The connected car was the theme at the Frankfurt Show this year. Opel launched its OnStar connectivity system in Europe, while other manufacturers were also keen to show that it’s a subject high on all motor manufacturers’ agendas. It also raises a few important questions, such as how will it work and how do you decide who will pay for the various connected elements?

This is something that US Silicon Valley-based company Jasper has specialised in. Jasper was started in 2004 and was one of the first companies to focus on the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT), or as it was originally known, “M to M” for machine to machine data exchange. Basically this is connecting devices and systems via the internet so that they can exchange information. In the case of cars this could be traffic information that allows your satellite navigation system to re-route you to avoid delays. In future it might include streaming music or email data via WiFi in the car.

“The problem that we’re solving is the connection that goes into one of the IoT cellular data connections,” explains Mark Thomas, director of product marketing, the Connected Car at Jasper, “It’s a point that can really be leveraged and managed. When operators decided to start switching business models from selling phone plans, where they are the ones who take the support calls, to selling essentially data services. The enterprise or OEM is then responsible for dealing with the customer solution issues.”

At this point, as Thomas points out, being able to tightly manage and understand the connections and the company’s ties to the device become very important. “Jasper was essentially built to allow companies to deploy, manage and monetise Internet services. It has just been transformative for so many enterprises because it means that when you add connectivity to whatever product it is you are selling, you go from selling a product to selling a service, along with that product. My focus is on the connected car,” explains Thomas.

Jasper’s product is called Control Center and is already in use by 18 OEMs, from Audi to Volkswagen. “It’s sold through global operators,” continues Thomas, “So if you are AT&T, one of our reference customers, they have integrated Control Center deeply into their network, so that when customers like GM’s OnStar deploy millions of new connected cars, they are able to have very intimate knowledge of the connectivity states. They are able to have very detailed control over the connection and the controls and can then automate that through a set of APIs (application-programming interfaces), so that their back end systems can control and understand what is happening in a car.”

Manufacturers might have built connectivity into a car in the past, but often the connections were not live because the end user did not want to run up big bills for roaming charges. “That was a terrible shame,” says Thomas, “The ability to check the health of the car, see what the battery level is, alert the truck driver that somebody left the door open and the product won’t be usable when it arrives, so there’s going to be a cost to replace the goods. Being able to take the connectivity and use it as a strategic advantage, by integrating different connectivity modes into the vehicle lifecycle.

“The ability to have a test-ready state that’s actually free to set and just make sure that the “ping” works, the ability to set the state from the back end that says, “this vehicle is in transition,” so we are going to allow only two connections per day, it’s allowed only so much data.

“If somebody gets in the car and decides they want to watch a movie, streaming can be detected. You can set up anti-fraud type rules, so if somebody decides to take the SIM card out and puts it in a phone, that can be detected. We can check to see if the radio is locked to the SIM and if it’s a different radio, we could automatically deactivate it.”

Control Center could have automatic triggers set up as business rules. This means the system could identify where the vehicle is in the manufacturing and delivery process and when it reaches the dealer; this is where you might want everything to be activated. While it is still in the dealer’s stock you might want the system to be activated only during business hours so you don’t have people running up charges. At the same time, a dealer would want to be able to demonstrate how the system works to customers.

“Then when the car is sold, there is a whole different set of rules,” says Thomas, “At the first layer, it’s having both programmatic and automatic connectivity management during the vehicle life cycle that’s important. Then when the car is being used by customers, having incredibly accurate, deep, real time diagnostics is important, so when there is an issue, you can either have it self-correct, using the automated rules, or you can then diagnose the problem.”

Thomas says we are entering the third wave of connected car services, as he explains, “The first wave was essentially, that OEMs foot the bill for the data and they either bundle the service with the price of the car, like Tesla, or offer subscription plans, like OnStar.” With OnStar after an initial trial period, the customer pays for the service. “In that sense, an automobile isn’t that much different from a vending machine,” says Thomas, “Come to the second generation services and the breakout app is Wi-Fi,” he continues, If customers have the ability to add their vehicle to their family plan. If you’ve bought 10GB of data this month and you have 4 family members, let’s just make the car the 5th family member, that’s another $10 per month and the car can use the same data pool as everybody else. In that instance the data used by someone using a tablet in the car doesn’t get charged to the OEM.”

“When we get to the third wave of services, which will be through App stores and a broad range of apps, the key differentiator is probably going to be in business model changes,” reckons Thomas, “Initially the successful apps were the paidfor apps, which allow you to buy in-app purchases for exactly the thing you want to do. That model will probably need to take place in vehicles. The ability to allow services to enter the car and be responsible for their portion of the data use, this split billing and the ability to take one “pipe” and allocate different qualities of service, allocate the bills, especially when driving through different States, with different taxes, it all gets amazingly complex, so that’s why you need a sophisticated internet services management platform. “In luxury cars you can bundle it in, in mid-range cars you can offer subscriptions, but it’s not how the other Internet connected devices have played out and it’s not how these are going to go.”