Lynn Walford 
AT&T is a major player in the connected car space. They are working on various ways cars connect to people including content.
I interviewed Joe Mosele, Vice President, IoT Solutions for Automotive IT News, who told me, “AT&T is providing 50% of the connectivity for cars sold in 2015.”
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n November, a great person, friend and world renown Caltech mathematician Rick Wilson was hit by a pickup truck. He has spent the last six months recovering. When I went to visit him in the hospital with turkey soup, after Thanksgiving, he looked terrible. Dr. Wilson was crossing the street with the “walk sign” on. It was obvious to all involved that the driver who hit him was distracted.
I’ve written about distracted driving as early as January 2010 when U.S Transportation Secretary, Ray LaHood announced a regulatory ban of texting by drivers of commercial vehicles such as large trucks and buses, along with stiff fines. Apparently the drivers are too distracted to be paying attention.
At the gym, I was got into a heated discussion with a man who was furious with automakers.
When I told him I write about connected cars he said, “You can’t have an electric car, unless you own a home, are rich or have another car!”
He had a limited view of the connected car space. He was talking about electric cars. Yes, it is nearly impossible even in large cities to drive an electric car without access to an electric outlet either in your own garage or nearby. His statements also made me realize that I live in the ideal place with the best of accoutrements for writing about connected cars and new car technology.
I guess I’m a born journalist, I have a photographic memory for facts that just don’t go away. This ability along with my alternative form of transportation put me smack in the middle of a local political scandal.
It is very important for a journalist to not only understand the basics of a subject but to ask questions and understand all aspects of a topic. It is even more important, especially dealing with technology because one misunderstanding changes everything.
As technology advances does the trend change the people or do the people create the trends? How important is wireless connectivity for human beings? It seems that we are programmed to do less physical connections and more wireless connections and we are hard-wired to do so.
The case in point is the recent Bluetooth bungle and Apple’s iOS 8-8.2 (iPhone 4S/5/5C/5S/6/6+) that is causing problems with connections with in-car systems, since September.
Freelance writers can write more than just articles. I was able to take an entire year of car technology and turn it into awards with live online voting. The writing embodied trends in the industry while the voting application required a few HTML CSS tweaks. So far, the news of the awards and the voting have increased web traffic by 20%. I’ll let you how it helps with web traffic and notoriety on Freelancewriternow.com Electric Car Insider co-sponsored the awards and embed links for the voting are offered to the media.
A few months ago, I read about DSRC being used to warn bicyclists and cars of the potential danger of them crashing into each other. I watched an interesting video on YouTube from Honda. I pitched an article on DSRC to a publication which accepted the idea.
It took a week of emails and phone calls to Honda PR and finally they informed me that they would not give an interview. I don’t know if the PR department put a stop on the interview or if the publication was not big enough for them.
My favorite part of being a freelance writer is interviewing experts. I can find out the deepest technical details from an expert that researching online would take days or even months. A case in point, is that I read in a news story that reason why Verizon Wireless was not providing 4G LTE connections in cars was that you can’t talk and use data at the same time.
From my years writing about wireless, I knew that statement was incorrect but I did not why until I talked to an expert at Qualcomm for Automotive IT News.