Multi-Channel Content Delivery Project
Professor Michael Fry of the University of Sydney has offered public details about the Smart Services CRC's project in Multi-Channel Content Delivery. Professor Fry is seeking research students for two deliverables that can be taken as credit-bearing subjects: Trends in Mobile Technologies & Services and Emerging Vehicular Technical and Service Environments. From the second project's description:
I also had a 2006 conversation with the CRC's Dean Economou about XM Satellite Radio's financial troubles in the United States market. XM had established a new market channel through a factory installation deal with GM. Economou countered that Australia lacked the mature market for satellite radio to be scalable in the same way.
In March 2007 shortly before leaving the Smart Internet CRC I discussed the sensor and wireless networks aspects with Swinburne University's Professor Ryszard Kowalcyk. The details remain "commercial in confidence" and Kowalcyk impressed me with his team's knowledge, which will be vital to the Smart Services CRC.
The business trends dimension of Professor Fry's project is important because his team already faces a probable major competitor.
The project will study and analyse technical and business trends in vehicular ICT environments. The project is not about core automotive technologies, but rather addresses new and emerging in-vehicle sensors and wireless networks, vehicle-to-vehicle communications and networks, vehicle-roadside communications and networks, and their capabilities and possibilities for the provision of new services to vehicle users such as context-aware navigation and traffic congestion avoidance. Potential convergence with other in-vehicle technologies such as digital radio, mobile telephones, etc, should also be considered.In 2006 a senior project manager explained to me that the Royal Automobile Association of Victoria and its state counterparts were undergoing some fundamental shifts in customers, markets and their management portfolio for members. For example, the drivers for vehicle-roadside communication included the RACV's expansion into hotel and resort management. In return, I pointed the senior project manager to Peter Morville's book Ambient Findability (O'Reilly Media, Sebastapol CA, 2005), and his discussion of wayfinding, or how people use symbols and objects to spatially orient themselves when navigating. Wayfinding is thus relevant to developing context awareness in physical and virtual worlds.
I also had a 2006 conversation with the CRC's Dean Economou about XM Satellite Radio's financial troubles in the United States market. XM had established a new market channel through a factory installation deal with GM. Economou countered that Australia lacked the mature market for satellite radio to be scalable in the same way.
In March 2007 shortly before leaving the Smart Internet CRC I discussed the sensor and wireless networks aspects with Swinburne University's Professor Ryszard Kowalcyk. The details remain "commercial in confidence" and Kowalcyk impressed me with his team's knowledge, which will be vital to the Smart Services CRC.
The business trends dimension of Professor Fry's project is important because his team already faces a probable major competitor.
Professor Fry's most visible competitor is perhaps the Microsoft Auto team which will leverage its software engineering expertise for in-vehicle entertainment, wireless networks and communication systems. In-vehicle environments are the logical extension for Microsoft's battles with Apple for the digital home space. Microsoft signalled this as a strategic priority when it announced a deal in September 2007 with Siemens VDO Automotive AG "to develop a new generation of on-board communication, navigation and entertainment systems that use Microsoft Auto, a software system and hardware reference design." Microsoft's contribution focuses on architecture, design tools and embedded systems. Just days later BMW and Siemens announced a deal with Microsoft and Novell that might hint at the preferred approach to the systems architecture: Linux open source software. This alliance would have the brand, market channels and expertise to get-to-market far quicker than a CRC although some analysts hope Microsoft will suffer execution problems.
The new AutoCRC might also be a domestic competitor for Professor Fry's research agenda. Yet if the CRC Association could negotiate and orchestrate some cross-CRC collaboration then this win-lose situation could be reframed as an infinite game or win-win-win outcome.
An opening gambit would be to dispatch a research team to the Internationale Automobil Ausstellung (IAA) in Germany to study the prototypes, or at least closely analyse the YouTube clips. The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals has some useful guidelines on how to conduct this analysis ethically at trade shows. Eldad Eilam's Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 2005) explains the more covert "hacker" approach that Microsoft's competitors will use at the IAA.
Professor Michael Fry's and Professor Ryszard Kowalcyk's teams might achieve the dream of every Wired Magazine pop futurist: the car of the future. Alternatively, they might make perfect scriptwriters for NBC's planned new series of Knight Rider.
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