For individual mobility to become intermodal mobility, the relevant solutions have to be simple to use. The aim must be to keep barriers to registration, use, and billing as low as possible. In this regard, there is room for future improvements, for instance to simplify mobile access to digital mobility services. In Germany alone, the constantly growing sharing economy currently comprises around 150 services, covering everything from cars to bikes and scooters. New services are being added every year, such as Coup, the eScooter sharing service that Bosch first put on the market in Berlin. But at present, every sharing provider has its own registration procedure, some of them quite complicated. Often, a user’s driving license has to be physically validated for each service. This is yet another area where new digital services can help: by considerably simplifying registration processes and thus access to sharing services. The idea is to implement simple, fast, and transparent central registration as a digital “master key” for the world of mobility. This would make the filling in of various forms and the multiple validation of the required documents a thing of the past. Once registered, users would have access to a whole range of sharing offers, including ones that they might not have heard of before. One look at a central app would suffice: it would take just one click to book any of the vehicles, bikes, and scooters available. Not only users but mobility services, too, stand to benefit from this service. Central registration lowers their individual registration process costs; the new service would allow them to attract new customers without themselves conducting complex registration and validation processes. This digital service clearly shows that users and their mobility needs and desires must be the focus of attention in the development of new mobility services. Users’ smartphones serve as a universal medium. This is why issues of ergonomics in use, the flexibility of the offers, and the dovetailing of different modes of transportation with efficient data platforms plays a major role in helping intermodal mobility to enrich people’s lives. This is why the term “mobile first” is becoming ever more important. In the future, this will no longer stand only for web pages being optimized first and foremost for mobile devices. Instead, it will mean developing digital strategies for services in the internet that primarily use mobile access to customers to create data‐based additional value for them.
41.3 Digital Services for the Mobility of Tomorrow
Beyond the topics of parking, sharing offers and intermodal traffic solutions, there are more eco‐systems in which a digital offering meets a connected customer in inner‐city and suburban locations. Examples of this include smart apps for the charging of electric vehicles, connectivity solutions for trucks and the digitization of workshop appointments.
It is often a problem for drivers of electric vehicles to find a free charge spot. Anyone using an all‐electric vehicle knows what it is like to look for one, and the frustration felt when the charge spot chosen is unavailable or first involves going through a complicated procedure to register for the different booking and payment systems. Innovative charging apps that help users to immediately find charge spots and pay with just one click are the solution. Here, too, smartphones are the key: charging apps on the phone allow drivers of electric cars to quickly find available charging stations in their area and then use them simply and conveniently. Working together with various automakers including smart, Mercedes‐Benz, and Renault, Bosch offers charging apps along with the backend infrastructure. A major advantage of the Bosch solution is its scope: by 2016 it covered around 3700 – or around 80 % – of the web‐enabled, public charge spots in Germany, and additional European countries will later follow. This means that app users can conveniently use the displayed charging stations without the need for cash, and without having to resolve complex technical and contractual issues themselves before doing so. Instead, all they need is a PayPal account and to have completed a one‐time registration. Even the payment process is completed from within the app in a convenient and secure fashion. This digital service lays the foundation for bringing together various players such as automakers, charge spot operators, energy providers, retailers, and electric car drivers on a single software platform. Meanwhile, the charging app again places the customer at the center of the digital solution. It is intended to help make electro mobility a little more practical for everyday use throughout Germany: because aside from attractive vehicle offerings, a straightforward recharging procedure plays a critical role in the continued advancement of electro mobility.
Mobility services must not stop at the city limits. Connectivity is thus also a way of making commercial vehicles even more useful and of developing new digital business models both for truck drivers and for fleet operators. Connectivity makes trucks even smarter and connects them with the internet. The hardware this requires is a connectivity control unit – a box that connects the automotive electronics with a cloud. This enables freight forwarding companies to monitor the wear and tear of truck fleets via control units and the internet to assist with planning maintenance and repairs in advance. It is also suitable for the logistics sector. Furthermore, connectivity via the internet can ensure that transported goods are safe, for instance through an eCall solution or trailer monitoring with satellite positioning. Rest areas for truckers along freeways are often hopelessly overfilled – especially at night. That is also when the risk of theft increases. Bosch offers a new solution for this as well: the online reservation of secure truck parking spaces at rest areas along the freeway via a smartphone app. Whenever truck drivers are looking to park, their truck sends its location data and a parking request to the system. This finds a nearby parking space and sends the details directly to the truck’s navigation system. These premium parking spaces can be video monitored, too, using camera systems and security control centers that track video footage.
A third example of new mobile services is the appointment at the workshop. How helpful would it be if the vehicle itself knew when it had to go the workshop and the spare parts needed were already in stock when it arrived? There are also digital solutions that generate, analyze, and correlate data to offer customers added value based on their mobile access. Since 2012, customers have been able to register with the Drivelog online portal and use a host of services for their own vehicle. In 2015, the new additional Drivelog Connect module expanded the car driver and workshop portal to include real‐time information. A Bluetooth adapter transfers data from the vehicle’s OBD interface to the Drivelog mobile app on the driver’s smartphone. This gives the driver information on vehicle data, route, fuel economy, mileage, and time, with the details entered into a log book for every journey. A car check function shows the state of the vehicle and any fault signals. If necessary, the driver can then book a service appointment directly and, if desired, automatically transfer the data to the workshop, so that information on the vehicle, fault codes, and the necessary maintenance requirements is immediately available. Furthermore, the program provides feedback on driving style and tips for fuel‐efficient driving. Digital communication and data transfer are playing an ever greater role at workshops. The workshop of the future can thus continually monitor the status of customers’ vehicles and, if necessary, recommend a repair before a vehicle component stops working. Moreover, the workshop can order spare parts and organize employees’ working hours much more effectively. If a customer arrives at the workshop on the agreed date, the fault memory is automatically read and the battery, tire pressure, and chassis geometry checked. But things could be even more convenient in the future: hardly any customers like taking their vehicle to the workshop appointment and either picking it up again in the afternoon or waiting until the repairs are completed. But this is yet another opportunity to put an app at the center of a digitalized business process. First, customers book their appointment via the app, regardless of whether this is fo
r servicing, diagnosis, a repair, or a breakdown service. They state when a driver can collect the vehicle and where, for example from the customer’s own home or place of work. If a customer wishes to stay mobile during the workshop appointment, a replacement vehicle is provided. Every step of the work in the workshop is then made transparent via the app. Customers are informed via their smartphone of the work performed, service results, and costs. Once all the work has been completed, a driver takes the vehicle back to the place stated by the customer. This makes the workshop appointment of the future transparent and convenient.
41.4 Technical Requirements for Mobility Services
The digital transformation of business models and increasing connectivity is an opportunity to redesign the mobility of the future and make it customer‐centered. This requires software and IT skills on the one hand and expertise in sensor technology for connectivity on the other. New services are being created on the basis of these key technologies. Scalability is a key factor for the success of connected solutions. Scalable infrastructure is thus essential, especially for digital business models. It must be able to be flexibly designed, and it must analyze, evaluate, and correlate corporate, customer, and market data in real time and send the results back to the customer. Like other technology companies in the connected devices arena Bosch has launched its own cloud network for the Internet of Things, the Bosch IoT Cloud. The first cloud is located in Germany in Bosch’s own computing center near Stuttgart. The software core of the Bosch IoT Cloud is the company’s own IoT Suite. It identifies any objects that are web‐enabled, orchestrates the exchange of data, and enables a multitude of services and business models. Big data management allows enormous amounts of data to be analyzed. Rules for automatic decisions can be stored in the Bosch IoT Suite – such as when patterns of wear and tear should be reported and preventive action taken to service machinery.
However, technology alone cannot guarantee the success of digital business models. Security is also an important precondition for customer and user confidence. Functional safety ensures that applications function reliably and that systems are safely deactivated if a fault occurs in one of the components. Data security, meanwhile, is about protecting against unauthorized external access. It is essential to ensure that data is protected against unauthorized use by third parties and that misuse is not possible. Here, Bosch for example relies on a multi‐tier approach to both hardware and software so that it can maintain the high level of security it offers today in a future of increasingly connected applications. In the future, secure over‐the‐air updates will enable increasingly sophisticated functions, for example, but they will also entail potential security risks for which technological protection is required. Finally, data protection is a legal consideration that is defined by laws and regulations. If a mobility service uses the Bosch IoT Cloud, the fundamental legal framework for this is German or European data protection law. Customers and users thus have full transparency and decide for themselves how their data will be used. After all, a significant precondition for the introduction of new services is the sensitive and consistently secure handling of the data mobility services generate.
41.5 The Future Vision of Mobility Services
Vehicle connectivity and mobility services development have only just begun – and that includes for example work on connecting the car with the smart home. For instance, the car’s navigation system can instruct the home’s heating system to warm up the living room for when the driver gets back. In the future, then, it will not be enough for Bosch as a supplier of technology and services to merely bring greater efficiency, convenience, and safety to components and systems under the hood. Instead, the company is very much looking beyond the hood to solutions for road traffic as a whole. This is where Bosch is finding customers with a wide range of mobility requirements, is deriving ideas and measures for the future, and is developing new technologies and services for a world of changing mobility. The foundation for this is a strategy with defined priorities extending from connected, electrified, and automated mobility through to new mobility services on which all divisions are jointly working on a cross‐company basis. However, people’s mobility requirements will continue to change in the future; infrastructure, transportation routes, and mobility users will increasingly connect. Consequently, it will also be necessary to develop new mobility services that enable the safe, convenient, and economic transportation of people and goods on land, in the air, and on water. If these digital services and business models are also simple to use and thrill automotive manufacturers, mobility providers, and users, then they will rightly be seen as technology that is invented for life.
Footnotes
1GfK Verein (2014): Sorgen der Autofahrer in Deutschland im Jahr 2014, http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/431413/umfrage/sorgen-der-autofahrer-in-deutschland/.
2APCOA PARKING Deutschland (2013): APCOA PARKING Study 2013.
3Adam, S. und Meyer M. (2015): Integration der Kundenperspektive als Basis für Bedarfsorientierung und Weiterentwicklung integrierter Mobilitätsplattformen, In: C. Linnhoff‐Popien et al. (editors): Marktplätze im Umbruch, p. 589–601.
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2018
Claudia Linnhoff-Popien, Ralf Schneider and Michael Zaddach (eds.)Digital Marketplaces Unleashedhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49275-8_42
42. Analyzing the Digital Society by Tracking Mobile Customer Devices
Lorenz Schauer1
(1)Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany
Lorenz Schauer
Email: [email protected]
42.1 Introduction
The ongoing digitalization is not only changing business and marketplaces, it is also changing our complete society. One of the most evident observation of this trend can be made in our life every day, e. g. when we go to work, when we meet friends, or even when we have dinner: people use their smartphones or other modern mobile devices for making business, chatting with friends, buying new products, or reading the newspapers on their way. Hence, the increasing usage of these electronic all‐rounders in nearly all situations of today’s life is an obvious characteristic of our digital society. Technically, the permanent and ubiquitous connection to data networks plays a key role in this process rendering digital mobile applications and services very powerful. Overall, without Internet, most services are not able to provide full functionality.
Therefore, together with the immense diffusion of smartphones and tablets, the usage of Wi‐Fi as state‐of‐the‐art wireless communication standard, has increased dramatically. Wi‐Fi infrastructures have been installed in many public spaces and buildings providing Internet access and local services to mobile clients. Both facts lead to a high percentage of Wi‐Fi enabled mobile devices which can be used to analyze our digital society by tracking mobile customer devices and without the users’ consent or even awareness. The extracted information from such tracking data might be very valuable and helpful for different kind of use cases, such as retail analytics, crowd control, emergency situations, or just commercial purposes. On the other hand, tracking mobile customer devices without asking for users’ compliance represents a privacy attack.
This book chapter firstly describes the technical background of tracking mobile devices using Wi‐Fi signals which are automatically sent out by any Wi‐Fi enabled smartphone, or tablet. Secondly, both scientific and commercial projects are presented and compared using such tracking data for different purposes. Overall, we discover potentials, risks, and limitations of this analyzation technique and focus on trends for the digitalization of the retail industry. In this context, some start‐ups are presented and evaluated in terms of their unique selling point (usp) and future oriented projects. The aim of this article is to give a compact overview of st
ate‐of‐the‐art methods nowadays, and how Wi‐Fi tracking can be used in the near future, when even more people use more than one device and MAC‐Address randomization is integrated in common phones.
42.2 Technical Background
As already mentioned, we firstly give a short description of why and how Wi‐Fi tracking can be realized technically. Wireless local area networks, commonly known as Wi‐Fi, are standardized in IEEE 802.11 [1]. The communication range varies from about 35 m for indoor to over 100 m for outdoor scenarios. The standard defines three individual frame types: Control frames, to support the delivery process of data frames and to manage the medium access
Data frames, to transport user data for higher layers
Management frames, to exchange management information for connection establishment and maintenance
For Wi‐Fi tracking, only management frames are of interest being involved in the 802.11 network discovery and association process as shown in Fig. 42.1.
Fig. 42.1IEEE 802.11 Network Discovery and Association Process
From the view of a mobile device, the discovery process can be either passive by just listening on beacon frames which are periodically transmitted by the access point (1) or it can be active by sending out probe request frames (2). The latter is preferred in mobile context, due to lower energy‐consumption and shorter discovery time of access points which could come into reach while moving [2].
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