auto

Last night Sprint M2M (Machine to Machine) and I hosted a dinner party under the stars for some of Los Angeles’ forward thinking women. Sprint M2M is responsible for providing the bandwidth for more than 5 million M2M devices.

I promise you this is interesting! Don’t give up on me.

Sprint has a line of products for insurance companies – OBD2 devices plug into your car, typically under the dashboard. Every car made from 1996 until today has an OBD plug in site (OBD = On Board Diagnostics). It’s where mechanics plug into your vehicle to get diagnostic information. For years fleet managers have used OBD2 devices to keep track of their vehicles and now the general public is becoming aware of how helpful these devices can be.

Rather than droning on and on let me list a few things these babies do:

• plugging it in is as complicated as plugging in a phone charger to your cigarette lighter
• They send you information about how your vehicle is being driven. You can get alerts if there’s excessive speed (you define excess in your settings), outside a given boundary or send auto text messages like this one
• You can disable text messaging while the car is being driven

If you want an OBD2 device you’ll need to ask C3PO and R2D2… I mean you’ll need to ask your insurance agent for one. Sprint has a whole collection of these OBD2 products for insurance companies to use in their Usage Based Insurance programs.

The OBD2 devices we are talking about now are yours to keep for however long you feel necessary. With a subscription the device sends you (the vehicle owner) feedback about how the vehicle is being driven. This is particularly useful with newer drivers or caretakers (okay nannies!) where you don’t want to be in the car with them but you do want everyone you love to be safer in said car.

Anyhow we’ll be talking about OBD2 gadgets and Sprint M2M quite a bit in August and right into September. I’d love to have you join the conversation. I’ll be announcing twitter chats shortly and they’ll come complete with great prizing so be sure to watch for #DriveSafe and you’ll want to follow @SprintM2M on twitter.

Our fabulous dinner was catered by Fresh Dish. I got to pretend I was a zillionaire because Fresh Dish brings personal chefs to your home (and you don’t even have to be a zillionaire). My friend Romi is the founder of Fresh Dish and I really think she’s hit a home run.