The third phase of the joint Blackberry L-Spark accelerator program wrapped up last week. Spanning five months, this latest round granted a select group of Canadian startups early access to the Blackberry Intelligent Vehicle Data Platform (IVY) to develop high-impact solutions leveraging in-vehicle data to improve driver and passenger experiences. Four companies were granted access to this round, including Raven Connected. 

BlackBerry IVY is a scalable, cloud-connected software platform that allows automakers to provide a consistent and secure way to read vehicle sensor data, normalize it, and create actionable insights from that data locally in the vehicle and the cloud. The IVY platform is Blackberry’s response to the shift towards a need to add and manage vehicle functionality to keep up with rapidly changing technology. While vehicles traditionally have all the bells and whistles built-in, a software-defined vehicle prolongs its relevance by expanding and upgrading the vehicle after it’s been delivered to the market through its software.Through its IVY platform, Blackberry has positioned itself as the leader of the software-defined vehicle. 

Raven Connected shares many similarities with the IVY platform, priming it for this accelerator project. Like IVY, Raven normalizes data and creates actionable insights locally in the vehicle and our AWS-based cloud. While many are familiar with our video telematics system, most are unaware of the underlying complexity of the solution and just how comprehensive the underlying systems and data pipelines really are.The Raven solution goes far beyond the capabilities of any dash cam system, delivering powerful edge computing right from the vehicle. 

Raven connects to the CAN Bus, reading data directly from the vehicle (both J1939 and J1979 standards). It also gathers a vast array of sensor data and video from the cabin and road, immediately processing all of this relayed information on the Raven Edge and in the Raven Cloud. This project was made possible within the five-month timeframe because we control our own hardware, firmware, cloud, and application layers which is critical to quickly and securely develop next-generation connected vehicle services.

For our project in the Blackberry L-Spark Accelerator, we built a Virtual Raven on the IVY platform, demonstrating that a software-defined Raven can run on a software-defined vehicle. The Virtual Raven collects data directly from the vehicle using the IVY platform. Then it’s transmitted to the Raven Cloud, where it’s seen by the Raven Web / Mobile Apps and APIs as being indistinguishable from data derived from a physical Raven device. While this project exhibited Raven’s ability to provide a parity service between vehicles on the road today and those in the next-generation, it also validated its capacity to provide robust video telematics-based services to OEMs.

Our team is very thankful for the opportunity to participate in this accelerator and is looking forward to continuing to deliver connected video telematics both as an aftermarket device and as a software-defined service in the next-generation of vehicles.