This weekend’s hype in the Twitterverse is hands down Mastodon — the free (as in free beer), free (as in free speech), open, federated social network slash microblogging service. Technically speaking it’s a GNU Social implementation, but what it really is in layman’s terms, is a Twitter clone. The service(s) currently count around 128k users, adding a couple of hundred every hour. I can’t explain very clearly why, but this attempt looks very exciting to me. I’m trying to collect nonetheless. Continue reading Let’s talk about the Mastodon in the room
Category: Generic
Riding the cat: connected car, take two
I finally had some time to gather some deeper thoughts (by Jack Ha… no) on the connected car industry, my experiences with it before and at MWC.
What is also evident is that while the primary focus is on the multimedia in your car, everything is connected now: your multimedia experience is tightly integrated with the core telematics, safety and security systems of the vehicle. This has fun applications, like turning your car into Mario Kart controller.
Unfortunately it also has less fun side effects, like when hackers turn your car into their Mario Kart controller; or kill it remotely, while you’re driving on the highway. Or simply switch off your alarm from their phone, using a hacked remote control app.
You can read the full article in the MOBGEN library. Enjoy!
In other news, we did a demo of the solution at KPN Digital Dutch 2017 earlier this week. Jaguar Nederland was kind enough to lend us a Jaguar XF-S for the event, and I had the chance to drive it from Beesd to Katwijk and back; an absolute delight! Also had time of course to snap some photos, for your viewing pleasure.
Hello world: hello MWC
I’m sipping my coffee in my room at Hilton Gatwick (the cognitive dissonance of hotels: it’s a Hilton, but at Gatwick), after a crazy 3 days at MWC (and another one in London, not related to this story.)
I attended the MWC as an exhibitor: we demoed the first-ever in car payments solution with Shell and Jaguar Land Rover at the Accenture stand, and we also won a GloMo award, the combination of the two resulting in a nice alternate hood ornament for our demo Rangie:
