RETHINKing - A European connected car, not too far from "HERE"

Friday, August 14, 2015

Nokia recently announced selling its HERE mapping service to a consortium of leading European car companies consisting of Audi, Daimler (Mercedes) and BMW. HERE aims to combine mapping technology with a cloud backbone to provide real-time, predictive and personalized location-based services. Let’s consider the potential implications of this sale and a subsequent large-scale European deployment for the RETHINK big Hardware and Networking Big Data roadmap.

The connected and self-driving cars already close on the horizon will drastically increase the amount of data generated for the HERE cloud service – data which will need to be processed in real-time. We suspect that this vast amount of data will need to be processed in-situ or near where it is generated in order to minimize network round trip time (RTT). In other words, the cloud is simply too far away for the massive real-time data that will be generated by cars. We thus foresee a potential business opportunity for specialized edge and fog computing hardware platforms.

We also foresee that it will be lucrative for European car companies to move into the mobile information service provider business, but that is a topic for another time.   

Osman Unsal, Adrián Cristal, Gina Alioto

 

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