Motorola Innovating From India

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Innovation Headlines

Innovation

Written by Anannya Nath

Thursday, 19 July 2007 00:00

Motorola was one of the first telecom companies to set up its R&D labs in India. And since then, there has been no looking back. We take a look at the various technologies developed at its R&D units, thanks to its strategy with respect to innovation.<hr id="system-readmore" />Motorola is known around the world for innovation and leadership in wireless and broadband communications. Twenty years ago, it introduced its first mobile phone that changed forever the way we communicate. Fast forwarding to today's world, the device, formally known as the cell phone, does more than keep one billion people connected; it allows them to express their personal style, access information, be entertained, capture memories, listen to music and more. And this is where the role of the research and development centres comes into play. Innovation is the keyword Innovation is a rule, rather than an exception at Motorola. As Bhaskar Harita, senior director, Motorola Software Group puts it, "Every product needs some innovation or the other. If it does not have it, it's usability is a rare chance." The research team at Motorola believes that innovation is not an in-house activity only. It needs external stimulants. Product innovation brings satisfaction and ease of use to customers, who, along with the academic institutions and young developers, make up the innovation chain or ecosystem. Companies that have been acquired by Motorola for their technologies, also form an important part of this ecosystem. Multimedia-the way to go Cell phones have evolved from being the cumbersome devices of yesteryears to the slim and smart gadgets that can double up as camcorders or video editors. However, to multi-task, the processing power of these phones needs to increase-Motorola's next generation multimedia architecture is trying to do just that. This architecture is focused on giving power to users to find, enjoy and interact with content and services that they want in all environments-the home, at work and at leisure. For this, Motorola has integrated the ScreeN3 technology, which grants intuitive access to news and information to a mobile device. It caches information related to a user's preference whenever the phone is idle. This cached information then forms a scrolling ‘ticker' on the phone's home screen. If more information is desired, single clicks can bring users to more detailed information and images. Along with this technology, the information gathered can be transferred from a mobile device to a home digital video recorder, extending the mobile personalisation preferences to the home viewing experience. A technology that grabs attention is advanced voice messaging and control. It aims to give voice to messages. "This will take cell phones to the next era. One can just speak out a message and be free from the trouble of writing," says Harita. At present, a similar technology has been launched by Kirusa but that is a third party software, which has to be specially installed. However, in the near future, Motorola phones will come equipped with this voice messaging feature. It also has the advantage of deciphering local languages with ease. "It is being personalised at the lowest levels so that the mobile phone is able to understand and interpret what a person is speaking, even if its Bhojpuri with a terrible accent," Harita adds. However, at present the challenge is to train the software for the task and to achieve faster speeds. Also, it needs to interpret and understand even the worst accents. "You will soon see this technology in our phones," confides Harita. Another technology, called ‘synch-and-go', made commercially available sometime back, enables the user to dock the mobile to a PC or a TV set-top box, and synchronise music, pictures and video for mobile use. "The ability to watch something that originated on another device, at any time, and in any location is a totally different experience and is available in Motorola products such as the Motorola Q," Harita says. However, moving on to the future of this technology, Motorola is working to develop integrated transcoding and access technologies that will allow a mobile user to access a video clip stored on a home device in a format suitable for mobile devices. Added to this will be the patterns of user behaviour, intelligently stored by the mobile, that will trigger a recording of associated content on a home device for use at a later time. Usage made easy Traditionally, user-experience designers have developed specifications for the user interface (UI) that have been implemented by programmers writing C/C++ code. These were developed on an iconic basis, which is time consuming, can result in translation errors, is relatively inflexible to intermediate design changes and doesn't give quick prototypes in between. Modifications also tend to be slow and complex. Motorola plans on making this significantly easier and is working towards the next generation user interface, which will be richer in features and graphics. User-experience designers will directly ‘implement' their vision of the UI-by using a combination of rich graphics technologies like vector graphics as well as declarative programming models using XML. "Our current energies are focused on developing the next-gen user interface that enables a lot of flexibility and portability," says Harita. "With this technology in place, user applications could be more easily and quickly put together using an incremental development process (allowing quick prototyping) and multiple changes (late customisation), using familiar Web tools and data access mechanisms," he adds. To make interaction easier, the Motorola lab has developed an intelligent user interaction (iUi) framework. ‘iUi' is a multi-device software that semantically recognises handwriting, speech and keypad input behaviour. So the next time the user types a letter of the alphabet, the phone intelligently interprets what he wishes to write and gives out the remaining letters of the word. New technologies powered by WiMax WiMax technology is poised to transform wireless broadband communications. Most importantly, it's the first technology that delivers true broadband mobility at speeds that enable powerful applications such as VoIP, online gaming, mobile TV and personalised infotainment. Delivering broadband access in the licensed spectrum, WiMax solutions that are based on the 802.16e standard, offer seamless mobility. They provide on-demand broadband connections that follow the user everywhere: indoors, outdoors and while on the move. WiMax is becoming a force in the wireless arena and various technologies are being woven around it. And you guessed right, Motorola is also doing the same. It is one of the technology leaders in both subscriber and network solutions based on WiMax, and the Motorola software group is closely involved in the development of some of these technologies. Using such broadband connectivity, Motorola has developed a set of software technologies known as Liquid Media, that allows digital content to be searched, accessed and moved freely between devices. As the name itself suggests, the software allows video and audio content to follow its user, morphing between formats to fit the playback environment. An extension to this technology developed by Motorola labs is ‘cache and carry', wherein old content that has not been accessed for a long time, is stored in the background even though new content is being added all the time. One can easily go back to the old content as it is not erased from the cache history. However, development of such technologies can lead to violation of DRM. A few examples could be the issues of who owns the content, or permissions needed to play particular content on any device, or the issue of multi-platform revenue. Currently, the necessary software for translating content and rights between multiple devices is being developed by Motorola and other handset manufacturers. A strong foundation Motorola set up its first R&D design centre in India, in Bangalore, in the year 1991. There are 3,000 engineers located at Bangalore and Hyderabad, who drive innovation and are contributing significantly to local Indian markets. Apart from this, it is also developing mobile phones and infrastructure software for Motorola products around the world. "We embrace an open, innovative and distributed development policy where work on new technologies is shared across the country, and it often includes customers and strategic partnerships with university telecommunications programmes," says Harita. The lab is also conducting research on technologies and solutions to connect the unconnected rural parts of India, through CDMA phones, and is contributing to ‘cool' new mobile phones and applications, like the MOTOFONE and MOTOROKR. "Today, we are designing and developing software for dual-mode handsets, including out-of-home GSM/GPRS/Edge and in-home Wi-Fi/Bluetooth," informs Harita. "Our India innovation leadership team (ILT) solicits and reviews ideas for new technologies relevant to the Indian market and oversees projects and funding through our early stage accelerator (eSA) programme. The team's first product recognises voice commands in Indian English," he says. Connecting to campuses Supporting the present culture of increasing the diffusion between the industry and academia, Motorola has tied up with various universities to leverage the best talent and skills, the latest being IIT Bombay. Under this MoU, the company will work towards encouraging R&D initiatives on applications of the next generation technologies. Other initiatives include R&D partnerships with IISc Bangalore and IIIT Hyderabad. A few acclaimed products and technologies from Motorola Motofone: Launched last year, the phone saw many new technologies included in it. A few of them were: • Voice prompts, letting go of the conventional icon display and being made available in Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Bengali. • SCPL thindesign platform, for better coordination between hardware and software. • E-Ink display, which made it easy to read in bright sunlight or dimly lit environments from virtually any angle-just like paper. Giving a visual impact to voice calls, Motorola launched its 'video telephony' technology nearly two years ago. Known as 'finger recognition', this technology is able to recognise and comprehend various strokes of the finger, such as slanting, straight, curved, etc. The technology has been launched with the Motoming. A few projects Motorola labs is working o As a part of the personalisation mantra, a team at Motorola labs is developing part of a local personalisation project called Multimedia Semantic Syndication. It aims to provide tools for large and small content providers to make their content accessible via semantic Web technologies. As a result, users will receive personalised, syndicated summaries of information that is of interest to them. Researchers at Motorola labs are coordinating a project called aceMedia that would bring together the collective expertise of multimedia and IT to drive research of media management tools. With this search, indexing, cataloguing and adaptation technologies will be developed to allow content to be easily accessed. The motive is to make content more relevant to the user; automate annotation at all levels, and add functionality to ease content creation, transmission, search, access and re-use. Thus, intelligent content applications, like search of video, image media, content adaptation across mobiles, and privacy policies enabling users to maintain privacy of their personal content when sharing with social networks, will be possible.n