#MWC2017 TECHNOLOGY IS GETTING MORE PORTABLE.

Conversations about the future Mobile World Congress 2017 has come and gone, but here are some of the leading narratives that will impact your immediate future, as told to LINDSEY SCHUTTERS by the people who drive the innovations.

Mobile, if you will. While traditional consumer technology showcases are erring on the side of high concept, MWC is becoming the launchpad for real-world solutions. You want to change the face of technology? Come to Barcelona and show your wares. This year’s show floor was buzzing with anticipation. Walkways were teeming with throngs of torsos all rabidly in search of the next breakthrough. That breakthrough was supposed to be 5G. This was the scene for the next evolution of mobile communication’s debutante ball.

To be fair, it was always going to be a non-starter. Long-term evolution (LTE) has barely bipedalled out of the building. My host, Qualcomm, was still trumpeting in gigabit 4G with the X16 modem built into the Snapdragon 835 processor. Sony was demonstrating 960 frames per second bursts of slow motion goodness, enabled by that hardware. The Internet of Things was still a babe, suckling on the teat of the wider LTE spectrum. No, there would be no 5G on show here. Just ripples from the first toes in the high speed data transfer pond.

And given a lack of a show-stopping story, I took to the halls in search of innovation. What I found was an industry on the brink of revolution. Solutions that will fundamentally change the way we interact with the world. The latest video experiences, served to mobile screens. Massive mobile screens in shrunken bodies. Shrunken technology in human hands. Humans at the centre again, not technology. Our monkey brains have brought the world around us full circle, back to serving us and not us hauling cash at shiny trinkets. The fourth industrial revolution will require faster data speeds, but right now we’re doing pretty well with what we have.

“Wireless VR comes from a partner of ours that we’ve invested in within our accelerator programme, the HTC Vive X programme. This is a company called TP Cast and it’s a wireless add-on that goes on top of the HTC Vive to make it a total wireless experience. So you don’t have that wire running from the PC to the HMD itself. It’s actually a bespoke protocol using the 16 MHZ band to directionally send the signal to the head-mounted display itself. This is coming out in Q2 and we’re looking at a simple set-up where the directional antenna is going directly into the headset itself. There are real-world applications where training can be done without wasting or breaking materials in real life. –

“What STK brings is the London fashion, trends and energy to the youth of South Africa, the early technology adopters. What we do is focus completely on the consumers, where a lot of the other brands don’t. We do that through the unique software that we’ve created, STK Care, that doesn’t override the Android software, but it’s keeping the phone brand new every day.

About two years ago we identified the top ten reasons why a consumer would return their phone. Whether it’s a battery issue, a screen issue, a software issue or a microphone issue. And what we did is hire an agency in the UK. This agency was the first to ever work on Nokia’s symbian OS. We’ve hired their services to work on algorithms that will essentially identify, automatically, those top ten reasons for returns, find out what those concerns are going to be, in real time, and fix them physically before it becomes a return.

For example: the battery is draining for whatever reason. What STK does silently in the background is pick that up and heal that issue for you automatically. We believe the brand is three clicks away from the consumer. You’ve got the brand, the distributor, the retailer, then the consumer. So through STK Care, we’re keeping the consumer’s device healthy.

It’s not an APK, because that only accesses system data; ours is raw data embedded in the ROM. We’ve got manual tests. So if the consumer has an issue with their touchscreen, for instance, they can literally run tests whether at home or at the retailer as we educate the retailers to assist. On top of that we’ve created Live Chat on our phones. In the same way that you can communicate with your family

and friends through Whatsapp, you can communicate with STK through STK Care. It (the chat) runs on minimal data and is active only when the consumer is engaging with it. What’s surprising for many is that the team responding to the consumers is situated in the UK.

It (STK Care) was such a success that we acquired the business that created it and now we’ve brought that software agency in-house. We have a small team of six at the moment supporting on the live chat, the upgrade and the evolution of STK Care. But more importantly, we’ve also integrated machine-to-machine learning on this. So if there’ve been common questions being asked by consumers and they have been happy with (the anwer), that answer becomes a repetitive answer by the machine to another consumer. Now if the consumer is not happy with that answer, it automatically goes to a live agent. The machine is constantly updating and learning to give the consumer the answer they require to keep them happy.

We’ve also thought about the packaging. For example, we use a rubberised finish and fill it with gold film; we take the consumer on a journey, so we give them an experience. And once they’ve opened it, we keep it premium with cool iconography and keeping everything boxed. One of the biggest problems consumers have is that they rush to open their new device and what they end up doing is throwing the stuff back in the box. With our packaging, you can stick everything back in its clearly marked box and close the package again in seconds. So when you move over to your next device, you can easily package it and pass it on or sell it online. We’ve been STK for over 20 years now. Design is in our DNA and we differentiate through care.

For us it’s all about future minds. It’s a bit more than coding; that’s really stage one of the evolution of embracing technology to enable the creative process. Our point of view is that STEM is great, STEAM is better – it’s all about the arts for us, obviously, that’s what involves us. When kids are looking at coding, they need to understand that it’s more than some white guy in a hoodie doing this (mimics speed typing). Breaking and unstereotyping that is critical for kids to realise that they can make video games or be an animator.

We work very closely with MIT and Google and built a board of advisors with them. The place where we bonded the most was in coding to learn and not learning to code. It seems like semantics, but the reality is that it’s not. It’s almost whole brain thinking and design thinking around building stuff. Even if that child learns those skills early on, but chooses to take a different path, those skills pay forward because it gives you life skills. So it’s about investment and making it more mainstream.

We have a network, and have a reach that’s unparallelled by anybody else with a wider group of kids, as opposed to just an academic execution of it – which is necessary and important – but to combine those things has proven to be better. By sitting with MIT and Google we make sure that when we’re putting coding in our programming; we’re doing it in a responsible way. In the Powerpuff Girls, you find out over time that Bubbles is quite a proficient coder. That was done side by side with Google, so when she made an app to find a lost dog, everything we showed was accurate and done in a very unstereotyping sort of way.

When we were looking at coding, my mandate was “this isn’t social responsibility, this has to be pervasive” because it’s a language that kids speak and our audience dictates what we do. We have to be a part of their daily habits. Making them understand that it’s no different from penmanship or language that they learn, it has to be pervasive in what we do. It’s not enough to look across content; we need to look across our gaming strategy, our digital strategy. If our goal is create a immersive world, how do we connect that thread to other areas? And that’s why we have the advisory committee.

We are launching another show called Okay KO: Let’s be Heroes. It’s basically a world of kids who play video games and build out those video games. We hosted a game jam where we invited in 200 independent artists and animators to help create moves for over 80 characters. That was the way we kind of went open source. In that way when, creatively, they decide to go down that road, we make sure that the animators have the resources to do it in a way that’s accurate and beneficial to audiences.

We don’t have quotas, but I will tell you on (the) kids side of the business across story board roles and creator roles our entire studio, it’s pretty diverse. I can chalk that up to the average age. It’s much younger. We have no generation gap between our audience and our creators. It’s different to a lot of studios. And because folks are younger, that naturally breeds diversity. In my generation there were fewer women animating, there were fewer women programming, so you find less of them. Now in animation schools it’s about 50/50.

To remain relevant in a more democratised viewing landscape you need to have a fan-first, consumer-centric brand.

What you can see is our mobile device tester, which simulates the network, so whenever you have someone who is developiong a chipset or module, they need to test it in the lab before going out in real life. What this box provides is everything that module needs for a connection. Then you can, for instance, make an analysis on the physical layer, the radio link and also the upper layers where the messages are being exchanged with the network. We call this protocol testing. We have a lot of customers who want to develop their own test cases, where you have a defined set of procedures and the mobile phone should step through all the procedures; then you get a pass or a fail. If you have a fail, you go into debugging and find out what was wrong. And we have a graphical user interface called Cmwcards where our customers can create those test cases based on this card UI. Once you have those test cases you can fill in a test campaign and this is the main goal. The technology today is IOT; there are two new IOT technologies called EMTC (enhanced machine-type communication) and NB-IOT (Cat. M1 and Cat. NB-1, respectively). You start with R&D, but later the device needs certification to go into market. You can use the same equipment for all these validation tests. I think that if you don’t have that, people aren’t looking for you on those many fragmented platforms. We’re not married to length; if we think we can tell a story in five minutes, then we’ll do that. But if you look at all the data, we see that people are watching full episodes more than they are watching clips. It’s definitely counterintuitive to people who think small screen means less time. Do I believe that people want to enjoy content on the biggest screen possible? Yes, I do. But more times the smart device is the biggest screen available and that’s why you see the painstaking and iterative technology of screen and battery.

With regard to the new display technologies, I go back to the switch from SD to HD, or were you gonna go with 3D or 4D? It comes down to critical mass and knowing how many smart TVS there are in homes, or which screens are at home before you make that change. I guess we have the same luxury as sport because animation and sport are made for better technology, like VR. It’s important to have the conversations about what the install base is or what the rate of conversion is. To date, I don’t think we’re anywhere near knowing what will endure. For us it’s about getting muscle memory in storytelling in certain formats and the animation we’re producing for the future.

I do think animation is an important storytelling tool for virtual reality because we believe in creating immersive worlds and VR will allow you to do that. A lot of it has been about gaming, but going forward, the last 12 months has been about understanding all of the hardware and technology that’s out there, what we think is the right fit for our audience and, most importantly, it’s about helping our creatives feel more comfortable telling stories in that way. We’re neck deep in it at the moment and we’ll get the skills and try to see which way the market will move. If you ask me when that will truly happen, I don’t think VR will take off before 2019 because I think that last year was the year of the platform and this year content will become less expensive. I firmly believe that when people stop taking pictures of you when you put the goggles on, then you’re there.” We’re expanding our business to being not only a car maker and we want people to buy those cars, but we also want give people the option of finding different ways to move. If you live in a city where your daily commute is stressful and you’re dealing with a lot of congestion, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have alternatives that will

allow you to remove that stress and remove that congestion, especially if we could do it in a way that will deliver it at a great price point, with great convenience and that gave you time back?

We’re talking to cities and asking, ‘What are the pain points?’ And one of the pain points, consistently, is: help us relieve congestion, help us improve our air quality. That’s why we’re in significant pursuit of electrification, new mobility modes and autonomy. If we link all three of those, we’ll allow cities to become smarter, cleaner, with less congestion, giving time back to people and making their commutes much more enjoyable. Maybe eliminating commutes altogether, because if you’re not driving, it’s not really a commute. And the end of the day it’s about making people’s lives better. People will still own a car to go on vacation, or take a drive into the country.

We started experimenting with new modes of mobility, firstly to try to understand what would work because there’s so many options: ride sharing, ride hailing and shuttle services, biking… We didn’t know what would work and what people would like. That experimentation led us to understand that car sharing is a pretty good theory, but not a good business model for removing congestion, nor is it a good model for us to go into a city with as the first solution. But it led us to understand that the first solution cities would prefer would be helping them take cars off the road in rush hour times by offering commuters a service that would put multiple people in a single vehicle. That’s what led us to acquire Chariot – a crowd-sourced, route based shuttle service. If you can put multiple people in the same vehicle along a route that they helped define, that will take cars off the road and relieve congestion. We’re investing in Chariot to help make it dynamic and to bring it to other cities outside of San Franciso. We’ve already taken it to Austin, Texas and we’re looking to add six more cities over the course of the next year. One of those will be outside of the US.

With emerging markets we’re mostly doing a lot of learning and listening, starting with experimentation to see what would work. If you don’t have a lot of smart city connectivity and a lot of people don’t have smart phones, having an app-based smart vendor dynamic shuttle might not make any sense, but there may be other solutions that make sense for an emerging market, such as a bike-sharing service, or a car-sharing service. One solution that we have brought to an emerging market is in India: we made an investment in Zoom Car, which is the leading car- sharing service in India and is showing tremendous promise because car sharing really fits the culture in India. It didn’t make sense in London or San Francisco.

In the context of electrification, we’re investing $4,5 billion between now and 2020 to create 13 new electrified vehicles. We are absolutely committed to increasing the availability of electric vehicles in our product line-up. It’s really in our DNA. Well before anyone was really talking about it, our chairman Bill Ford was very outspoken about environmental consciousness and that ripples through the company. We’ve announced that we’ll have a fully electric compact utility vehicle with a 300-mile range and we’re really excited about that. We’re gonna have a hybrid Mustang in our range, a hybrid F150 truck. Two police interceptors will be hybrid and a plug-in hybrid Transit van. The Transit and the CUV will be global products.

You probably heard that the 3310 is making a comeback, but that isn’t the story. The story is that Foxconn, the company that manufactures the iphone, is making Nokia-branded phones for the licence-holder HMD Global. Nokias 3, 5 and 6 are all exquisitely crafted devices that run mid-range hardware, are sensibly priced and operate on a stock version of Android. The Google-supported handsets will receive updates almost immediately alongside the Pixel and Nexus models. In fact, the Nokia handsets are the first non-pixel devices to run the Pixel launcher (Android skin directly from Google). Our company is focusing on 3D depth-sense technology. We realised that the best application would be automotive, specifically in-car gesture interfaces. That is the real use case we have at this moment. It is like Lidar, but it’s called Flash Lidar; instead of traditional Lidar scanning, we’re taking a snapshot all at once. So we take all the pixels at the same time. We don’t need any mechanical moving parts to scan. The resolution is QVGA, 320x240. If you put it into the slower long range mode, you can see up to 5 or 6 metres. Those are the basic technologies and we can use it for basic gesture control or body tracking, and for driver monitoring.

There are also AR/VR applications… we can put such cameras on a head- mount display and add real hands into the image or we can use the depth data in robotics or introduce it in drones for better object detection or collision avoidance. This particular configuration is for mobile use; indoor and short distance. But we can change it for longer distances by using fewer frames per second. The more frames you shoot, the shorter the range, but the accuracy improves. Of course, there is a limitation of the light source, but using the dimensions you can play with the frame rate and power of the light source. PM