“Built Ford Tough” is one of the company’s most recognizable mantras, but the past few years have brought new meaning to the word “tough”. Economic hardships have particularly plagued American car companies, encouraging innovation on a level not witnessed for decades.
The result is a technologically advanced system called Ford SYNC which aspires to make Ford vehicles more appealing to the tech savvy demographic. Even if they aren’t the most tech savvy, enough of the general population is plugged in far enough to appreciate some additional access to their favorite services directly from their phone.
That could very well be the reasoning behind Ford’s consideration for open Sync apps, which would encourage developers to create applications to work with the Sync platform. Microsoft’s Sync has been a prime project for Ford in its push to supersede other manufacturers in the market. With Sync, the capabilities of the car itself are vastly improved, with a new wave of convenience now draping Ford vehicles to entice new drivers.
When I visited Ford last year to see their upcoming models, the Flex caught my eye because of the potential behind its Sync integration. The hope then was to leverage speech transcription to create a hands-off experience for Ford drivers. For instance, your text messages could be read to you, and you could speak your response, all while you drive. That concept can be carried over into various aspects of social media, as your Facebook messages, events and alerts could be read to you as well.
While Ford may look to developers to help creation additional value around an open-source Sync platform, Microsoft also has an opportunity to infiltrate yet another form of standard software on a vehicular distribution plane. That’s all well and good, but where does social media really fit into all of this?
Such development really pushes developers and consumers to change the way in which they think of cars. As an emphasis is placed on building smarter cars, technology offers a conduit for attempting to remove any and all inconveniences currently associated with driving. The inability to fully disconnect from our mobile phones means that certain aspects of our mobile phones should be run directly through our cars. At least, that’s how the theory goes.
We already have significant merging of computer and mobile technology, as well as television capabilities. Most everything else is being morphed more and more into a computer, including our cars. To that end, our cars becomes additional access points for our social media, personal media and more.
Is there any escape from the growing types of access points to our social media? Will we reach the point where we won’t comprehend our lives without the immediate gratification of our Last.fm play lists, transcribed inbox messages and auto-tweet updates based on our car’s GPS? It could be scary to think about, but it’s an inevitable fact of life. Cars are a major frontier for technological integration on a personalized and social level, and Ford is looking to be a leader in its implementation.
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