Asha has been the trend over the past few years, the Consumer Electronics Show this time was a lot about automobiles, as it was about technology and gadgets. When you look at it from the outside, the automobile these days is the ultimate consumer electronics gadget—as much computer as machine. As expected, a lot of what was on the show was about autonomous vehicles. For me, the show stealer, despite all the concept cars being exhibited, was the BMW cars powered by Intel’s Mobileye technology. What was more stunning about them than the Toyota and Nissan concept cars, you might ask? Well, those are concepts, and this is something you can find on the road, right now. That is a big difference, if you ask me. I have seen and experienced quite a few autonomous vehicles over the past few years. The technology from Mobileye, the Israeli start-up Intel picked up for over $15 billion last year, seems to be the closest to something we can have on the roads. It is also the only one that lets a car retain its looks and does not overwhelm it with sensors and camera appendages. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced that 2 million vehicles from BMW, Nissan and Volkswagen will soon use Mobileye Road Experience Management technology to crowdsource data to build real-time, low-cost and high-definition maps with centimetre-level precision through this year. Also, Krzanich announced an automated driving platform combining automotive-grade Intel Atom processors with Mobileye EyeQ5 chips for Level 3 to Level 5 autonomous driving—a Level 5 vehicle can drive itself without human interaction on any road.

At the show, everyone seemed to have a take on autonomous cars and how they should drive on their own or help make the drive better and safer whenever there is a driver at the wheel. While seeing a Ford or a Kia showcase autonomous cars is not surprising, it was interesting to see a lot of tech companies—from Sony to Samsung and Panasonic—dedicate a significant portion of their booths for something to do with this impending future of cars. Meanwhile, an Indian firm appears to be thinking of what happens when those inside the car no longer have to drive it. For the Indian ride-share company Ola, an average trip is already 55-minute long, and that was one of the primary drivers behind creating Ola Play. “With a two-way commute to and from work, you are spending close to two hours inside an Ola cab every day. That is more time than we spend in front of the TV,” Ankit Jain, vice-president and head of Ola Play, explains.

While so far the in-car experience has revolved around the driver and has been anything but customisable, the advent of autonomous cars means you need to look at ways to keep the drivers as well as others in the vehicle engaged. Ola Play is the first step towards creating a monolithic ecosystem of content with module elements that will present advertising opportunities and improve driver experience. Ola’s partnership with Microsoft, for instance, will help passengers improve their productivity by accessing the MS Office suite on car screens. With a passenger pretty much being captive inside the car for a few hours every day, Ola hopes to offer her content that is both relevant and contextual. “We know that the mood she goes to office in will be different to when she is heading out for a night out with friends later in the evening. The content does not have to be the same for both the occasions,” Jain says.

This also means the same content can be used to serve advertisements like never before—a mix of online and offline behaviour. “We could tease a billboard on the way or keep showing content from it even after the billboard has been left behind. If a passenger is going to a specific location, we can give her offers that incentivise a visit to a partner,” he says. “There are two filters here: target filtering for the advertiser and relevance filter for the customer,” he says. Although Ola has developed the platform for its own fleet of 8,00,000 cars, given the opportunities this presents in the future, others are also interested. Jain accepts that the platform concept could be a great product in itself for other ride-sharing firms, for instance. “There is a lot of interest. But with just 50,000 cars in our fleet covered at the moment, there is so much scope to grow within Ola itself. Our effort this year will be to complete that.”

Nandagopal Rajan
nandagopal.rajan@indianexpress.com