All Pages Tagged: ‘GPS’

CSR, in conjunction with the Telecom Council, is today hosting the 6th annual Locations & Beyond Summit at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Palo Alto, California, bringing together leaders in the location ecosystem with the aim of working together to tap the enormous potential for location services.

In his Analyst Overview, Roger Lanctot of Strategy Analytics provided an Analyst Overview in which he declared that smartphone connectivity is the new frontier in the car.
“The iPod/iPad are transforming the design of the car, much to the consternation of auto manufacturers,” Lanctot said. “But several auto manufacturers are embracing these platforms, and finding that doing so helps sell cars – as contrasted to simply putting modems into cars.”
Who’s doing it right? Lanctot cited BMW, Ford and GM, all of whom have scalable, consistent platforms worldwide.
Other observations:
• Android IS coming into the car, especially in China.
• A plethora of new, location-aware social networking applications are being developed.
• The industry is in transition as players try to figure out how to connect smartphones safely and easily. Manufacturers who focus on this will sell cars.

Telematics Detroit is one of the top automotive industry events. The conference attracts leading vehicle manufactures and tier one suppliers and enables them to discuss their visions for telematics technologies that will give consumers a better driving experience and which are more enjoyable, safer, and at lower personal and environmental cost.

As a recognised leader in location and connectivity technology, CSR is always keen to have a presence at such an important event. For the 2012 conference, we prepared a number of innovative solutions to wow our visitors at our booth. Demos of these were filmed at the event by our team and can be viewed on our YouTube channel.

To express our vision of a more enjoyable in-car experience, we prepared a ZiiSound D5 Bluetooth® Speaker and a Motorola RAZR android smartphone to demonstrate the superb audio streaming quality of aptX®. Both commercially available products are equipped with aptX® CODEC technology and deliver CD-quality sound over a Bluetooth connection. The sound coming out of the speaker was well defined and the bass was unmistakable. We were certainly noticed by Telematics visitors! With more and more consumers carrying their favourite music in their phone, those who experienced the sound quality expressed how much they were looking forward to having the technology also available in their car stereo. View the demo

aptX® capability is not limited to just delivering CD-quality audio via Bluetooth. Another market defining feature of aptX® is its low latency. We set up two BlueCore5-Multimedia boards to stream audio from a PC playing a video clip via A2DP over to a headset demonstrating the differences between aptX® and standard CODEC in the “lip-sync” audio visual quality. The difference is readily noticeable by those tried it out and aptX® was very well perceived. View the demo

On the safety side, we prepared a Bluetooth low energy (BTle) multifunction steering wheel. The advantages of using BTle to replace the wired control mechanism are cost and weight reduction. It is estimated that each single wire costs car manufacturer one US dollar to install. For this particular steering wheel, five wires were replaced with CSR1001™ development board which sent commands (e.g. audio volume up/down, answering phone, skip track etc.) to our SiRFprimaII™ SOC platform. This demonstration created a lot of buzz and visitors at our booth were very excited by by this first-of-its-kind demonstration. View the demo

We also demonstrated RealVNC connectivity software running on our SiRFprimaII™ SOC platform. The software projected the full user interface of a smart phone onto SiRFprimaII™. The idea is that consumers will be able to use the projection on SiRFprimaII™ to directly control the phone: to start a navigation application, for example. In effect, consumers can bring their favourite/latest/greatest application into their in-vehicle infotainment system. The true uniqueness about our demonstration is the wireless connection (via Wi-Fi®) instead of the wired connection between the phone and SiRFprimaII™. This was a really impressive demonstration. View the demo

CSR’s introduction of the automotive grade CSRG35ea – SiRFstarVTM Automotive, the first announced product based on the SiRFstarV ™ architecture, was also well received. With this new market leading automotive grade GNSS platform CSR is positioned to address global, as well as regional preferences and requirements such as Glonass for Russia, Galileo for Europe, and Compass for China. Furthermore, the additional satellites accessible by SiRFstarV™ improve position accuracy and availability and will enable CSR customers to develop best-in-class next generation products for the Infotainment and Telematics markets.

CSR had a great show that attracted new interest in our technologies and strengthened our existing customer relationships. I’d like to thank everyone who attended from CSR for helping to wow our audience. And a special thanks to those who made those demonstrations possible.

Regards

Jimmy Pai
Technical Marketing Manager

CSR Takes Location to the Next Level with Offerings Enabling Indoor Location and Premium In-Vehicle Infotainment for Mainstream.

Kanwar Chadha, CMO and board member of CSR and founder of SiRF, announces CSR’s two new platforms

Today we at CSR are very proud to announce new products that will take location to the next level and enable exciting new applications that significantly improve the user experience. The products are SiRFstarV with SiRFusion – an end-to-end location platform – and SiRFprimaII, a complete auto infotainment platform.

Distribution of information is changing profoundly. Until recently, PCs held the content and applications for information delivery, we are moving to a cloud-connected world. This will have a major impact on how we use products and location technologies.

Location has traditionally been associated with navigation, but is now becoming a fundamental contextual element for delivering relevant information from the cloud to people on the go. Regardless of where people are – indoors or outdoors, in their cars, or walking – more accurate and reliable location is essential to enhance the consumer experience with a broad range of applications. That fundamental shift – from auto navigation to location with you all the time – needs to work seamlessly from outdoors to indoors.

In launching SiRFstarV, our new location platform, we are fusing multiple technologies together to enable true indoor location. It supports signals from multiple satellites – not just GPS, but Russia’s Glonass, China’s Compass and Europe’s Galileo – and will also support multiple radio signals including Wi-Fi, cellular and other signals to make indoor location better. We are also taking data from various sensors such as gyros to augment location accuracy. This combination of satellite, radio and sensor signals will give consumers a better location experience.

We’ve also greatly improved power management: when you switch on your navigation/location, your battery is compromised significantly. To address that, we have employed very sophisticated power management – looking at location as a whole and managing power depending on needs of each individual application.

The second product we’re introducing today is SiRFprimaII, a complete, connected auto infotainment system platform. SiRFprimaII has more than location in it – it also provides complete visualisation capability to bring a next-generation experience. It’s like augmented reality: you can see not only maps but the buildings around it and other things beyond your visual range, which makes the navigation experience much better, and boosts safety because you have a better idea of your environment as you drive around.

Our goal is to bring this down to a few hundred dollars to ensure widespread consumer adoption.

This is an important day for CSR! I’m writing this in a few quiet minutes after the shareholder votes which confirmed the merger of Zoran with CSR. This process began months ago and I want to reflect on why this transaction is happening and why I feel this is an exciting moment for all of us.

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