I’ve been having calls with corporate executives around the world, getting their insights on global innovation trends. Last week I had a call with my friend Dan Doron in Israel. Tel Aviv is definitely a center of digital innovation these days, with many thriving tech startups (including Waze, which sold to Google for a mind-boggling $1.3 billion) so I was interested in Dan’s insights and observations. 

I asked Dan what he saw as hot areas in digital innovation these days he said “Oh, V2X for sure. V2X is very hot with lots of activity right now”. 

I searched my brain for all the tech acronyms I know and couldn’t figure out what the hell “V2X” could be. So I finally had to admit to Dan I had no idea what he was talking about. 

“It’s vehicle to anything, dude!”, he said. “The cars of the future will be connected to everything around them!”.

Sure enough, there’s a whole set of these acronyms listed on Wikipedia: V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure), V2V (Vehicle-to-vehicle), V2P (Vehicle-to-Pedestrian), V2D (Vehicle-to-device) and V2G (Vehicle-to-grid). 

Clearly, I need to get out more. 

At Tivix, we haven’t yet done any digital development for auto platforms, but we’re certainly aware of the current trends, as for the first time Silicon Valley actually has car companies (notably Tesla, but many of the incumbent auto companies have established innovation centers here in Silicon Valley as well). 

And one trend that we’re very much aware of is that today it’s not about developing software for various devices, it’s about developing cloud software with many “endpoints”. Those endpoints can be a web browser, a mobile phone, an IoT device, and – potentially – a vehicle dashboard. 

So, while I hadn’t heard the term V2X before (sorry, Dan), I am very familiar with the fact that software development has moved away from being device-specific and toward being endpoints which can be devices, services, or other software. It’s a huge trend these days, as software increasingly needs to provide data and operability transparently to/from anything, anywhere.