About Mobility

While driving to work yesterday morning, the traffic was heavy. I stopped at the gas station to refuel. While the gas prices have been getting lower, the prices are still expensive (I was able to find a gas station with $2.29/gallon). This gave me some time to think about the car of the future…

The car of the future, realistically speaking, is not a flying-car, or super fast vehicles that take you from point A to point B at very fast speeds, or electric or levitating cars necessarily.

The car of the future is not about the car itself, but about the combination of intelligent cars that collectively use real-time traffic intelligence. The goal is to ensure a constant traffic flow. Instead of traffic flowing in packets, as it happens today, traffic will flow very, very tight or close together, not only making it constant and more predictable, but also helping save energy.

The car of the future is about the highway of the future. On the highway of the future, sensors will be located all over the place: streets, and highways and poles, even your driveway, all connected to a quasi-central station that monitors overall traffic performance. The car of the future wirelessly connects to the traffic monitoring station, and uses the up-to-the-second traffic information, combined with its current position (GPS), and detailed knowledge of streets and highways and their current status, to adjust routes and/or speed, or to suggest routes or speeds to use.

There is no reason (besides cost) why the car and highway of the future can't be built today.

ceo

[Image source: Volante Aircraft]

Update:

I just saw at the Mobile Technology Today website a piece on this same topic titled Future Car Tech: Say Goodbye to Traffic… that is very inline with the above thoughts…

There was a couple. And the couple was chatting.
"Honey, but how do we get to the fields?",
asked the spouse. "Let's ask Google, Google knows
everything"... the spouse answered. And the couple
smiled, and Googled away for the fields...,
"I told you honey, Google knows everything"
said the spouse. The spouse smiled, and clicked on
the links for the fields... "tell me more Google"
she said to herself. 

...but the link was broken - 404 Page Not found! 

"What the ..." the spouse said...

...and the couple never found the answer...

The End.

On the serious side, the above is trying to make a point. The fictitious couple probably represents a large segment of the Web users — access to the Web is increasing, yet not everyone is technical-savvy. At the end of the day, for everyone and anyone, a broken hyperlink is just a bad experience. For many web users, the Web, or the search engine, is broken, even though you and me know it's not the Web or the search engine per-se what is broken.

Search engines, with their robots, already have the capability to help minimize the bad experiences such as the one experienced by our
fictitious couple. At the center of the web is the hyperlink. The solution is to have the hyperlinks themselves reflect their quality, through the use of visual (or not) cues, for example mapping quality to font size, or color. Broken hyperlinks are clearly identified beforehand, minimizing unwanted surprises such as the '404 Page Not found!”. The concept can be extended to represent other characteristics such as frequency and importance. Let's call this a Multi-cue Hyperlink.

Multi-cue hyperlinks can be implemented purely on the client-side, with more limited functionality (meaning, search engines can provide much more information or cues, as they can carefully analyze each hyperlink and their relationships and state), via extensions, such as Firefox extensions. Once I find the time, I will explore this. A quick search revealed a Firefox extension called TargetAlert, which could serve as a starting point for Multi-cue Hyperlinks…

ceo

I'm on my way to the Texas Wireless Summit 2006 – see the event's program. Good set of speakers. I'm looking forward to listen to what they have to say…

ceo

According to the Prince & Cooke consultancy group, SMS penetration in Argentina is 97% if users under 18 are taken into account, and 92% otherwise.

That's a very high pen rate.

And that translates to one thing: Argentinians are a bunch of social, friendly people – which makes SMS adoption a natural thing. It also means the cost of using SMS is low enough that almost everyone is able to use/afford it (low-cost, flat rates?).

ceo

[Via Cellular-News]

See a very good and entertaining talk on Human Computation and “games with a purpose” by Luis von Ahn, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. What an ingenious method to have humans help solve the open problems yet to be mastered by computers. It's a 51 minutes video, but Luis does such a great job speaking, so time flies.

Enrique

[Via Google Blog]