Without a doubt, in just a few years' time, cars will be quite different from what we see on the roads today, and we're not talking here about a significant change in the technologies powering them or their overall shape/form factor, but rather about the fact that they'll become a lot more “intelligent” and connected to the world around them.

For this reason, it should come as no surprise that more and more car manufacturers are seriously working on developing “smart” infotainment solutions running on various operating systems, whether we're talking about Windows (although that situation seems to be rather rare) or Linux. And, in fact, that's exactly the subject of the following announcement, regarding the GENIVI Alliance and MeeGo.

The aforementioned alliance has as founding members BMW Group, Delphi, GM, Intel, Magneti-Marelli, PSA, Visteon and Wind River, and they've recently revealed that they've chosen MeeGo as the basis of their next reference release for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI). As some of you probably know, MeeGo is an open source platform hosted by The Linux Foundation that brings together Intel Corporation and Nokia’s previous projects and is designed for computing device types including smartphones, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and IVI systems.

IVI is a rapidly growing and evolving field that encompasses the digital applications that can be used by all occupants of a vehicle, including navigation, entertainment, location-based services, and connectivity to devices, car networks and broadband networks.

“We are pleased to see GENIVI choose MeeGo to power their software platform,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “MeeGo has been built from the ground up for these types of applications. Because MeeGo is a truly open platform, the work GENIVI will do to extend the platform can benefit the project and all who use it. For developers, this is a great opportunity to harness the power of the MeeGo APIs to target a variety of devices and architectures and extend their work on handset applications toward vehicles.”

“We selected MeeGo as the open source basis for our platform because it is technically innovative and can provide the cross architecture build support we require for our references,” said Graham Smethurst, President of GENIVI. “Working with MeeGo we expect to establish a solution that effectively merges IVI needs with those of the other MeeGo target device categories.”


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