Last year, Google robotics division head Andy Rubin left the company after nine years, to start his own incubator, “Playground Global, ” which joined Redpoint Ventures as its newest Venture Partner.
There’s been Now a lot of speculation about what Android inventor Andy Rubin has been up to. Rubin tells Wired that his company is making a dash cam with a unique business model: you’ll get the hardware for free, but you have to hand over the camera’s data in return. It’s not clear why Playground wants to make that bargain, although one possibility is that it’ll create a visual map of streets around the world.
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Google has done an incredible job of mapping the world through Google Maps, but it’s merely a regularly updated snapshot in time at the moment. A real-time view of the world has many benefits, but Rubin doesn’t address any of the potential privacy issues or legal obstacles in the Wired interview.
Dashcams become popular in Russia where on-the-road insurance fraud is a significant problem. This could democratize dashcams by making them available to anyone who’s willing to give up a bit of privacy in return for proof of innocence.
Rubin says he’s working on other ideas that he’s “not willing to talk about” at the moment. Even if those don’t materialize any time soon, though, the dashcam project might shake up the tech industry.
Rubin is currently building an ecosystem of hardware and software tools to help entrepreneurs of all sizes, including those found on Kickstarter, realize their ideas. Rubin appears to be building a modular hardware ecosystem for any type of device, something that will aid startups for years to come.
READ MORE: Andy Rubin
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