 Silicon Valley at the Motorola office and hello, so who are you? My name is Steve McDonnell I'm the director of the mods ecosystem here at Motorola. And who are you over there? Oh, I'm Christian Flowers. I'm a member of the systems architecture team and the moto mods ecosystem team here at Motorola mobility And you are are you in Chicago? Yes. All right. So you have the Moto Z right here Which is a very innovative product? So can you describe a little bit how it's designed how it's made? Yeah, I mean basically what happened is a bunch of really smart engineers at Motorola in Chicago looked at the mobile phone and Decided that they wanted to make it a lot thinner and By making it thinner they were also going to provide a very new model for attaching Extra accessories to the phone and really truly beyond accessories. So this is crazy thin I mean, this is the thinnest high-end phone in the world, right? I believe it is This is a we're talking five point something millimeters. Oh Christian Yeah, I think it was five point two is there you go. I'm gonna trust you on this But that's that's and so how does it how do they make it so thin like oh that is made the battery much thinner I believe there's some liquid cooling going on in there You can imagine that they basically went all the way back to the drawing board and looked at what they could do to make to take some thickness off the device and Truly the reason for that is So you can do this So you can just easily dock like it's is it fully magnetic how's the system where it where the magnets? That's part of the secret source. There are definitely magnets involved Does it I guess that means here this little locator all that's really very important for the way that the Accessor the mods attached to the phone So those connectors down there is called gray boss, right? And and how does that work? What's the bandwidth and all that stuff? So gray bus is the the protocol that gives you the ability to hot swap and to essentially extend device drivers That are actually located on a separate piece of hardware up into the Linux kernel And they appear to the Linux kernel on the Moto Z like those devices are locally attached The bandwidth varies it depends on which interface you're using So over those 16 pins we actually support a variety of a very fairly powerful interfaces. So I can do a CSI camera at You know 10, I'm sorry 13 megapixel at 60 frames a second At the same time that I'm doing Oh the bandwidth. Are you still there? Yeah Rose does it automatically reconnect all right, but I think one of the important things to talk about at this point even is When you talk about throughput What you're essentially doing is with this speaker it now has access to raw digital Audio directly from the device raw digital audio. Yeah, we can there's a so there's a raw line that it can get access to So that's higher quality in Bluetooth potentially, right? Oh, yeah, definitely now what that means is that when I attach this I'm not just attaching an accessory to the phone I'm adding a new speaker to the phone. This is now the phone speaker And this is the highest quality loudest speaker in a phone ever as far as I'm aware But remember and you're absolutely and you make and you're along the right lines there This is not an additional Bluetooth speaker or something like that. This is now this phone speaker In the same way if I put, you know, a battery on there this now intelligently works with the phone You know, I can see should we click on try again to get him back or? Yeah, I can yeah Let's see if hopefully he comes back automatically. Oh wait, did I cut the wrong control just gonna this is this is really cool on the projector TIDLP Pico Hi, you're back So you were talking about the gray bus and you were saying that bandwidth varies But are you talking about is this the same bandwidth as if the hardware was like on the PCV inside? Yes, that's true. That's largely a true statement. So Christian the example I was just giving that is that you know by attaching this speaker to the phone. I'm not putting an accessory on the phone I'm adding a new speaker to the phone this speaker now has access to the To the data in the phone in the same way as we'd actually as if we'd actually built this speaker in so whatever The fastest format we can move audio around on the phone This speaker now has access to it doesn't have to go through Bluetooth doesn't have to go through Wi-Fi or any kind of other connection process it is now this phone speaker and So this is hotswappable technology. Yes, this is like There's some kind of safety in terms of like not corrupting anything in the Android I guess you modify the Android to support this or has a so there's like Advanced customization of how or very what's called efficient Integration of this technology in the way Android works Yes, we did a we did a lot of work to ensure that We we integrated with Android. Well, so it was seamless. So audio is a perfect example We're using audio devices and you could you could expose yourself as a multitude of devices And the the the audio device types for instance match the Android device types one for one That means that if you tell the tell what Moto Z. I am a loudspeaker It will route loudspeaker audio to your Moto mod as opposed to your phone's loudspeaker and these are dynamic devices as well So now if I plug in a headset Your Moto mod would inform the Moto Z. Hey, my audio device is now a loudspeaker and A headset The Moto Z's standard routing would say well a headset takes priority over Your loudspeaker and because this headsets on the Moto mod. I'm gonna I'm gonna push it out to the Moto mod So there's one example of just how it's integrated really tightly And not every instance actually requires an Android application along with And so for example, there's multi display because you kind of output the mirror display on the projector, right? And you could have another display outside Yes, so if you're aware of of Android and the operating system and the API as they provide We added Displays in as an Android secondary display Which means that any application gets mirroring for free and if application actually wants something custom on that secondary display They they use the Android presentation class right standard API and they can now Provide custom content on that second display that is unique from the content that their application would just provide on the primary phone screen So there's extended display and mirror display. There's optional different different things in there I guess and the app the apps API's can easily hook into that if you want to do an app that Let's say output something different like a ebook on a ink display outside and then on the main Android You keep having your normal Android phone Well, not quite to that degree. It's the front most when you're talking to the display class You're showing this the front most application. So an eek application. That's an e-reader would probably be implemented in a different manner All right, so there's a there's display. There's data and this power And all that goes smoothly. Why do you need all these pins? So what do they all do though? There's six it was a 16 pins 16 pins. Well, so we've got A couple of ground pins because grounding is pretty important we have a Pin that allows the moto mod to power itself from the phone There's one pin that's dedicated to Charging power back and forth We've got a pin dedicated to a large amount of the command to control and Signaling between the two moto mod the moto mod and the moto Z Four of those pins are a fi So over those five pins you could either run raw USB 3 1 Raw I squared S or if you're using that moto high-speed bridge I can do CSI camera and DSI video and USB 2.0 and I squared S audio all in parallel simultaneous This is not that we've also got another USB interface and a mobility display port interface Display port so that's the that's the standard goes through for the display That's one of them. Yes. The other one would be DSI which is more for embedded devices Display port would be really good for a dock type implementation where you're plugging in something external And it seems a very stable and reliable when you when you dock it you just know it works, right? When you when you put it in on the phone Does you put it on the phone you get a nice connection tone a nice animation that lets you know it's there and ready to use So yes because the magnets and and the alignment pin And frankly the hard work that we did it with the mechanicals they line up nicely they almost just fall into place That's totally awesome. So you have a for about for a few maybe for like introduction kind of like moto mods and now you're talking about expanding this You are expanding this to hackathons and to indiegogo and you are encouraging all developers to Participate in this ecosystem. So really the the initial devices that came out are to prove the market Obviously we want people to be able to buy a mod, you know when they buy their phone But the real big play here is opening this up to a broader Ecosystem and truly what we want to do is encourage an ecosystem So, you know earlier you were talking about the idea of adding Bluetooth to the speaker I think that's a great idea, but I really hope that somebody out in the world does that Potentially it could be JBL potentially it could be somebody else There's a lot of ideas that that are out in the world that need to be You know developed and we we hope that people will will do that we've created the MDK in order to eliminate a lot of the barriers to getting to You know a prototype so the idea here is essentially this is just mostly an emptied out Mod so with all the connectors and gray bus and all those sorts of things that you need And then you can add whatever type of card you need to Define what sorts of things or aligned with what sorts of things you want to do This is just the perforated board. So you can kind of add whatever sensors or whatever you wanted to add to that So you would put the you connect some cables in each of those holes. Yeah Sensors cables, you know, whatever it might be with a with a what's called a the iron You would solder. Yeah, some cables to it, right? Yeah, absolutely, but you know, here's one that's already got A lot of the it's actually got the battery in it. You can see that there So this is one that you would snap in and it would have a battery personality already So you can look at adding other things to that if you want to led or something like that You might you know, I think there's a lot of room for battery plus one type solutions out in the world So battery plus memory would be an interesting one for people to work on I think but I don't know battery plus an RFID reader battery plus You know, who knows a single button that allows you to turn your lights on when you've got you lights at home or something like that So that's a battery card This one's an audio one. So that's just pops in there and now I've got a speaker that I can start working with We give you the full electrical schematics The full firmware and where there's an application involved the full application that runs on Android We give all of this open source so you can use those to learn like oh, how does battery charging work? And how do I control this? To prototype so you can kind of get your project going and understand how is the platform work? And what do I want to do with it? So really with the MDK The motor mods development kit, you know, not only can you work on that perforated board and saw to your solution down And the reason we have the perforated boards is so you can reuse that reference motor mod again and again You're not ruining it with just one solder project and oh, I've got all these wires. I can't clean it up This is a reusable prototype board very much so you can use it for You know display for audio you can switch these all in and out use it for a number of different things put it together any number of Perforated boards you want to use this is the Raspberry Pi hat board So this would allow you to attach Obviously this goes into the mod and then you can attach your Raspberry Pi projects directly to that and start using those You know with drivers and software that you'd have to develop so if you have a Raspberry Pi project What do you need to modify or adapt to have it like show up on the Moto Z? Like to put it to work it have to be the right kind of project right off the bat, but go ahead Christian You have to write firmware. So from a hardware standpoint You're done, right? You can just slap the hat on and it's existing working hardware now depending on what's on there You'll have to write I squared C Pi drivers right you have to write audio drivers if it's an audio hat So it really depends on what the Raspberry Pi hat is But from a hardware standpoint, you're largely done Attach it plug it in Wipe your hands or walk away But you do have to develop firmware and it's likely that the sensors that you choose or the what are on there Aren't currently supported in nut X and you will have to write that initial firmware Not X is the operating system the embedded operating system that Moto mods run on Gray bus is a protocol that runs a layer on top of that And then developers actually develop device drivers that sit on gray bus So you never actually have to contend with the complexities of the communication back and forth and interrupts and everything else You just write a device driver and you get callbacks That come up the stack. What's the mod X? Is that like a very small OS that runs on a micro controller on the? Yes, it's an it's an open-source RTOS, you know, very standard interfaces like POSIX APIs Flexible scheduling round robin interrupt, you know, but it's essentially it's a it's a nice lightweight real-time operating system It needs to be able to just instantly boot up when as soon as you connect the Moto mod and and instantly be a Super stable and everything right actually what's neat is if your Moto mod has a battery in it It might never turn off but So typically if a model motor mod has a battery even when detached It's still powered and running to an extent, but you're right. It needs to be very fast So if it was in an off-state say it doesn't have a battery You needed to get powered up get initialized to get enumerated quickly, right? Otherwise this would be a frustrating experience. So could you add with a motor mod? You could add a modem. Could you add white spaces different kind of connectivity? Yeah, external kind of like processing extra processor somehow Um, you could add a modem at that point. You would really just look like a USB data connection You would want to be a Device at that point from a USB standpoint not a host So you could do modems carriers might not be necessarily excited by it But it is possible to provide another data path All right beyond that What was some of the examples you threw other examples you threw out there I was thinking adding more processing power or something. I don't know some external a second processor that does something else If it's if it's fairly custom then you could But you know androids not just going to Buy default offload some processing power. It would need to be something pretty custom One good example would be if you were doing a camera And your camera had an ISP on it Right, so that's a that'd be a case where you'd have a second processor You're adding processor power essentially Yeah, because the Hasselblad camera you have is pretty it looks pretty great So what's the quality on that? How does that work? There's like it's zoom it's real zoom the big thing the big thing that's added is Mechanical zoom or physical zoom so instead of I think they call it optical zoom because every phone today uses every mobile phone camera uses digital zoom Which has its limitations But potentially you can have like a camera made that that would have 4k super high quality So there would be an ISP in the camera to add that kind of suddenly your phone becomes Like a high-end camera like not just like a smartphone camera Yes So that's that's possible And so you are What is it? What is the relation you have with indiegogo? How do you encourage projects in indiegogo indiegogo is a campaign we announced Very recently two weeks ago, I think and we're working with indiegogo To foster the ecosystem We've introduced the MDK to make it easier to get to a hardware prototype The next step is how do we actually help people get to market and how do we help these ideas flourish? And how do we help the ecosystem flourish truly and and obviously? Indiegogo is a big player in that space already the whole idea of crowdfunding is Increasingly important and I think this gives our customers an opportunity to vote about what kind of mods they'd like to see But essentially from a partner point of view or from the ecosystem point of view We've launched within the go-go the transform your smartphone challenge And the goal there is for people to submit their ideas and how they hope to get to market You know a little bit about their business case their team those sorts of things they send that information over to us We've already got hundreds of entries And we're going through those now Kristen's helping with some of that We look at those we evaluate them, you know, what's technically possible what addresses customer pain points, you know What is commercially viable? What is an interesting use of mods? Evaluate all those and we'll be sending out a motorola Z and an MDK with a kit of the Personality cards will be sending that out to the winners who qualify and those people will have as much time as they need Well, not as much time as they need they'll have till early January 2017 to have their project ready All those projects will go live on Indiegogo on our landing page the transform the smartphone challenge page and People will start funding them In early March, we're going to take some of those top programs the most funded programs About ten of those and take them off to Chicago and we're going to do a shark tank event We're going to have Lenovo capital there Verizon Verizon ventures obviously motorola And we'll be evaluating those companies for potential distribution Investment and then beyond that, you know, how can we help them get to market with? You know relationships introductions those sorts of things so There's a potential and there's a potential that there will be some motor mods You haven't even thought of right now. I hope so that would that'd be great That would be completely revolutionary for this for the smartphone industry, right fingers crossed This is what's potentially is gonna happen right now. Absolutely some some some people an amazing idea And it just makes sense and it just changes the way you use a smartphone Obviously, there's a lot of smart people at motorola. This couldn't have happened if there weren't a lot of smart people, you know Building amazing things, but we don't have every smart person in the world We know there's a lot of smart people outside motorola as well So we really have done everything we can to empower an ecosystem to do exactly what you're saying to come up with Something we've never thought of we could not be more excited with that possibility And you you have confirmed that the next generation will fit all the motor mods. Yeah, yeah proof, right? Yeah, yeah, we've we definitely committed to multiple generations Maintaining this attachment architecture, you know the software and hardware Connections we're very much locking a lot of that detail in so we have multiple generations Of phones supporting this architecture Like I think Marcus Broly he was saying he'd like to high quality DAC audio with a headphone jack That could be one more to mud. You should get on with that Yeah, good. I'd like to see you ink. I'd like to see some other kind of displays on the back Maybe a laptop doc or some other ideas, but I'm guessing over those hundred you already have some pretty We do exciting Submissions already do we do right? Yes. Unfortunately. I can't talk about them because their people's are business proposals But so very soon you'll start hearing about them in early January I'm I think you'll you'll start seeing those and can start finding them I'm just gonna throw some ideas out like solar panels. You could have Just a second display that they can normal display in the back or you can have There's so much potential. There's so much there really is I mean again the idea is that You know, I'm attaching now my phone's projector Tut, you know plug-and-play it all just works Now I don't want a projector. I want a speaker now. I want a battery now I want solar charging now. I want whatever it is Remember the experience when you first started playing with apps on your phone and all the freedom that you got because suddenly You could address the specific thing that you needed to be able to do what we're doing with this Development is doing the same thing with hardware. So now your phone is exactly what you need it to be It's got as much battery as you need it's got Some kind of sensor that you need because you need to be able to measure infrared light or whatever it might be It's got a better camera because you personally care about photography and you want to be able to zoom in It's got a better speaker because that's what you care about But the person next to you doesn't care about photography. So they don't need that better speaker So we get all that better camera. So again, we go away from that incremental Very general approach that's been happening with smartphones where it's one size fits all We'll keep trying to make it smaller and a better camera, but that's really all we can do by opening this up we create an environment where The world is your oyster the limitations are the imagination and truly we're going to see an apification of These mods and what we can do with phones potentially point-of-sale They could be like sure like some They could be another one where it would be like used for border control like a passport where they have those or they can have You can have card readers for credit card payments Well, we think there's a lot of I mean this there's obviously a lot of consumer opportunities But there are B2B and you know really interesting Enterprise solutions as well because I mean don't forget everybody who works in the enterprise also probably has a phone So everybody's a consumer to some extent or another but in terms of you know a very focused enterprise solution A lot of the times you see somebody Having to build a phone in order to put this boost special solution on top of it You know RFID scan or a barcode scanner or whatever it might be some kind of comms or a card reader You know now you can start with a fully powered You know modern smartphone and then attach whatever you need to it to do that specific thing So if you need a solution that only does one thing if it's not a consumer oriented approach You can also begin with a smartphone and then attach what you need the reader the Whatever it might be like health care A little like hospital with all the sensors people need to I don't know measure blood glucose all these different things There's so much potential right here. So it's 5.5 inch Yeah, I'm like I've been addicted to the sixth inch. It would have been awesome But who knows maybe they could be like a different size in the future But for sure the 5.5 is gonna continue for multiple generations Definitely these connectors are gonna continue. So the architecture at the back We're gonna keep that for you know for at least for a while But certainly we'll have multiple generations of phones supporting the current mods System that that's awesome. There's a lot of potential. Maybe who knows maybe you you open the system up to invite Other players in the industry connect with your mods. Maybe never say never never say never There's a lot of opportunities as you say. All right, it's very rich All right, and there's there's a lot of reviews already and people are quite excited with your phone, right? Like what what is media saying you think I think they're saying super encouraging things I mean, I think everybody loves the size of the phone So you can just start with the phone by itself, but you know this concept of what's beyond the current You know smartphone is truly we're beginning that conversation now There were other players, you know project ARRA was around and that what that was Google's approach I would say that was a much less consumer oriented type approach LG had their friends That wasn't plug-and-play. I don't think that was a really again It wasn't taken from the point of view of the consumer and the experiences they want to have This really is a whole new language around the way phones work I think and we're where we're at the beginning I hope of a revolution about what the smartphone is and project ARRA was an open Open-source Project and it kind of gave you some technology right here, right? It gave you a gray bus, right? We certainly pursued some of their innovations. Yeah, and we've added back to that as well. So, you know all of the Like I said, we were based on the NutX RTOS that legacy from ARRA and all the changes that we've done to add new protocols or to you know further shore up the gray bus protocol You know, we've pushed those back to open source. Those are available on github As well as all of the kernel changes in Linux Those have been pushed to open source as well The the only thing that's really proprietary that we don't share are our changes in the Android framework to integrate these Moto Mod devices Into Android and make it really that seamless experience that you get All right, but I mean who knows what happens in the future Maybe you you want to push this even more to make it like the new standard for smartphones. I'm just thinking who knows try to Encourage everybody to you know, follow your lead and doing some innovation Well, certainly and I think that as I say anything is possible But the key now is really to foster a successful ecosystem and that's why we're doing the crowdfunding campaign within the go-go And that's why we've also announced our first two hackathons We're doing our first hackathon in December in New York and our second one in January in San Francisco I'm sure there can be a link with some dates and that sort of thing So is a few days or today hackathons, you know There's the standard start on Saturday morning set some challenges and because of the MDK and the capabilities that it provides People will have a working prototype on Saturday on Sunday and we'll be looking at those For a variety of prices, but also, you know potential funding potential distribution all those sorts of things as well How can we help those people get to market? That's awesome So and this is this is the this is the vision statement of Motorola to to provide a custom Custom technology right for digital life for everybody, right? So this is it This is the next level after motor maker you were doing before where people just customizing colors and stuff, right? Now they're customizing that The the motor mods the technology it's absolutely a logical extension of everything that people have wanted from their phone for a while And again, I I start with the idea of applications because I think that was one of the first places that people were truly Really customizing what their phone was about by putting their own apps on there to do measurement to do Expense tracking whatever it is you need to do that was when we first started going Wow, my phone can be whatever I need it to be You know, I think the physical customization in terms of you know different backs and that sort of thing is really that's a personal You know preference a matter of taste and and there's we have style cells that allow you to do that as well with the same connector But then beyond that really adding true functionality. Yes This is an extension of allowing people to have a smartphone that fully integrates into their digital life and with the various other Aspects in the digital life as well. So this is this is so awesome I guess and in Chicago, maybe also here to say come out you have some amazing engineers working on this, right? You have a pretty cool team of Crazy experts in the smartphone business, right? Is that where you are that those are the kinds of guys you work with? Oh, yeah, they're all behind me in a lab right now And so that's pretty cool. And so now I'm hoping that the marketing is gonna Go in the direction of selling millions and millions of these we absolutely hope so well on November 3rd, I think it was we started a new TV campaign Which I love personally because it is definitely very different to anything we've done previously And I think that there's more to come around that Cool. Thanks a lot for showing off this awesome innovation. My pleasure. Thanks for coming along