Tag: EC Hardware

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With Kokomo VR meeting software, Canon takes a step away from its hardware roots

Canon has a long and deep history of being a hardware manufacturer. Most consumers know it best as a camera manufacturer, but the company has a long, deep and illustrious history in medical, office equipment, and other imaging applications.

During the pandemic, a lot of its business shifted. People stopped going to offices. Sporting events were shut down. And while the medical industry was booming, Canon as a company needed to rethink its mission and vision: What does an imaging company do in a world where people have a desire to connect, but are unable to leave their homes while a deadly virus rages around the world?

At CES 2023, the company showed off its vision for the future — a vision that seems a lot less hardware-y than you would expect from the 85-year-old company that has traditionally made all of its money from making things with buttons.

A rag-tag bunch of Canon veterans took on the challenge and created Kokomo, a VR meeting software package that, in essence, makes real-time 3D video calling a reality.

Users don a VR headset and point a smartphone at themselves. The software scans your face, and creates a photo-real 3D avatar of you and the person you are calling. It uses the motion sensors in the headset and the camera to capture your avatar, moving you into a photo-realistic space, and boom, you are virtually present with a colleague, family member or friend. The technology to scan your face is similar to the tech used by iOS’s face ID, doing a brief pre-capture process. From there, your face’s shape and texture can be shown off inside the video calls.

A quick scan with the Kokomo companion app captures your face so it can be shown to your friends in VR. Image Credit: Canon

The most interesting thing to note about the above paragraph is the lack of Canon products. Traditionally, Canon’s software solutions have focused on enhancing and facilitating the use of its hardware products. The company makes neither smartphones nor VR headsets, however, so this move represents a major departure from its roots.

TechCrunch sat down with the team that led the development of Kokomo to figure out how it came about, and where Canon is going as it re-imagines its own future.

Kokomo is a way to enable people to be there, when they couldn’t. Jon Lorentz

“This is representing a very exciting new innovation for Canon – but also a very new business direction for Canon, as well,” said Jon Lorentz, one of the co-creators of the Kokomo solution. “As you know, traditionally, Canon is very much tied to our hardware products. When we announced AMLOS at CES last year, it was about innovating work from home. Our task [with Kokomo] is to innovate life at home, and that is where this project came from. When we started, we were in the thick of COVID, and there were not a lot of ways for people to get connected. The underlying premise for what we created was to be a solution to that. Kokomo is a way to enable people to be there when they couldn’t.”

The team’s goal was to create a solution that takes the experience beyond a phone call, a FaceTime call or a Zoom call – to feel present rather than to just look at each other on a screen. A worthy pursuit in a world where travel is limited and screen fatigue is real. But how is Canon’s solution for bringing people into a virtual world going to accomplish that?

“We support most of the popular consumer VR headsets in the market to enable people to engage in immersive calls, as we are calling them. In these calls, people can engage. They are dynamic, in living, breathing environments. You can download a companion app on a mobile phone, which lets the person you talk to see you from head to toe,” explains Lorentz. “No more legless avatars. No more wondering what someone is actually gesturing. And you can actually see the other person. You can be in the call, rather than on the call.”

Below is an in-depth interview with Kokomo co-creators Jon Lorentz, Ray Konno and Jason Williams. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

A phone and a VR headset are all you need to use Canon’s Kokomo. Image Credit: Canon

TechCrunch: Why is Canon excited in software? Isn’t that a step away from its hardware roots?

Jon Lorentz (JL): At our core, Canon is an imaging company, and that’s really our specialty. Kokomo is applying that specialty to the software rather than starting with our hardware first. We see that the ability to step into a call is really stepping into an imaging sensor. It’s about taking that image sensor data, and then applying it to someone else’s visual field.

Obviously, there are a lot of details behind that, but our core is imaging excellence. As you bring in mesh reality and virtual reality, you need to have a certain level of meshing: it really needs to match up. Otherwise, you’re going to feel disconnected – it’s not going to feel natural. The same goes for the environments; they are not static, from another virtual place. We’ve captured real-life environments, and brought them into VR. You really feel like you’re in the dynamic, living places.

With Kokomo VR meeting software, Canon takes a step away from its hardware roots by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

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How the FirstBuild product co-creation studio is changing how new things are made

If you are running R&D at a large appliance manufacturer, you have a challenge.

You typically make products in enormous quantities at pretty slim margins. In order to recoup your development, tooling and launch marketing costs, you need to create and sell a huge number of products. To ensure that that’s possible, you’d probably end up doing a bunch of user and market research to ascertain that you have the highest chance of success with your products.

That makes sense, but the very business model itself means that it’s hard to do something truly risky, which in turn means that mainstream manufacturers rarely come up with anything genuinely innovative.

If there was a mushroom fruiting appliance, would a lot more people regularly be growing mushrooms at home? There was only one way to find out: to build one and to try and sell it.

That’s where FirstBuild comes in. If you’re a small appliances nerd, you may have seen its Opal nugget ice maker, the studio’s first big breakthrough; the Mella mushroom fruiting chamber; its indoor pizza oven; or the Arden indoor smoker. I spoke with André Zdanow, president at FirstBuild, to figure out where these ideas came from and how the studio is working to try to replicate those successes.

“The most famous example is probably the Opal nugget ice maker. At first, it wasn’t actually a product at all — it was a technology being worked on in the refrigeration division of GE Appliances,” Zdanow said, explaining that it turned out to be a head-scratcher. They wanted to put the “nugget ice” into a fridge but weren’t able to figure out exactly what the market size would be for such a thing. “It’s actually really complicated to put the technology into a refrigerator. In other words, it was really a great idea that engineers had been toying around with for years, but in the context of the focus and economics of a multibillion-dollar company, it wasn’t something that they could focus on.”

The Opal nugget ice maker was FirstBuild’s first commercial success. Image Credits: FirstBuild

In a parallel universe, that tech would never have seen the light of day, but instead, the engineers came to FirstBuild and wondered what would happen if they put the tech in a separate appliance, rather than into a full-size refrigerator.

“We see lots of people go to the store and buy this type of ice. They call it Sonic ice or hospital ice. We decided to develop a prototype and see if people want it to be just an ice maker,” Zdanow explained. That was the genesis of the FirstBuild lab’s success. “It started with crude concepts that looked like an ice maker but had nugget ice in it. From there, it progressed through industrial design and ultimately to a $2.7 million crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter back in 2015.”

How the FirstBuild product co-creation studio is changing how new things are made by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

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How to land investors who fund game-changing companies

A lot of problems worth solving aren’t ones that you can solve in a year or two or even 10.

For founders and investors alike, such long timelines can seem daunting. But for Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO of battery tech startup Sila, hard tech problems are also some of the most tantalizing.

“It’s always a good time to be a hard tech startup,” Berdichevsky said at TechCrunch Disrupt. “One of the reasons is that the world doesn’t change just because it should. It changes because someone goes after something insanely hard and actually succeeds at it.”

Such hard.tech startups run the gamut from advanced batteries like those made by Sila to nuclear fusion, quantum computing, automation and robotics. Any tech that has the potential for such broad impact also has a massive potential market, and that means a certain class of investors are willing to be in it for the long haul.

“Hire people to do the technical stuff. Keep an eye on it, but then go learn the other pieces.” Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO, Sila

“We look for real step-change, game-changing technologies that are going to benefit everyone and we think that will drive a huge [total addressable market],” said Milo Werner, a general partner at The Engine.

When Berdichevsky founded Sila, he believed his company’s technology, a silicon-based anode that promises to improve lithium-ion battery energy density by 20%–40%, would be a significant enough advance that it would have no problem finding a market.

What he didn’t expect was how long it would take. When Sila’s first product debuted inside the Whoop 4.0 wearable last year, the path to market had been twice as long as Berdichevsky had expected.

How to land investors who fund game-changing companies by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

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Biden’s new restrictions on exporting semiconductor tools hit China where it hurts

Chinese semiconductor manufacturers and their U.S. suppliers should have seen the Biden administration’s latest export restrictions coming. It’s possible they did. The question is whether they’re prepared.

Years ago, the Trump administration sent the first shot across the bow, first cutting off Huawei from advanced chips and later successfully pressing the Dutch government to bar the sale of EUV lithography machines made by Netherlands-based ASML to leading Chinese semiconductor firm SMIC.

The EUV ban kept SMIC and, by association, China, from getting a chance at producing leading-edge chips with smaller transistors. Smaller transistors make for faster, more energy-efficient chips, and there were concerns that EUV-made Chinese chips would have facilitated myriad military and surveillance applications, including hypersonic missiles and AI-powered video and cyber monitoring tools.

Though SMIC said it could produce chips that were similar to some of its competitors’ second-best designs, the yields were reportedly atrocious. Without EUV, the process was unlikely to be profitable anytime soon.

China is likely trying to develop its own version, but it’ll be a long road. Even if Chinese companies could get their hands on EUV and related technologies, whether through espionage or some other means, they still would have to duplicate ASML’s global supply chain of more than 5,000 suppliers, some of which are the only ones that have the expertise to make those specific parts.

Biden’s new restrictions on exporting semiconductor tools hit China where it hurts by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

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DIY: 5 ways disruptive component startups can win over OEMs

Ori Mor Contributor
Ori Mor is chief business officer and co-founder of Wi-Charge.

Creating a disruptive hardware components startup can be quite exciting. Few things can compare to the joy of physically interacting with your creation as you design and build it from scratch.

But hardware startups are challenging. Think of it as the business version of the age-old question: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” You have to figure out which comes first: The components you’re creating or the devices that are designed to use those components.

This may sound like an easy question to answer, but it isn’t. For example, our company built a new way of delivering long-range wireless electricity using infrared light. In order to “catch” those beams of electricity, though, devices would need to have the receiver chips built in, and product designers would need to substantially change their devices to power them wirelessly.

We hoped that manufacturers would be excited for our system and move quickly to update their products. We got positive feedback, too, but most simply had no bandwidth for disruption as they grappled with their burdens of running a business and worrying about earning calls. They liked the idea, but they put it on the back burner.

So we began to build devices with the necessary receivers built-in to showcase how they work. Here are five things you should do if you’re on a similar path:

Creating your own devices does not mean giving up on your original goal of providing components for other manufacturers to use.

Start with just one

Let’s be honest. The chances are quite low that you’ll have the world-changing success of cargo containers or Qualcomm SoCs. So there’s no point rushing when building a hardware startup. Instead, start by making just a single prototype that you can use to show OEMs.

Don’t worry about making this first version of your device perfect or packing in all the features you’ve thought up. Think of it as a relatively crude demonstration that can give people a glimpse of what’s possible.

For example, we made a small digital display device for a supermarket shelf that could be powered wirelessly. We 3D printed it and actually used some tape on the inside to keep things in place. The only goal was to show potential buyers a proof of concept that validated our idea.

While you’re showing off your first device, gauge people’s responses and ask for both initial impressions and constructive feedback. Would they use it? Would they want more? What might make it work better?

DIY: 5 ways disruptive component startups can win over OEMs by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

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Mobileye IPO warns of potential potholes in the road to autonomous driving

Mobileye, Intel’s automated driving division, filed Friday for what is expected to be the year’s largest IPO, but its success is far from guaranteed.

The Israeli company, acquired by Intel five years ago for $15.3 billion, touts a broad vision: An autonomous future “where congestion is seen only in history books.” But its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission underscores its precarious position in the ever-evolving self-driving vehicle industry.

Founded in 1999, Mobileye has benefited from its first-mover advantage, supplying automakers with computer vision technology to power their advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Now, as Mobileye expands its business model, it faces a proliferating number of rivals — from every side — in the wild and woolly world of automated vehicle technology.

The company’s list of competitors in its S-1 extends beyond the “Tier 1” suppliers in its core business to now include robotaxi developers like Argo AI, Aurora, Auto X, Baidu, Cruise, Momenta, Motional, Waymo and Zoox, as well as what it describes as “consumer AV” competitors Apple, Sony and former customer Tesla.

TechCrunch pored through the S-1 to identify the speed bumps and bright spots in its pursuit to dominate autonomous driving.

Vertical integration

In the filing, Mobileye warned that its historical reliance on a handful of automaker partners may jeopardize future revenue. For the first six months of the year, Mobileye reported that 76% of its revenue was derived from eight automakers. But now big spenders such as General Motors and Mercedes-Benz are starting to develop their own autonomous driving systems in-house.

Mobileye IPO warns of potential potholes in the road to autonomous driving by Jaclyn Trop originally published on TechCrunch

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Mobileye IPO warns of potential potholes in the road to autonomous driving

Mobileye, Intel’s automated driving division, filed Friday for what is expected to be the year’s largest IPO, but its success is far from guaranteed.

The Israeli company, acquired by Intel five years ago for $15.3 billion, touts a broad vision: An autonomous future “where congestion is seen only in history books.” But its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission underscores its precarious position in the ever-evolving self-driving vehicle industry.

Founded in 1999, Mobileye has benefited from its first-mover advantage, supplying automakers with computer vision technology to power their advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Now, as Mobileye expands its business model, it faces a proliferating number of rivals — from every side — in the wild and woolly world of automated vehicle technology.

The company’s list of competitors in its S-1 extends beyond the “Tier 1” suppliers in its core business to now include robotaxi developers like Argo AI, Aurora, Auto X, Baidu, Cruise, Momenta, Motional, Waymo and Zoox, as well as what it describes as “consumer AV” competitors Apple, Sony and former customer Tesla.

TechCrunch pored through the S-1 to identify the speed bumps and bright spots in its pursuit to dominate autonomous driving.

Vertical integration

In the filing, Mobileye warned that its historical reliance on a handful of automaker partners may jeopardize future revenue. For the first six months of the year, Mobileye reported that 76% of its revenue was derived from eight automakers. But now big spenders such as General Motors and Mercedes-Benz are starting to develop their own autonomous driving systems in-house.

Mobileye IPO warns of potential potholes in the road to autonomous driving by Jaclyn Trop originally published on TechCrunch

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Beyond volatility: How semiconductor companies can thrive with a focused sector strategy

Ondrej Burkacky Contributor
Ondrej Burkacky is senior partner at McKinsey & Company based in Munich, Germany, leading global Semiconductors and Business Technology practices. His expertise in semiconductors, R&D and embedded software to advise clients on operational improvement, R&D and software-related topics.
Nikolaus Lehmann Contributor
Nikolaus Lehmann is an associate partner at McKinsey & Company based in Munich, Germany. Prior to joining McKinsey in 2015, he was a manager for Strategy and Business Development at Intel Mobile Communications and a Strategy Consultant with Infineon Technologies.

Semiconductors are critical to the economy of almost every country in the world. However, the industry is facing significant challenges.

Even with fabs operating at full capacity, companies have struggled to keep pace with demand, pushing lead times to six months or longer. Moreover, the impact of the pandemic, a talent crunch and spiraling design complexity mean an industry that should be riding high is under increasing pressure.

Amid soaring demand, semiconductor markets have boomed, with sales growing by more than 20% to around $600 billion in 2021. However, global chip shortages have caused manufacturing slowdowns in industries from autos to agriculture, and led to debates over the reliability of an industry that is vital to the global economy.

In the U.S., the federal government has responded with a swath of legislation, including the CHIPS for America Act, which authorizes $52 billion in funding for the expansion of the domestic semiconductor industry. The new rules aim to protect industries against supply shortages and reduce their reliance on fabrication plants in Asia. Companies including Intel, Samsung, Texas Instruments and GlobalFoundries are planning on adding more capacity in the U.S., and Europe is also seeing significant investment.

The recent ramp up in productive capacity reflects the consensus that, notwithstanding the current environment, the longer-term outlook for the semiconductor industry remains positive. From domestic kitchens to the most advanced manufacturing plants, semiconductors are embedded in modern economies. Combine that with the rise in home working, and it’s not difficult to predict the industry’s direction of travel.

We estimate 6% to 8% growth per year up to 2030, amid expanding demand for digital services, the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and mass migration to electric mobility. On that trajectory, we predict a trillion-dollar industry by the end of the decade.

Image Credits: McKinsey & Company

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Battery startups are working to disrupt more than just cars and trucks

There’s an open secret in the battery startup world — everyone is pitching their cells as the ones to spur consumers to ditch their gas-guzzling SUVs for sleek, fast-charging electric vehicles with cross-country range, even if they’re really eyeing something else. Sure, some companies will leapfrog the steady 5% annual improvements that lithium-ion batteries have been making over the last several years. (Most won’t, but that shouldn’t stop companies from trying!)

Sometimes, though, the EV pitch is just that — a pitch. Battery startups are almost obligated to note it in their press releases and pitch decks. Investors love the potential for growth that EVs represent, and startups would be remiss if they didn’t at least mention the enormous potential market.

As investors have realized the boundless potential of the EV market, money has been pouring into battery startups. In the last five years alone, $42 billion in venture capital and growth equity have been invested in the sector, according to a TechCrunch and PitchBook analysis.

Still, EVs are just one part of the story. The reality is that because batteries have improved radically in the last decade, startups like Form Energy and EcoFlow no longer have to pretend that they’re going to be the Next Big Thing in electrified mobility. Rather, they can acknowledge that they have far more potential to disrupt other parts of the economy.

One of the latest examples is Natron Energy. Natron was founded a decade ago after its CEO, Colin Wessells, came up with a battery that instead of nickel or cobalt used Prussian blue — the pigment that revolutionized the art world in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Other researchers had explored Prussian blue’s use in batteries for decades, but Wessells found a way to make a commercially viable cell using a version of the pigment coupled with a sodium-based electrolyte. Perhaps more important than what materials it uses are those it doesn’t — lithium, cobalt, nickel, or other rare materials whose prices have skyrocketed in the last year.

But apart from a brief, almost vestigial mention of EVs in a recent press release, Natron recognizes that the strength of its cells lies in other markets and has focused the company accordingly.