If you’re the kind of person who loves to grab a donut and cup of coffee in the morning but hates running into sociopathic, racist women bent on destroying every remaining shred of humanity as we know it, General Motors is working on an automobile app system just for you. On Thursday, GM CEO Dan Akerson spoke at the Chief Executives’ Club of Boston – my membership is still pending – and he issued a challenge to all of you smarty pants web designers out there.
Having previously announced its intention of creating an actual in-dash app store that allows vehicle owners to buy programs to customize their cars as they please, GM is reaching out to software developers to create the best and coolest apps they can possibly think of.
“To really blow this out, we need to borrow from the smartphone playbook and entice thousands of ‘codaholics’ to write apps for our cars,” Akerson said at the Chief Executives’ Club of Boston, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. “With an army of coders working to write 4G-optimized programming for our cars, our GM App Shop may someday be as popular as iTunes or the Android Marketplace.”
“How cool would it be to have your car automatically call Dunkin’ Donuts when you’re a mile away so your coffee and cruller are ready and paid for when you pull up?” Akerson asked. “And wouldn’t your kids love to stream ‘Fast and Furious 6’ into the backseat instead of endlessly watching the same DVD for hours on end? Some of this is possible today. Some is still years off. But all of it will require far more bandwidth and much higher download speeds.” (Via the Detroit Free Press)
Now I’m no big city, fancy pants app designer type, as my software knowledge is limited to clicking download and praying that I don’t have to call customer service and cry because I can’t understand “Steve” through his thick accent. But I have a really cool idea for a car app if any programmers out there want to team up and help make it a reality. Let’s make a program that changes a minivan into a sports car like in the Inspector Gadget opening.
Also, I want a dog that can help me walk from rooftop to rooftop. So get cracking on that, geeks.
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