SAP HANA Academy supports the SAP TechEd Meetup Palo Alto 2013 with the Ford, SAP and the Connected Car “Hack Day”

Connected Car:  A journey of collaboration

Since the early 1900’s the automobile has been part of our everyday life.  We have given them nicknames, decorated them on special occasions and sometimes used them for temporary shelter.  So is it really far-fetched to think of your car as a personal assistant as well?  SAP and Ford don’t think so and we are launching the “Make my Day Better” one day “Hack” Challenge.

At the SAP TechEd Meetup Hack Day in Palo Alto, Oct 21-22, developers from SAP Labs, SAP HANA Academy, Ford Innovation Center and around the Silicon Valley, will come together to explore new and interesting ways to connect you, your car and the community around you to make your day better.

Please Note:  Registration for this event is full, but the response has been so great we are planning to do a similar event in Walldorf right before TechEd in November.  Stay tuned for more info on that event.

Here’s what’s happening:

1. Teams will be formed to work on selected use cases.
2. Using OpenXC APIs from Ford, developers have the ability to tap into vehicle information in real time to discover key telematics such as vehicle location, direction, speed, fuel consumption and other driving status indicators.  Using OData services, this data will be posted to SAP HANA for the teams to utilize.
3. SAP and Ford have captured some of this historical telematic data from their vehicles and made it available in SAP HANA in the cloud.  This data can be analyzed to determine triggering events for real time actions
4. The teams will be given the ability to set a threshold limit for a given metric and that threshold will be used to create a trigger for subsequent events to happen in SAP HANA.  Perhaps if the trigger is fuel level low, they might query for nearby service stations.
5. Using the Connected Car APIs from SAP, developers can utilize mapping, parking, food and many other servicing options available in a given location, as well as facilitate mobile payment and other transactional events and offers
6. Using other public APIs or connectors, developers will be able to combine contextual information or link to business services to enrich the experience
7. To achieve the end goal of creating a mashup or application connecting the car, the driver and the experience in a new way

Here are some of the ideas we came up with – how about you?

Connected Assistant:  what if your car could work in concert with your cell phone, your calendar and your contacts list to analyze your current driving progress, determine that you may be running late for a meeting and then send a text message to your client that you are running about 15 minutes late?

Connected Maintenance: what if your car could notify you when it requires servicing (low fuel status, low tire pressure, low engine oil level, etc.) and then query your calendar, your location, and local service stations in the area to set up an appointment for servicing?  Why not offer a discount coupon on your mobile device to entice you go to a particular business?

Connected Incident Reporting: how about using the telematics from your car to augment photos or video from your cell phone along with mapping, weather, traffic or road data to snapshot conditions in order to create an incident report following a traffic accident? Would that help to process your claims faster, more precisely and maybe help lower rates?

Connected Concierge:  what if you were driving a rental car to a tourist destination or sporting event and could use a mobile app to locate and reserve an available and affordable parking space?  Then, we you are ready to leave, your mobile app would be able to use spatial data to help you remember where you parked, use transactional data to help you pay for your parking, traffic & map data to detail the best route at this time of day, and business data to direct you to the closest takeout food place to pick up you pre-ordered meal on the way back to the hotel.  With tired and cranky kids, that sounds pretty helpful to me.

As you can see in the above sample scenarios, we see the Connect Car initiative as more than just making your ride into a mobile device. We see cloud, mobility, real time data analysis, business networks and you as powerful partners for commercial and personal gains. For this meetup, we want to bring together bright minds working on a focused topic and see where it takes us.  So go ahead, Make My Day.

Sound like fun?  Consider joining us at future events like this….