Besides the nominations and voting opening for Tech CARS Awards from Auto Connected Car News. There was hardly any connected car new this week–just from CITGO, Motorq and FOMO.
CITGO App Car Connected
Purchasing fuel, food and merchandise from a mobile device, receiving customized offers, and rolling back prices at the pump will soon be a reality at more than 4,500 CITGO branded retail locations in the United States. The enhanced CITGO mobile app is powered by P97 Networks, a leader in cloud-based mobile commerce. The app will integrate and support Connected Car and the CITGO shopper loyalty program with state-of-the-art mobile commerce technology.
Motorq Funding
Motorq, the connected car API company, has closed a $7 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Story Ventures with participation from existing investors FM Capital and Monta Vista Capital and a new strategic investor Avanta Ventures, the investment arm of CSAA, a AAA Insurer. The company also unveiled a suite of fleet management intelligence tools designed to help fleet owners and managers reduce cost, increase efficiency and improve overall fleet management.
“Today there are 560 million supercomputers on wheels across the U.S. and Europe generating hundreds of millions of terabytes of untapped, business critical data each year,” said Arun Rajagopalan, Co-founder and CEO of Motorq. “We are building the platform and toolset needed to extract, analyze and make sense of this data for fleet owners today and ultimately for consumers tomorrow.”
Motorq’s cloud-based system ingests and monitors embedded data from a vehicle’s onboard computers, runs advanced analytics and machine learning models, contextualizes the insights with other information sets and delivers those insights to customers via application programming interfaces (APIs) and other tools. Datapoints include vehicle location, charge/fuel use, driver behavior, safety warnings, maintenance alerts, certain remote commands, and other important information.
The company’s new suite of tools include Pre-Delivery Tracking, Full Vehicle Portal, V3 API Access, Snowflake Data Lake Integration, and many others.
Motorq is initially focused on deploying the platform into the business fleet and dealer markets, where business owners can use the data to increase safety, efficiency and become more profitable. Fleet owners can easily customize analytics and reporting options and also integrate the insights into their own applications and workflows.
Long term, Motorq envisions a world where consumers also benefit from a connected vehicle ecosystem of features, data, information and applications.
“Much like Twilio made it easy for rich applications to be built on top of communications services, and just as Plaid connected legacy financial systems with emerging new banking and payment apps, Motorq is the platform connecting vehicle manufacturers, dealers, owners and service providers,” said Rajagopalan.
Key to Motorq’s goal of creating this global connected vehicle platform is its success in securing developer agreements with auto manufacturers. Today, Motorq is the leading integration platform for global OEM’s. With relationships with seven of the top 10 global leaders covering 21 brands, Motorq is able to quickly and securely connect to and provision information from more than 32 million vehicles, a number that is increasing each day. Having direct access to vehicle data streams across disparate manufacturers is not just a prerequisite for a scalable platform, it’s also extremely difficult and time consuming.
Mobile Disinfection
FOMO CORP. (announces that its wholly owned subsidiary, Purge Virus LLC, has completed the first sale of its recently launched Purge Virus Mobile Disinfection (PV-MD) offering via a leading global e-commerce platform as a service (PaaS). Purge Virus recently chose the provider as its online enabler for PV-MD sales because of the substantial direct-to-consumer (DTC) market traction for the one million businesses that run on it in 175 countries generating billions of dollars of annualized gross merchandise volume (GMV). Purge Virus took its first online PV-MD order on December 21, 2020 and is anticipating substantial growth in 2021 as it adds more products to its catalog. Over the near-term, top global B2B e-commerce platforms that have approved PV-MD for listing are similarly expected to activate, which management believes will further boost market awareness and momentum for PV-MD.
PV-MD is one of the most cost-effective ways for facility owners and managers to improve indoor air quality (IAQ) and reduce the spread of COVID-19. The portable device that combines ultraviolet light (UVC) with photo plasma has proven disinfection capabilities for viruses while removing odors through ionization. The device simply rests on or mounts on janitorial or housekeeping carts; afterwards, the service provider plugs it in to any standard wall outlet in the room that they are cleaning and, when done, the technology travels from room to room. The device disinfects the air while rooms are cleaned making deployment simple, fast, and cost effective. PV-MD is ideal for schools, senior living properties (retirement homes, nursing homes, and assisted living communities), hotels, motels, offices, and any other facility that has staff or contract cleaning services.
Said Charlie Szoradi, CEO Purge Virus, “Some of our customers have embraced in-duct and wall mounted systems to systemically disinfect the air continuously through their buildings. Others have asked about solutions that do not require the time and cost to retrofit Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. Our PV-MD offering was born out of a meeting in December with the owner of a motel that is part of a nationwide chain looking for disinfection solutions for their 30,000 rooms. PV-MD is a cost-effective way to maximize available disinfection technology for 2021 and beyond.”
Said Vik Grover, FOMO, CEO: “COVID-19 has persisted and may be with us through the fall of 2021 and beyond, even with vaccines. New variants also add risks and reasons to proactively go beyond masks, testing, and social distancing. Among many of the COVID-19 challenges, K12 schools need to re-open to aid the economic recovery while nursing homes need to protect their patients. PV-MD answers the call via the ease of e-commerce purchasing from our online partner to deliver solutions to the market.”