CloudMade
Enhancing the Connected Car Experience

"We are on the doorstep of some dramatic changes in the automotive landscape,” begins Juha Christensen, Chairman and CEO, CloudMade. In today’s era, customer engagements in the automotive sector are changing and are highly influenced by the millennials coming of age and becoming the main buyers of cars. There is a great demand for in-car infotainment services and customers feel that today’s vehicles do not meet their needs. As cars become less attractive and desirable to people, customers’ brand choices are becoming weaker. Car manufacturers are now focusing on the ways to make cars connect with people’s digital lives.

Headquartered in Menlo Park, CA, CloudMade is building solutions for the car manufacturers to create the connected car. The anatomy of a connected car consists of various building blocks and solutions including navigation, safety, and infotainment. Customers increasingly expect built-in assistance, safety, and vehicle protection features to reduce risks and protect their investments. CloudMade is focused on creating great software tools that let customers craft truly unique experiences while providing customization options that let the customer’s brand and user experience model shine.

CloudMade solutions for connected car environments are helping the automotive industry to better understand the vehicle performance, automotive business, and connect with customers at a deeper level to improve efficiency and brand loyalty. However, CloudMade’s top priority is to provide technology that makes cars safer to drive. “Safety is a big mantra for the industry right now and it is increasingly important in the way consumers buy cars,” says Christensen. The company is providing a set of predictive technologies around safety by distributing computing between the car and the cloud. The technology which is integrated into the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) enables to predict unsafe driving and reacts to adverse road conditions caused by traffic, weather or other factors. It further recommends the driver’s preferred route or their driving style.

Apart from providing solutions concerning safety, CloudMade’s offerings have expanded to more areas. Its Navigation and Guidance solution offers an unparalleled degree of flexibility and control.

We help different manufacturers achieve differentiation, clarity, and impact with each of their brands

The technology delivers rerouting suggestions in extreme traffic situations as well as suggests relevant places of interest along the way to the driver. In addition to this, CloudMade’s Connected Car Content lets automotive manufacturers deliver rich, content centric experiences that are integrated into the native Human Machine Interface (HMI). CloudMade helps to build a predictive model for the ways a vehicle should be operating by leveraging the cloud and the car as a distributed learning machine. The company also has deep domain expertise in user experience design for consumer mobility solutions, ranging from connected cars and on-dash navigation to Smartphone applications and wearables.

CloudMade differentiates itself with its comprehensive model which lets the automotive brands and the consumers own the data. While some companies have an idea that they own the data, it is risky for the automotive brands to put valuable data in the hands of someone else as opposed to keeping it themselves, mining that data and using it. Therefore, CloudMade is placing a huge emphasis on enabling customers create experiences that are uniquely theirs.

With a strong focus on innovation, CloudMade plans on recruiting quite heavily on all their sites across the globe. In the coming year, the company is developing more of interface builders, so that it makes it easier and faster for the car manufacturers to build their own version of interface and at a particular user interface level. The future will witness CloudMade entering the automotive space with a modular approach and provide more comprehensive solutions and building blocks for creating connected cars.