Event Information:

• Fri

  31

  Jan

  2014

  PubNub Releases Connected Car Solution Kit

  Michael Vizard, January 31st, 2014

  Connected cars are one of the primary use cases for the Internet of Things (IoT) that capture the imagination of the general public and developers alike. At the Machine-2-Machine (M2M) Evolution Conference that was held this week at part of a larger ITEXPO event, PubNub announced that it is making available a Connected Car Solution Kit that developers can employ to access a range back-end cloud services that will enable to them to more easily build and deliver connected car applications.

  Developers can access PubNub’s cloud services via APIs included in the Connected Car Solution Kit. These are building blocks the developers will need to build real-time applications such as taxi dispatch and hailing applications or entire fleet management systems, PubNub CEO Todd Greene says. The services include the ability to push data, store and playback data streams, analytics, presence, mobile application management and security—all of which are delivered and managed via 14 global data centers, Green says.

  

  The PubNub Connected Car Solution Kit, which supports more than 50 SDKs, provides access to services such as the ability to track vehicle locations, the state of the vehicle and even whether the vehicle has exceeded a certain geographical boundary.

  Greene says the Connected Car Solution Kit is designed to make it easier for developers to bring connected car applications to market without having to build and then manage multiple data centers. It’s not uncommon, notes Greene, for an organization to develop an application only to discover it doesn’t have the capital investment resources needed to manage that application at scale. PubNub takes that uncertainty off the table by providing access to a set of distributed data centers that help ensure application performance by minimizing network latency, he adds.

  PubNub is already seeing traffic levels approaching “Twitter-like levels,” Greene says—yet the biggest challenge facing the company is the tendency of many organizations to want to build everything on their own rather than leverage an existing cloud service.

  Connected car applications are just a small segment of the thousands of applications that already run on PubNub, including videoconferencing applications developed using WebRTC and a BitCoin Exchange application, says Greene. The Connected Car Solution Kit was announced the heels of a recent alliance that PubNub struck with Ford Motor Co. under which the automotive maker is working with PubNub to expose its APIs to create connected car applications. These applications may wind up doing more to show people the potential of the IoT than any other apps.