Bill Ford is, of course, the great-grandson of Henry Ford, and the executive chairman of the company that bears his name. He also co-founded a venture capital firm called Fontinalis Partners that focuses on next-generation mobile technologies. Fontinalis is leading a $2.8 million investment round in Masabi with participation from London’s MMC Ventures and existing backer m8 Capital. The company has already gone through several funding rounds, raising $2 million in 2010 and $4 million in 2011. m8 led both rounds.

London-based Masabi said that the strategic investment is aimed at promoting its mobile ticketing technology to U.S. transit agencies, building off of its success in the U.K. (it has 13 transit contracts across the pond), and its recent deployment with Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. To date, the company claims it has processed $50 million in ticket sales worldwide and $3 million alone from the MBTA since its system went live in November.

Masabi’s key product is called JustRide, a cloud-based end-to-end ticketing platform that allows riders to purchase, manage and store transit tickets and passes in their mobile phones. Users can buy tickets from an app in their smartphones rather than wait in ticket lines. For train systems with conductors, the tickets show up as animated watermarks easily identified by ticket takers. For automated ticket systems, the app will display a QR code that will get you through the turnstile. Masabi is also upgrading its software to support near-field communications (NFC) in the future.

Boston, for instance, still utilizes smart card ticketing – which also can be linked to JustRide platform – but the gradual move of its smartphone-toting ridership to the cloud-based ticketing service saves it millions of dollars in ticketing machine and backend infrastructure.

Though smartphone-initiated mobile payments haven’t exactly taken off in the U.S., transit ticketing is starting to become a key component of the digital wallet. The carriers’ mobile wallet Isis may still be limited to two cities, but it’s become popular as a mobile pass for Salt Lake City’s public transit system. Amtrak has started accepting digital tickets on the iPhone, and all of the major airlines now have boarding pass features in their apps.

As for Ford’s interest in public transit technologies, the chairman appears to be throwing his money in the same direction as his rhetoric. Ford has spoken several times about how, at the current rate of growth, the number of cars on the world’s highways would soon lead to massive congestion problems. His proposed answer is coordination between public transit and intelligent traffic management systems to better control of the flow of billions of people as they go about their daily lives.

Fontinalis has invested in many startups designed to make cars smarter such as Streetline, Life360 and Parkmobile, but it’s also invested in companies like Masabi and Wheelz, which go against Ford’s vested interest in individual car ownership.

Bill Ford image courtesy jurvetson via Compfight cc

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We’ve already seen location-sharing app Glympse make it into its first connected platform, Ford’s Sync AppLink. Now BMW’s strategic investment arm i Ventures is partnering with family locator service Life360 to develop in-car technologies that would allow family members to locate one another and coordinate their activities. i Ventures is also making an undisclosed investment in the San Francisco startup.

While an app like Glympse allows you to selectively share your location with anyone for a set period of time, Life360 creates a permanent share between a close-knit group such as a nuclear family. That allows Life360 to build services on top of that presence data.

“Imagine you want to meet your wife at your kids’ soccer game,” said Chris Hulls, co-founder and CEO of Life360. “Right now you have to call her, get an address and then program it into your navigation system to get directions. That’s a lot of unnecessary friction.”

What Life360 proposes is an in-dash app that automatically keeps tabs on your family members’ activities. To find your wife, as in Hulls’ example, you merely have to tap on her portrait in the app, and her location is automatically fed into the car’s vehicle nav system.

BMW isn’t the only automaker that thinks Life360 shows promise in the connected car. One of the startup’s lead investors is Fontinalis Partners, a transportation technology fund founded by Bill Ford, the executive chairman of his namesake company. The company recently closed a Series A round of $3.5 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, 500 Startups, Kapor Capital, Venture51, Bullpen Capital, Social Leverage and EchoVC Partners.

As you might expect, Life360 as apps in the works for both Ford and BMW’s connected car platforms, but Hulls said its working with other automakers as well, including Mercedes, General Motors and Hyundai. While Hulls wouldn’t reveal which automaker’s platform would be the first to launch Life360’s app, he said the app would go live in a least one connected car system this year.

We’re already starting to location finding its way into more connected car apps and not just in the form of navigation software. Roximity and BeCouply are using presence data to push location-based deals and recommend nearby activities for the amorously inclined.

And while location-sharing isn’t a feature in most in-vehicle nav systems it’s starting to make it into many mobile mapping and navigation apps. Telenav recently announced an update to its iOS software that can share not only a user’s current location but also your intended destination, allowing friends to coordinate their activities on a map.

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“There is no technology barrier from going where we are now to the autonomous car,” said Jim McBride, a Ford Research and Innovation technical expert who specializes in autonomous vehicle technologies. “There are affordability issues, but the big barrier to overcome is customer acceptance.”

McBride said Ford has already built research vehicles with high-resolution omnidirectional cameras that can see the road and the cars surroundings far better than any driver with a few mirrors. Those vehicles also have scanning lasers that can model the world around it in 3-D. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications standards have been finalized that would allow cars not only to broadcast their location and speed to one another but also create ad hoc vehicular networks — hive minds that could coordinate the actions of thousands of automobiles on the roadway.

Those assets combined with location-based technologies and growing street-view-image databases from companies like Google can give a car a greater awareness of its surroundings than any driver alone could achieve, McBride said. And while laser arrays and omnidirectional cameras may be price-prohibitive, there are plenty of features already in vehicles today, such as front-and rear-facing cameras and ultrasonic sensors, that could perform many of those advanced technologies’ basic functions, he added.

But while Ford may be ready to take that technological jump, drivers aren’t quite prepared to take the leap of faith necessary to forfeit complete control of their vehicles to an onboard computer or larger network intelligence, said Mike Kane, the Ford vehicle engineering supervisor for driver assistance technologies. It’s not that drivers are adamantly opposed to the concept of a driverless car, Kane said; they just need to be introduced to that concept gradually.

Baby steps

Kane said Ford has hosted clinics and done polling on how consumers feel about autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. It found that while people are still uncomfortable with the idea of ceding the driver’s seat to a computer, they are very open to the idea of their cars becoming more intelligent and aware. New capabilities like collision warning for safety, automatic parallel parking and Ford’s Sync voice-control technology have been well received. Ford believes that through the gradual introduction of more automation, drivers will come around to the idea of a car that drives itself.

“People are more accepting of the idea,” Kane said. “They always want their cars to do more. . . . It’s going to take a decade before the masses fully accept the autonomous car, but they’ll get there.”

To help them along Ford is starting to move automation features that were previously only available in high-end luxury cars down to mass-market vehicles. The new Ford Fusion is the first affordable sedan to contain the automaker’s Lane Keeping System, which uses the car’s forward camera to detect when a car is drifting outside the lines. The system alerts the driver through vibrations in the steering wheel and audio warnings, but if the driver doesn’t respond the car will automatically correct, nudging the vehicle back into its lane.

That is an example of automation on the small scale, Kane said. The car isn’t taking over. It’s just giving the driver prompts, along with a slight little push in the right direction. Other technologies like pull-drift compensation, which automatically adjusts steering for crosswinds or uneven roads, automated parallel parking assistance, and adaptive cruise control are all examples of semi-autonomous features that are making it into mass-market cars like the Fusion. Ultimately making those features standard in all vehicle models will begin to alter the average consumer’s perception of automated driving, Kane said.

And what about the thrill of driving?

You’d think in a country as car-obsessed as the U.S., allowing your car to do the driving for you would be anathema to many drivers, especially the ones who invest in high-performance vehicles. But McBride said the opposite true: It’s in sports car and luxury car lines that automation is in highest demand.

That’s explained, McBride said, by how the average U.S. driver actually spends time on the road: commuting from home to work and back, often in bumper-to-bumper traffic. There’s nothing thrilling about a road bogged down by congestion, and it’s in traffic that these automation services are most useful, McBride said. He also noted that customers can elect to turn off those automation features whenever they choose. When on an empty rural highway with the top down, a driver doesn’t necessarily want his car constantly correcting his lane position.

“You still have that freedom whenever you want it,” McBride said. “But if drivers spend 53 minutes of their day in traffic, they get tired.”

There may, however, come a time when that freedom isn’t an option. At Mobile World Congress earlier this year, Ford’s namesake Executive Chairman Bill Ford laid out a “Blueprint for Mobility,” which envisions a world of 4 billion vehicles. All of those cars simply won’t have room to move if all of their drivers are acting independently, Ford predicted. Only through inter-networking vehicles with one another and other transportation networks will we be able to ensure all of those drivers get from point A to point B.

Ford’s notion is interesting, because in that world the driverless vehicle remains automatic but is no longer autonomous. Instead it is working with all the other vehicles on the road to create the optimal traffic patterns for the whole, while ignoring individual drivers’ own inclinations to, say, weave through lanes or tailgate. It’s a sort of enforced social contract on the highway, and, according to McBride, eventually we may not have a choice but to enter into such contracts.

There are already cities like London that place conditions on drivers entering their confines — rush-hour congestion taxes or prohibitions against energy-inefficient vehicles, McBride said. It’s not that far of a stretch to imagine that cities with the worst congestion would require future drivers to hand over the steering wheel as a condition for driving on their streets.

Image courtesy of Flickr user epSos.de

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Such technology could be used to create harmony on the highway, Ford said, sorting vehicles into the optimal spacing pattern and allowing them to automatically decelerate when cars miles down the highway warn of impending traffic. It will be the closest thing the industry has ever developed to autopilot, Ford said. Furthermore such ad hoc vehicle networks could be integrated with other transportation networks, from pedestrian cross-walk systems to connected bicycles, making your car a single node in a giant grid of multi-modal transit intelligence.

Ford’s point is that modern car is already one of the most sophisticated collection of sensors and computing power consumers own, but so far none of those capabilities have been networked—they function solely within the confines of the vehicle. Networking vehicles through peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connections would bring that intelligence out of isolation. In all, Ford painted a very bright picture of how networking technologies could change the face of transportation. But the future he predicts could also be a very scary one.

There’s a good reason in-car networking has focused primarily on entertainment and navigation. Giving the network access to the more sensitive workings of our cars’ drive computers could wind up being privacy and safety nightmares. Sharing real-time data about your car’s current direction and speed to hundreds of other vehicles is going to be disconcerting to many, but what happens if the drivers of those vehicles or anyone with a Wi-Fi receiver can access that same data? Could that connection be used to track cars as they traverse the highways?

What if the network is hacked? Such networks aren’t just transmitting information, they’re acting on it. Introducing false vehicle data into the stream could cause our cars to respond to phantoms, swerving to avoid vehicles that aren’t there and braking for gridlock that doesn’t exist.

Security will obviously be a huge part of any future standard involving interconnected cars. Not only would automakers need to ensure that only vehicles could access and transmit data through the network but also that none of it was stored or somehow passed on. But if Ford can convince other automakers and regulators to back such an idea, it would not only change the way we drive, but the way we approach wireless networking.

Ford is asking us to sign a social contract of sorts. We’re essentially putting part of cars into the public trust, allowing the government or some entity charged with managing the system to use our vehicles as relays within a huge mesh network of interconnected, distributed yet autonomous nodes – all of which are constantly moving and reconfiguring. Technically those same principles could apply to the cellular network as well. Instead of connecting to a tower, devices would link to one another, daisy chaining their way back to a tower. Such a set up could infuse enormous amounts of capacity into any mobile networks, whether composed of handsets or automobiles. But we would also have to come to terms with the concept that our phones and are cars are not completely our own.

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Let’s take them one by one.

I like the plaid, but do these PJs come in 4G?

Yes, we have all heard the myth of the connected refrigerator, but O’Hara promises we’ll see the world’s first pair of connected pajamas, embedded with sensors to monitor a child’s heart rate, breathing and other vitals. In fact, the GSMA’s Connected House exhibit this year will be full of mysterious wireless-embedded items including a singing robot from Korea Telecom and something called a “social media vending machine” from Vodafone.

The GSMA estimates there will be 24 billion connected devices by 2020, making embedded wireless – or machine-to-machine communications – a $1.2 trillion global industry. They won’t all be pajamas and robots, though. More likely they’ll be tablets and computing devices, TVs and other entertainment products, health and medical devices, and of course, cars.

This year, O’Hara and Warren predicted that the connected car would be a big source of conference chatter. MWC has whole tracks devoted to the topic, and Bill Ford, his namesake company’s executive chairman, will be delivering one of the keynote addresses. This year, the connected car discussion will move beyond the infotainment system and into the drive train. According to Warren, technologies are emerging that will allow cars to communicate with each other and the Internet to help make us better drivers, not just more entertained ones.

In addition, the technology we’ll see out of the newest concept vehicles is sure to impress even the most spec-obsessed gadget lover.

“The things we’re seeing today are what we’ll see in cars five years from now,” Warren said. “It’s not because the technology isn’t available today, but it’s because those are the design timelines of the automakers.” These aren’t cellphones that we change out every year.

Open up that mobile wallet

Near field communications is another sector with growth projections that boggle the mind. The GSMA projects that 1.5 billion handsets with NFC chips will be in the market by 2016, processing some $50 billion in transactions. The wireless industry is about to become a financial powerhouse, O’Hara said.

NFC payments also could become one of their more controversial topics at the show. The GSMA and many of its carrier members are promoting payment solutions that verify user identity via the phone’s SIM card. Meanwhile Google is promoting its own NFC solution Wallet, which bypasses the SIM and thus the operator. That conflict has already emerged in miniature in the U.S. as Verizon Wireless and Google have already banged heads over Wallet on the LTE version of the Galaxy Nexus. Google’s Eric Schmidt is delivering one of the major speeches at Mobile World Congress, so there’s potential for that conflict to escalate.

NFC won’t just be confined to payments. O’Hara said a lot of technologies will emerge at MWC that show how identity fused with ultra-short-range radio can be used in everything from electronic subway passes to concert ticketing. My colleague Ryan Kim has already written about the myriad of other uses for NFC, and we’ll likely see many of those alternatives emerge at MWC. NXP is hosting an NFC lounge where it will demo a motorcycle that can be started with your smartphone, peer-to-peer gaming through the NFC link, and even an app that allows you to summon your waiter and order food from your device while at a restaurant.

LTE is king, but Wi-Fi is getting all the attention

For the last several Congresses, operator after operator has taken the stage to announce their LTE rollout plans. At this year’s Congress many of those networks will finally have been built, making this year the show for the devices.

“It’s fair to say we have a feel for these things, and we’re expecting a slew of LTE announcements at the Congress,” O’Hara said.

But don’t expect LTE in absolutely everything, O’Hara cautioned. Many European operators are behind the LTE deployment, after the U.S. got to an early start, so they’re very much still focused on their HSPA networks. O’Hara said we’re likely to see a plethora of LTE dongles and Wi-Fi hotspots, but there will definitely be some high-end LTE smartphones.

While not every device will have the raw connection speed of LTE, we’ll see plenty of phones that skew toward raw processing power. LG has already revealed it will launch its first quad-core smartphone at MWC, using Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chip. Quad-core will still be a rarity, but dual-core devices are becoming almost the norm. Qualcomm expects that there will be several smartphones unveiled at MWC that utilize its integrated Snapdragon dual core processor and LTE modem, which has the additional “dual” benefits of driving down both cost and battery drain.

The GSMA and Wireless Intelligence now estimates there are 12.28 million LTE subscriptions in the world, though a disproportionate number, 7.69, are still in North America, primarily on Verizon’s network. The Asia-Pacific region comes in second with 3.71 million subs, while Europe is just starting to ramp up with 745,000 total LTE connections. In comparison there are 750 million HSPA connections globally. LTE may have a long way to go, but it’s getting there quickly. Wireless Intelligence says LTE subscribers are being added globally at a rate of 2 million a month.

At MWC we’ll likely see many European operators announce or detail already revealed LTE launch plans, but also expect the U.S. operators to be on hand to talk up their LTE plans, including T-Mobile USA, which just announced an ambitious plan to shut down most of its GSM networks to make room for LTE.

The dark horse candidate for show stealer is Wi-Fi. MWC is a cellular networking event , but so far much of the network technology buzz has been about unlicensed local area network technology and how it can be incorporated into operators’ 3G and 4G services. The jokes are already emerging about how MWC should be renamed the Mobile Wi-Fi Congress. The GSMA’s Warren, however, welcomes the development, saying Wi-Fi isn’t being positioned as a competitive technology to cellular, but rather one that is complimentary to HSPA and LTE.

If you’re attending the Congress you’ll have a lot of company. Last year, MWC attracted 60,000 delegates, and O’Hara said the GSMA’s registration logs show it is well on its way to breaking that record this year. There will be plenty for those delegates to see as well: 1,400 companies and organizations are exhibiting.

The conference outgrew the venerable Fira de Barcelona long ago, forcing exhibitors to spill out into the surrounding courtyards and streets. This year, many exhibitors are dealing with the lack of space by building up, not out, O’Hara said. So that’s one last thing to expect at MWC: we might see the first three-story booth.

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