Driving Tracker Zubie Wins First Nokia Connected Car Funding
Need a backseat driver? There’s an app for that…
The only pedal you’ll be pushing to the metal in the future will be the brake. Even then, your car or an aftermarket device will probably chide you if you hit it too hard. That’s because devices that plug into your car will offer you suggestions—and commercial deals—to improve your driving behavior. Last week Zubie, the South Carolina maker of such a device, announced an investment of US $8 million from Nokia’s Connected Car Fund (see our coverage of the fund’s May launch). This is the fund’s first investment, signaling how important Nokia considers this class of device.
“We’re competing in just a massive market and that’s always exciting for an entrepreneur,” says Zubie CEO Tim Kelly. A 2013 report from Transparency Market Research estimated that the connected car market could grow more than 30 percent per year and reach $132 billion by 2019. While the connected cars of the future may need sophisticated communications tools to alert one another of their positions, known as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, Zubie and similar devices on the market today focus more on recording and offering driving information to the driver or owner of a vehicle.
More: Driving Tracker Zubie Wins First Nokia Connected Car Funding - IEEE Spectrum