presentation on research the company conducted on the impact of ride-sharing and car-sharing on the auto industry,

The fourth-annual C3 Connected Mobility Conference at CE Week drew a record crowd on June 22 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan. “As this space evolves and expands, we’re seeing entirely new segments of attendees,” said Doug Newcomb, President and Co-founder of the C3 Group. “This year’s C3 Connected Mobility Conference attracted attendees from not only automotive and media, but also included a strong showing from the financial industry, academia, policymakers and social media influencers.

The fourth-annual C3 Connected Mobility Conference kicked off with a presentation by Akshay Anand, Manager of Commercial Insights for Kelley Blue Book, highlighting research the company conducted on ride-sharing and car-sharing on the auto industry, showing how these two new forms of mobility are “not an immediate threat to car buying.”

This dovetailed with the topic of the first panel, How Car-Sharing and Ride-Sharing Are Reshaping the Auto Industry, which featured Anand, Steve Banfield, CEO of BMW ReachNow, and Michael Mikos, CFO and Director of Business Development for Daimler’s Car2Go, and moderated by C3’s Doug Newcomb.  Panelists from BMW and Daimler stressed the value of trusted brands as consumers gain acceptance of the new technology and explore how to adopt car-sharing and ride-sharing into their mobility choices.

The second panel explored the Financial and Societal Impact of Self-Driving Cars, and featured Peter Esser, General Representative of Washington Operations for NXP Semiconductors, Bryan Reimer, Associate Director of the New England Transportation Center and a Research Scientist at MIT’s AgeLab, and Tushar Sethi, a Director at Quid, with Catherine McCullough, Director of Intelligent Car Coalition, serving as moderator. Topics include the liability and ethics implications of self-driving technology.

The final panel was titled How the Aftermarket is Connecting Existing Vehicles to the Cloud and featured Avery Ash, Director of Federal Relations at AAA, Ted Cardenas, Vice President of Car Electronics at Pioneer Electronics, and Mark Spain, VP of Automotive for Vinli, and moderated by C3 CEO Dave Robinson. The three panelists detailed how the millions of existing cars can be connected and consumers can receive the benefits now offered in new vehicles.

The C3 Group wants to thank its sponsors and participants for a successful event and we look forward to continuing to drive the conversation and engagement in connected car and mobility through future events that bring together thought leaders in the space.

Filed Under: Events and Conferences, featured story Tagged With: AAA, BMW, C3, Car2Go, Daimler, Kelly Blue Book, MIT, NXP, Pioneer, Vinli

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