Monday, February 15, 2010

Now Your Dog Can Tweet

Interesting item on Mashable about a new product from Mattel. Puppy Tweets dog collar lets your dog's movement create auto generated tweets through blue tooth connection on collar.

While this may or may not seem silly, to me this is really about the Internet of Things. What if instead of tweeting it was sending GPS co-ordinates. There are probably already products that do this.

What if instead of being on your dog, it was on your car - oh -like OnStar or the new Ford Sync products?

Why not use that stream to charge insurance rates? Been thought of a long time ago.

How many remember the original use of the OnStar system was to create a record of events in the 30 seconds before an accident to use for denying the claim?

1 comment:

Chris Beeler said...

WilliDuke,
Your blog post is prophetic. You mentioned using this type of information to establish auto insurance rates. Have you heard of MyRate from Progressive?
Just introduced in Georgia January 15th 2010.
MyRate is a transmitting device that if a customer accepts, will monitor the vehicles use in exchange for a possible discount.
Now, here's the very cool thing: the user/insured may view the results of the device daily and Progressive will provide estimated savings at the next renewal based on the driving information collected.
If the driver has a good day the device reports a projected savings; driver has a bad day and device detracts those savings or reports no projected savings.
The idea is really cutting edge and you can check out more at my blog post entry www.beelerinsurance.com/blog
I should have the post ready by Thursday Feb 17th.
Chris Beeler