Tag Archives: commute

Car Infotainment for Better User Experience

August 27, 2021 The Silo Leave a comment

The car industry follows modern technology. In terms of car design, car security, quality of overall materials used to make the engine and car shell. The better overall quality of the vehicle is the main goal that carmakers want to achieve. But in addition to the car quality, a lot of thought is put into customer experience in the car. Every carmaker wants to make cars more comfortable and more technologically advanced than the previous one. Infotainment is a big part of the customer experience and technology possibilities in a car. Infotainment allows users to have a high experience.

Tesla is updating its in-car internet browser with Google's Chromium, says Elon Musk - Electrek — Tesla is currently the only auto manufacture with a built in touchscreen capable of web browsing but that will soon change as others up their game.

Infotainment as Travel Entertainment

A few high-class cars have touchscreen tablets built into vehicles that allow users to use web browsers. In addition, they are potent sources for gaming and watching movies. The web browser allows users to use it for work, entertainment, and getting information. While the car is standing, the user can access the mailbox through a web browser and read emails, files and send emails. In addition, you can check your business servers and have an emergency meeting on intelligent voice control.

If you want to clear your mind off work while waiting in traffic, you can play online games through the web browser. They have enough power to run demanding HTML5 animations, like in online slots Canada real money websites. Funnily enough, somebody did that, and here’s a video where a couple of guys tried Tesla car’s infotainment center with an online slot game. And it worked!

Either way, there’s plenty of things to do entertainment-wise, you can go on a long trip with your kids in the back seat, and they will see the screen and play with wireless controllers. 

Infotainment as Your Virtual Mechanic Assistant

Infotainment helps the user to take care of the car on time. The engine will send you a warning when it is needed if your car needs an oil change or window cleaner. When your gas reserves become low, the engine will message that your gas is low and the nearest gas station. Infotainment and car computers have become one smart device. Your car screen will show you more than a thousand possible car problems. In addition to the virtual assistant, car sensors are a great addition that infotainment shows you potential street problems. On a touchscreen, you will see cars too close to your car, and the distance in meters or other metrics users choose. Parking sensors are a great help. They will show you the space the whole time until the car stops. Sensors are getting more and more “smart” as they allow users to have a safe environment in and outside the car.

Porsche Classic Communication Management systems - Porsche AG — Porsche Cayenne touchscreens have been available since 2005.

The car industry is evolving fast. Infotainment will soon be a standard part of equipment in cars with a web browser and more additional possibilities. We will see how cars will develop and standard in some family cars from the middle class in the next five years. From Tesla, (who is currently the only car with an advanced infotainment system with a web browser and gaming system) to infotainment centers found in other cars that for now have only GPS and vehicle alerts without options of web browsing. For the Silo, Ika.

Art

Audiobooks Are A Quickly Growing Industry In Canada

October 27, 2019 The Silo Leave a comment

Canada is in the midst of an audiobook boom. Though sales numbers aren’t available yet, they’ve been growing rapidly in the United States, and north of the border, there’s been a substantial influx of publishers entering the audiobook market.

Why Do Canadians Listen to Audiobooks?

What’s behind their growing popularity? It all comes down to the pleasure of listening. Canadians are busy, stressed out, and looking for a way to slow down. Carving time out of the day to sit back and listen to a book is a chance to clear out the cobwebs, recharge, and rebalance. You can listen to audiobooks at the end of a long day, on your commute, on a lazy Saturday morning, or while you’re cleaning up and doing the dishes.

There’s also the appeal of the narrator. Talented voice actors bring great stories from the page to the speaker. They can bring a different personality to a book and new life to a story you already love.

While not every author has a voice made for narration, some of the best audiobooks available are narrated by the authors themselves. Neil Gaiman is a standout in this category. A natural-born storyteller, Gaiman has narrated a number of his own audiobooks and graced other works with his signature voice, though he’s not alone. Writers like Jenny Lawson, Christopher Hitchens, and Seamus Heaney have all made names for themselves narrating their own books.

Indie Canadian Publishers Getting into Audiobooks

It’s not just international publishers that are producing audiobooks in Canada. Independent publishers like House of Anansi and ECW Press have entered the audiobook market, producing some of their own award-winning titles and making them available on various audiobook platforms.

Titles like Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers, Eden Robinson’s Song of a Trickster, and Cherie Dimaline’s bestselling Empire of Wild are just some of the titles available as audiobooks thanks to the recent uptick in the Canadian market.

Great Canadian Talent

Canada has been relatively slow to enter this market, but it’s uncovered a hidden talent pool. As independent publishers have looked toward local actors, they’re discovering Canadians have a knack for narrating. Some audiobook producers are hoping more Canadians will make it easier to find great voice actors for their titles.

How Audiobooks Are Changing Book Clubs

Audiobooks have also opened up new opportunities for book clubs, moving from solitary reading to listening as a social activity. Clubs can now appreciate titles together and talk about what they think chapter by chapter. Club meetings can even be hosted online.

How Do Canadians Get Their Audiobooks?

Subscriptions have become the preferred way for Canadians to get their audiobooks. They work like a “book of the month club.” For example, a subscription with Audible gets you credits to pick one audiobook each month. You can buy more if you’re a voracious listener, and there are usually other membership benefits, such as access to podcasts.

With fast-growing sales and increased production, Canadian book-lovers can look forward to lots of new Canadian titles making the transition to audiobook format.

Sci-Tech

Digital Bus Stops Replacing Paper Timetables In Australia

March 2, 2018 The Silo 1 Comment

Catching a bus in Sydney just got a whole lot smarter, thanks to the new digital bus stops from Mercury Innovation and Visionect. These intelligent signs run on solar power and have been developed on energy-saving electronic paper technology to ease the daily commute in the bustling Australian metropolis.

eStops New digital bus stops have been installed around Sydney’s Town Hall, replacing traditional bus stop paper timetables. Dubbed ‘eStops’ and developed on electronic paper, the displays have been developed with the commuter in mind, making access to travelling information and emergency notifications easier than ever before.

The digital stops provide real-time bus arrivals, as well as capacity information, service notifications and any other relevant commuter information right at the stop.

Best of all, each eStop is solar-powered, running on the plentiful Australian sunshine, a natural resource that Sydney has in abundance.

This makes the display not only simple to install, but also completely independent from the power grid, making it accessible to even the most remote of areas. Transport for NSW can now communicate critical notifications at exactly the right moment, keeping passengers up to date and ensuring accurate information is delivered at the point of action, no matter your location.

Nowhere is this more crucial than in Sydney—one of the busiest cities in the world, the metropolis is host to a variety of special events, such as the upcoming Mardi Gras Parade, with streets closed off and normal city flows disturbed.

The new eStop displays allow service disruption information about such events to be communicated to the public in real-time, before and during the event, allowing for efficient interaction with bus commuters, increasing the service experience for passengers and providing an effective management system for the city.

Not only this, in cases of emergency, the eStop can provide crucial emergency information to not only the bus ridership, but Sydneyites in general, displaying notifications even during blackouts, when other digital displays fail.

Based on electronic paper technology, they eStops have been designed and manufactured by Australian engineering company Mercury Innovation and the EU-based Visionect, the world leaders in outdoor e-paper products.

The eStop is another breakthrough product in the partnership between Visionect and Mercury. Together, Mercury and Visionect are making outdoor sustainable signage a reality, following the success of their 2016 installation of solar powered e-paper traffic signs in Sydney, a world first, running uninterrupted with an unprecedented zero failure rate more than 2 years later.

Culture

Ontario Greens – Average Commute In GTHA Is Eighty Minutes

May 21, 2014 The Silo Leave a comment

According to a 2011 Swedish study couples in which one partner commutes a long way to work (more than 45 mins.) are 40% more likely to divorce than couples who don’t have to travel so far for their jobs. More: http://umu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:415050

Mike Schreiner, leader of the Green Party of Ontario and candidate in Guelph, wants to get you home faster and will be honest about how to do it.

“Our great grandparents invested in Niagara Falls to power our homes and businesses. Our grandparents invested in 400 series highways to move the goods we produce. Those investments have powered Ontario’s economy,” says Schreiner. “Our generation must invest in the transit infrastructure needed to move our economy forward in the 21st century.”

The average daily commute time in the GTHA is 80 minutes long. That’s the equivalent of eight 40-hour work weeks every year — or about seven years in a working lifetime. Gridlock costs us $6 billion a year and will cost more than double that by the end of the decade.

“We can fix gridlock for less than it costs,” says Tim Grant, Green Party Transportation Critic and candidate in Trinity-Spadina. “It mystifies me that the other parties promise the moon but can’t tell us where the money is coming from, as if we’re children who believe in the tooth fairy.” The Green Party is willing to say how much it will cost and where the money is going to come from. We propose a combination of province-wide and urban-focused mechanisms (including a gas tax, congestion charges, commercial parking levies, and land value capture) to produce the revenue necessary — $3 billion a year — to build and operate the public transit and transportation infrastructure we need.

“For $250 a year for each person in Ontario, we can solve a lot of problems,” says Scheriner. “We can save people months stuck in traffic. We can lower costs for businesses trying to get goods to market. We can help employees take the jobs they want because they know they can get to work.”

The Green Party is committed to bringing better transit to Ontario, and honesty, integrity, and good public policy to Queen’s Park. For the Silo, Candice Lepage.

Supplemental- How commuting sucks the life out of you http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/07/qa-why-commuting-sucks-the-life-out-of-you/