I just got back from another CTO Breakfast. We continue to attract new people and today there were 6 or 7 people there who'd never been there before. I enjoy these events a lot because there's always some interesting discussion. One of the things that came up today was using OnStar equipped cars to feed information to traffic systems. Our highway departments spend billions of dollars, collectively, creating huge centralized systems for gathering traffic data so that they can keep traffic flowing. Its cheaper than build new roads. What's interesting is that there's a huge distributed traffic system already on the roads that we're not able to use. Every OnStar equipped vehicle knows where it is, how fast its traveling, whether the brakes are on, and even things like the temperature outside the vehicle. Wouldn't it be great to be able to capture all of that data and use it as the input to our traffic analysis systems? There's no reason why we couldn't. We just haven't figured it out yet. If I were GM, I'd be doing pilot projects and talking to state highway departments.

Meanwhile, put May 28th on your calendar. That will be the date for the next CTO breakfast.