Self-driving cars will become taxis?

Uber, for some time, has been bent on developing autonomous cars to use them as a fleet of driverless taxis. Lately,Tesla Motors has announced a bold plan to operate its self-driving cars as an Uber-like fleet later on.

Meantime, Apple is gearing up its self-driving car project by hiring a former Blackberry executive who was the head of automotive software division, and plans to launch its autonomous cars by 2020.

In China, Alibaba moves ahead with a blueprint for   self-driving cars. Faraday Future, a US-based Chinese-backed electric vehicle maker, is posing as a big rival to Tesla Motors, and also has a self-driving electric car in its investment portfolio.

Wait a minute. The rise of the sharing economy may tend to leave no stones unturned, and you may find it in every nook and cranny. But one big question looms large. Will consumers try to share everything they own, most of the things they own, or the select least of things they own?

You've got a top-of-the line McLaren or Bentley, and it is out of the question that you are willing to share it with others to save a few pennies.

It will be three decades until autonomous cars will hit a critical mass, according to some analysts. I am somewhat inclined to say it will take at least over a decade until a full deployment of self-driving cars is achieved. The self-driving cars appear to be a top agenda item for automotive OEMs and high-tech giants, but the power struggle between automakers and technological giants will continue for a while.

Google and Apple are most unlikely to start manufacturing self-driving cars any time soon, but seem to be more interested in becoming a market leader in the evolving operating platforms of connected cars. The ongoing evolution of the "connected car platforms" will show some fragmentation until a dominant platform takes its root into the ecosystem of the connected cars, of which self-driving cars form a subsector. Not to change the subject, do you think self-driving cars will become Unber-like taxis sooner or later? If the full deployment of autonomous cars is not going to happen in the near future, then a niche market for self-driving cars should come into being as soon as possible.

In other words, connected cars evolve into either smartphone-based Telematics 2.0 or in-vehicle operating platforms.

Silicone Valley is losing its glamour as technology hub?

It is premature to say anything about the status quo of Silicone Valley, but I see a growing sign of exodus from SV. Skyrocketing housing costs and overpopulation plus lopsided racial distribution and wealth inequality in Silicone Valley may slowly fan the momentum.

Verizon Wireless acquires Yahoo's portal business

VZ finally acquired Yahoo for  less than $5 billion, and are actively launching into Internet advertising market, where Google and Facebook have a combined market share of 90%.

The two Internet moguls are moving rapidly into mobile Internet  in a shift from a desktop-bound Internet. Tons of questions are looming large ahead of VZ, including one in particular: How soon can VZ catch up with Facebook and Google in mobile web ads?

VZ has already got AOL and will most likely seek for synergistic momentum from a mix of AOL and Yahoo. Some experts wonder if the synergistic merge would meet the goal, and how soon?

On the other side of the coin, however, VZ has got the largest smartphone subscribers in the US market, which can be a strategic advantage over its two rivals. However, VZ still lacks in social media fans, compared with Google and Facebook. Cohorts abound for Google and Facebook, but not VZ. It remains to be seen, and I will be back to add more to this article sooner or later, as the emerging technology in connected cars will soon get to an Y-fork dilemma: Connected cars based on smartphone-based Telematics 2.0 or in-dash screen solutions resembling treelike branching of  platforms, including Tizen.

Why is automotive holism critical for future cars?

As an inventor in the emerging automotive telematics industry, I have coined a term of  "automotive holism".  The automotive holism  in short describes why each car on the roads should be dealt with in terms of design and functionality as an essential constituent of road traffic, as opposed to a discrete or stand-alone entity of a car being emphasized. This makes much more sense, especially when connected cars are becoming the name of the game.

Lately, Telematics 2.0 is being touted, based on smartphones' increasing role in connected cars, but the smartphone-based telematics won't last very long, perhaps five years from now or until 2020, according to empirical data, but will gradually evolve into OEM versions of in-dash navigation. 

For a while, iOS and Android will prevail in connected cars. However, continuing upgrades of smartphone paltforms and growing fragmentations, particularly of Android, will push automotive OEMs to rethink outside the smartphone. Soaring costs involving the said  upgrades and fragmentations won't be disregarded  as miniscule expense items by automakers, but will indispensably become a new source of aftermarket revenue streams. Automakers won't sit back to be complacent as money collectors working for  iOS and Android developers.

To sum up, there are form factors and parameters that have just started to rule the burgeoning ecosystem of connected cars. The following  items are currently  topping the agenda for connected cars:

• ADAS to cope with motorists' "prisoners' dilemma" and to improve Human-Machine Interface for road safety (ADAS: Advanced  Driver Assistance Systems)
• Distracted driving resulting from sun glares, head lamp glares, HID lamps and roadside LED billboards
• Gas guzzlers v. hybrid & EVs
• Mobile payment as a long-range one to shift away from the obsolescent proximity-range mobile payment system like NFC
• Autonomous cars and their full deployment stage; V2V(Vehicle to Vehicle) communications, and IoT-based V2I(Vehicle to Infrastructure) 
• The advent of mirrorless driving in lieu of divergent self-driving car solutions
• Automakers v.  platform developers for both smartphones and in-dash navigation
• Google's Waze (Just In Time & P2P apps) v. emerging AR-based Remote-Viewing of traffic scenes in real-time & VR and/or AR format(AR: Augmented Reality, VR: Virtual Reality)
• Maps will be superimposed, when and if necessary, on traffic scenes (AR)
• Use-based car insurance may cause privacy issues in view of insurance carriers' growing emphasis on insurance telematics
• Multi-channel dash cam or video-enabled vehicle blackbox running 24/7
• ITS focused on mass surveillance of not just roadways, but also of transport hubs and mass gatherings
• Continued growth in ad hoc facilities to monitor road traffic scenes
• Mass transit system to deal with  multimodal trasnsport means, including rapid transit,  for mass evacuation and mass surveillance.

Simply put, cars should be designed so as to function as a comnponent of  road traffic from now onwards to alleviate human-made afflictions.

Self-driving cars vs. Flying cars

Self-driving cars are a hot menu item for big corporations like Google, Tesla, Apple,  and even unicorns like Uber. And even big auto makers are jumping on the bandwagon. You know what? Alibaba is joining the club of self-driving cars. Simply put, self-driving cars are operated by computers, whereas cars are made to be driven by a human being

So what are we going to get from self-driving cars in the end? You can commute without bothering to drive because your car will be driven by a computer and you will sit in a back seat or a passenger seat and enjoy your coffee, reading newspapers, playing your favorite game, exchanging text messages with your friends and trying to catch up with your postponed chores. You may even catch up with the sleep you missed. Car pool bans might be a good idea for commuters headed for the same destination.

And while you are in your self-driving car, you will enjoy a perfect freedom from driving and be able to focus on something else. Now you will say  a utopia of self-driving cars is on the way. Is that right?

Some skeptics tend to remind other people that all that glitter is not gold. The world of IoT sets in, the driverless cars and even human-driven cars may be subject to hacking. Another question is whether the self-driving can ultimately address the top issue of road transportation: traffic congestion.

There was one incident, in which Google's self-driving car was pulled over by a cop because it was running slow at the speed of 24 mph or so, while other cars were going at 40 mph.

Flying cars may be  a lot better solution to traffic congestion than self-driving cars. However, flying cars were allegedly under development 60 years ago from now, but still far away from hitting a critical mass. In that sense, self-driving cars may have a better chance of getting deployed on the roads.

It is still hard to tell whether self-driving cars will remain to be a hot topic in another  five years from now. Likewise, it is unpredictable to see whether flying cars will be commercially available in another five years from now.

Cheaper oil is a bonanza or a disaster?

Years ago consumers including me were worried about an oil spike, but now today consumers are concerned about the the opposite: a nosedive of oil prices and possibly continued long-term glut of oil worldwide. People may wonder if the glut of crude oil might lead up to a financial crisis or another decade of a bigger economic recession on the dark side, but an accelerated exit out of the Great Recession.

The cheaper oil trend will have a greater impact than the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s, the aftermath of 9/11 tragedy, or the subprime  meltdown  and the Great Recession started in 2008?
My personal opinion is that the cheaper oil might bring a much bigger impact on the global economy than the above-mentioned disastrous events combined together.

USA Today were reporting in an article that there are four losers and four winners as a result of this glut of crude oil and continued low prices set around $56 per barrel. Only four losers and winners, respectively? Maybe or maybe more on both sides.

Iran, Russia, Nigeria and Venezuela are the four losers, according to USA Today, while Japan, USA, China and Saudi Arabia turned out to be winners.

In 1973, there was the so-called oil shock, also dubbed oil crunch, or oil crisis, which was initiated by the then OPEC countries that showed they could begin to wield oil power the world over. Now is the beginning of the demise of the OPEC?

Cheaper oil could mean a lot actually. Industrially, politically and socioeconomically.  Electric car manufacturers like Tesla Motors are the first to be hit by the cheaper oil. Oil explorers and wildcatters might be hit as well. Oil exploration equipment and facilities might face a sluggish phase of manufacturing.

Shale oil explorers in USA might experience a growing financial burden, while consumers may find more room for their daily spending, perhaps more on grocery and foods.

On the other side of the coin, environmentalists may lose momentum in their endeavors to curb global carbon footprints. It is too premature to predict anything about the cheaper oil, but one thing for sure I can predict is the global economy and technological agendas might have to face an abrupt turn from the current path.

Smart watches and wearables can be the next big thing?

Being an inventor in telematics, I wonder from time to time if what technologistas  believe could be the NEXT BIG thing comes true all the time. Maybe or maybe not.

I can say personal computing has evolved from desktop, laptop, palmtop to dashtop in terms of form factors.  Palmtop in the form of cell phones and smartphones,  and dashtop in the form of navigation, or in-vehicle infotainment equipment.

Wearables have been a buzzword in personal computing  for a couple of years. And now some people do not hesitate to say smart watches are the next big thing.

Wearable devices may be worn  in or around different parts of a human body, like ears, eyes, fingertips, wrists and so on. Not just wearable but implanted or embedded is what has been there for some time. The thing is whether  commercialization has been made enough to reach consumers in general. Have wearables  hit the critical mass already or been losing steam destined to be a thing of here today gone tomorrow?