Time travel into the future this weekend!

If you're an executive who's trying to prepare your radio station (or other company) for the future, wouldn't it be great if you could jump into a time machine, travel forward to approximately 2015, see what's happening, and then come back to the present, so your could prepare your company to be a winner in 2015?

Well, when it comes to the subject of how radio will be used in automobiles in 2015, I believe I can show you a way to do that this weekend!

Here are step-by-step instructions:

(1) Buy or borrow an iPad with 3G data access (as opposed to just Wi-Fi).

(2) Set it up in your car (or a borrowed or rented one) in such a way that it's positioned somewhere near the "center stack" -- i.e., if you're the driver, just to your right, either (A) on the dashboard or (B) in front of the radio/GPS/ventilation controls or (C) in front of the stick shift if you have one. Ideally, if possible, plug the audio out from the iPad into your car's audio system.

(3) Imagine that the iPad is actually a 9" diagonal screen set into the center stack.

(4) Now start using the iPad for the weekend: Use Google Maps as your GPS, use your favorite radio app(s), use Yelp for finding restaurants, maybe use a great app called ClockTacular as your clock, etc. (Not to be a braggart, but AccuRadio has a very nice iPad app, with 600+ channels of personalizable music organized by genre, and with a neat "cover flow"-like history display that works really well in this context.)

Voila! This is what driving is going to be like in approximately 2015 for a reasonably typical consumer: Big screen, fast Internet connection, cool apps.

Now come on back and join us in 2012 -- and start preparing for that future!