He walked to a whiteboard and drew a series of bubbles, which he labelled "dashboard," "pilot," "weather," and "complex system of moving parts".
"Taking a burden off people may free up their thinking capacity to make more decisions and consider more options," he says.The Dashboard will offer a wider range of information sources than any of Ambient's previous products, including forecasts for skiers, sailors and fishing enthusiasts.
"It's Happy Socks Day at Fab," says Jason Goldberg, the company's chief executive and founder, as he checks digital dashboards on his iMac screen that continually chart customer sharing and spending.
Mr. Bird would not disclose the costs of the effort, but he said the dashboards had helped the company stay on pace with its goal of cutting $150 million in costs by digitizing processes and thereby improving efficiency.
Thin-skinned and volatile, he tears around town drumming his fingers on bar counters and car dashboards as he listens to pop music on his headphones.
He divided his apprenticeship between the college and Rolls Royce where he worked on walnut dashboards for the luxury car.
Had he been content to keep the feat to himself, he might have escaped any consequences, but he posted his dashboard-camera video online.
Sometimes, standing at the wheel, where bouquets of plastic flowers adorn the dashboard, he would talk to his second-oldest son, Bo — a soldier, he says, who has done two tours of war and is now preparing for a third.
He sees the overwrought dashboards as trouble.
When our cabdriver heard that we were there to listen to opera, he slotted a cassette into the dashboard player: he himself singing "O Sole Mio" to an accompaniment generated, he explained, on a home computer.
