Ideas to introduce and improve self-driving technology and IoT.

Here are some ideas. You hear Tesla, Google, Apple, Samsung, Wink, Intel, Qualcomm, Garmin and others?

Best to perfect the technology on sparsely populated low traffic areas first and then people movers or dedicated roads instead of trains or buses.

Perfect example comes to my mind.

A retirement community with a golf course and other activities.
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Self-driving wheel chairs, golf carts and minivans with sliding doors.

Just imagine the entire golf course lawn monitored by cameras to see where watering or lawn maintenance is required and sending messages to crew using IoT. The golf ranger cart with cargo capacity to send sod or supplies to the crew and even transport the crew. Tiny solar cells and wireless technology embedded in the golf balls to help the players locate the balls or let them know that ball cannot be recovered where it is. Later the crew will know how to recover and recycle the balls and sell it back to the owner but share the profit. Players have an app in the phone to know where the balls is and automatically score. self-driving golf cars to keep track of multiple players sharing the cart and moving the cart as required on the designated areas.

Now extend the self-driving carts in the retirement community. App on the phone or TV to request a cart as in uber to go the the club house, the gold course or to visit some one in the same community or to the entrance of the community and then connect to a bus or uber or other transportation service. This may even be a minivan for larger number of people.

People mover without rail tracks
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Huge corporate campuses with designated pathways for self-driving carts to move not just people but supplies between buildings. Expensive lab equipment could be shared between several buildings.

Airports do not have to invest in dedicated self-driving trains to move people between terminals, rental cars and ground transportation. They can be electric minivans or golf-carts on dedicated pathways.

Toll roads and car pools dedicated to self-driving cars can accommodate bumper to bumper vehicles moving like a train. No slow pokes holding up traffic and speeders tail gating. Nav software updated to encourage people to use combination of uber like which connect to self-driving cars can even replace the sparsely used buses and they have the priority in the sense that others have to yield when they see flashing green leaf symbols on such cars.

I see a win-win here.

Tax payers will pay less for rail, road and bus infrastructure.

Auto makers can sell cars to people who cannot drive.

People can use their time more effectively while taking less time to go from A to B and spend less because there is no need to own a car or even if they have a car, they carry a device which records the actual use and insurance may be less or more.

Yeah. There are many challenges other than technology. Vested interests to keep the status quo and monopolize, legal issues, safety concerns to name a few.

Open letter to Intel.

I worked only for 2years at Intel back in 84 as a new college grad. Later I was an investor and did well too but no longer an investor.

Here is my point of view. Back when iPhone came and later Android came, the writing was on the wall that the conventional PC model is changing. Intel did not embrace the change and rather than capitalize on the strong ARM, Intel did the opposite and got out of ARM completely. The foray into foundry services to offset the cost was perhaps too late. The failure of WiMax and the delay in entering the networking market did not help. The decline in PC graphics and the move to game consoles and tablets for gaming did not help either.

Once the management changed, the emphasis on cloud services and IoT was a plus. Hope this is just the start.

Time has come for lot more changes than a big layoff to take the company into the next stage.

Hardware is commodity. Hardware has less value without software. I believe that consumers will only have one PC or Mac and replace it only if it breaks. Microsoft has acknowledged the change and made office available on multiple devices and the cloud.

What if Intel re-embraced ARM. If not hardware, emulation assisted by hardware acceleration? That should enable Android and IOS apps to run on x86. Eventually acquiring a company like ARM itself perhaps?

Partner with Samsung, Tesla, Apple and Google to enter IoT end user market, self-driving cars, next generation cellular networking etc..

In other words, major changes...

Time for Cable companies and content providers in the US to evolve.

You keep reading that Comcast with 27.7Million subscribers with average revenue of $100 per customer does not want to make available their content including USA Network, Bravo, E!, CNBC, MSNBC, Syfy for streaming. They will allow only their subscribers to stream.

Just as it required old management to leave before companies like Microsoft embraced cloud services as opposed to Windows and Office, it is time for the management to change and consolidation to happen.

For $100, people get many channels they never ever watch. So, out of 200 channels, people actually want to watch only 40 channels but they are willing to pay $50, the revenue per channel is $1.25 instead of $0.50. Let the channels which people do not watch disappear. Let the shopping channels pay more money to service providers. Also, by offering TV only over Internet, the cable companies could cut their costs. No need to transmit cable and Internet signals. No need for extra hardware. Also, by offering channels over internet, content providers including Comcast can significantly expand the number of subscribers to 27.7M in the US to the entire world. Just as DirectTV got absorbed by ATT, Dish Network can also be absorbed by another service provider like a Verizon. There can be roaming arrangements for Internet between all internet service providers as in cellular data. Satellite may be required only where there is no Internet or Satellite can be used for Internet TV because downstream bandwidth on Satellite is much better than upstream.

Internet service providers will win if there is no such thing as unlimited data. It can be pay per use. Let the free market decide how much bandwidth is needed by consumers. High efficiency codecs allow very decent 720p signal to be sent with just 1Mbps downstream. Most people cannot tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on their TV. On Mobile devices with screens 10" or less need no more than 480p. The costs incurred by internet service providers will come down as usage comes down.

Content providers will win because the potential subscribers are huge. At some point the broadcast TV network is not required. Just stream. Of  course the FCC must allow that too. DVR is only in the cloud. It is just a stream. Anyway, their content is saved somewhere.

Consumers will win because they will pay perhaps $50 a month for content instead of $100. They may pay $60 for faster cable if they want higher definition TV than 720p and their watching patterns but they may pay $40 less than currently.

I do not see any losers in this. It can happen.