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Marketing Ford

Ford looks for APPy partnerships

By Sean Hargrave

October 4, 2012 | 3 min read

Ford of Europe is appealing for partnerships with ‘innovative developers’ to enable their applications work on its cars from next year onwards.

Duncan Burrell, Manager of Connected Services at Ford of Europe revealed to Mobile Marketing Live delegates in London this week that the car manufacturer had thought long and hard about how to make sure its cars remained modern and relevant.

Car owners are showing a penchant for bringing their own applications in to cars on a single smartphone rather than buying in-vehicle or electronic accessories. In fact, motorists are now ten times more likely to navigate on their smartphone than through a navigation system, he revealed.

Hence, partnering with the companies behind the applications its drivers want to use has been decided as more preferable than developing its own downloadable tools.

“There are so many applications out there, the last thing people would want are a load of Ford-specific applications,” explains Burrell.

“So our strategy is to move forward in partnership with application developers and that’s what we’ve been doing in North American since 2010. We have an API which partners work with to ensure their applications work on the screen inside a Ford and is interoperable with our voice recognition systems and steering wheel buttons.”

The strategy, which is expected to see a raft of Ford-compatible apps launched next year, is already in place in North America, following a similar previous appeal for application developers to join its American API partnership programme.

Burrell explains the partnership route is constructed around three elements of ‘built-in’, ‘brought in’ and ‘beamed-in’ - meaning the screens and systems inside cars need to be interoperable with multiple devices and the applications they use to bring content to driver and passengers.

In North America this has seen partnerships forged with several companies, such as music service, Pandora and radio provider, Tune-In.

Burrell emphasised that the partnership API route was the least risky means of ensuring its cars offer drivers a pleasurable experience. With a model expected to go on sale for a decade and be on the road for twenty years it would be impossible for anybody to predict now what services a car should be launched with.

However, by ensuring its cars work with partners’ applications, all Ford has to do is provide the necessary interoperability and leave it to the developers to react to market demand and launch relevant new applications and updates.

Marketing Ford

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