There already are some drive-by-wire cars being sold, including a few (in Japan) that can parallel park themselves. And while I fear that anti-terrorist worries may stand in the way of self-driving and automatic cars, one early application, before we can get full self-driving, would be tele-operated cars, the the remote driver in an inexpensive place, like Mexico.

Now I don't know if the world is ready, safety-wise for a remote chauffeur in a car driving down a public street, where it could hit another car or pedestrian, even if the video was very high-res and the latency quite low. But parking is another story. I think a remote driver could readily park a car in a valet lot kept clear of pedestrians. In fact, because you can drive very slowly to do this, one can even tolerate longer latencies, perhaps all the way to India. The remote operator might actually have a better view for parking, with small low-res cameras mounted right at the bumpers for a view the seated driver can't have. They can also have automatic assists (already found in some cars) to warn about near approach to other cars.

The win of valet parking is large -- I think at least half the space in a typical parking lot is taken up with lanes and inter-car spacing. In addition, a human-free garage can have some floors only 5' high for the regular cars, or use those jacks around found in some valet garages that stack 2 cars on top of one another. So I'm talking possibly almost 4 times the density. You still need some lanes of course, except for cars you are certain won't be needed on short notice (such as at airports, train stations etc.)

The wins of remote valet parking include the ability to space cars closely (no need to open the doors to get out) and eventually to have the 5' high floors. In addition, remote operators can switch from vehicle to vehicle instantly -- they don't have to run to the car to get it. They can switch from garage to garage instantly, meaning their services would be 100% utilized.

Read on...

GPS receivers with bluetooth are growing in popularity, and it makes sense. I want my digital camera to have bluetooth as well so it can record where each picture is taken.

But as I was drivng from the airport last night, I realized that my cell phone has location awareness in it (for dialing 911 and location aware apps) and my laptop has bluetooth in it, and mapping software if connected to a GPS -- so why couldn't my cell phone be talking to my laptop to give it my location for the mapping software? Or ideed, why won't it tell a digital camera that info as well?

Next week (Mon-Tuesday) I will be speaking at David Isenberg's "Freedom To Connect" conference, on an open net, in Silver Spring, Maryland (Washington DC.)

April 10 I will be at UCSB's CITS conference (Santa Barbara, obviously) on growing network communities.

The next week April 19-21 sees the annual Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop, always a good time.

See you there.

Jeff Pulver is a giant fan of the SlingBox, a small box you hook up to your TV devices and ethernet, so you can access your home TV from anywhere. It includes a hardware encoder, infrared controllers to control your cable box, Tivo or DVD player, and software for Windows to watch the stream. The creators decided to build it when they found they couldn't watch their San Francisco Giants games while on business trips.

And I get that part. For those who spend a great deal of time on the road, the hotel TV systems are pretty sucky. They only have a few channels (and rarely Comedy Central, which has the only show I both watch on a daily basis and which needs to be watched sooner rather than later) as well as overpriced movies. But at the same time you have to be spending a lot of time on the road to want this. My travel itineraries are intense enough that watching TV is the last thing I want to do on them.

But at the same time it's hard not to be reminded of the kludge this is, especially hooked to a Tivo. And if you have a Tivo or simliar device, you know it's the only way you will watch TV, live TV is just too frustrating. I don't have Tivo any more, I have MythTV. MythTV is open, which is to say it stores the recorded shows on disk in files like any other files. If I wanted to watch them somewhere else, I could just copy or stream them easily from the MythTV box, and that would be a far better experience than decoding them to video, re-encoding them with the SlingBox and sending them out. Because of bandwith limits, you can't easily do this unless you were to insert a real-time transcoder to cut the bandwidth down, ideally one that adapts to bandwidth as the Slingbox does. And I don't think anybody has written one of these, because I suspect the MythTV developers are not that too-much-time-on-the-road SlingBox customer.

(Admittedly the hardware transcode would be useful, but a 3GHZ class machine should be capable of doing it in software, and really, this should just be software.) For watching live TV, if you cared, you probably could do that in Myth TV. If you cared.

So the SlingBox...