Summary
Fuse is a new product that connects your car to the rest of your life. Here's the backstory on what we expect for Fuse and the Kickstarter campaign.
I just pushed the Launch! button on my first Kickstarter campaign: Fuse: Connecting Your Car to the Rest of Your Life. First of all: stop reading and go pledge. Then come back.
Good, thanks for helping.
We believe that cars need to be connected to more of our life—put in context. The Kickstarter campaign will build an app that uses an off-the-shelf OBD II device that has a built-in GPS unit and cellular modem. The device connects to the same cloud-based platform that makes SquareTag work. The device is constantly streaming data about the car up to a personal cloud controlled by the vehicle's owner.
We see Fuse as a platform for connecting products to their owners. Fuse will replace SquareTag as the brand for our connected product work. We believe Fuse (née SquareTag) has the power to change how people, manufacturers, service agents, and other relate to each other through products. But we need a place to start.
Cars are a good place to start because:
- Cars are important to people and people spend a lot of money on them
- We can connected any car to Fuse using a simple, inexpensive device that's easy to install and configure
- Cars generate a lot of data that can be combined with other data from your life in interesting ways
We plan show how connected products on the Fuse platform make people's lives more convenient and save them money, starting with a car and then moving on to other connected things.
If you read my post on the family fleet manager, you know that we've been playing with this idea for a while. We have a couple dozen test units in the field and have built proof-of-concept-level apps to experiment with features and backend processes.
Kickstarter is a place for us to get real feedback on the concept and test our product hypotheses. Kickstarter also forces a product team to focus on specific decisions that have to be made to launch the campaign. Kickstarter presented an opportunity to build a product, with a vertical focus. We had to decide on a target, a message, a set of features and communicate it all succinctly on Kickstarter.
We're excited about the possibilities for Fuse and hope you'll take a minute to help: pledge and then tweet or Facebook your support. And if you know someone at a car dealer or service and repair business who would like to get Fuse for their customers, please do an introduction.