Several decades after the advent of CAD, electronic ignition and anti-lock brakes, digital technology continues to make new inroads into the auto industry. A few of the more interesting examples:

Advertising?  There’s an app for that. Volkswagen is planning to promote their new GTI (the performance version of the Golf) exclusively via a licensed and rebranded mobile game app released for the iPhone and iTouch.  Recognizing a substantial overlap between the iPhone and GTI demographics, VW is apparently counting on the free app alone to get the job done, and at a much lower cost than traditional commercials and print ads.  The game uses the iPhone/iTouch motion-sensing, includes a virtual VW showroom (at left), and in a clever promotional move, VW plans to give away free cars to the six highest-scoring players.  If effective, look for more convergence between apps and advertising going forward…


The car network Another innovation from Germany: the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, in collaboration with manufacturers such as BMW, Audi, and Daimler, is working on the specification of a network standard to unify the various (until-now) standalone digital systems found in the modern automobile. Dubbed “Security in Embedded IP-based Systems“, the research project is aimed at reducing complexity and ensuring security, and will be based on Ethernet networking technology and the same Internet Protocol upon which the internet is based. We’re thinking such a system could easily find its way into the aviation industry as well. Yet more uses for ethernet – after over 30 years, maybe the most successful, extensible and long-lived networking technology ever invented.

At this week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco, Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker had a lot to say about the future of mobile computing, most of it strongly positive.


A few points from her presentation:

• Apple makes a great device, which has helped drive explosive growth in mobile computing
• The stock market is a leading indicator of economic recovery
• Mobile computing means carriers face “surging demand but uncertain economics”

Granted, these proclamations are hardly revelatory – in fact, they’re nothing you haven’t heard a few dozen times before. But while it’s hard to know what contribution (if any) yet another restating of such already thoroughly accepted truisms will make to the current level of reverberation going on within the echo chamber of technology and economics analysis, there was (as usual) a great deal of other useful information packed into her presentation.

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No! Not Wayne’s World. Nor The World According to Garp. Instead, your and my world. And this time according to either Thomas L. Friedman, Professor Eli Noam, or Facebook - depending on how you choose to see it.

If you ask long-time New York Times op-ed writer Thomas Friedman, the world is flat, implying that digital communications increasingly ensures everyone everywhere has access to the same growing pool of World Wide Web-provided information. This levels the playing field for all of us, he says, to impact the plethora of socio- and economic-political issues — no matter where and who we are on this globe.

This sounds promising, I thought, if it wasn’t for an off-the-cuff conversation I had with Columbia Business School Professor Eli Noam, about a year past Friedman’s book published.

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Last week, I watched a great technology-related segment on The Daily Show.  The subject was flash trading - the algorithm-based automated trading of securities executed by high-performance computers on high-performance networks at certain exchanges – done at an extremely fast pace.

It’s not something those involved want to make too much noise about, but countless such trades are being fired off by machines continually throughout the trading day – and it’s on the rise.  Often, these are trades you or I might be interested in making – but flash trades execute just a few crucial milliseconds before ours would, often adversely affecting the prices we get in (or out) at.  Reported by a cow suit-wearing Samantha Bee (‘cash cow’, get it?), last week’s segment on flash trading was The Daily Show at it’s finest: intelligent coverage of an otherwise under-reported issue, all wrapped in a layer of funny.

It got me thinking about technology …and gaming the system.

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ICANN might be the most important non-profit organization you’ve never heard of.  Based in nondescript office building just off Lincoln Boulevard in the Marina del Rey section of Los Angeles, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is charged with (among other things) mapping human-readable domain names to internet IP addresses   Although technically a sovereign organization, historically ICANN has been under the control of the Dept. of Commerce of the United States, the country that invented the plumbing for – and tacitly claims ownership of – the internet.

Until now.

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