More and more people are spending more and more time in their cars. IBM says the average commuter spends between 10 and 20 hours per week unproductively. To prove its strategy, IBM conducted consumer focus groups across the country, asking drivers what they wanted to accomplish behind the wheel.
Productivity tops the list, accessing e-mail, calendars and address books.
Navigation, roadside assistance and entertainment make the list too. When we talked about this and talked about the features, people were talking about price points comparable to a laptop or something like that. And what we believe is that it's much more affordable than that to enable a car or start the basic services. We also talked about the notion of a monthly service fee and the model they liked the most was the cable model. But even as IBM and others zero in on how much the consumer is willing to pay for information technology in their cars, some serious technical challenges remain.