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Welcome to another week in review, recapping some of the top stories from the week in the embedded M2M solutions sector as report by TMCnet.

First up, County Connection began providing bus riders in Contra Costa County, California, with Wi-Fi access on local busses. The company's goal with this is to make it easier for passengers to find schedules since transit in suburban areas is typically inconsistent, while helping them to be more productive while traveling.

County Connection has been providing fixed bus route and paratransit service in Contra Cost County for over 30 years. The area has more than 500,000 residents spread over 200 square miles, which are services by 121 busses that carry over 3.2 million passengers per year.

Next, Ford made its OpenXC open development platform available to developers for download. OpenXC allows access to a vehicle interface module based on the Arduino platform, which has been growing in popularity with the DIY hardware crowd.

This module can be used to read data about a vehicle's performance on its internal communications systems. The OpenXC website expands on this with vehicle schematics, documentation and code, for a number of other hardware modules, enabling developers to go much further and possibly develop some innovative applications.

Laird Technologies announced this week that its Summit 40 Series radio modules now support Android (News - Alert) Gingerbread 2.3. These modules also support Linux kernel version 2.6.37, Windows Embedded Handheld 6 and 7, and Windows Embedded Compact 6 and 7.

Said Chris Bolinger, product director, Laird Technologies (News - Alert), “Business-critical mobile devices such as handheld mobile computers are beginning to run Android instead of Windows Embedded Handheld or Windows Embedded Compact. 40 Series radio modules now offer the same proven enterprise-grade features on both Windows and Android.”

In other news, Pedigree Technologies released its OneView suite of Web- and tablet-based apps designed to track, monitor and diagnose equipment as well as asset and fleet vehicles from a single interface.

This system is able to monitor all of a business' critical resources from people to assets and equipment.

OneView can also integrate data about physical assets with workforce information such as location, service hours and job assignments in real time. Its convenient Web interface, however, is OneView's most prominent feature, making it extremely convenient and easy to use.

Lastly, Sprint (News - Alert) and Aegis Mobility announced the FleetSafer distracted driving app to assist businesses, fleet owners and operators to concentrate on driving better. Specifically, FleetSafer ensures that divers avoid the distraction of mobile devices.

The FleetSaver device is enabled as soon as a vehicle starts moving and prevents texting, e-mailing and browsing on any mobile device. It does not, however, disable hands-free phone communications, allowing organizations to conform to Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration rules for phone use.

That's all for this week in review. Check out the Embedded M2M Solutions Channel for more news in this sector.

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