We play cars in an adult way: how we became suppliers of IT solutions for the largest automobile concerns
Work at the intersection of engineering technology and programming is the future. Already, many startups are joining developers and techies in their teams to design, for example, robots and drones.
The automotive industry is a little aloof, in which conservative moods predominate. The exception, probably, is only Tesla Ilona Mask. Brands do not allow third-party developers to access their technologies and develop them within companies, rightly fearing industrial espionage.
However, there are already startups that spend a lot of time and effort on developing devices that increase the capabilities of cars. This is the story of Bright Box and the Connected Car platform Remoto
. About the technologies that we use, and about how the development process in our company differs from others.
Bright Box is a Russian startup specializing in the development of technological solutions for the automotive business. In the market, we are known primarily for two products:
The company was founded by Ivan Mishanin and Alexander Dimchenko in 2012. Prior to that, they worked together at BrightConsult as a business development director and director of the portal solutions department, respectively, and when it was sold to Incadea, a German developer of ERP systems for car dealers, Ivan and Alexander decided to leave and create their own startup.
The first investor in the newly made company was their former boss Innokenty Belotsky, together with partners in the Cloud4Auto Ventures fund. Unlike most startups, Bright Box primarily formed a custom software development unit, which quickly became profitable and was able to cover all the costs of maintaining the company. Attracted investments were spent only on the development of the first product - Dealer Mobility.
Dealer mobilityhelps in resolving issues of marketing, sales, after-sales service. The application is installed on smartphones of car dealers' clients, reports on all promotions and helps to send a request for service. The founders of the company in their previous work have well studied one of the main problems of dealerships: when it comes to service, customers prefer to turn to cheaper informals. Almost no one comes to the official dealer for the third MOT. To keep the client, he needs to call, write and make special offers on time. Dealer Mobility solves this problem, and its use by motorists costs absolutely nothing, dealers pay for the installation.
In 2013, Bright Box successfully launched the first version of the application, quickly gained customers and became the undisputed leader in this niche. At the same time, our team began developing a new project - Remoto. As planned, this solution allowed you to remotely control your car from anywhere in the world from a smartphone.
At that time, Bright Box had no expertise in the development of such devices from the hardware side, but there were contractors who developed the scheme for the necessary device, and two factories in Russia and China that agreed to assemble it. At the same time, KIA Motors Russia became interested in the project, which agreed to become a pilot client.
The next six months were spent on developing a mobile application, the first batch of 1000 devices and firmware for it, so that by the end of 2013 the first batch of Remoto could hit the shelves of all KIA dealers in the Russian Federation.
To date, we have adapted our technologies for many automotive brands, including those outside of Russia. For example, the new Nissan SmartCar solution in the Middle East is based on the Remoto platform. Dubai Police is collaborating with Bright Box and Nissan Middle East to create a new technology service for road safety.
Our developments are used to ensure the safety and control of the condition of cars in Europe and Asia. We also actively cooperate with Telecom companies. For example, to ensure a high-quality level of Remoto communication in the CIS, we work with VimpelCom.
Remoto is a very complex technology project. Before starting development, Bright Box analysts conducted a survey of car owners. It turned out that first of all they need remote control of door lock, climate control and, of course, search for a car with alerts about bumps or evacuation.
And if there were no problems with the latest requirements, since for quite some time there have been technologies and mobile applications that allow you to collect information about the state of the car, then with the real management of auto systems, the situation was much more complicated. Only a few manufacturers equip their vehicles with a standard control from a smartphone. For example Volvo with Volvo on Call or BMW with ConnectedDrive. But the installation of the first system costs from 1000 euros (plus an expensive subscription), and the second does not work in Russia. Thus, Remoto practically had no competition in this niche.
Starting the development of Remoto, we had to quickly assemble a special team of engineers - Remoto Laboratory. As designed by the developers, the designed system should at least be able to safely (through a secure communication channel) start the engine, open doors and trunk, control the temperature and turn on the light.
To provide these capabilities, it is not enough just to connect to a standard diagnostic connector. You need to know the protocols by which car modules communicate with each other. Moreover, automakers often do not seek to open the specifications of their protocols to startups.
Now most of the employees in the company are engineers. Bright Box is developing the entire stack of equipment technologies, embedded software and server infrastructure of a mobile application.
Our community of developers is represented by teams of 5-6 people who own these stacks and are engaged in sets of specific tasks. These teams are cross-functional - each has specialists representing several stacks.
Remoto is being developed as a large platform by all developers, and in the future, a separate team will be created for each client, which will adapt this platform to the requirements of the automaker. For quality control, Bright Box has a division of field testers.
Our first Dealer Mobility product was based on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, so when developing Remoto we had no doubt about choosing the technology stack. Initially, there were two main reasons for using the services of the corporation from Redmond:
1. Historical. Bright Box was easier and cheaper to rent the necessary services than to buy licenses. And, having accumulated a large amount of technical expertise and experience with Microsoft products, it makes no sense to change reliable technologies in working on our own projects.
2. Support. Microsoft guarantees a high (24/7) level of reliability and accessibility of important services for consumers almost anywhere in the world. To ensure the same level ourselves, it is necessary to invest huge amounts of money in infrastructure around the world, hire special engineers, and maintain equipment. Clickable We use PaaS and Azure infrastructure components. Among PaaS-components it is worth highlighting Cloud services and various storage technologies - blobs, SQL Database. Distributed caching facilities (Azure Redis Cache) and components for storing unstructured data, i.e. telemetry data coming from a car.
If we consider the infrastructure components, then our developers use the Microsoft Azure virtualization technologies on which the applications are located. They perform certain business operations: data is processed, reports are built.
Remoto uses a wide range of technologies:
All data is streamed through the Azure Event Hubs and then processed using Azure Stream Analytics, thereby performing a hot data analysis.
At the same time, data from streams and other sources is collected in the Azure Data Lake storage where they are further processed using Azure Data Lake Analytics.
Also part of the analytics is carried out on the Apache Spark cluster. For data experiments, Python / F # is mainly used. Together with the Jupiter Notebook, Azure Notebooks is used to store and run them.
Each year, Bright Box collects exabytes of data from its Remoto platform. The information received is not personalized, it becomes anonymous, after which it is processed to extract any patterns and patterns from it. Data is used by car manufacturers for several tasks.
The first is tracking the quality of cars sold. Remoto collects all information about defects, analyzes them, and transfers them to car manufacturers. This helps them understand their causes and eliminate them in future versions of cars.
The second is the use of the data to analyze the behavior of their customers and the formation of various proposals and recommendations for them on how to use and maintain the car. The system tells at what time it is better to do MOT, when it is better to go to the dealer for diagnostics, if there are any problems of any on-board vehicle systems.
The third task is to analyze the style and habits of driving a client. Such data are used for submission to insurance companies and are taken into account when calculating the cost of insurance. Also with them you can increase the level of care for the client, thereby tying him to himself for the longest possible period of time. Everything is done to ensure that the client remains loyal as long as possible.
One of our latest achievements is to work with the Dubai police. Bright Box and Nissan have created a new road safety service called Smart Response , the first of its kind in the Middle East. The system analyzes traffic, warns of accidents and traffic jams.
Bright Box has an impressive track record in the software and automotive engineering that we value. We like what we do and the challenges we face. For example, we recently announced the development of an unmanned car driving system that works with students using generated frames from computer games and real shots taken from the streets of a computer vision network.
Remoto Pilot is our new unmanned vehicle driving system that allows you to detect and avoid obstacles in real time, drive along a pre-planned path, guaranteeing safe and reliable lane driving.
Bright Box is the work at the intersection of engineering, programming, cloud technology and big data. These are truly adult car games. We create technologies that only large foreign brands could swing at. There are simply no analogues in Russia. Our employees gain enormous international and intersectoral experience and work in those areas that will be relevant in the near future. Join now!
We need:
Project Manager
QA Specialist / Test Engineer
Presale Consultant
System Analyst
The automotive industry is a little aloof, in which conservative moods predominate. The exception, probably, is only Tesla Ilona Mask. Brands do not allow third-party developers to access their technologies and develop them within companies, rightly fearing industrial espionage.
However, there are already startups that spend a lot of time and effort on developing devices that increase the capabilities of cars. This is the story of Bright Box and the Connected Car platform Remoto
. About the technologies that we use, and about how the development process in our company differs from others.
History of Bright Box
Bright Box is a Russian startup specializing in the development of technological solutions for the automotive business. In the market, we are known primarily for two products:
- Dealer Mobility is a platform for car dealers and their customers, which with the help of a mobile application and telematics allows you to increase the life cycle of the client, increase the frequency of visits to the service and improve the quality of interaction with customers
- Remoto - Connected Car platform for remote control of a car using a smartphone.
The company was founded by Ivan Mishanin and Alexander Dimchenko in 2012. Prior to that, they worked together at BrightConsult as a business development director and director of the portal solutions department, respectively, and when it was sold to Incadea, a German developer of ERP systems for car dealers, Ivan and Alexander decided to leave and create their own startup.
The first investor in the newly made company was their former boss Innokenty Belotsky, together with partners in the Cloud4Auto Ventures fund. Unlike most startups, Bright Box primarily formed a custom software development unit, which quickly became profitable and was able to cover all the costs of maintaining the company. Attracted investments were spent only on the development of the first product - Dealer Mobility.
Dealer mobilityhelps in resolving issues of marketing, sales, after-sales service. The application is installed on smartphones of car dealers' clients, reports on all promotions and helps to send a request for service. The founders of the company in their previous work have well studied one of the main problems of dealerships: when it comes to service, customers prefer to turn to cheaper informals. Almost no one comes to the official dealer for the third MOT. To keep the client, he needs to call, write and make special offers on time. Dealer Mobility solves this problem, and its use by motorists costs absolutely nothing, dealers pay for the installation.
In 2013, Bright Box successfully launched the first version of the application, quickly gained customers and became the undisputed leader in this niche. At the same time, our team began developing a new project - Remoto. As planned, this solution allowed you to remotely control your car from anywhere in the world from a smartphone.
At that time, Bright Box had no expertise in the development of such devices from the hardware side, but there were contractors who developed the scheme for the necessary device, and two factories in Russia and China that agreed to assemble it. At the same time, KIA Motors Russia became interested in the project, which agreed to become a pilot client.
The next six months were spent on developing a mobile application, the first batch of 1000 devices and firmware for it, so that by the end of 2013 the first batch of Remoto could hit the shelves of all KIA dealers in the Russian Federation.
To date, we have adapted our technologies for many automotive brands, including those outside of Russia. For example, the new Nissan SmartCar solution in the Middle East is based on the Remoto platform. Dubai Police is collaborating with Bright Box and Nissan Middle East to create a new technology service for road safety.
Our developments are used to ensure the safety and control of the condition of cars in Europe and Asia. We also actively cooperate with Telecom companies. For example, to ensure a high-quality level of Remoto communication in the CIS, we work with VimpelCom.
Remoto
Remoto is a very complex technology project. Before starting development, Bright Box analysts conducted a survey of car owners. It turned out that first of all they need remote control of door lock, climate control and, of course, search for a car with alerts about bumps or evacuation.
And if there were no problems with the latest requirements, since for quite some time there have been technologies and mobile applications that allow you to collect information about the state of the car, then with the real management of auto systems, the situation was much more complicated. Only a few manufacturers equip their vehicles with a standard control from a smartphone. For example Volvo with Volvo on Call or BMW with ConnectedDrive. But the installation of the first system costs from 1000 euros (plus an expensive subscription), and the second does not work in Russia. Thus, Remoto practically had no competition in this niche.
Starting the development of Remoto, we had to quickly assemble a special team of engineers - Remoto Laboratory. As designed by the developers, the designed system should at least be able to safely (through a secure communication channel) start the engine, open doors and trunk, control the temperature and turn on the light.
To provide these capabilities, it is not enough just to connect to a standard diagnostic connector. You need to know the protocols by which car modules communicate with each other. Moreover, automakers often do not seek to open the specifications of their protocols to startups.
Now most of the employees in the company are engineers. Bright Box is developing the entire stack of equipment technologies, embedded software and server infrastructure of a mobile application.
Our community of developers is represented by teams of 5-6 people who own these stacks and are engaged in sets of specific tasks. These teams are cross-functional - each has specialists representing several stacks.
Remoto is being developed as a large platform by all developers, and in the future, a separate team will be created for each client, which will adapt this platform to the requirements of the automaker. For quality control, Bright Box has a division of field testers.
Technology Stack - Microsoft
Our first Dealer Mobility product was based on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, so when developing Remoto we had no doubt about choosing the technology stack. Initially, there were two main reasons for using the services of the corporation from Redmond:
1. Historical. Bright Box was easier and cheaper to rent the necessary services than to buy licenses. And, having accumulated a large amount of technical expertise and experience with Microsoft products, it makes no sense to change reliable technologies in working on our own projects.
2. Support. Microsoft guarantees a high (24/7) level of reliability and accessibility of important services for consumers almost anywhere in the world. To ensure the same level ourselves, it is necessary to invest huge amounts of money in infrastructure around the world, hire special engineers, and maintain equipment. Clickable We use PaaS and Azure infrastructure components. Among PaaS-components it is worth highlighting Cloud services and various storage technologies - blobs, SQL Database. Distributed caching facilities (Azure Redis Cache) and components for storing unstructured data, i.e. telemetry data coming from a car.
If we consider the infrastructure components, then our developers use the Microsoft Azure virtualization technologies on which the applications are located. They perform certain business operations: data is processed, reports are built.
Remoto uses a wide range of technologies:
- .NET platform - for server software development and data processing;
- For the analysis, processing and extraction of structured data from arrays, such generally accepted Big Data technologies as R, Python and Hadoop are used;
- For Embedded development - C ++ programming languages and low-level frameworks and operating systems: RTOS, on the basis of which the blocks work;
- Technologies and protocols that are designed for the Internet of things. MQTT as a protocol for the exchange of data between automotive and server-cloud infrastructure and the exchange of data between mobile applications and the cloud infrastructure.
- Various systems are used for data storage depending on the tasks - both Microsoft solutions and various Open Source solutions. Data caching is mainly Redis clusters, Microsoft SQL Server is used for business data and client data. For working with geographic data - PostgreSQL with Postgis and pgRouting extensions. Azure Tables and Apache Cassandra are used to store large volumes of log data and time series, which do not require complex dynamic queries. In the same places where flexible data analytics and preferably more compact storage are required, the ClickHouse column database is introduced. To store large volumes of unstructured and semi-structured data, the HDFS compatible Azure Data Lake system is used.
All data is streamed through the Azure Event Hubs and then processed using Azure Stream Analytics, thereby performing a hot data analysis.
At the same time, data from streams and other sources is collected in the Azure Data Lake storage where they are further processed using Azure Data Lake Analytics.
Also part of the analytics is carried out on the Apache Spark cluster. For data experiments, Python / F # is mainly used. Together with the Jupiter Notebook, Azure Notebooks is used to store and run them.
What we do with big data
Each year, Bright Box collects exabytes of data from its Remoto platform. The information received is not personalized, it becomes anonymous, after which it is processed to extract any patterns and patterns from it. Data is used by car manufacturers for several tasks.
The first is tracking the quality of cars sold. Remoto collects all information about defects, analyzes them, and transfers them to car manufacturers. This helps them understand their causes and eliminate them in future versions of cars.
The second is the use of the data to analyze the behavior of their customers and the formation of various proposals and recommendations for them on how to use and maintain the car. The system tells at what time it is better to do MOT, when it is better to go to the dealer for diagnostics, if there are any problems of any on-board vehicle systems.
The third task is to analyze the style and habits of driving a client. Such data are used for submission to insurance companies and are taken into account when calculating the cost of insurance. Also with them you can increase the level of care for the client, thereby tying him to himself for the longest possible period of time. Everything is done to ensure that the client remains loyal as long as possible.
One of our latest achievements is to work with the Dubai police. Bright Box and Nissan have created a new road safety service called Smart Response , the first of its kind in the Middle East. The system analyzes traffic, warns of accidents and traffic jams.
We play cars in an adult way
Bright Box has an impressive track record in the software and automotive engineering that we value. We like what we do and the challenges we face. For example, we recently announced the development of an unmanned car driving system that works with students using generated frames from computer games and real shots taken from the streets of a computer vision network.
Remoto Pilot is our new unmanned vehicle driving system that allows you to detect and avoid obstacles in real time, drive along a pre-planned path, guaranteeing safe and reliable lane driving.
Bright Box is the work at the intersection of engineering, programming, cloud technology and big data. These are truly adult car games. We create technologies that only large foreign brands could swing at. There are simply no analogues in Russia. Our employees gain enormous international and intersectoral experience and work in those areas that will be relevant in the near future. Join now!
We need:
Project Manager
QA Specialist / Test Engineer
Presale Consultant
System Analyst
