Reports 9to5Mac:

According to people familiar with the plans, Apple is working with car makers on updated versions of car center consoles that could attach to iOS devices like the iPhone. Specifically, an iPhone could be plugged into a car and an optimized, redesigned version of Apple Maps will appear on the car’s built-in display instead of a proprietary GPS system found in many cars.

The Maps app on the dashboard — mirrored from the phone’s display — would then be controlled via voice with Siri, according to the report.

That Apple has bigger plans for the car beyond a hands-free assistant app is not surprising. The car will be an integral part of consumers’ connected, digital lives and Apple can’t sit that one out.

But the report is vague about how far along the company is with these plans. It mentions that the capability is based on iOS 7 — which is expected to be introduced at WWDC in June — but that “a public release could be potentially be far off.”

Considering how slow it’s been going for the Eyes Free feature, it could be a while for even fuller integration. It was at WWDC 2012, last June, that Apple announced that Audi, BMW, Chrysler, Honda, General Motors, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes and Toyota were on board for Siri Eyes Free. To date, only General Motors has implemented the feature (two Chevy models) while Honda and Mercedes have announced plans.

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Ford executives explained why the connected car is increasingly important at the International Consumer Electronics Show. Surveys have shown that 65 percent of recent Ford buyers felt that the Sync platform was an important factor in their purchase decision. Ford also knows that there are one billion smartphones in use today with another billion expected by 2015.

So Ford created its Sync AppLink and APIs for mobile app developers, launching a portal at developer.ford.com. The software tools provide programmers with methods for their apps to access in-car voice control, displays, buttons and audio settings.

Ford provides the tools for free and helps app developers with support issues. It’s a fairly open system as described. The only caveat is that three app activities are not allowed for safety reasons: video functions, excessive text and games. There goes Netflix and Angry Birds!

After the event, I got a quick demo of the Amazon Cloud Player integration, partly for selfish reasons since I’m a paying subscriber to Amazon’s music service. Using the Sync voice button, you can tell the car to start a playlist in the cloud or on your mobile device: Music is piped through the car’s audio system through Bluetooth. Song information appears on the car’s display as well.

Glympse is another app that’s perfectly suited for the automobile. The app shares your location in real time, but doesn’t infringe on your privacy. You control who can see your location and for how long. I actually use the app on my phone to tell my family where I am on my way home so they know exactly when to expect me. Of course, the primary use case is in the car, so it just makes sense to integrate it directly into the Ford Sync system.

As a new Chevy Volt owner, I’m a bit jealous of those driving new Fords, especially since I use Amazon’s Cloud Player. For now, I’ll stick with Pandora, which is integrated in my car. And I expect the pace of app development for connected cars to pick up now that we’re done with a few years of warm-up laps. A car paired with your smartphone and filled with easy-to-use but not distracting apps is where we’re headed.

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Moj.io, a current project trying to raise $100,000 in funding on Indiegogo, takes advantage of the OBD, or on-board diagnostics, port found in all cars built on or after 1995. The ODB port is mainly intended for auto shops to connect to and get information from a vehicle’s computer to assist with diagnosing problems. But it can be used in a real-time mode for data such as speed, fuel levels and more.

Getting at that data is only part of the solution, however. The small Moj.io module integrates both a GPS and cellular radio to gather location information and for connectivity. The GSM radio inside uses T-Mobile’s network for M2M, or machine to machine, data transfers, sending data up to the cloud.

From there it’s accessible through a smartphone app and the Moj.io team already has eight in mind:

1. Family Connect can notify you when another driver in the household exceeds a pre-set speed limit. (Sorry teens!)
2. Drive Smart disables incoming texts and calls when the car is in motion. You can allow incoming calls from three pre-determined contacts, however.
3. Vehicle Locate does what it says: Shows your vehicle on a map and provides walking directions to it.
4. Tow Alert notifies you if your car is broken into or being towed away.
5. Mileage Tracker eliminates the need to manually track miles for business expensing.
6. Auto Text is perhaps the most impressive to me. Upon starting a drive, the app checks your calendar for any appointments within the next hour. It can then send a text message to any meeting participants, telling them how far away you are and when you should arrive.
7. Virtual Mechanic provides basic diagnostic information and fuel levels.
8. Good Driver Points sounds like a rewards system that will earn perks in the future.

To back the project as an early adopter and get the lowest price will cost $89 which is a $60 savings over the expected retail price. There’s more to the system than just the module though: Expect to pay $7.99 per month to cover the Moj.io’s cellular service. Again, backing early will save you some money: You’ll get three months service for free. And all backers will get a special yearly subscription price of $79 to cover the connectivity.

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Newer models are also more tied into other cars or to outside infrastructure and to the ubiquitous cloud than you might think, according to speakers at GigaOM’s Roadmap Conference on Monday. In that scenario, cars are just one more set of “things” that are part of the “internet of things” scenario. The only issue with that is that cars — the ultimate mobile devices — can go 90 mph and there are obvious concerns about how connectivity effects that. Distractions flowing in from the outside world, or a cloud, are just not a good idea.

In short: Infotainment is one thing. Safety, efficiency and traffic management are another, Paul Mascarenas, CTO and VP of research and innovation for Ford said on a Roadmap panel about the connected-car-as-computing-platform.

“From the Ford perspective, there are different levels of security in the vehicle — there’s partitioning around the power train and safety systems because it does concern our customers,” he said.

It’s great to think of the ability to stream down real-time traffic information or send up car diagnostics to the car maker, but that stream, obviously, has to be segregated from the music and podcasts that the driver or passengers are streaming or downloading to entertain themselves.

“Streaming content is cordoned off from the other systems — Ford has to control the apps and make sure it knows what’s doing on,” said Kevin Dallas, GM of Microsoft’s Windows Embedded effort. The two panelists said this is the fifth anniversary of the Ford/Microsoft collaboration on Sync which brings voice control to some automotive control functions. More on Sync here.

Over time, there might be ways to rationalize all that connectivity. “Right now, the connectivity with Sync is through your mobile device, so you’re using your regular data plan for that but I like the idea of the car being another device on a shared data plan. That might give us flexibility to provide a user experience where your car is like your second home or second office where you seamlessly share content,” Mascarenas said. That scenario would involve a single data account tied to a person rather than to a device or a vehicle.

The key to all of this is simplicity and safety.

If, you’re like many people these days, you’re putting a lot of your content into the cloud, where you can access it from your tablet, phone or PC. “There’s no reason your car should be any different,” said Dallas.

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below:

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Speaking Friday at our Mobilize conference in San Francisco, Research in Motion Senior Vice President of BlackBerry OS and QNX Engineering Sebastian Marineau-Mes told the audience that although ubiqutious computing is many people’s ultimate dream in a wireless world, it’s not going to happen without standards that don’t yet exist. Although he painted a beautiful picture of his phone telling his car about a doctor appointment, leading to a chain of automation that included navigation, prescription-filling and his house’s air conditioner kicking on at just the right time as he finally made his way back home, “The big barrier to really achieving this level of integration,” Marineau-Mes said “… is really the interoperability of all these types of data sources.”

And to all the Apple and Android diehards out there, Marineau-Mes said that neither of those platforms are the answer. iOS is too closed, he explained, while Android is so open it tends to create silos of developers who just go off and do their own thing. The answer is something he calls “curated openness” — essentially the standardization of a few core functions to ensure that data can move freely between apps and that apps can move freely across our devices, whether those are phones, tablets, refrigerators or cars.

The automobile industry, Marineau-Mes said, is already trying to standardize around HTML5 to ensure that drivers can get largely uniform experiences regardless what cars they’re driving, but even that effort is still in its infancy. Questions such as how to translate a mobile app to a car’s interface and how controls will work (e.g., touchscreen or voice-control only while driving) still need to be answered. “The key is abstracting that so the application developer community can build it once and deploy it across the industry,” he said.

Clearly, though, an industry-by-industry approach will only result in more silos as each settles on its own set of standards. Rather, Marineau-Mes said, it will take something akin to an internet of things version of the World Wide Web Consortium to really drive cross-industry standards. But that approach has worked for the web and the internet, and it should work here, too.

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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From working at XM Satellite Radio to leading Rhapsody’s music service and later launching the Internet-connected GPS device Dash, I have spent most of my career in pursuit of one goal: to deliver the connected information and entertainment content people want to their driver’s seat. In my my current role leading Aha by Harman, I believe the “connected car” industry’s biggest challenge is to provide the mobile apps and services that consumers want in a way that makes safety the top priority. To do that, we have to look beyond interface design and consider human behavior.

Automobile makers understand people’s desire to be connected. As a result, some of their newer, more technically advanced automotive infotainment systems are starting to resemble smartphones and tablets on wheels, featuring large capacitive touch-screen displays. The problem, of course, is that a car is neither a phone nor a tablet. It’s a two-ton hunk of steel and glass that has to be maneuvered safely through traffic.

Two schools of thought have emerged. One is to ban or severely restrict the use of distractive technology while driving. We all know how well that works. A recent survey found that nearly 40 percent of young drivers admit to texting while driving, and laws requiring drivers to use hands-free mobile phone headsets don’t seem to have had much effect, based on casual observation of cars driving past my office in Palo Alto, Calif.

The other approach is to design new user interfaces — the modern, digital versions of buttons and knobs and dials — that provide the same general functions of smartphones and tablets while minimizing distractions for the driver. There have been promising advances in voice recognition and controls — Apple’s Siri is one emerging example, Dragon from Nuance is another — but the technology is still in the training-wheel stage.

There’s also a huge challenge: If the controls for these new dashboard information centers are either too complex or fail to quickly deliver the information one wants, drivers will simply skip the car’s built-in systems and go back to using their handheld phones and tablets while driving. We’ve got to make the automobile interfaces compelling enough to persuade drivers to put aside their smartphones, but not so compelling as to divert attention away from the road ahead.

Adding to the challenge, the technology in our pockets is advancing faster than a Ferrari down Highway 101. Apple comes out with a new and improved and more alluring iPhone every year, while the information system built into your dashboard is locked in for as long as you own the car, which today is an average of six years. Even if your new car comes with today’s latest whiz-bang technology features, it will seem outdated a few years from now when your new iPhone 10 has a 3D holographic display and a mind-reading interface.

We know what won’t work: millions of drivers hurtling down the road while poking, swiping and typing on touch screens for email, text messages, podcasts, driving directions, global streaming radio, restaurant reservations, social media feeds and the like.

But we also know what has worked in the past. Generations of drivers have managed to stay relatively safe while reaching for the volume knob on a car radio, or pushing a preset button or switching from AM to FM to CD to Sirius/XM satellite radio. Current physical dashboard commands — up arrow, down arrow, right arrow forward, left arrow back and so on — are familiar and easy to operate, and certainly less distracting than a touch-screen display whose user interface requires the driver to slide a finger precisely along a path. The key will be to map a diverse array of new digital services and applications to familiar human behaviors that minimize the distractions for the driver. It’s been exciting to see major car makers such as Acura, Honda and Subaru (disclosure: all are Aha partners) move in this direction with their infotainment systems in 2013 model year vehicles.

Paradoxically, the solution might be to go back to dedicated buttons that don’t require taking one’s eyes off the road. Video game developers learned long ago that when aliens are attacking, a single “Fire!” button works much better than a sequence of CTRL-ALT-whatever keystrokes.

Another design strategy might be to eliminate, or at least limit, interface elements that require the driver to respond immediately, or to retain sequences of information that are cognitively demanding. When the user is sitting at his desk at work, he has no problem tapping out sequences like “Show me reviews for all the three-star Chinese restaurants within five miles,” and “Make a reservation.” “How many people?” “Four.” “What time? Your options are 6:30, 7:15 and 7:45.” When the user is driving in rush hour traffic, such extended interactions are a recipe for an accident.

Above all, the goal of interface design in automobile-based services must be safety. A decade ago, researchers at Harvard estimated that drivers talking on cellphones caused 2,600 fatal accidents and 570,000 other injury accidents the previous year. That was before the iPhone and iPad, before Facebook, before just about all the mobile apps we now can’t imagine living without. The question now is, can we live with them in the car?

In the car of the future, these concerns might not matter. The biggest advance in automobile safety will come from replacing human drivers with radar, LIDAR, GPS, computer vision and robotic chauffeurs. At that point, we’ll all be passengers, free to sit back and touch, swipe and immerse ourselves from here to Grandma’s house. But these are far-off concepts.

Until then, we have to figure out how to design compelling apps that are safe for human drivers to use. We don’t have the answer yet, but we do have a huge opportunity.

Robert Acker has been an entrepreneur in the connected car space for more than 14 years. In his current role with global infotainment company, Harman, Acker and his team are developing and launching Aha, which turns Web content into on-demand radio stations. 

Robert Acker will be discussing the connected-car experience onstage at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference on September 20.

Image courtesy of Flickr user digitaljournal.com.

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The Devium Dash is a 4-inch-by-7-inch unit that is installed the same way as an in-dash GPS unit, but it replaces your whole stereo.  It’s a pretty plain design, with a slot to pop in an iPhone or an iPod touch and scroll knob. Founder Jeff Lizer says other smartphones will fit eventually too, but he started off with the original design for the iPhone because he “had to focus on a single product to get this right.”

The product’s information page says that your iPhone will fit with or without the rubber bumper that many people use. And we shouldn’t fret if Apple changes the body style for its next iPhone, he writes: ”I know the iPhone ’5′ may be released this summer and if its dimensions are similar to the current iPhones then it will work without purchasing a new faceplate. If the new iPhone varies too much, a new faceplate will be developed and released as soon as possible.”

Other interesting specs, according to the official site for Devium Dash:

Right now, Devium Dash is a Kickstarter project and is a little under halfway to its $45,000 funding goal. The company seems confident they’ll meet the goal and start producing units by July — the price will be $300 at retail. Those who cough up $250 now will get a unit when they start shipping, according to an announcement made Monday.

Speaking from experience, it’s amazing how out-of-date even a pretty nice two-year-old car’s stereo can be. It has a CD player and a digital interface, but all I really want to do is listen to my iTunes playlists anyway. My car did come with a 30-pin connector inside the middle console that lets you plug in an iPhone or iPod and control the device through the car’s dashboard. But the car’s frustrating interface uses buttons you click and a wheel you scroll, which is a pain when you’re used to touchscreen tapping or scrolling when selecting your music.

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What does this Internet of things really mean? More connected televisions, cars, DVD players, photo frames and of course tablets and smartphones. This is a profound shift, and its implications are going to have an impact on every aspect of our society. We are going to be discussing the impact of this “connectedness” with the folks who are inventing this connected future — folks like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey — at our upcoming conference, RoadMap, scheduled to be held on Nov. 10 in San Francisco.

Check out the GSMA’s data on connected devices in this infographic:

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