NEWSLETTER | JANUARY 2016

GENIVI enjoyed its fifth year in Las Vegas during the week of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2016 and the footprint of GENIVI’s activities continues to grow each year.
 
Before the CES 2016 show began, GENIVI President Matt Jones gave a keynote (see photos) at the one-day Consumer Telematics Show (CTS) and in addition to discussing GENIVI’s efforts to accelerate software for the connected car, he also announced the first four “startup” members of GENIVI that have joined through Jaguar Land Rover’s technology incubator.  These startup members, officially known as Promotional Associate members, will become familiar with GENIVI’s technologies and align their products and services accordingly.  If your organization is a startup (or you know of one) interested in engaging into automotive IVI software solutions, see the article further down about this new GENIVI program.
 
On the heels of the successful CTS event, the next day started with two panel sessions during a Connect2Vehicle program track jointly presented with the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE).  The first panel (see photos and watch recorded session) entitled “Connected Cars – A Landscape Fraught with Peril,” explored some of the reasons why the connected car is a prime target for cybercrime.  Paul Hansen, founder of The Hansen Report, moderated the panel. Among other things, the discussion indicated that automakers are hesitant to talk openly about security challenges but that security through obscurity was not a viable solution.  The example of Tesla and others holding open, security hack-a-thons and rewarding companies for finding vulnerabilities was argued. 
 
The second panel (see photos) moderated by John Ellis, managing director at Ellis & Associates, sought to explore existing security solutions and approaches to automotive cybersecurity challenges.   Panelists including Anuja Sonalker, vice president engineering and operations at TowerSec; Alon Atsmon, vice president of technology strategy at Harman; Sachin Lawande, president and CEO at Visteon; and Andreas Mai, director smart connected vehicles at Cisco.  Like the title of the panel, existing security solutions in many commercial products suggest that the future of automotive security is “full of promise.”
 
Last, but certainly not least, was the ever popular GENIVI CES2016@Trump Showcase and Reception (see photos) occurring during the Wednesday and Thursday evenings of CES.  Over 800 individuals visited the showcase and enjoyed demonstrations from 27 different GENIVI member organizations. One of the showcase tables featured the newly released Automotive Grade Linux Demonstrator which includes many of GENIVI’s core software components.  

GENIVI cannot thank our 11 sponsors enough for the great event that resulted in hundreds of valuable discussions about GENIVI’s technology solutions and related connected car technologies: 

• Intel (Emerald Sponsor)
• Mentor Automotive (Platinum Sponsor)
• Wind River (Gold Sponsor)
• Harman (Gold Sponsor)
• Arynga (Silver Sponsor)
• Renesas (Silver Sponsor)
• Opensynergy (Silver Sponsor)
• ICS (Silver Sponsor)
• Global Logic (Silver Sponsor)
• irdeto (Silver Sponsor)
• Luxoft (Silver Sponsor)

GENIVI’s spring All-Member Meeting (AMM) will be taking place on 26-29 April 2016 at the Paris Marriott Rive Gauche Hotel & Conference Center. Registration for the event is now open. The cutoff date to receive the discounted hotel group rate is 30 March 2016. Please reserve your hotel room here.

GENIVI’s spring event brings the IVI community together with programs for members plus two open days of activities that members and nonmembers can both enjoy. The open portion of the program featuring the theme "smart cars in a software connected world" is intended to inform attendees about relevant connected car topics, IVI trends and to provide updates on GENIVI’s recent technology accomplishments. The popular GENIVI members showcase and reception is included in the open portion of the program. A small registration fee will apply for nonmembers.

The popularity of the GENIVI Demo Platform (GDP) activities at the previous events continue and tutorials will be held throughout the week in Paris. A “GDP room” will be reserved to hold multiple build tutorials involving different hardware platforms and build processes, enabling technical participants to get firsthand experience with GENIVI’s platform.

Throughout its history, GENIVI has pursued creative ways to attract and to engage organizations as alliance members. The newly launched, Promotional Associate Membership Program is now in full swing and available to qualified startup organizations who have developed a business relationship with sponsoring Charter and Core GENIVI members.

Conceived in 2015 and recently announced at the Consumer Telematics Show (CTS), the Promotional Associate Membership Program was launched to encourage immediate, active participation in GENIVI’s technical and business activities by startup companies as they develop their first products. This one-year, low-cost premembership program targets startup companies that, with proper mentoring and guidance from a sponsoring GENIVI member, show a clear growth path to full membership at the end of 12 months, and sustainable participation in the alliance going forward.

Membership in the program is by invitation of a qualified, sponsoring Charter or Core GENIVI member. Jaguar Land Rover serves as the lead for the pilot GENIVI program and has recently introduced four startups (BabyBit Technologies, EggCyte, Parking Vision Information Technologies and urban.systems) to the in-vehicle infotainment software ecosystem by providing technical guidance in the development of prototype to meet automotive requirements.

Companies participating in this program receive many of the benefits of a full Associate GENIVI membership during their tenure in the program. They receive access to the compliance statement and GENIVI’s internal communication channels and will be encouraged to participate in expert groups and GENIVI technical activities. They may attend both All-Member Meetings (spring and fall) during their year in the program, and their logo will be seen (designated as a program participant) on GENIVI Web pages, at events and in other collateral.

Cost to the startup is $1000 for the year. Upon successful completion of the program, the startup company will become a full Associate member of the alliance at a cost of $10,000 per year, or join at a higher membership level for a higher fee. To be eligible for the program, a company must meet size, financial and product development requirements, and should have a business relationship or engagement with the member sponsor.

For more information about this program including requirements, please contact Steve Crumb.

GENIVI recently launched new public collaboration tooling to support its continued efforts to openly engage the open source community and nonmember stakeholders.

GENIVI’s IVI software work has increasingly required interactions and collaboration with nonmembers. Three years ago, GENIVI launched http://projects.genivi.org as a site for hosting open code projects. This site, hosted by the Linux Foundation, contains about 25 open source code projects, each of which includes tooling like Bugzilla for bug tracking and git as a code repository. However, the incompatibility of the wiki associated with these projects and with GENIVI's internal wiki generated extra work and an unwelcome learning curve, so a search for a more consistent public tooling infrastructure was started.

After submitting an application to Atlassian Software, makers of the Confluence and Jira tooling, GENIVI received approval for a no-charge license for public versions of the Confluence and Jira tools. This approval came as a result of Atlassian’s recognition of GENIVI as an open community and a nonprofit organization.  The public wiki and Jira instances of GENIVI’s Open Source projects are now on a server version of Confluence.
 
Other content is being managed already in this new tooling, including activities of the Tools Team, new information on GENIVI reference architecture, and a new GENIVI resource kit to improve awareness and adoption of GENIVI technical deliverables.

GENIVI believes that this new public tooling will make it easier to inform and collaborate with contributors and adopters who are not currently GENIVI members. A more effective engagement with the open community will help GENIVI and the industry to produce useful open source IVI software for current and future automotive programs.

The four-part webinar series on cyber security sponsored by GENIVI in partnership with Automotive World has concluded and is now available for replay.

Part 4: “Architecting the Secure Connected Car.” Watch here.
Part 3: “Cybersecurity and the Automotive Development Lifecycle.” Watch here.
Part 2: “A Sideways Glance at the Automotive Security Threat Landscape.” Watch here.
Part 1: “Automotive Cyber Security - Protecting the Connected Car.” Watch here.