Range extenders can extend the driving range for an electric vehicle ...

Renee James (top right) - senior vice
president & general manager, Software &
Services Group, Intel and (left) Kai Öistämö
- EVP, Devices, Nokia at the MeeGo launch in
Barcelona, Spain.
AI: Why is the automotive industry
important to Nokia?
Ali-Vehmas: Consumers are spending
a significant amount of time in their cars and
they want constant access to services such
as phone calls, music or navigation. With a
Nokia phone and OVI services, a consumer
can access all of these. Nokia aims to offer the
best possible user experience in all environments
whether at home, work or in a car. It is very important
that consumers can fully enjoy their personal services in a safe
and exciting environment. Safety is essential – drivers should only
have to focus on driving and should have access to hands-free
systems for their entertainment or navigation needs.
AI: Tell us about the role Nokia plays in the GENIVI Alliance.
Ali-Vehmas: Nokia is aiming to be an active and trusted
member of the consortium. Since the collaboration is a dialogue,
Nokia is keen to understand the needs of all GENIVI members. We
consider the open collaboration between automobile, information
and telecommunication industries as a tremendous opportunity to
build meaningful new services and products which enable new
ways of communication. Relevant standards and application
platforms are also crucial elements.
Nokia is a member of a large number of open standardization
initiatives and forums globally, and is very interested in building
and facilitating open collaboration and utilization of all innovations
for the faster adoption of new services and products. In the future,
the roles of traditional standardization organizations, voluntary
alliances and open source software communities will converge in
a similar way to technologies.
It is no longer possible to develop separate vertical solutions
for each application but rather horizontal technologies, software
platforms and standards. These will be used to enhance innovation
for faster and more predictable service adoption. The recent
announcements related to MeeGo – a merger between Nokia’s
Maemo and Intel’s Moblin open source initiatives – might be of
particular interest to GENIVI. Much of the work that has occurred
in GENIVI to date is based on Moblin, so transitioning to MeeGo
would be a natural move with the added benefit of supporting both
Intel Atom and ARM architectures from a single distribution. As
well as economies of scale, GENIVI will gain
from the continuous innovations that Nokia
and Intel will bring to MeeGo.
There is significant amount of technologies
already available for the in-vehicle infotainment area.
Nokia’s interest is to be a key contributor in this space as
well. One interesting area is called Terminal Mode. Together with
the CE4A (Consumer Electronics for Automotive, www.ce4a.org)
consortium, Nokia has defined a profile for how a mobile device
connects to the in-vehicle infotainment system of a car. This
method is based on standard components such as UPnP, USB
and Bluetooth. We hope to see Terminal Mode become part of
future GENIVI releases.
AI: Please tell us a bit more about MeeGo.
Ali-Vehmas: Nokia and Intel are creating an open Linuxbased
platform which will run on multiple hardware architectures
across a wide range of computing devices, including pocketable
mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected
TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems. It merges the best of
Moblin with the best of Maemo and will offer Qt for application
development. Qt makes it possible for developers to write their
application once and then deploy it easily across other platforms,
including Symbian, without rewriting the source code. You can find
more information about MeeGo and Qt via http://www.meego.
com and http://qt.nokia.com.
AI: What are some of the OVI solutions for the future
‘open-source’ infotainment platform?
Ali-Vehmas: Customers must be able to continue using
their favorite services in any location – at home, at work, in the
car, on their computer or on their mobile. That means that for
consumers that already use OVI services, such as our free OVI
Maps service or OVI Music service, there are new opportunities
available to continue using these services in the car. Services
include exchange of destinations, points of interest, combining
drive and walk navigation, listening to music and more. AI
Automotive Industries 61
Timo Ali-Vehmas,
vice president, Compatibility & Industry
Collaboration, Nokia.