Toyota Creating “Social Network” For Cars With Help Of Microsoft
Totyota teamed up with Microsoft to bring the cloud to the next generation cars. A social network for cars could bring cars to the next level. Is this the first steps towards real driverless cars? Maybe.
Toyota Introduces ‘Toyota Friend’ To The World
Toyota has been hard at work recently trying to get Toyota owners more connected with their cars and vice-versa. They have had multiple Internet and intelligent features integrated in their latest cars. And now they are pursuing the creation of a social network. But not one to compete with Facebook though. They simply want to connect their cars to their owners in a better way and the car owners to each other. And they call it ‘Toyota friend’.
As future cars get more dependent on electricity and less on fossil fuel, charging station locations and the battery level are going to become two very important pieces of information that all Toyota owner would need. According to Toyota, their cloud network would help owners by posting this data much like it is posted on Facebook. Owners will then have the option of keeping it private or sharing it with other Toyota friends.
Help And Collaboration
Microsoft is the second largest funder in this project at $4.1 million, preceded of course by Toyota themselves at $5.5 million and followed by Salesforce.com at $2.8 million.
Salesforce.com will be powering the initiative through their Salesforce Chatter network. The rollout will happen first in Japan (no surprises there actually) and will be available on electric and plug-in hybrid models from next year onwards. The service will connect owners to their car and other owners through smart phones, tablet devices and they will have the option of plugging in their exchanges in to the more public domains of Facebook and Twitter.
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Written by oliversk Thursday, May 26th, 2011
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