The Dash Driver Network/Community
As a subscription service that requires a new CE hardware purchase, we are expecting that a lot of our initial customers will be Gen Xers (like myself) and Baby Boomers. Most of them didn’t grow up posting pictures on their on-line profiles and now have busy lives and aren’t looking for new communities to join. Thus, we haven’t been as focused on creating a sense of “community” for our future customers as some other companies here in Silicon Valley targeting different demographics.
Our unique approach to traffic does however create a network of probes out of all of the Dash devices, ensuring that each device always has up-to-the-minute traffic flow data. We’ve been careful to design our system so that this data is both collected anonymously and automatically, ensuring privacy and eliminating any extra work for our customers. We call it the Dash Driver Network and not “community.”
However, during our National Road Test this summer (we selected our testers from our target demos) we saw a number of our testers recognizing that they were part of this broader community of Dash users and proactively reaching out on our forums. Some posted about their first “Dash sightings” in other cars, wondering who those people were. Others noticed that their devices gave them traffic flow data on arterial roads or areas they did not expect to find other Dash drivers and posted asking if someone else had recently been driving in those areas. One of our forum threads went down multiple pages with testers volunteering where they drove and when to help put identities behind the traffic data others in those areas were seeing on their devices.
While “anonymous” and “automatic” remain core to the traffic system we are building, this community dynamic was fun to watch and one that we look forward to developing further in the future.
October 13th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
I think it’ll definitely be more “community” based in the beggining — always looking for other nearby DASH users to see how often traffic is being updated from other units.
Any chance there could be an option on the unit to see how many other DASH users there are in an X mile radius?
October 19th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
What are the possibilities of “reporting” speed traps? Is it possible for a dash user to “push a button” to report a sighting of a speed trap and have that data propogate to other dash users? If possible, perhaps the data could be “aged” - showing the most current points as bright red, aging to darker red, orange, yellow, and disappearing… This “aging” could be over a 10-minute duration… I leave it up to you…
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:28 am
Thanks for the suggestion Steve. We are exploring ways for you to easily tell how timely and accurate the data is on your device. Knowing how big the dash network currently is in your area is something our road testers also asked for and we’re considering it as part of our future roadmap. Since we will upgrade our customers’ software OTA, even our initial customers will get our new features when we later role them out.
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:30 am
awurst: Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, two-way connectivity makes features like the one you’re suggesting possible and it specifically is one we’ve been contemplating for the future.