“There is an incentive for good behavior, which is why we’re called Karma,” co-founder Robert Gaal said.

After percolating all summer, Karma officially went live on Tuesday. It began accepting orders on its website for its $79 WiMAX hotspot, which taps into Clearwire’s 4G network in 70 cities. For that price you get free shipping and 1 GB of data that doesn’t expire. You can buy more bandwidth for $14 a gig, but if all goes according to Karma’s plans, it might be a while before you have to.

The Wi-Fi connections on all of Karma’s hotspots are open. Whenever the hotspot is on, anyone can latch onto its Wi-Fi signal, where they will encounter a welcome screen offering them 100 MBs of free data. That 100 MBs isn’t subtracted from the hotspot owner’s data bucket though; rather Karma awards the hotspot owner an additional 100 MB for making the connection happen.

A Karma customer could feasibly rack up a nearly unlimited amount of free data by simply leaving the hotspot on and open all day in public areas, though Gaal said in Karma’s beta trials the typical hotspot receives about five guests a week. Karma, however, is hoping that number will increase dramatically as word of mouth spreads and users learn to pick the Your Karma SSIDs from Wi-Fi network lists.

As for guests, they’re free to use that 100 MB in one sitting or spread it over several sessions, each from a different Karma hotspot. Karma tracks data use by tying you back to a Facebook account. Once that 100 MB is used up though, it’s gone. You can either sign up as a Karma customer or bid the service farewell.

Welcome to the social mesh

Karma launched in Amsterdam, but relocated to New York City last year to participate in TechStars and to find the 4G network required to make its shared mobile broadband experiment work. Karma calls its concept “social bandwidth,” but it’s an idea we’re seeing start to gain traction throughout the MVNO community and the wireless industry at large.

FreedomPop, another Clearwire MVNO that just launched, is doling out network capacity on social principles as well, allowing customers to earn and trade megabytes like virtual currency. Ultimately, FreedomPop doesn’t want to sell access, it wants to sell services like VoIP that ride over a free or heavily discounted data connection.

FreedomPop is using those social features largely as a means to attract customers, which is Karma’s goal as well. As people encounter its open hotspots and free bandwidth in public, a portion of them will eventually turn into paying customers, who will in turn seed the country with more open hotspots, which will be used to recruit more customers. And since every Karma account is linked to a Facebook profile, Karma is hoping to grow through traditional social networking as well.

But Karma sees social bandwidth as more than just a marketing tool. Rather it’s a more efficient way to deliver mobile data. What’s really revolutionary about Karma is how it’s decoupling the service from the device. It’s possible to be a paying Karma customer without ever owning a hotspot – you just latch onto whatever Karma Wi-Fi signal happens to available at any location.

Of course, buying a hotspot guarantees you’ll have connection rather than depending on chance. But Gaal said not everyone will have their hotspots with them at all times. If Karma can reach a certain scale, it can build a persistent network where enough hotspots are in the wild at any given time that Karma users are almost guaranteed of getting a signal in crowded public places like airports or city squares.

I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours

This concept of collective networking is starting to gain currency around the world through networks like Fon. Even carriers are starting to build social contracts into their services: In France, Iliad’s Free Mobile has a network of 4 million Wi-Fi hotspots, each of which hangs off of its residential customers’ home broadband connections. MVNO Republic Wireless is adopting a similar Wi-Fi-first approach.

The idea is that devices shouldn’t be designed to connect to specific networks. Instead, they should use the best network connection available. Perhaps the most radical proponent this sort of crowdsourced network is startup Open Garden, which is distributing software that links any device into ad hoc mesh networks. That network then connects to the internet through the fastest and most reliable link.

Open Garden’s approach is social bandwidth taken to its logical conclusion: every device has access to every possible connection and everyone benefits. But Gaal said consumers aren’t quite ready for such a radical approach in networking. They’re too accustomed to the idea that they own their connections to the network, and therefore they need incentive to share them.

“I do believe there is a huge opportunity there but there has to be a way to implement it so it doesn’t cost you,” Gaal said. “Mesh networks are awesome, but if only one person is footing the bill, not so awesome. If there is no value exchanged in the long run, it’s not a sustainable model.”

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Reno Martin

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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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