Can Lingdong's main platform + security network promote the intelligence of automobiles through the integration of software and hardware?

Just as smartphones and smart TVs have become indispensable technological elements of modern life, the wave of automotive intelligence has followed.

Just like many common dash cam products on the market now, they even have multiple functions such as navigation, entertainment and even driving monitoring. Since Tesla has become a hot topic, more and more car manufacturers have begun to keen on installing "iPad" on the center console, allowing people to see the future prototype of smart cars.

However, under the general trend of the integration of smart technology and automobiles, most technology companies still choose to start with functional products and focus on the research and development and manufacturing of products such as driving recorders.

Different from the general practice in the industry, although NetQin is also optimistic about the prospect of automotive intelligence, through the acquisition of Finnish technology company Atom, NetQin is more focused on using platform products at the system and hardware levels to lay out a new blueprint for future automotive development.

(Photo) NetQin shifts from mobile entertainment to smart car field

15 years of experience in more than 200 projects. This is a system manufacturer recognized by top sports car brands.

As the foothold for NetQin's layout of smart cars, the name Lingdong Technology may be relatively unfamiliar to most ordinary consumers, but as it is vertical to the automotive industry, Lingdong has already accumulated a deep foundation.

The predecessor of Lingdong Technology was a Finnish company called Nomovok. Before 2002, it belonged to the ecosystem of Nokia, the giant in the mobile phone industry at that time. It developed Meego and Maemo operating systems for Nokia, which gave it an operating system development background and accumulated certain industry technologies.

After 2002, Link Motion Technology began to focus more on projects in the automotive industry. In the more than 15 years from 2002 to the present, it has participated in more than 200 projects in the automotive industry, including first-tier engineering companies and vehicle manufacturers of Japanese brands, as well as very influential European automobile companies including Renault.

It is particularly worth mentioning that in 2014 and 2015, Lingdong Technology used its own system combined with the performance requirements of sports cars to make a two-in-one "entertainment + data display" instrument for Lamborghini. This system-level product is used in the current Lamborghini Huracan sports car.

The fact that it is favored by the world's top high-end sports car brands strongly demonstrates that Lingdong Technology is highly recognized by the automotive industry.

Integrating the system and hardware into one, Atom also needs to do subtraction for smart cars

Similar to the well-known smartphones, an excellent smart car system is inseparable from the application performance that brings diversified experience upwards, and also inseparable from the stable and reliable basic hardware support downwards.

Just as Steve Jobs emphasized at the launch of the first iPhone that "anyone who really takes software seriously should make their own hardware," when it comes to automotive intelligence, Link Motion Technology also realizes that if it really wants to do a good job of the operating system, which is essentially software, and give full play to the performance of applications, making its own hardware is a necessary step.

Therefore, developing hardware that can support the operating system and the performance of top-level applications on the operating system, and integrating the system with the hardware, has become Lingdong Technology's current overall product approach.

This does not mean that Lingdong is trying to develop a complete vehicle that matches its own operating system. In fact, Lingdong prefers to see itself as a more integrated role in the automotive industry chain, bringing more possibilities to its partners in the development of automotive intelligence.

Take Lingdong Technology's current in-vehicle computer for the automotive field as an example. This box-shaped product was unveiled at the CES in the United States at the beginning of the year and has been mass-produced in June this year. It has a lot of interfaces reserved on one side, allowing each car manufacturer to add or reduce functions and customize them for different models, such as supporting up to four screen displays, the addition of 4G and other communication modules, body bus connection, etc.

(Picture) Lingdong's Nearly Ideal Vehicle Architecture

At the same time, because this box combines the operating system and hardware, it can be customized according to project requirements and adapt to different products. More importantly, there is only one platform for later maintenance. If a single system OTA can solve many problems, it can reduce the recall cost of traditional car manufacturers by 80%-90%. From the perspective of development and operation, this figure is quite considerable.

In-depth system bottom-level design Lingdong comes up with new ideas to ensure the safety of smart cars

Of course, after being recognized by automobile manufacturers and realizing product advantages such as being able to greatly reduce the R&D and maintenance costs of automotive intelligence, whether it has sufficient safety naturally becomes the key to whether intelligence can truly enter the automotive usage scenario.

As we all know, NetQin itself is a technology company with an absolute leading position in mobile Internet security. When its subsidiary Linktech becomes a promoter of the development of smart cars, security will inevitably be elevated to a higher product level.

From the perspective of general car manufacturers, security issues are mostly realized after a threat occurs, or some security countermeasures appear only after an attack case occurs. Security is viewed more from the perspective of solving problems.

However, Link Motion Technology's thinking on the security aspect of automotive intelligence is at a more basic level. When designing the system and hardware, it will consider what will be the source of attacks that threaten the security of smart cars and how to prevent them. Then, in the initial product design, it will do its best to minimize security risks.

For example, some car manufacturers were very keen on installing entertainment systems in cars in the past few years, and they were often accustomed to using software solutions that were not much different from ordinary smartphones. There were some security risks in using them in cars. However, Atom has always insisted on using the Linux solution, matching various types of applications from the outside, giving the product a higher security starting point from the beginning.

In addition, the car itself is an extremely complex product. From the most basic running mechanism, driving dynamic monitoring, to the surface entertainment system, each application is packaged separately in a "small container" to create system-level virtualization, which is also a completely different product idea for Link Motion Technology to deploy smart cars. Each part of the resources is isolated separately and given different permissions, so that different applications do not affect each other under unnecessary operating conditions, and the correlation failure rate between applications is minimized.

It is understood that in the domestic market, Lingdong Technology is currently coming up with three ideas, corresponding to fuel vehicles, electric vehicles and special models mainly passenger vehicles, to help the entire automotive industry and actively promote intelligent transformation and upgrading.

Especially for the electric vehicle sector which has just emerged and has a generally low level of popularity, Lingdong's platform products also conform to the research and development ideas of highly integrated electric vehicle software and hardware.

If the trend of automobile electrification is unstoppable, then with the combined effect of deep technical accumulation, software and hardware advantages, and complete safety thinking, Link Technology will inevitably continue to accelerate the development of automobile intelligence.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.