Audi Vehicles to Talk to U.S. Traffic Signals in First for Industry

Audi Technology – Vehicles to Coordinate with Traffic Signals

Audi, the German manufacturer is developing a technology which would enable its vehicles in the United States to coordinate with traffic signals, permitting a more stress-free trip, which is said to be the first commercial use of the nascent technology in the car industry. Audi of America, owned by Volkswagen has handpicked 2017 Q7 and A4 models built after June 1, 2016 to be furnished with its vehicle-to-infrastructure technology.

Recognized as `V-to-I’, in the industry, the technology enables traffic signals together with the other infrastructure to interchange safety accompanied with other operational data, wirelessly to vehicles through the cloud. Ultimate applications of the technology that tends to continue for testing across the globe by manufacturers as well as transportation agencies would be beneficial in mitigating crashes thus dropping jamming on highways and roads.

Pom Malhotra, general manager of the connected vehicles division of Audi had commented that this is their foray into V-I and this is designed not as a safety feature but a comfort and convenience feature. Malhotra states that the system of Audi permits the vehicle to exhibit a countdown before a red light tends to turn to green and being aware of how much time one has before the light could change to green could relieve much of the apprehension of waiting.

Traffic Line Information – New Line of Ground-Breaking Connected Car

The countdown also tends to display on the dashboard if the vehicle decides that it would not be capable of making an approaching light before turning to red, to enable the drive to apply the brake. On waiting for the red light to turn to green, the display tends to disappear a few seconds before it turns to green, compelling the driver to be aware of the intersection and regulate when it is safe to go ahead, informs Malhotra.

Traffic light information seems to be the new line of ground-breaking connected car improvement by Audi. Audi had been the first manufacturer in 2010, to provide a broadband enabled vehicle and since then, Audi connect tends to continue to enlarge on its industry leading services and potentials. Towards 2014, it had been the first manufacture to provide 4G/LTE Broadband connectivity.

Planned partnership as well as proprietary scalable infotainment architecture has enabled Audi to constantly provide its customers with the latest in solutions to mobile connectivity. An executive has informed that the future applications of the technology could envisage it to be linked to the navigation system of the car or its stop/start roles.

Manufacturer’s Efforts to Leverage Technology

Another possibility is that the traffic signals could direct the vehicle to maintain a certain speed to match the flow of traffic lights. Audi intends to roll out the competence this year, in five to seven U.S cities with cities to be switched on one by one.

The company has not revealed which of the cities would be the first. The manufacturers of car have been making efforts to leverage technology inclusive of vehicle-to-vehicle communications – `V- to –V’, enabling vehicles to talk to each other, in order to decrease accidents and to improve overcrowding. Organizing such types of schemes could be challenging since both V-to-I and V-to-V technologies tend to need safe communication infrastructure as well as close assistance with municipalities together with transportation agencies.

 The President of Audi of America, Scott Keogh had stated that `continuous innovation in connected car services as well as advanced driver assistance systems which enriches and improves the customer experience is at the core of the Audi brand and our collective future.

Increase Engagement With Mobile Apps

The mobile access to the internet is a dynamic platform that is used a variety of ways. The entire cycle of browsing, engagement, and purchase happens through apps on mobile devices at an increasing rate. Here is a look at how you will be able to increase engagement and conversion for your brand with the Instagram, Pinterest, and Wanelo mobile apps.

Instagram

The format of the Instagram app lends itself perfectly to mobile use. When people see images on the app that truly engage them, a majority will take some kind of action in response. This can range from liking the image to following the account, to purchasing a product. Content from a business such as Hamptoncreek not only communicates the ethos of the brand, it engages with colorful and appealing content.

Make it Dynamic

To fully utilize the power of Instagram, an extra layer of relevancy can be added in the form of dynamic advertising. This enables a business to harness data from a user’s online behavior to target what products are relevant to that individual consumer. If a prospective customer has browsed your offerings elsewhere online, when they come to Instagram they will see products that are relevant to them. This all happens in something called the carousel ad format.

Carousel ads provide more advertising options and flexibility by providing more information and images for those people who want to learn more about a particular image. A user who wants to learn more about the features of a product or service can choose to swipe left and access this additional content while still staying on the Instagram app.

Drive Traffic in Pinterest

Pinterest helps millions of people discover more about things that they are interested in. Through the power of visuals, users get ideas, make plans for projects, and find things to purchase. A business presence on the Pinterest app needs to communicate your brand through inspiring and entertaining visuals. When you have connected on that level, you can then show your followers why you are an expert in your product or service.

In It for the Long Term

For the length of engagement time per pin, Pinterest has a much longer life than Facebook or Twitter posts. People who are contemplating a big project or purchase will build large boards for months at a time and look at images in them repeatedly to figure out their plans. People who are using Pinterest to explore their passions and hobbies curate their boards for years. This results in added value for the content you put on Pinterest.

The tutorial site wikiHow has used Pinterest to build its online presence by building boards highlighting their instructional content. They see the app as a long term partner for their website’s growth. By judiciously pining their most engaging content on Pinterest, they are able to generate referral traffic several times larger than what they get from Facebook. Many times wikiHow edits and polishes older but still relevant content so that it will best present itself on the Pinterest app. WikiHow is also careful to pin content that fits in with their brand. They also use analytics from Pinterest to find viral content from their website.

Wanelo

With a mostly female audience that is made up of fifty percent millenials, Wanelo is a shopping platform that is reaching into the future. Users of Wanelo are coming to shop and purchase on their mobile devices. Both new and experienced retailers with their own commerce sites have been flocking to the app due to its conversion rates that are higher than industry standards. Many of the small businesses on Wanelo feel that the app with millions of users has made them just as visible as huge conglomerates. The effectiveness of selling on Wanelo will increase even more with the advent of being to sell directly on the app.

To enable your business to sell merchandise from the Wanelo app, you need to submit your product feed to them. The app will then sync up with your inventory and enable your customers to complete their purchase right on the app.

With more mobile devices appearing in the marketplace every day, the time is now to utilize mobile apps that will grab the attention of your audience and turn them into customers. Interactive platforms that use innovative ways to easily convert visitors into consumers are the apps that achieve the best results in mobile internet solutions for business.

Mozilla Firefox 48 Out Now with Multi-Process Electrolysis

Firefox 48 –Designed to Enhance Stability/Security

Firefox 48, after seven years of progress is eventually enabling a multi-process feature which is similar to what Internet Explorer as well as Google Chrome has been offering as stable feature from 2009. Firefox 48 has recently shipped two long anticipated new features which have been designed to enhance the stability as well as security of the browser. Running their rendering engines in a distinct procedure from the browser shell, IE and Chrome have been steadier as well as secure.

To bring about a similar multi-process competence to Firefox, Mozilla had begun in 2009, the Electrolysis project, but the organization had taken longer than Apple, Google and Microsoft in shipping this feature. The delay of Mozilla was partially driven by altering importance in the organization and Electrolysis progress had been on hold in 2011 before it was restarted in 2013 and partly due to the historic extension architecture of Firefox which made this type of split-up difficult to accomplish. The old extensions of Firefox invasively tend to interfere with fragments of the browser and several assumed equal access to the rendering engine as well as to the shell of the browser.

Rollout of Electrolysis Controlled Conventionally

The developers of Firefox had to create a new extension system as well as create shim layers to provide the developers with a temporary system to continue assisting their old extensions. The multi-process system of Firefox even after all this time does not seem to match its peers. The roll out of Electrolysisis being controlled conventionally in spite of its successful beta. It is said that for the next few days, a part of a percent of Firefox 48 users by default would have Electrolysis turned on.

If this rollout turns to go well, the multi-process feature would be roll out to around half of all the users of Firefox 48 and would be prolonged in handling extensions which are known to be compatible in Firefox 50. Thereafter Electrolysis will be rolled out to the users of Firefox 51 with touchscreen devices, right-to-left languages as well as disable accessibility software thus making it accessible to most of the users of Firefox.

Rust Language of Mozilla – Similarity of Performance

The multi-process feature of Firefox still tends to fall short of what Chrome, Edge and Safari do, since it would be utilising an individual process for each tab. The other browsers employs one process for single tab which means that not only does a crash in the renderer seems to guard the browser shell, but also averts any contagion between tabs where one tab crashing seems to cause another one to perish.

Moreover, it also stops any leakage of data between tabs and provision for one process for each tab is presently due to be available in the first half of 2017. Once this has been accomplished, the extensions would be moved to single processes as well. Rust language of Mozilla is said to be designed to give the similarity of performance as well as control as C++ though minus the weakness of the C++ to security errors.
Rust code has been developed by the company to replace the C++ code which tends to presently handle difficult media formats and this replacement code is being shipped in the stable version of Firefox 48.

Researchers Printed Energy Producing Photographs

Picture/Text Can be Inkjet Printed as Solar Cell

Manufacture of solar cells have been done for a long time from economical substances with various printing procedures and biological solar cells and dye sensitized solar cells in particular have been appropriate for printing. A solar cell that comprises of both solar as well as non-solar sources of light like photons from incandescent bulbs is said to be a photovoltaic cell. Essentially the strategies requires to satisfy two roles namely photogeneration of charge carriers – electrons and holes, in a light captivating substance and separation of the charge carriers to a conductive contact which tends to transmit the electricity.

The conversion is said to be the photovoltaic effect and the arena of research linked to solar cells is called photovoltaic. With the process established in Aalto University,researchers have invented a system where any text or photograph could be printed as a solar cell. As per Aalto University News website, Janne Halme, University Lecturer commented that they wanted to take the idea of printed solar cells further and see if the materials could be inkjet-printed as pictures and text like traditional printing inks. Utilising the latest technologically advanced expertise, any picture or text can be inkjet-printed as a solar cell and when light is captivated in an ordinary ink, it causes heat.

Darker the Colour, More Electricity Produced

Photovoltaic ink though coverts a portion of that energy into electricity and the darker the colour, the more electricity tends to get produced since the human eye is said to be sensitive to that area of the solar radiation spectrum that has the maximum energy density. The most effective solar cell is thus pitch-black. The purpose of a colourful patterned solar is to combine the other properties which tend to take the benefit of light on the same surface like in the case of visual information and graphics.

For instance, this kind of solar cell, installed on an adequately low-powerelectrical device, could be a part of its visual design while simultaneously create the required energy, contemplates Halme. In the case of inkjet printing, the photovoltaic dye can be printed to a shape determined for a selected image file and could be adapted precisely with the darkness and transparency of the various sections of the image.

Postdoctoral Researcher Ghufran Hashmi has commented stating that `the inkjet-dyed solar cells were as effective and long-lasting as the corresponding solar cells prepared in a traditional way and endured more than one thousand hours of constant light and heat stress without signs of performance degradations’.

Progress of Decorative Product Building Integrated Solar Cells

The electrolyte and dye which seemed to be the best had been obtained from the research group in the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, the place where Dr Hashmi had worked as a visiting researcher. Doctoral Candidate Merve Ozkan informs that the most challenging thing was to obtain appropriate solvent for the dye and the right jetting parameters which gave accurate and uniform print quality.

The results of the research have given rise to new possibilities for the progress of decorative product-building-integrated solar cells. The results had been published in the Energy & Environmental Science, the most renowned journal in energy research. The research had been financed mostly by the Academy of Finland and the SELECT + Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Programme of the European Union.

Hackers Hijack a Big Rig Truck’s Accelerator and Brakes

Discoveries of Unsettling Set of Tests – Industrial Vehicles

In recent years, when cyber security researchers had revealed that they could hack a Chevy Impala or a Jeep Cherokee in disabling the brakes of the vehicles or hijack their steering, the outcome seemed to be a distressing wakeup call to the customer automotive industry. At the Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies conference, a team of University of Michigan researchers intended to present the discoveries of unsettling set of tests on industrial vehicles.

On sending digital signals in the internal network of a hug rig truck, the researchers were in a position of doing everything from change the readout of the instrument panel of the truck, trigger unintended acceleration or to even disable a form of semi-trailer’s brakes. The researcher also discovered that evolving these attacks was in fact easier than consumer cars due to a common communication standard in the internal networks of several industrial vehicles, ranging from cement mixers to tractor trailers to school buses.

One of the researchers from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute, Bill Hass has stated that these trucks tend to carry hazard chemicals and large loads. They are the backbone of the economy. If one could cause them with unintended acceleration, it would be too hard to figure out how many bad things could occur with it.

Unintended Acceleration – Tap of a Laptop Keyboard

A video of the researchers portrayed the consequences of unintended acceleration with only a tap of a laptop keyboard. The researchers had targeted several of their attacks on a 2006 semi-trailer though they had also attempted some hacks on a 2001 school bus. On connecting a laptop to the vehicles through their on-board diagnostic ports, they observed that they could look up most of the commands utilising the J1939 open standard which is said to be common to heavy vehicles.

This enabled them in duplicating signals on the networks of vehicles without the laborious reverse engineering other car hackers had to perform in order to replay commands within consumer vehicles, that lacked the calibration of industrial trucks. The other Michigan researcher, Leif Millar had commented that if one desired to hijack someone’s car, they would need to have the knowledge of the make and model and then adopt the attack. With trucks it seems to be all open so it is easy to craft an attack.

Disable the Brake of the Engine of Truck

It was for this reason that their complete truck-hacking project that had started as a University of Michigan class assignment had taken only two months. For the big rig truck that the J1939 standard permitted them in sending commands which accurately altered the statistics of almost any portion of the instrument panel. For instance they were capable of taking-off a full tank of gas when the truck was short of fuel or even avert a warning that the truck would be running out of compressed air in its air brakes, leading the vehicle to apply the emergency brakes without warning.

They could completely disable the brake of the engine of the truck, at 30 miles per hour or less, compelling the driver to rely on other form of brakes which is known as foundation brakes that tends to get overheated and fails. Most upsetting was the fact that the researchers managed to speed up the truck against the will of the driver on sending signals tricking the power train commands of the vehicle to limit the acceleration of the truck or max out its RPMs in any gear. They observed that they stopped short of attempting to put an end to the engine of the truck though they guessed it was a possibility.