Ford pushes APIs for Android in Silicon Valley lab

Published:2012/6/18 23:15:00 Author:Ecco From:SeekIC

When Giuli was fresh out of engineering grad school at Stanford University nine years ago, he joined Ford’s Dearborn, Mich., labs. He’s been working on setting up Ford’s presence in Silicon Valley "philosophically for a long time, but the actual work of finding and setting up an office has come just in the last few months."

It’s a modest beginning with only four engineers in a Palo Alto office a few blocks walk from Stanford. Although the team is small, it’s ambitious. They develop a project named OpenXC, and it is prototyping open source hardware and software that would let drivers upgrade their vehicles. However, Giuli hopes to hire a mix of engineers and business people over the next two years.

To be specific, the group has established a variant of the Google Android to provide access to data from dozens of sensors in a car of CAN bus, and it has developed a few sample applications to run on it. The goal is to see if it will make ford be the next open source mobile platform for the third party developers. The Ford lab also is prototyping technologies that would let drivers install their own modular hardware upgrades for devices such as built-in navigation and audio systems--even displays.

At present, Ford pushes APIs for Android, iOS and Blackberry environment so that developers can create apps for the Synch in-car infotainment systems Ford co-developed with Microsoft.

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