I'm giving away a freebie here ;)
I've had this idea brewing in my head for years now for something I call "CAR CONNECT" where you can connect with another car driver or owner via their license number.
With "CAR CONNECT" you can "DIAL" someone's license plate and send them an email, SMS, or perhaps and actual phone call. With the voice to text conversion as good as it is today, the easiest anonymous implementation would be text obviously.
Background: People not old enough to remember CDs don't remember the day when we could go "Breaker one nine, does that red Chevy Nova by the Whipple exit on 101 got their ears on?". I met tons of people just driving down the road chatting randomly, some even turned into friends out of the car. Cell phones came along and we lost that ability.
How it would work is like minded people that don't mind having someone connect with them, provide CAR CONNECT methods to contact them which would be completely blind and anonymous, managed by Car Connect's server. If you decide to disclose your details to the other person, it's easy, but only with your express authorization.
For voice conversations it would work like the walkie-talkie apps where it records a brief voice packet and sends it to the other person, not an actual phone call. That allows it to be anonymous as no phone numbers, email or SMS is disclosed, on the server knows.
Possible uses:
- Chat with other drivers like the old CB days
- Let someone know their car has a problem, like smoke pouring out the back
- Alert people their parked car as lights on, brakes failed and it rolled, vandals at work, etc.
- Report a stolen car, maybe while it's moving, to the owner from the license alone!
If you never used a CB back in the day, imagine driving on a deserted road late at night and you're tired and lonely. You used to be able to chat with anyone on that road to help stay awake and maybe make a friend. Sometimes we'd stop at the same gas station or a truck stop for food.
Sometimes even stopping at a hotel together, hehe
With Car Connect you could do that again!
Also, you could make a group chat just like on IM where more than one car could hear the walkie-talkie chat mode or get the same text message, all completely voice controlled either way.
With tech like Google Glass it could locate the license plate, scan it and send a message with a simple voice command.
Totally anonymous, totally opt-in, totally awesome and it could even be a life saver if someone sees something you don't know about, like smoke pouring out from under the car from an engine fire...
... or help you meet that cute person in the other car ;)
Could be a total game changer for road based communications if anyone wants to build it and more of the tech is probably open source and just needs to be bolted together.
You could probably even help people find others to chat with based on GPS locations and direction of travel, make a "caravan list" and make auto chat channels.
I can think of all sorts of cool possibilities if you can just get people to provide the license to phone mapping to get them into the network.
I think it would need to be linked to something like 4sq or Twitter to really take off.
That's it!
I'd love to be a customer but I'm too busy to build it ;)
