How do you fundraise (or hire, or talk about your idea to the press, or…) for your company? If you frame your work with this sentence in mind, I have found it cuts to the oaken core of your value:
“This unusual group of resourceful people is unusually good at something valuable”
Convince your audience of that one sentence.

We’ve saddled production vehicles with high-quality sensors in the interest of safety – or what is currently referred to as ADAS or advanced driver assistance systems. But while most of these sensors are on 100% of the time the vehicle is running, they’re primarily doing the job of a quiet watchdog. They’re active and sensing, but accidents are infrequent and things like advanced cruise control aren’t running but a portion of a duty cycle.
Instead, we need to consider sensors in our vehicles as our subjugates – that we can control and can use for safety, data collection and profit. During a 30-minute commute, a driver should be able to produce meaningful data from her vehicle’s sensor suite such as:
The modern vehicle is a sensor workhorse, but has a very narrow idea of work. We need to broaden it as a networked sensor workhorse, with the owner / operator benefitting by letting her vehicle’s sensors add to a corpus of sensor data. All of the things listed above are services and markets that measure in the billions.
I call this act of selling back vehicle sensor data ‘machine earning’ and I believe that over the coming decade we will see a number of markets emerge to serve this need, some coming from within the vehicle and some perhaps operating on top. My friend Colin O'Donnell at Intersection calls this 'captcha for cars.’
e.g.
As vehicles get more sensors, the driver gets more 'workers.’ Now we need to unleash the power of these sensors for a greater, more valuable good. Machine earning will be a new way to 'work’ and earn for miles traveled.
Photo by Jon Ottosson for Unsplash.

I’m not even sure the Big 3 is even the right name anymore – they’re not as big as they once were, and they aren’t even three (Fiat Chrysler is Italian-owned and headquartered in London). In thinking about the new wave of mobility, these are the new colloquials as I see them:
**Big 3**
GM
Ford
Chrysler
**Future 4**
Apple
Google
Tesla
Uber
**Dragon 5**
Baidu
Alibaba
Tencent
LeTV
Didi Kuaidi

I was recently inside of a vehicle buck (a stationary, artificial vehicle) that changed the way I think about cars. This was a completely brandless experience, with nothing exotic about the leather surfaces or even the displays. But, the one thing this vehicle did unlike any other was offer blistering fast network access – a ‘5G proxy’ – that simulated what it would be like to inhabit a vehicle in an era of 50x network speeds. In a real-world example, 5G means downloading a 2-hour movie in 8 seconds, compared to the 6 minutes that would take today on a good 4G connection.
Years back my friend Om Malik was fond of saying, 'broadband changes everything.’ This isn’t purely about the speed of the experience, but moves the user into a situation where they are redefining worthiness of the object. In some ways, redefining their life.
The remarkable thing about this artificial vehicle was that it was built for an internal audience. It was designed so that the company’s own product designers and executives could 'feel’ what 5G meant and how they might plan for a different world. The prototype was a way for them to create an entirely new innovation framework.
This is a stone-cold example of my friend Diego’s #1 innovation principle: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world. These executives could have simply talked about 5G on powerpoints and waved their arms around about how this could impact them, but building a live experience of it made it completely different. My contact said that over 100 executives and designers had experienced the vehicle as I had and each one walked away fundamentally changed about what it means for the vehicle.
Leaving that day, I wondered: in the next wave of vehicle innovation, will one manufacturer use networking speed as a defining characteristic? Imagine an entire brand built around the notion of fast networking.
(photo by Vladimir Kudinov)

Another year, another trip twice-around-the-clock on the couch kit. This is my home base for all the various streaming and twitter lists I follow to keep up with the race.
(Note: this page updates frequently as links head back to the garage for repair. If you have a new link or comment, leave it in comments.)
Start time:
US TV Coverage:
Coverage on Fox Sports is disjointed as always. This is the full schedule as best we know it (thanks to Chris Press for these times):
(all times Eastern)
Audio Streaming:
Video Streaming:
Onboard / team cameras:
Timing / Scoring:
Entry List:
Twitter resources
Other Useful Info:
2014 Info:

We need more destination information to make transportation more efficient.
People tend to make car trips to the same locations (work, home, market, school, church, etc) – the number is generally believed to be 6 locations, although I don’t know of specific research that supports the claim. Because of our regularity behind the wheel, navigation systems aren’t used on most ‘regular’ trips. We just don’t need them – and that is going to be a limiting factor in opening up the full capability of the transportation market.
But, consider for a moment you know each driver’s destination and you can accomplish some powerful things. For example:
The last example above is the most impactful and the one most hindered by our lack of navigation data. Those cars 'driving blind’ without making their destination data available are throwing away money, or at least the potential of recouping costs. In the US alone, passenger cars travel nearly 3 trillion miles per year. Should those drivers elect to carry a passenger at even a very modest rate of $.25/mile (an equivalent to transit), that represents a $750B market that is largely unrealized due to lack of destination data.
There are a few ways we can get more destination data.
In a real world example, some congested cities have accidentally produced more destination data, even on common trips. Los Angeles has highly variable traffic and multiple routes are possible, so drivers can have vastly different trips if they can choose the route with the least traffic. This has made Waze an almost critical driving application there, and in turn has exposed a lot of destination data.
In another example, we know a lot about a user’s destination given their calendar. Integrating the calendar locations gives us a rough proxy for where that person is headed. Its limitation, of course, is that users tend not to calendar regular trips (commuting, going to a favorite restaurant after work).
For a more futuristic example, we can use historical patterns of the user. If I turn out of my driveway and make a right and then a left, I’m probably going to my grocery store. Or if it’s 7AM on a Monday and I’m 14% of the route to my office, the vehicle can make an assumption I’m headed there. Ford just published a patent about that very idea. Lyft’s desire to expose this market – via its Driver Destination rollout at the end of last year – falls directly in line with Ford’s line of thinking.
There’s a massive opportunity in knowing Point B information. But until we do, we’re blind to the potential (and $750 billion dollars).
(photo by Israel Sundseth)