Retooling an Old Car for Smartphone Apps

Pioneer is already on to its second-generation AppRadio 2, which now supports iPhone 4 and 4S models and more than a dozen Android phones. The $499 receiver has a seven-inch touch screen, an AM/FM radio and Bluetooth. The system has no CD player. It relies on connected smartphones for playing tunes instead.

Music can be streamed from Pandora and Rdio, for example, and there are plenty of driving-centric apps, including Waze and Inrix Traffic, to help avoid road congestion. There’s even a Best Parking app that will direct drivers to the cheapest garage near them (it covers 43 cities and 79 airports). The AppRadio supports more than two dozen apps, with additional ones being added.

If you still have a CD collection, Sony’s XAV-701HD, with a seven-inch touch screen, is a better option and may have advantages for Android owners. In addition to playing discs, the $700 XAV-701HD can receive HD Radio stations, works with Bluetooth and supports Pandora streaming music from iPhone, Android and BlackBerry phones.

However, its real strength lies in that it is one of the first in-car receivers to support the MirrorLink communications standard for Android phones. MirrorLink is intended to make it easier for cars, stereos and handsets to talk to one another and share information on-screen. Unfortunately, only a handful of Android phones support MirrorLink.

If all you want to do is stream Pandora stations into your car, most stereo and navigation makers offer compatible models, including Jensen, JVC and Kenwood. The Pandora app on Alpine’s top-of-line INE-Z928HD works with iPhone, BlackBerry and Android phones, but the unit is costly, $1,500, with a generous eight-inch screen with built-in navigation, free lifetime traffic reports, HD radio (for digital broadcasts) and Bluetooth for hands-free calling.

When choosing a receiver like the models mentioned from Pioneer, Sony and Alpine, shoppers should use a professional installer, who will charge about $100 to set everything up correctly. If the cost or trouble of replacing the unit in your dashboard is too daunting, iPhone owners have a simpler, less expensive alternative.

Clarion’s $270 NextGate looks like an oversized portable navigation device but is in fact an iPhone app controller that sits on the dash. Just download Clarion’s Smart Access app and plug an iPhone 4 or 4S into the NextGate and the seven-inch touch screen will give you access to apps customized for in-car use.

It enables drivers to tap into Inrix Traffic, thousands of stations from TuneIn, custom Pandora channels and even special Twitter and Facebook apps without looking down at the phone.

Apple iPhone fans should be aware of one major caveat when looking to make an in-car connection: most existing multimedia models will not work properly with the new iPhone 5, even with an adapter.

Meg Whitman’s Toughest Campaign: Retooling Hewlett-Packard

IT’S not as easy being Meg Whitman as Meg Whitman might have expected.

At 56, Ms. Whitman, the eBay billionaire who spent a fortune unsuccessfully trying to become the governor of California, has found her Act III. She has been chief executive of Hewlett-Packard for a little more than a year, and many people are still waiting for her to get her message out about the place.

Here it is:

Meg Whitman believes in H.P., and believes that this company matters to Silicon Valley, to California, to the world. She believes that Wall Street doesn’t quite get it — doesn’t quite see the promise she sees. She believes that mobile devices, cloud computing and Big Data will re-energize H.P., a company that for a decade has grabbed more headlines for boardroom soap operas than for bold innovation.

“I believe in creative destruction,” Ms. Whitman says in a conference room near her executive cubicle.

Even, it seems, when the stakes include her company and reputation. In all likelihood, this is Ms. Whitman’s last great public performance. She became rich by building eBay, then spent more money than any candidate for public office in the nation’s history trying to become California’s governor. She was sometimes portrayed in that race as an aloof 1 percenter — as someone who pushed around subordinates, once literally, and who was unkind to her housekeeper, an illegal immigrant. “I left a little bruised,” Ms. Whitman, a Republican, says of the 2010 race she lost to Jerry Brown. “It was hard, it was personally very hard.”

So now Ms. Whitman is focusing her energy on H.P., the company founded by the tech legends William Hewlett and David Packard. Bill and Dave, as they are referred to at the company, spawned Silicon Valley. Last year, H.P. posted revenue of $127 billion. It employs 320,000 people directly, and easily that many again through a network of manufacturers and computer resellers across 170 countries.

Ms. Whitman has plenty of impressive-sounding stats at her fingertips. H.P., she says, employs thousands of people in Costa Rica, Houston and Boise, Idaho. “In India, we have 60,000 people,” she says. A new program for selling printer ink is in exactly 87 countries. Every 15 seconds, the company turns out 60 new printers, 30 personal computers and one powerful computer server. Still, she yearns for even more data, something closer to the command of the day-to-day process she had at eBay.

THE fact is, H.P. isn’t what it used to be. Next to Apple or Google, it looks like a bit of a loser. In the most recent quarter, as Apple soared to new heights, H.P.’s revenue fell 5 percent and its operating margins dwindled. Profit margins at I.B.M. and Apple are several times that of H.P. And H.P.’s share price, at just over $17 on Friday, is about where it was in 1995.

“It’s staggering,” says A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “This is now the cheapest big stock in the last 25 years. That reflects an industry belief that the company is going to decline.”

Ms. Whitman is impatient to move H.P. closer to a global computing explosion that is transforming the industry. Smartphones and tablets from Apple, Google and others are now flying into consumers’ hands worldwide. Those computers are tied via the Internet to cloud computing data centers operated by Amazon, Microsoft, and hundreds of multinational companies. Information from all the consumer devices, in addition to data from billions of sensors and Web-crawling robots, is crunched in these supercomputing clouds, creating a Big Data revolution full of business opportunities and dangers.

From Ms. Whitman’s high vantage, the trends of mobile, cloud and Big Data resolve into a single phenomenon: the creation and exploitation of Information Everywhere. H.P. makes consumer devices, in addition to servers for the cloud, sensor networks, and analysis software. Instead of standing at the confluence of the phenomenon, though, H.P. is on the sidelines, with most of the parts but none of the integration to make it a leader.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 30, 2012

An earlier version of the text of the slideshow accompanying this article referred imprecisely to the reasons that Carly Fiorina left Hewlett-Packard.  She was fired amid uneven business execution and not because of a corporate spying scandal. (The spying incidents came to light after she left.) The slideshow also referred imprecisely to the dismissal of Mark Hurd. He resigned amid charges of inappropriate conduct with a female contract employee, not an female employee of the company.