MapmyIndia has partnered with VE Commercial Vehicles for enabling connected school buses. The solution, which aims to provide comprehensive details about the children and the bus during transit, will be equipped optionally on newer Eicher buses. The solution will include vehicle tracking via GPS, RFID tags for children to track when the get off and get on the bus, on board cameras with DVR and GPRS connectivity for live two-way communication, and an alert system that will send alerts above various activities of the child to parents via email and SMS. Other features include driver authorization which only lets an authorized driver start the bus, remote vehicle disablers, historical route play and scheduling reports. MapmyIndia’s maps and voice guidance system will be used on the bus for tracking and route guidance. This partnership is a part of a trend we are going to see as connected devices start becoming a norm. Companies that traditionally offer offline services, such as in transportation, healthcare etc, will tie up with online services to build various connected services. Earlier today we also saw Vodafone partner with Diabetacare to bring its diabetes monitoring service online, another example of such a partnership for connected devices. Privacy issues of IoT: As the number of IoT devices grow, privacy will increasingly become an issue, as these devices collect, store and/or transmit data from consumers, which could be hacked into or used with malicious intent. As Medianama had pointed out earlier, we give our data away online every day…
