Griffin technologies has introduced SmartDeck. It's super cool. It's a cassette deck to use your ipod in your car, but it also takes commands you give your radio (play, skip, etc) and converts them to ipod remote signals and sends them along.

So for $25 you get car integration that also works with your radio head unit controls, steering wheel controls, automatically pauses and plays as you start or stop your car or radio. I might rip out what I have now and get this.

The first project Nikhil, Jason, David and I worked on at Stanford was a flash mp3 player that had the form factor of a cassette. You could put it in your car deck and play mp3s, and it would skip, pause etc based on mechanical movements in the car cassette player.

We didn't get too far on development, but it was this same basic idea. Very cool.