Gadgetory

hello folks welcome back to the live stage here at cnet's CES coverage 2013 CES we've got so much going on here at the show and we just did our best of CES finalists unveiling among the finalists in there in the car tech category is some new innovation coming from Ford's I want to talk a little bit more about that because I'm the car guy I'm the car tech guy one of our car tech team and Julius marks wiki does too Julius welcome thanks for being here thank you thank you for having me you're the head of the Ford SYNC AppLink section of Ford's technology explain what that is for folks that maybe are not doing apps in their car yet fantastic thank you Brian and thank you for the nomination we're extremely excited your app link is technology that lives on a smartphone and inside of our vehicles and it enables your in vehicle controls through voice or through steering wheel to control the smartphone applications that you already have on your iPhone or Android device and even blackberry if you still have a blackberry yeah that's right you still got some black great support there um here's the thing is this what we call in the tech biz a HMI connection you're making the letting the buttons on the physical part of the dash control the phone app and get my eyes where they should be exactly so one of the things that we always say is keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road yeah we know that our customers are two times more likely to pick up their phone while driving if they're in vehicle technology doesn't meet their needs so what's really important for us is to make sure that the technology in the car meets their needs and if you don't do your job right you are any automaker in this kind of integration of apps in the dash they don't give you a lot of time before they go grab the phone again exactly exactly so it's really as no bears they forget this once you get the phone pick a very very important for us to to focus you know focus the the use of voice inside of the vehicle right so you control these applications and that hang up on a big monitor that's static and large and auto optimized exactly exactly you up before we get into the really deep part of this let's go it's sort of the really accessible part which easier you rolled out some more apps what are some of the new ones you've got supported in your cars sure well in addition to the fantastic apps that we have today such as Pandora stitcher to in I heart I Heart Radio or iheart auto as their as they're called now yeah we launched a number of new applications glimpse for example you know the application that lets you share your location with your friends and family so you no longer have to respond to that text message that says hey where are you you can just glimpse your location straight from the vehicle voice activated I can say send a glympse to Brian Cooley I call that overshare calm but that's just me that's just me not everybody has to be on the same page yeah what's another one you implemented well so another great example aha radio 30,000 streams of contents right all voice activated voice enabled so you can say play my weather station it'll give you your localized weather and then it can give you your social feeds and you can listen to internet radio or news or music and then some other fantastic news apps for example a kaliki which reads magazine content to you human read voice same with USA Today the magazine era of the newspaper every day digitized into voice human read for you now all voice activates are converting content that might be media-rich into audio right you're not displaying a simple version of the USA Today on the screen or any exactly it's okay it's all voice enabled it's read to you in voice you hear a human read to you for example today's news stories or today's money stories yeah and all voice activated and you can use the steering wheel controls to skip through content Wall Street Journal live for example same thing all of the Wall Street Journal radio content provided to you you know you skip back and forth between stories fantastic about some of this audio content you're doing more and more we are bringing in terrestrial radio stations through various apps here and folks I think sometimes say okay wait a minute I got a radio in the car it works real well and it's real easy volume am/fm presets we don't how to use it why the complication of adding radio station apps yeah well you know the radio stations are starting to see this move into digital right and content is no longer you know you send it and you forget it content is now you know they digitize it they tag it they store it so you can bring it up later yeah so one of the things that we're seeing is on demand radio on demand interviews morning shows you know you may miss your favorite morning show that day so you're going to want to hear that later you know later in the afternoon for example so you can bring up that content with your voice from from some of these radio applications like w RI f you can access you know interviews and and their morning show every day just if you missed it right yes and change the world of radio broadcasters because they're used to having their local market to themselves and not having competition from stations hundreds of thousands of miles away but now you can listen to a New York station in Detroit absolutely absolutely you know and I'm a Chicago guy so I like sometimes I like listening to my Chicago stations in Detroit so and now you can enable that it's fantastic now let's move to the future those are some of the new apps you've got a really big thing you announced that is less sort of you know gettable by the consumer but it's huge underlying tech as you've opened up your cars and your sync app technology to developers decode all that for us oh it's a well what we've done is we've launched what's called the Ford developer program you can go to developer for calm and access all sorts of resources then that effectively give you the ability to you know just deploy test develop software that works inside these vehicles so the pandora's the all the apps that we're talking about will give you the SDK they have it's there it's on your developers kit software development kit absolutely documentation sample code online tips and tricks a block blog forums I mean and most importantly for developers that are there to support you so we have an entire team of people that are that are helping developers now through this developer program this ecosystem you're creating that's the interesting part you know folks the the development communities that have really fostered well are because the companies behind a Google and their Android or Apple it's not just because they've exposed all this technology developers need but some companies do a particularly good job of working with developers having actual bodies at their company that say yes we'll help you get your app to work when you're stuck or optimizer to do whatever there's still a lot of high touch in the world of bringing developers because you guys are up against iOS and Android primarily well here's what's amazing about the for developer program is that it doesn't actually require you to learn anything about the automobile we give you libraries for your Android and iPhone applications that's how Apple Inc works so they kind of translate them to Ford you compatible you drop in this library and you have AP is we've wrapped services so for example the voice service you want to say something to the driver with our text to speech engine it's the API is called speak and you issue a speak command and you give us the text you want us to speak to you yeah and so it's a fantastic it's a fantastic way because I don't have to learn something specific for the vehicle I can drop this library and most of our developers are kind of like a bunch of macros right that help them get things done in a short cut within your system in wrapping up this idea what's the vision let's say one year from now we talk to you about how is it going with developers developing apps that will then pair from they never leave the phone they're always on the phone but they're integrated with the car in a rich way what do you hope will be the goal you have a little be a Ford app store well definitely definitely not afford app store we want customers to follow the same trends they're doing today which is downloading from the apple app store from google play so no new no new stores right we're going to help categorize we're going to show where applications are available yeah but at the end of the day you're going to use your phone and you're going to download from the store that you've already downloaded for the world has downloaded 55 plus billion applications you're not going to reinvent the wheel and get into the app delivery and sales business okay got it all right this very interesting stuff you know we will check yeah I'm gonna hold you to this a year from now come back here and show us how I would love to be back I want to know what the what apps are going to be coming up in the next week is this will be real this year right yeah okay so we'll see what some developers have done to develop for Ford fly another car developer for calm absolute ideas thanks for being