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How many batteries do you need to visit your mother?

Detroit Electric car charging (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I do not like batteries and I do not much like cars. So when my colleagues in the Atos Scientific Community talk about these two things in 1 whitepaper you can understand it is something I cannot ignore.

Batteries are empty when you need them most (look at any horror movie and you know what I mean). Cars are expensive and they pollute our planet.

There is a multitude of battery formats and you have to go to the store to buy them – or you need to charge them and that takes a lot of time (iPhone anybody?).

So, electric cars, cars fuelled by batteries, is something that I find an unlikely combination.

Charging them is time consuming and a charger is not available everywhere. The use of changeable batteries might seems like a good idea, but is it really convenient and what about formats and availability?

Exactly this dilemma of ‘Electromobility’ is described in a whitepaper of the Atos Scientific Community:

“The success of Electromobility depends on addressing two major challenges: User acceptance and the availability of supporting infrastructure and services.”

After looking into the subject it became clear that next to user acceptance and the support infrastructure, we can also see this as a huge area of new revenue possibilities and innovation.

Leasing and pay-for-use in mobility are much better business cases for both the vendor and the consumer. It also ‘fuels’ (sorry, I could not resist making that joke…), the innovation process because you take out the big capex investment for the end user.

“New business models like battery leasing, simple easy to use charging infrastructure and the involvement of all stakeholders are the key to a positive business case.”

Instead of buying a new car every 5 or 6 years, the consumer (and companies) can choose to either own a car or lease one according to his needs of today.

With the right infrastructure he can choose to just change battery or even change the whole car. And through some clever analysis the supplier can even predict the end user behavior.

This prediction leads to a more tailored offering and in itself will drive further innovation. Such analysis, combined with extending the eco system for example into insurance companies, food and beverage providers, holiday brokers and other leisure providers can create whole new commercial eco systems.

“Electromobility needs multi-sided flexible business platforms with open interfaces to create new value.”

This is of course all very much in the future and will mean we need to change our habits, both on the provider and the consumer side of driving a car.

But change is inevitable and with the right standardization to support ease of use, and a well-integrated system for payments and loyalty schemes, I might be persuaded to buy into such a solution for visiting my mother.

For now we just need to start to understand what is at stake, what is possible and which actions we need to take. For this the upcoming whitepaper is an excellent first step. 

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[This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2012/11/13/watch-this-space-how-many-batteries-do-you-need-to-visit-your-mother/]

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del.icio.us Tags: Atossc,Scientific Community,whitepaper,electromobility,emobility,cars,battery

 

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• There is no better battery (manifestdensity.net)
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• IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Collaborating With SAE International and German Institute for Standardization (DIN) on Electromobility (sys-con.com)
• Electric cars stall in USA, Australia (go.theregister.com)

Do you understand the world?

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[This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2011/12/21/do-you-understand-the-world/]

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Real estate brokers already know this for years; the most important aspect of their profession is location, location and location.

Given the recent boom in providing maps to mobile phones, this aspect of our lives is not just important for real estate brokers anymore. Anybody with a decent smart phone has access to a variety of mapping material, aiding in navigation and, through the addition of a GPS-receiver, location based services.

The impact of this capability to use digital maps is described in a whitepaper by the Atos Scientific Community, which states:

Magellan Blazer12 GPS Receiver. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“For centuries, humankind has devoted efforts to cartography (map making) as a means to represent the Earth in order to achieve a better understanding of the world and to solve practical problems (navigation, exploration, planning). The advent of electronic computers and peripheral devices caused another revolution in cartography during the 20th century. However, until the late 1990’s geo-information did not take a pervasive step into other fields. In the 2000’s, geo-information has become popular and is widely used by billions of people around the world for everyday purposes: we look for directions, plan our holidays or check the evolution of news events with the support of geo-information."

And while we are all just getting accustomed to this digitally enhanced 2D world, a new way of looking at this information is emerging: 3D location based services.

Using complex mathematics and new type of sensors, we will be able to enrich our flat maps with depth, height and rotation. This opportunity opens a new dimension (pun intended) in the way we can use the digital maps for more purposes than just finding our way home.

Applications in building-management, tsunami warning systems, climate and weather control as well as looking at relations between human wellbeing and location based data (such as pollution), are now in use.

The new elements coming because of 3D are emerging, so we can track people in buildings, assets in datacenters and generally combine information to create meaningful relationships in data visualization.

Tracing and combining data in 3 dimensions is not only more accurate, it also give more insight in relationships between the subjects. Only now that we are getting more insight in the associated math and have the (real-time)processing capability to calculate complex equations, we are getting insight in the correlations and how they help us interpret the real word around us.

The paper describes multiple examples and explains how the extra info can be expected to enrich our way of using the extra information for location based data.

The key is to connect the available 3D information to this extra information. This combination not only will enrich our lives, but also opens a new business opportunity for information brokers to provide and combine data that without this technology would possibly be meaningless by itself. In order for this additional data to be completely integrated in our daily lives we certainly need more study and technical breakthroughs. Most of this is done in the background, but some research and results are needed in understanding the way that people interpret 3D information.

Google Earth and other similar technology is showing me nice pictures, but does it provide extra value in 3D (on a flat screen…)?

In the end the 3D element will, certainly, greatly influence the way we interact with our world and our understanding how things relate to each other. Understanding relationships, in my opinion, always makes us a better human.

That combined with the new business opportunities, drives both personal and economic growth, so I consider this a good thing.

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The Atos whitepaper can be downloaded here.

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Technorati Tags: location based services,lbs,mapping,3D,google earth,Atos,whitepaper

Home at last

Image via Wikipedia

Arrived at home yesterday afternoon 5:30pm CET after 20 hours in a touring car from Barcelona to Amsterdam. Many thanks to my brother and his wife and travel agency "Valkering Incoming" for helping me get from Barcelona to Amsterdam while the rest of travelling Europe was completely shut down.