[IRCA] Roadcasting - can it grab some of radio station audiences?

["Bill Harms" <wharms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Radio Friends:

This is a way to broadcast without a license.  Will it take off?
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http://www.detnews.com/2005/technology/0508/18/0tech-281644.htm

New 'roadcasting' concept allows music sharing in and between cars

By Timothy McNulty / Scripps Howard News Service / Pittsburgh Post-
Gazette

Just as commuters are catching up to the idea of satellite radio for 
their cars, former graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University 
have developed a next-generation radio concept that allows users to 
tune into music from iPods and other digital music players in nearby 
cars.

The idea, which the students developed for an unidentified "major 
automaker" last year, is called Roadcasting. Using it, you could tune 
your radio to music playlists coming from other cars within a 30-mile 
radius. Or you could transmit your own list of songs for people in 
other nearby cars to listen to.

Perhaps best of all, the Roadcasting software would learn what songs 
or musical genres you like. Using those preferences, it would sift 
through all the broadcasts available at any one time and choose the 
ones you should like best. Every time you turn on the Roadcasting 
apparatus, it would find an ad hoc radio station -- or create a mix 
of songs -- with your tastes in mind.

That kind of matching -- called "filtering" -- is what makes the idea 
special, and ties it to an important trend in how people are 
experiencing technology and culture.

Like the recommendation filters for Netflix or Amazon.com, which 
suggest products to you based on your past orders, the Roadcasting 
software would propose songs.

Additionally, concepts like Roadcasting are a logical next step for 
music playlists, which users already share all over the Web, 
including at Apple's popular iTunes site. The system, then, is 
something that unites people, contrary to the traditional image of 
technology being a cold or heartless thing.

"The Roadcasting system brings together people with common interests -
- both musical and otherwise -- as the system also learns what radio 
personalities, commentators and podcasts drivers like," said one of 
its developers, Jim Garretson.

Garretson and four other graduate students at Carnegie Mellon's Human-
Computer Interaction Institute were commissioned to develop the 
system last year for the research and development arm of an as-yet-
unnamed automaker, with the hopes of introducing it to cars by 2010. 

<see URL above for rest of article>
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