Recently i have taken a look at a few car steros that are being made that include a 10GB hard drive. That's great. BUT you have to copy all the mp3's to the drive via CD's with either the mp3s on them or RIP the music in the player itself. Ok, it's not that big of a deal, but what would make it better? This is what i was thinking. Put a WiFi system in the car stero as well. You come home and park your car. It uses a little power to keep a WiFi connection open once you've turned off your car. You walk inside and sit down in your home and relax. As you're screwing around on your home computer you are now able to transfer mp3's to your CAR STERO via the WiFi connection. DUH! it's so simple.
BUT that's just the start.
Now we're talking about a metropolitan area with cars EVERYWHERE. Suddenly this takes music sharing to a whole new level. Gnutella and Napster never even thought of this possibility. You could literally share music as you drive. With a simple interface you could even set search parameters for your car stereo to go out and find the music you want to listen to AS YOU DRIVE. It would literally be a whole new sharing system. There would be major draw backs though. If you do find a song that you want, and start downloading it, who says that the person you're sharing with is not going the other direction on the freeway at 90mph? So i started thinking about the network itself.
But then i really started thinking
Forget music for a second. What if the cars themselves provided the backbone itself for the network? I know in most free WiFi systems you really need wireless systems tied to ground based lines. But what if you could manage a extremely dynamic set of moving connections to piggy-back or hand-off a connection. If there were a large number of cars with WiFi, would you be able to maintain a network while it is moving at high speed? If so, could you dump wireless phone calls to this kind of network? OR lets even think about SOMETHING USEFUL. All cars could easily be set to send out BASIC telemetry. Like speed and location. As you move along during your commute, you could be feeding traffic information to a database so that up to the second traffic reports could be fed to other cars around you, or more importantly, the ones stuck behind you.
Then comes the part that i think is going to happen SOON
Lets just say that advertisers embrace the WiFi system. Why the fuck would they? Lets say in this same car you could set the stereo to a "passive mode". Almost like just scanning whatever is around. There could be a new WiFi protocol made for the general purpose of telling you about WHERE you are. You drive past a movie theater, and you get movie times. You drive near a shopping center and you get information about sales. You could distribute information about events, food, lodging, AMBER ALERTS, just about anything AND IT COULD BE USEFUL.
SO where does this leave us? Well i can say it leaves me waiting for Apple to make a car stero. :)
Sunday March 9th 2003 07:47 PM PST
Thursday April 17th 2003 01:52 PM PST
Thursday April 17th 2003 02:33 PM PST
I won't even bother putting numbers here. We all know the answer.
So now you're going to tell me that the music companies are going to stop the electronics companies from making something that will make them a lot of money. Lets just make things really clear. Lets just take SONY. They build electronics and they produce music. The two divisions are engaged in a conflict of interest. So who is going to win? The one that makes less money for the whole company?
