The famous “Jet d’eau” of Geneva

I’m writing from Geneva, Switzerland where I’m attending the Fully Networked Car Workshop and Exhibition. The workshop is organized by the ITU and its aim is to bring together telecommunications and automotive companies in a discussion about creating the networked car of tomorrow. The workshop is collocated with the 2007 Geneva Auto Show. Turnout is excellent – there are around 350 registered participants.

When people talk about a “networked car” they mean both networking devices within a car and networking the car to other cars or to an external infrastructure. This is of course what the Project54 effort addresses and why I was interested in giving a presentation at the workshop.

Very appropriately, I experienced the state-of-the-art in car-to-car communication immediately on arriving in Geneva. My wife and I took a taxi from the airport. As the taxi was flying through the city (we were glad we had seatbelts) another car cut us off. Our taxi driver swerved and stepped on the brake avoiding a collision. This is when the car-to-car communication commenced. Our cabbie rolled down his window and started yelling at the driver of the other car (he also made some hand gestures). The other driver yelled back and this went on for about 30 seconds at which point the communication link was broken and we sped off.

One interesting prediction I heard at the workshop is that cars will become “docking ports.” Gone will be the CD players, radios, etc. Instead cars will provide infrastructure for aftermarket devices (makes you think of Project54). An example of a device that was once predicted to be in many cars that’s now nowhere to be found: the car phone.

Andrew Kun

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