The startup that I’ve been part of for more than a year has launched this week : Automatic – Your Smart Driving Assistant. It’s a hardware device + mobile app + cloud combination that helps you save money by helping you drive in a more fuel-efficient way, monitor your car engine’s health, automatic call to local authorities/911 in case of a car crash, and will automatically remember where you parked your car (note that the product is currently USA-only).

Now, go and pre-order it now at www.automatic.com.

So how did I get involved? A couple of years back when I was considering freelancing full-time, Thejo Kote got in touch with me and I got started with NextDrop for which he was one of the co-founders. After some time, I was looking for something more long-term, so I pinged Thejo and he welcomed me to join his new startup.

It was a YCombinator company and was well-funded and I actually liked the idea, although at the time I was skeptical if this is something people will buy, that question has been comprehensively answered by the audience response and media coverage this week. Finally, I’m part of a hardware startup that had a working product before preorder launch :)

It was funny that as we were working on this in stealth, I would see many articles such as:

• Forget the Internet of Things: Here Comes the ‘Internet of Cars’
• Cars Are The Next Playground For App Developers
• The startup hardware M&A market will be vibrant in 2013
• Your Car: The Next Big App Platform!
• U.S. govt. report that household expenditures for gasoline account for nearly 4% of pretax income
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers quantify the effect of increasing highway speed on fuel economy