Futuristic technology

Before coming to Sweden our class was divided up into groups and each group was assigned a company to research; my group’s company was WirelessCar. So when we visited WirelessCar, today, it was really interesting to see what they did in person. We took a ferry to get across the bay area to Lindholmen Science Park, which is where it was located.

We met with Martin Lundh, who is a group manager. He’s been working there for six years. WirelessCar is a telematics service provider; they used to be focused on the product side of the business, but now they are switching to become a service company. They have two million vehicles in 50 countries and are on four continents. The company was founded in 1999 and is now branded with the Volvo Group. Some of their customers include: BMW, Volvo, Audi, Sprint, Allianz, Chrysler, FIAT, and Qoros. Currently though, there are only five percent of cars in the world that are connected with technology such as this. Some of the threats WirelessCar faces are that consumer electronics can be expensive, Internet isn’t free, and smart phones are already connected. Opportunities they have are that consumers like this type of technology service, it will benefit carmakers and make them more money, and it’s cost efficient.

The company’s vision is to connect people and their cars to basically everything. We watched a video that gave scenarios of when this type of service would be used. The first example was if you get into a car accident your car will send information about the accident to authorities and other cars to warn them about the dangerous road conditions in that spot so they can slow down, it will also get road side assistance to show up and help, as well as, get an appointment as soon as possible at a repair service. Then, the car driver would get a notification for a discount at their favorite café to get a coffee while they wait for their car to be fixed. Another scenario he gave us was if a woman goes into labor, she gets in the car and the seatbelt can monitor the health of her and the baby, then as she’s on her way to the hospital the car notifies the hospital that she’s coming and gets priority at stop lights to get there faster. This technology will truly change the future. The benefits of it are that it will increase car dealers’ revenue, increase customer loyalty at those dealerships, decrease costs of warranties, and decrease the costs to the customer because they will have less repairs and it will be safer to drive.

Bert, Product Manager

Then, we went to ABB for the afternoon. There we met with Bertil Thorvaldsson, the Global Product Manager. A year ago in J.J.’s marketing class we Skype with Bert, so it was nice to meet him in person. Bert works for ABB Robotics as Product Manager; there are over 150,000 employees, they have $39 billion in revenue, and are present in over 100 countries. ABB is a global leader in power and automation technologies. They have manufacturing in Europe, Asia and America. ABB introduced painting robots in 1969 and the world’s first commercially available electronic robot in 1974. There are over 200,000 robots installed worldwide! Their product line consists of robots, application equipment, software (Bert’s area), manufacturing cells, and automotive systems.

He talked to us about RobotStudio, which is a smart phone solution for robot users. The benefit of using RobotStudio is that there is increased life-cycle productivity. He later brought in a couple developers to show us something they’re working on, which is where we got to put on goggles and it was like a virtual reality and you could control what you saw and did by turning your head and looking around and using a controller similar to an Xbox controller. They said this technology should be available to consumers by Christmas time!

That night we went to the Frolunda Indians hockey game. We had great seats in the corner next to the “crazy” fans. They were chanting and playing a drum the entire game. They were winning 1-0 until the third period when they let up one goal, so it went into overtime and then a shootout, which then we ended up losing 2-1.