I don’t know, when I go to the gas station most of the time I just want to get gas not buy tickets or coffee or order dry-cleaning or get a coupon for $1 off bottled water…just the gas! Gas pumping however a seems to be the last thing on the minds of some folks at the CES show this week. A major case in point was the Dresser Wayne booth in Microsoft’s Automotive Business Unit tent.
My colleague John Cox wrote up a great item on the Dresser Wayne “Ovation IX Technology Platform,” which for the uninitiated is a term that’s hard to associate with pumping gasoline. But the Ovation IX runs the embedded Microsoft Windows CE 5.0 operating system, a powerful Intel XScale processor. It also sports a brilliantly clear, crisp, color.10.4-inch full VGA touch screen. It has a built-in 802.11b/g wireless access point and supports the ISO 14443 contactless payment standard, which is being aggressively backed by Visa, Master Card, and others. The Ovation’s multimedia capabilities let retail chains promote, using video and audio, a range of products and promotions, and measure the effectiveness of such programs. Oh and it can pump gas I hear.
