Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The taxi’s waiting, it’s honking its horn, time to go to the airport.

Yes, the passport is in my pocket. I checked five minutes ago.

Of course, the cost of checking again, just one more time, is tiny. Hardly worth discussing with myself. And compared to the cost of being wrong, of missing the flight… go ahead, check again.

And like giving into a toddler every time he whines for ice cream, this is the problem.

The lizard brain seeks constant reassurance. It will wheedle and argue and debate with the rest of your head, pushing for one tiny bit of evidence, some sort of proof that everything will be okay.

Don’t do it.

When you indulge the lizard, it gains power. It doesn’t walk away ashamed, humiliated at its anxiety. Instead, it merely sidesteps and looks for the next thing to worry about, because, ready for this? It’s nice to be reassured.

Developing the reassurance habit is easy to do and hard to kick. The problem is this: there are some ventures where no reassurance is possible. There is important work for you to do where no proof is available.

If you’ve trained the lizard brain that reassurance is forthcoming, it will scream even louder when those projects that don’t come with proof are at hand.

Kim Dotcom is a hard man to reach. The founder of Megaupload.com, the popular file-sharing site the Federal prosecutors just shut down, has been accused of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated content uploaded to his service–movies, music, TV shows, and so forth. But the chief innovation officer, who oversees more than 30 employees in nine countries, has made a business of testing the legal limits–his umbrella company has pulled in roughly $175 million, according to court filings, of which he received more than $42 million in 2010.

Inquiries to Megaupload over the past year have not been responded to; when I reached out to a source this week who had a connection to Dotcom, the source responded, “Sorry, but Kim told us explicitly not to put him in contact with journalists.” But Dotcom hasn’t been able to evade the Feds: Prosecutors have indicted him and six other defendants over online piracy, and are seeking the forfeiture of $175 million, dozens of bank accounts around the globe, as well as a stable of Mercedes-Benzes, Maseratis, Rolls-Royces, and Lamborghinis boasting vanity license plates that likely reflect the Dotcom era of Megaupload: “Good,” “Evil,” “CEO,” “God,” “Stoned,” “Mafia,” “Hacker,” and perhaps most telling, “Guilty.”

According to court documents, Dotcom owns roughly 68% Megaupload.com, Megaclick.com, and Megapix.com, subsidiary sites of the Mega Conspiracy brand. Dotcom also owns 100% of registered companies Megavideo.com, Megaporn.com, and Megapay.com. This family of sites grew to include more than 180 million registered users. Premium members of the service helped bring Mega Conspiracy more than $150 million, according to the Feds, while online advertising help the company bring in another $25 million.

To give some sense of just how large Dotcom’s dot-com business grew, between roughly 2006 through 2011, Mega Conspiracy’s PayPal account is said to have received over $110 million from subscribers and other associated persons. Fees for accepting payments on PayPal range from about 2% to as high as 3.9% for international transactions; thus, even a low-ball estimate would suggest PayPal likely made millions of dollars from Dotcom’s operations.

At a Hewlett Packard event in late October, company suits showed off the latest HP tablet: the Slate 2. The second version of the Slate 500, HP’s Slate 2 is a thick, Windows 7-based device targeting the enterprise that comes with a stylus and starts at $699. It might be hard for consumers to imagine buying this tablet over the best-selling iPad 2, which starts at just $499. But for many in the enterprise space, a Windows-based mobile device is almost required to integrate with Windows workplace IT solutions. Is the enterprise’s dependence on Windows going to drive sales of Slates?

“Absolutely,” said Mike Hockey, worldwide public relations manager for HP’s $40 billion personal systems group. “What’s happening here–and you can call it the iPad effect–is that you get a lot of people in the enterprise saying, ‘Wow, we see the potential of tablets. Great. Now, how can I integrate that into my environment?’ But all their systems are based on Windows. They have custom legacy apps that only work with, say, x86 Windows environments. So this HP Slate is the right product for them.”

In other words, OEMs like HP are depending on outmoded Windows-based enterprise systems to drive sales of their hardware–and the strategy appears to be working. Windows PC and tablet manufacturers will sell $69 billion in hardware to enterprises this year, says Forrester Research. But Apple is catching up. Forrester estimates that Apple will sell $19 billion in Macs and iPads to enterprises in 2012, a 58% leap over last year. What’s more, a new report out this week from IDG Connect found the iPad is dominating other tablets in the enterprise, indicating that HP can’t depend on Windows forever.

According to the survey, 67% of professionals in the U.S. use their iPad at work, and 93% of professionals use their iPad for work communication. More telling is the 51% of IT decision-makers who always use their iPad at work and the 79% who always use the device on the road, figures that rocket even higher in other regions of the world. The point here is that despite the enterprise’s traditional dependence on Windows, it appears businesses are becoming more and more open to finding solutions with Apple. That’s why during a recent earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook boasted that 92% of Fortune 500 companies have either tested or deployed iPads–a remarkable feat, considering Steve Jobs never had much interest in the enterprise market.

But talking to representatives at HP’s event in October, it would appear the company believes any “iPad effect” would only lead to more tablet interest in the enterprise market, and thus more inevitable interest in Windows-based tablets like the Slate 2.

“To be honest with you, we’ve had many customers look at the iPad, but they’re not necessarily looking for that whiz-bang experience,” said Kyle Thornton, category manager for emerging products at HP. “Let me tell you, for a lot of customers, the Windows 7-based Slate performance is more than enough for what they’re looking for. They’re not looking for a quad-core processor … Now, the CEO might get the iPad, but for the 500 or 2,000 employee deployment? They’re not going to get iPads. They’re going to get something like this Slate 2.”

Added Hockey, “That’s what the iPad has done. There’s been a great awareness of tablets, and people saying, ‘That’s cool. How do I bring that into my business?’ And, in some cases, it works. But in many other cases, there’s a compatibility issue, because they’re running their old systems. No one is going to rewrite software just for a new processor or a new OS.”

“Our point is that it really meets business requirements,” said Thornton. “In the medical field, for example, those guys have invested tens of millions of dollars in custom apps, more so on training and hardware. They’re not going to go tomorrow to buy iPads to replace them. Even if their clients want it. Because they’d have to reinvest that money. It’s very expensive.”

The key point here: The enterprise can’t have iPads “even if they want it.” This mindset to some degree has helped HP, which is able to leverage the enterprise’s addiction and dependence on Windows-based IT solutions to sell its own products. But the industry is shifting away from that mindset–a trend commonly referred to as the “consumerization of IT.” It’s a shift that’s having as much of an impact on workplace productivity–many companies have implemented “Bring Your Own Device” programs–as it is on corporate hiring. A recent Cisco study found that allowing employees to bring whatever devices to work that they prefer–whether an iPad or Android tablet–can boost recruitment rates.

Yet according to HP’s reps, the enterprise might think different than the consumer market–but not in favor of Apple.

“They think totally different than you and I would think,” Thornton explained. “You and I might look at different devices on the market and go, ‘Oh, obviously the iPad is the right choice for me,’ But the enterprise doesn’t think that way.”

Well, the enterprise has begun to change its thinking. Perhaps they might take a gander at the TouchPad instead?

Apple announced a new iBooks Author App on Thursday that makes creating an Apple ebook a drag-and-drop process.

Using the app, which was announced at the same time as a new textbook experience for iPad, users can drag a Word file into a book creation space. The app automatically determines the best way to lay out the book and creates appropriate sections and headers. Users can then drag and resize images within the text and add terms and definitions.

Users can preview their books on their iPads or publish them directly to the iBook store.

Apple’s Peter Schiller called iBooks Author “the most advanced, most powerful, yet most fun ebook authoring tool every created.”

You can judge for yourself whether he’s right, starting today. The app is free and available on the Mac App Store.

For about a decade or so, Cessna proudly produced the world’s fastest civilian jet, the Citation X. Apparently the engineers at Cessna weren’t too happy when the Gulfstream G650 took that title a few years back, because they’ve been hard at work on an updated Citation X. Test pilots have completed the first flight of the plane, now known as the Citation Ten.

The new business jet is a little bigger, flies a bit further, carries a little more and runs a bit more efficiently than the Citation X. And according to Cessna’s preliminary specs, it can cruise a little bit faster as well. The Citation X’s official max cruise speed at altitude was 525 KTAS (604 MPH), while the Ten is expected to peg its max cruise at 527 KTAS.

Of course the big question is whether it will reclaim the fastest jet title from Gulfstream.

The truth is, the cruise speeds of both aircraft are very close, within a handful of knots. And most of the time these jets will be cruising at similar speeds, and well below their top speeds because it takes a lot of fuel to get those last few knots. Also, on transcontinental trips, or any flight at the edge of an airplane’s range, it’s better to fly a bit more slowly so you don’t have to stop for fuel. Your flight is faster by flying slower.

That being said, there’s plenty of pride, not to mention marketing muscle, in being able to say you produce the world’s fastest civilian jet. To claim the title pilots must make a level flight, without descending. This is usually done at the higher cruise altiudes.

The Citation X first flew in 1993 (Arnold Palmer got the first one, in 1996); its maximum speed is Mach 0.92. The use of a Mach speed rather than knots is common for jets for a range of reasons, but the important bit is Gulfstream achieved Mach 0.925 with its G650 a few years back. That’s only about three knots faster, but it counts.

Cessna is claiming the new Citation Ten will be able to cruise a few knots faster thanks to the new design and new engines. That should translate to a handful of knots at top speed as well. But we’re guessing Cessna wants to be careful not to say too much until the test pilots have had a chance to prove the numbers in flight testing.

Of course the ultra-fast vaporplane (aka supersonic business jet) is still a few years away.

Photo: Cessna

Via Wired Autopia: http://www.wired.com/autopia/

I recently watched the 1966 movie Blow-Up. As the movie trailer warns, director Michelangelo Antonioni’s “camera never flinches” from the “dazzle and the madness of London today!” It’s a great movie that weaves the sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll scene of the mid-1960s into the life of a “wild” fashion photographer. These were the holy trinity of shocking topics of the day, but the movie seems tame and quaint by today’s standards. Which leads one to ask–does anything shock us anymore?

People want to feel alive. We want to have new experiences and see things that surprise, inspire, or yes, even shock us a little. But we live in an Internet-exposed world that gives us all we want, raw and in real time, and we have an “I’ve seen it all before” attitude about everything. Yet companies are more cautious in this politically correct, overly litigious, and socially enabled environment. According to Trendwatching.com, consumers are “able to handle much more honest conversations, more daring innovations, more quirky flavors, more risqué experiences–these consumers increasingly appreciate brands that push the boundaries.” So companies had better figure out how to let their brands thrive in today’s world.

Just where is that boundary, and just how daring are today’s marketers? How do they straddle that fine line between engaging and offending? What happens when the unreasonable objections of rampant political correctness threaten to stifle their best ideas and creative content? Here are a few guideposts to follow in searching for ideas in advertising that could break through.

Understand that it’s all relative: What is offensive to me might make you laugh. What works with a male audience might be way off the mark for women. Regions, religions, and races all possess socially acceptable norms. Because the Internet makes everything accessible to everyone all the time, whatever you do–anything you do–that is remotely controversial will be criticized by someone. Get used to it. You can’t be universally loved and hope to shock people. They don’t go hand in hand. Find the courage to speak to your consumers in a way they will love and care less about what the “others” will say about your brand. See what K-Swiss’ “CEO” Kenny Powers says.

Give them a surprise rather than a shock: Shock makes us stop. Surprise makes us think. Brands need to build relationships that are lasting. Just shocking someone doesn’t mean they will think about or engage with your brand. For a brand to engage, quite often that means getting them to rethink what role the brand could play in their lives. If you do things that are unexpected, fresh, and surprising for your brand, your consumers will start thinking about you in a different light. How best to be surprising? Do or say that thing you always dream of and have never dared express. Good advice in both marketing and life. (See Ally Bank.)

Let your audience help: I just saw a play in New York called Sleep No More, a wildly inventive and brave attempt to create a theatrical experience that brought the audience into a voyeuristic partnership with the actors. We became part of the show, and once you realize that you’re part of the experience, you become less critical because you feel some level of ownership. Brands need to do that same thing. Have the consumers contribute ideas and content to the brand’s story, and its relevance and appropriateness become self-regulating. (See Doritos.)

Lighten up: Companies are way too serious and afraid. I get it. Anything that is different, shocking, or surprising can create extra work and add some risk to the equation. Anything interesting you want to do with your brand will have corporate detractors. Fear drives too many corporations. But your consumers will applaud you for taking a risk, sharing a laugh, being brutally honest about the world in which your brand lives. To do something mildly interesting, let alone shocking, often takes too much effort and the best ideas die before they see the light of day. Have courage, lighten up, and do something surprising. (See Domino’s.)

Don’t be mean-spirited: It’s easy to be shocking at someone’s expense. Don’t. (See Groupon’s much-reviled Tibet ad.)

Realize that candor can be shocking: There is a famous ad by the explorer Ernest Shackleton that says, “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.” Pretty shocking. But completely honest. Marketers get a bad rap (and often deservingly so) for trying to overspin their message. Be straight with your audience. Tell them what you want from them. In an over-hyped world, they will appreciate the candor, and you might just get better results. (See DIRECTV.)

Give it the family test: Your grandmother knows (the cool one on your mother’s side). Your kid knows (the smart one who actually does her homework). And your spouse knows (they always do). If you can’t share your idea or work with your family, it’s probably over the line. I have yet to find something that shocks my kids. Buckle up; when the younger generations take control, things will get pretty exciting.

I love brands that always choose to push the boundaries in ways true to their soul. These brands make me laugh, think, and feel a little uncomfortable at times–and I respect them for their courage and conviction, even if I don’t always agree with them.

Image: Flickr user Thomas Dongga

The patent in question, number 8,099,665, was filed in late 2006 and among the short list of inventors listed one name, inevitably, stands out: Steve Jobs. The fact that Jobs is listed here adds a certain extra value to what’s included in the filing but it’s not actually the most interesting part. Among the ideas falling under the general description– “A method of organizing episodic content includes identifying a list of items associated with episodic content and sorting the list of items based on at least episode order upon a prompt”– are several that we’ve not seen displayed by Apple yet. They could be core features of the long-hinted Apple Television.

The main thrust of the patent is pretty straightforward, and in plain language we find it’s a system for an Apple TV to work out that videos form episodes as part of a TV series. By querying a remote data source, the TV can use metadata associated with the videos so users can identify the series they’re interested in, and find the relevant clip by sorting it in different ways (number, title, data it was first broadcast and so on). Artwork relevant to the clips is shown, and there’s also scope for “promotional material” to be displayed, individually or linked to menu items…which is a hint at advertising in the system, even if it’s as simple as “New episode available! Just $0.79″ or something similar.

People who own an Apple TV will see this as a familiar way to present data–it’s perfectly aligned with the way the Apple TV’s menu system works.

But there’s more to the patent. How about the fact that “The menu items, can, for example, correspond to television shows that have either been recorded from a broadcast or purchased from a content provider”? There’s no facility in the current Apple TV hardware to actually record TV, as a Digital Video Recorder, althought the technology is surely capable of it in many ways.

In the wording of patents it’s prudent to cover your bases, of course, so this may be just a piece of careful protection put in by Apple. But recorded content is mentioned several times. In fact the ability to record, pause or otherwise time-shift broadcast television would be a key expectation in some way if Apple did make a full-featured Apple Television set (assuming the set would also integrate with existing modes of getting TV content to users, via radio, cable or Net connection). As PatentlyApple notes, a 2011 patent is more explicit about this idea, stating a similar system must “could also be used to connect a media environment to a video content provider, such as a cable service provider.”

Later in the patent documentation there’s mention of the remote control unit users would interact with. The generic controller mentioned includes a “rotational input device.” In the hardware imagined here, it sounds something like the original iPod click wheel. The patent does note that other input systems could work too–it could “comprise a rectangular surface, a square surface, or some other shaped surface. Other surface geometries that accommodate pressure sensitive areas and that can sense touch actuations may also be used, e.g., an oblong area, an octagonal area” and may include click features, separate buttons and gestures of sorts.

There are hints here of the current Apple remote, but also a suggestion that Apple’s really trying to reimagine the control paradigm for TVs. Elsewhere the patent notes “It is desirable that the user interface conveys information to the user in an intuitive manner. However, current media devices often present the information in a poorly organized manner, and do not provide the capability to reorganize the information according to one or more aspects related to the information.” That’s right up there with the thinking revealed by Steve Jobs’ now-famous “cracked it” quote when talking about a TV interface–because, let’s face it, the menu on your TV or your cable provider’s set-top-box usually sucks, being inelegant and also not allowing you to sort the content in ways that might be more useful. There’s also evidence here that Apple’s model would disrupt the idea of channels and broadcast times–because if you commanded a TV to sort shows by genres like comedy, or by broadcast time, the actual soruce of the show would be irrelevant to you.

And yes, we know that picking through patent text is a risky and generally unrewarding endeavor. But what we can draw from this one is that Steve Jobs really was intimately associated with designing a better digital TV paradigm as far back as 2006, and that many thoughts about how the interface would benefit the user (rather than the TV show creator or the network its broadcast over) were in place already. We can also assume that many other as yet unrevealed patents cover similar, and more complex ideas. Does that Apple Television rumor sound a little more interesting to you yet?

Image: Flickr user williamhartz

This past Christmas season Amazon stole business from brick-and-mortar retailers with its free Price Check app for iPhone and Android. With Price Check, your phone could scan the barcode on any product in any retail store, or simply take a picture of it, and then compare its price with Amazon’s. And, pouring salt on wounds already being nursed by retailers everywhere, Amazon also announced that if you were in a store, used Price Check, and then bought the item from Amazon, you’d get an extra discount–mobile magic for the coupon-clipping set.

Price Check is Amazon’s contribution to instant, frictionless price transparency, and it represents just one of the many skirmishes in what promises to be a decades-long transformation of our entire commercial system. Technologies and services like Price Check are now steadily tearing away the protections that sellers used to be able to hide behind in their efforts to make a profit by selling commodity products at non-commodity prices. During the Christmas shopping period, more than a whopping 40% of all Google inquiries for “last minute gifts and store locator terms” came from mobile devices.

For years now, Internet guru Doc Searls has been suggesting that the future of commerce will be defined not in terms of how commercial enterprises manage their selling and marketing processes, but by how consumers manage their spending and buying processes. While businesses have been using ever more sophisticated computer technology to do “CRM,” or “customer relationship management,” Searls maintains that the real end-game for ubiquitous, inexpensive interactivity will be consumers managing their relationships with the vendors they buy from, a process he dubs “VRM,” for “vendor relationship management.”

CRM can be thought of as a set of business processes and technologies for treating different customers differently, which completely undermines the traditional product-centric business processes used by nearly all companies and organizations until near the end of the 20th century. In our 1993 book The One to One Future, Martha Rogers and I called this new kind of competition “one to one marketing,” but “CRM” is easier on the tongue and we ourselves have used these two terms interchangeably for the last 15 years. In 1993, we predicted that eventually consumers would take things over entirely. We called it “privacy intermediation,” rather than VRM, and our thinking was that sooner or later technology would be so inexpensive that consumers would be able to use it themselves to retain control of their own personal information and preferences, rather than having them “managed” by the companies they dealt with. (And today one interesting startup in the VRM business is Privowny, the brainchild of a French entrepreneur, a company promising to help consumers manage their relationships with the companies they interact with by protecting their privacy and allowing them to retain control of their personal data.)

For your own business, in the face of this onslaught of galloping transparency, the question you have to ask yourself is, how will you make a profit when your customers know everything about your costs and pricing and have more or less instant access to your strongest competitors, anywhere in the physical world? This dilemma will soon confront every business in every industry, but since we started with brick-and-mortar retailers, let’s stick with them. A physical store’s natural advantages, when it comes to competing with online retailers, include its local presence, a physical showroom, and so forth. Using these advantages, I can think of at least four competitive strategies; maybe you can think of more:

1. Improve the customer experience within the store.  When Target puts a Starbucks in front of the cashiers’ stations, or when a bookstore adds a reading lounge and brings in authors for book signings, this is what they’re trying to do. The only problem is, even though customers might find the store experience more inviting, they could still choose to buy the product somewhere else (perhaps just by using their smartphone), which is one reason Borders has closed its doors and Barnes & Noble isn’t doing so well, while online book vendors continue to grow briskly.

2. Charge admission.  Don’t laugh, this is exactly what warehouse stores like Sam’s Club and Costco do. They charge customers an annual membership fee for the privilege of entering their stores. Other kinds of stores do this on an occasional basis. When the iPhone was first introduced, Apple stores charged admission in order to manage the crowds of customers jamming in to see it. And some independent bookstores have begun charging admission for customers who come to the store for author book signings and similar events. It isn’t hard to imagine a retailer charging customers a one-time fee for entry, and refunding that fee against any product bought within, say, forty-eight hours.

3. Build a service business.  Help your customers install, maintain, and repair the products they buy in your store. A car dealer with a great service reputation is likely to generate better car sales, even when facing competition from no-service vendors selling the same cars for less. And where I live in Georgia, we could buy our electronics products online or from any of several “big box” retailers, but we usually buy from H&H Lifestyles, a local retailer with slightly higher prices and a reputation for comprehensive and excellent in-home service. (This way when the home theater system gets out of whack, we don’t have to wait for one of the kids to come home from college before getting it to work again!)

4. Extreme trust.  This may be the strongest strategy of all, because it makes it likely your customers themselves will want you to succeed. Being proactively trustworthy (we call it “trustable”) requires you to watch out for your customer’s interest even when your customer isn’t paying attention. For instance, if you try to buy something from iTunes that you already bought, they’ll remind you that you already own it. Ditto Amazon. Extreme trust like this engages people’s natural impulse to show empathy, transcending the commercial domain of monetary incentives and tapping into the social domain of friendship, sharing, and reciprocity. And extreme trust should be even easier for a physical store to earn, because most people find it easier to trust other people they come face to face with.

Extreme Trust is actually the title of Martha’s and my next book (our 10th together), due out in March. In it we suggest that as technology generates more and more transparency (from Price Check, to reviews on Yelp, complaints on Twitter, and other social tools), you can expect consumers to hold businesses to higher and higher standards. And the only reliable competitive advantage that any business is likely to have, in the totally transparent future, is the extreme trust of its customers.

Image: Flickr user Raul Lieberwirth

Anyone who’s driven through a god-forsaken wasteland like, say, west Texas with young children has glimpsed a corner of hell. The road is long and the scenery boring, a combination that can have your kids pushing you to the limits of sanity.

General Motors wants to help you out with that.

The automaker asked the dreamers and designers at Future Lab at Israel’s Bezalel Academy of Art and Design to develop a futuristic suite of apps that effectively turn car windows into a tablet.

Yes, yes, we know. Many vehicles feature DVD players, rare is the child who doesn’t have an iPhone loaded with music or a smartphone loaded with games, and you can always hand Junior an iPad and tell him to play Fishdom until you hit El Paso. But GM is looking to the future, where cloud-connected cars integrate with our digital lives.

The General’s Windows of Opportunity Project was inspired by psychological studies that found passengers often feel disconnected from their environment. The goal is to create interactive displays that are, according to GM, “capable of stimulating awareness, nurturing curiosity and encouraging a stronger connection” with the world beyond your window.

“Traditionally, the use of interactive displays in cars has been limited to the driver and front passenger, but we see an opportunity to provide a technology interface designed specifically for rear seat passengers,” Tom Seder, who leads GM’s human-machine interface R&D team, said in a statement. “Advanced windows that are capable of responding to vehicle speed and location could augment real world views with interactive enhancements to provide entertainment and educational value.”

This is not so far-fetched as you might think. Everyone in the auto industry is scrambling to bring the cloud to your car, and six of the 10 major automakers were at CES this year showing the latest in cloud-connected hardware and apps. Audi, for example, let people play with a cool heads-up display that lets the front seat passenger view data with a rig not unlike what you saw in Minority Report.

Since GM, like Audi, has no plans to put this tech in production cars anytime soon, it told Future Lab to go nuts. The sky was the limit, with no real consideration to whether the ideas could be mass-produced. The lab developed four apps:

• Otto, an animated character that responds to passing scenery.

• Foofu, an app that lets passengers finger paint on the windows. Think of it as the modern equivalent of drawing on fogged windows.

• Spindow, an app that lets you peek into other users’ windows around the globe in real time.

• Pond (pictured) lets you download, stream and share music with other cars and send them messages.

To test all this tech, Future Lab created a touch- and gesture-sensitive window — essentially a tablet — using motion and optical sensor technology developed by EyeClick. And though you aren’t likely to see it in the next-gen Chevrolet Cruze or Cadillac CTS-V wagon, GM says the project could inspire technology for future models.

“Projects like WOO are invaluable, because working with designers and scholars from outside of the automotive industry brings fresh perspective to vehicle technology development,” Omer Tsimhoni, who leads the human-machine interface at GM’s Advanced Technical Center in Israel,” said in a statement. “WOO is just one of many projects underway at GM that could reinvent the passenger experience in years to come.”

And perhaps cut down on the number of times you hear “Are we there yet.”

Images and video: General Motors

Spindow, an app that lets you peek into other users’ windows around the globe in real time, is among the apps General Motors commissioned for its Windows of Opportunity project.