On this episode of The Six Five Webcast hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman discuss the tech news stories that made headlines this week. The six handpicked topics for this week are:
- Qualcomm Announces Partnership at IAA Mobility 2021
- Webex Partners with Google
- Zoom Puts Another $30 Million Behind Neat
- IBM Power E1080 Server Announcement
- IonQ Scores a $20M UMD Deal
- Luminar and Intel Mobileye Partner on Robotaxi Service
For a deeper diver into each topic, please click on the links above. Be sure to subscribe to The Six Five Webcast so you never miss an episode.
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Disclaimer: The Six Five Webcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.
Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Hi, this is Pat Moorhead with Moor Insights & Strategy and we are here for another awesome episode, episode 93 of The Six Five podcast and I’m here with my world famous, jet lagged, fresh off the airplane from Munich, Germany, Daniel Newman. How are you, my friend?
Daniel Newman: I’m doing well, Mr. Moorhead. And you are right, the show must go on. And I am doing well. I’m feeling a little bit tired. I’m not going to let anybody that’s watching our show know that, except by telling them. I’m going to be exuberant and energetic and excited and have a ton of fun today because we do have a great show and we are back, baby. Six days in Europe, but you know what? I didn’t miss last Friday, I didn’t miss this Friday. I plan my whole life around The Six Five pod.
Patrick Moorhead: In fact, we even did one in the middle. We did a Six Five Insider with Rowan Trollope, the CEO of Five9.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. Well, I’ll throw that in the show notes for everybody because if you missed it, it was Wednesday night at night. It was midnight. I’m jamming. Here we go. But it was great. It’s always great to get Rowan Trollope on our show. It’s great to get so many of the people that we have, but this show no insider, no brand, no specific company, just lots and lots of analysis.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right. And one thing I do want to point out, we do cover publicly traded companies but please don’t take anything we say as investment advice. This is for educational entertainment purposes only. There we go. And if this is your first time tuning in, we cover six topics, five minutes each, sometimes eight minutes each. And we really try to focus less on the news, you can get the news anywhere. This is really about analysis and our opinions on those things. Daniel let’s jump in. Something near and dear to your heart. We’re going to bookend the IAA Munich show or as they say in Germany, IAA Show, our first and our last topic are going to be about that. Let’s start off with Qualcomm. We had Cristiano Amon who did a keynote there and had a couple news events.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it was a pretty big show. And just as a quick introduction, IA was pretty much a mega show, six halls at the Munich Messe, tens of thousands of people attending, major corporations. You had an entire show and I want to give a quick shout out to the German government that got the show off the ground. There was a lot of administrative and paperwork and forms that had to be filled out for traveling in and out. But as a whole, we were able to attend. It was very normal with the exception of the masks, having to show vaccine but it was a good indicator to me, Pat, that with good governance, good management, we might in fact be able to get back in person. And by the way, you and I will be at re:Invent with Amazon and Snapdragon Summit with Qualcomm so this winter barring any major variants, we’re starting to see signs of human to human interaction once again.
All right. I don’t want to take any more time on that, but I wanted to point that out because a lot of people I think are asking that question, “Hey, are we ever going to get back in person in the tech industry?” And by the way, so good to be face to face., So good to actually get to see things. I’m going to talk real quickly on the Qualcomm side. Great story from Cristiano, there was a big piece of news that dropped about a partnership between Qualcomm, Google and Renault. Renault not as familiar to most people here in the state side but very, very large automotive company, announced a significant partnership to basically use Qualcomm’s third generation Snapdragon automotive cockpit platform along with the Google Assist Google Maps to create this integrated experience for the buyers of the new Renault vehicles.
This is kind of just a example of what’s going on across the board. We’re hearing from the entire gambit of semiconductor companies, which are quickly becoming some of the most influential companies in the automotive space. That to me was the big theme of this IAA show. When we come back on the back end of this and we’re going to talk about another big announcement, is what we’re finding is that there are a few different systems in the automobile and the automobile as it gets electrified and as we move towards autonomy are basically being driven by computers. What is being considered, Qualcomm calls it a digital chassis. Some people call it the skateboard but what we are going to have in the future with these electric vehicles is you have motors and you have braking systems, you have a compute system and then you have these different onboard systems.
You have infotainment, you have telematics, you have the drive control navigation, you have ADAS and you have these different systems that are all connecting. You have vehicle to cloud or C-V2X is what we call it. And you’ve got all these different things, taking all this data in real time, it’s processing and essentially the vehicle of the future instead of having all the complexities of a combustion engine and these different small systems and dozens and dozens of different subsystems of the motor, we are going to be able to work with a couple of these different chip companies, put this together and basically create a very dynamic vehicle economy. If you knew about vehicles in the past, seven year design cycles or more, very complex to make changes.
Well, we’ve all learned from Tesla over the past decade that you can create a cloud updated vehicle that essentially the 2013 S model and the 2020 S model have the exact same software, the large tablet, download the newest software from the cloud. Same sets of features only very, very small iterations in between so then instead of having to come up with new models that are completely new, it’s constantly being updated. And that really was what I got from Cristiano’s themes of his keynote was one, the vehicles are going to be iterated upon but they’re going to be dynamic and agile just like the cloud. The vehicle itself becomes a rolling data center at the edge. All the data around it is going to become an imperative. 5G is going to connect everything so that things like autonomy, smart cities, the grid, the infrastructure, other vehicles, humans can all interact with this infrastructure, Pat.
And then in the end, we’ve got a future where mobile phones and vehicles have more in common than you ever thought, essentially getting us from one place to another. And then you add in full autonomy and that could be the Arriver offer from Qualcomm that is L2 working towards L4 or something like Luminar, something like what Nvidia offers. There’s so many options but overall big set of updates, Pat. I’m going to hog this one a little bit but you’re going to get a couple of extra long segments later on. But exciting news. I know you watched it from afar. You were covering it closely. Any other things that you saw because I’m sure I covered a lot but God, there was so much.
Patrick Moorhead: Daniel, I want to actually take a step back. And the thing that really dawned on me is that, we’ve seen various forms of agreement and disagreement on the future of the car. And I would say that initially on, let’s say seven or eight years ago, the traditional automakers really gave it lip service. And it really took kind of the fast movers like Tesla to really show how it’s done. And then people started getting into the how do I implement this? A lot of the traditional auto makers said, “Hey, I can do this myself,” or, “I can do this just working with a tier one and I don’t even have to talk to the chip makers.” But we’ll here we are. I feel like the entire industry has an agreement that so first of all, the car is a software defined data center on wheels.
The second thing is, is that while you do need smarts to create an EV, don’t confuse showing up with an EV as having a smart car. You can have a very dumb EV car, but making it software defined is a whole other type of thing. Companies like Tesla, they’ll change a bumper design with 10,000 cars in. A traditional manufacturer would never even think of doing that. They would think of, oh my God, what about supply chain? What about spares? How do we do this? Well you know what? Tesla figured it out. I think we’re at the point though, where all the automakers get it and what do they get? They know that they need a direct relationship with the chip maker. And if they didn’t learn that by now, by not being able to get chips, they’re never going to learn and they’re probably going to be out of business but also for collaboration.
And don’t confuse anything that people like Qualcomm are trying to become a tier one they’re not or this direct relationship that they have with the end customer, the end automaker, it’s that when you’re a tier one, there’s a limited amount of people you can actually help when you go direct to a company like Qualcomm or Intel or Nvidia, there’s a lot more that they can do for you. And they can share a lot of that value. I wrote an article on Forbes, 1,500 words. You can check that out. I did a YouTube interview with the business lead, Nakul Duggal, who actually runs the automotive business. You can check that out as well. And I’ll put that in the show notes, but let’s move to the next topic.
And that is that Cisco, WebEx and Google meet interoperability. And he might be like, oh, what’s the big deal with that? Well, here’s the thing. When it comes to video rooms or video equipment, you just can’t talk to each other. Sure, your PC can talk to another person’s PC, but guess what? If you’re running Zoom, you still can’t connect using WebEx. It’s as simple as that. It’s like, duh. It’s an impedance mismatch.
One of the things though that end users were trained on their PCs is they wanted the ultimate flexibility. If their customer used Google Meet, they use Google Meet. If their customer used WebEx, it used WebEx. What Google and Cisco announced this week was that their devices will talk together. If you have a Google Meet device and Google did announce two or three pretty unique devices and devices that I think finally make me think that they’re in the game, you can connect to our WebEx Desk Pro and it’s going to be a button that literally is Google Meet.
You click on a link on my Desk Pro here from Cisco and it will give you the opportunity to run a Google Meet video chat. There’s a ton of details on what’s supported and what’s not but I’m going to let you read about that. I think the most important thing that isn’t supported, there’s lots of support, don’t get me wrong, but what isn’t supported is the encryption, end to end encryption that you can get with Cisco’s product. If you connect a Cisco to a Google device, you cannot do end to end encryption yet. I don’t know if it will be an option. Quite frankly, there’s a lot of massaging that Google has to do on that video data. With that, I’ll turn it over to you.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. This topic actually will flow somewhat neatly into our next topic neatly. Ironically when video was room based only or primarily room based only, there were standards. Standards like H.323 that enabled IP video systems to talk to each other. You’d have poly-com before it was poly and you had Cisco. And those were probably the two biggest players. And historically you had a lot of different hardware, different iterations and versions and years and these systems all had to talk to each other and it was complicated. But by creating standards, you had to have gateways and gatekeepers and such that would simplify that. But essentially hardware could talk to hardware. Now, throughout that pandemic, what we have was a super fueled, supercharged implementation of video inside of the work ecosystem but most companies picked a few different platforms or standardized on them.
And because of things like web RTC, instead of really saying, “We’re going to have our systems and you’re going to have your systems and we’re going to use our systems in your systems,” we used whoever’s systems. Meaning, send me a Zoom link, send me a Meet link, send me a WebEx link. And we just jumped on each other’s platforms. Most of us don’t use hardware. Pat, you and I, because of the work we do, we have systems from Poly, we have systems from Cisco and we use them but we don’t always use them all the time. You and I, the backbone, we call our Desk Pros, we talk to each other on our WebEx because it’s both all on the expressway. We can click to click, point to point on different networks, but we can talk on that system. But if I wanted to use Zoom, you wanted to use the WebEx that’s not possible.
What we’re actually seeing here is what I think is the movement towards creating more interoperability as we re-return to a more hybrid and in person work situation where companies have to really think about the fact that video has been adopted at scale. Remote work is here to stay. People are going to work in offices all over the world. And even if your entire enterprise has done a good job of delivering standards, the chances of your entire supply chain, your partners, your customers, your training, education, anyone in your ecosystem all being on the same system are going to be smaller. Creating a world where there’s more options for interoperability on systems that are popular and used in different enterprises is going to be valuable.
WebEx, which has historically been one of the more closely held architectures primarily because their desire to keep everything very secure has not really opened up the kimono. You mentioned that this doesn’t fully enable all the security features but as Google’s popularity grows, as its platform grows, I think Cisco is realizing that it is probably going to limit its ability to grow if it doesn’t start to think about how to be more interoperable. And so this is a good example, it’ll be a good test case. And I think it’s a good chance for the market to see. And of course, if Google, which often does wonderful in software but struggles with hardware, can actually be successful with hardware. That’ll be another thing to watch from this whole launch of Google getting a little bit more weight in hardware behind its software path. That’s kind of my take here. And like I said, I think this flows really well into our next topic.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. And I really appreciate the historical web RTC perspective. It’s what’s new here too, is that there’s actually interaction like chat, that will come along with this interoperability. Stuff like whiteboarding, things like that, that make it a lot more complex. Thing I haven’t figured out though, Daniel is why Google? And why WebEx? Why not another partner? But I’m whiteboarding that to figure out is it weakness versus strength? Strengths versus weaknesses? I would love to have been a fly on the wall with their corporate strategy folks, but hey, let’s move forward here. Zoom, which by the way, Daniel, you and I are going to be attending Zoomtopia next week, puts another $30 million behind Neat. And if you’ve never heard of Neat, they have a line of pretty interesting UC equipment. Just when you thought the industry didn’t need another equipment maker, there is Neat.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. This is a pretty neat one, Pat. 41 million now that Zoom has put behind Neat. Neat makes a series of collaboration hardware, most notably it’s boards. It’s you’ve heard about maybe Microsoft Team boards and WebEx has it Spark Boards. It’s not called Spark Board anymore, they changed the names. But the point is, is that there’s always been these room based, fully collaborative in innovation ecosystem products that people can go into little huddle room. And Pat, by the way you said, I would love to have whiteboarded that. Well, this is what this product is all about. Well, Zoom obviously has been hardware light. Meaning as a company, done extraordinarily well growing to a billion dollars a quarter on an almost pure edge to edge desktop based video collaboration solution. But hardware has increasingly been part of its ecosystem.
You’ve maybe heard things, something called Zoom Rooms and that’s the ability to use hardware based, it’s been built on mini Mac and different hardware cameras that go into rooms, integrate with the Zoom system and enable these room experiences to be integrated to these individual desktop or PC or smartphone based video collaboration experiences. Here with this particular investment, what it looks like to me is Zoom has its venture business. It’s flush with cash and the company is coming into a situation now where it is having to figure out how it’s going to differentiate. Whether that was the significant multi-billion dollar investment in Five9 to move it into contact center in the cloud.
Whether it’s been the events platform. well getting more into hardware is going to be important. Again, just like we mentioned with the Cisco and Google collaboration, Zoom needs room based technologies that are going to win because when people go back to the office.
And I don’t care how many CNN or CNBC segments you hear that say, “People do not want to go back to work,” people want to go back into physical spaces with other people, as soon as they are ready and they believe it is safe and it’s healthy and we are more successful at engaging and collaborating when we have this blended environment. There are just times when we need to be able to get in a room and stencil something out, people can’t be multitasking and looking at their screens. And I think that’s really what this is all about. And Zoom has found a company that builds really good product. By the way, a lot of the Neat people have historic backgrounds from companies like TANDBERG. This is another Oslo based, Norway. The Norwegians seem to really get this collaboration thing. Not sure, been doing it forever.
And so, when I think about it, Pat, it’s in the Zoom world, a company that’s doing a billion a quarter, 30 million isn’t a huge number but it’s a meaningful investment in a company to continue to develop products that are going to work and integrate very well with Zoom. And I think it’s again, the underlying story is more about what work is going to look like. Zoom, WebEx, both of these stories are indicators to me that they see a hybrid future, people in offices and needing better equipment in rooms to connect those experiences to those that are not in the offices.
Patrick Moorhead: Wow, Daniel. The only thing I have to add to this is thinking strategically, why Zoom is doing this. And there’s this notion of having rabbits who can implement features on the service side as quickly as possible. We’ve seen this in Windows PCs. We’ve seen this in servers but I don’t think Zoom has that problem now. They have partners like Poly who are pretty much adding all the advanced features exactly when Zoom is able to provide it. The other part of this, I think is it’s a hedge. It’s a hedge against risk that says if let’s say some of these vertical ecosystems get too powerful, like Cisco WebEx, which by the way, we just talked about them opening up with Google Meet interoperability, that they would be able to go in there and either fully acquire the company or at least be able to take advantage of its upside and in a way, control the company by having a 51% ownership stake.
I almost think it’s a hedge against, it’s sending a message to companies like Poly that, okay, if you’re not going to integrate our latest features when we need you to, Neat will and then sending kind of a kind of a hedge against Cisco with a complete vertical stack. Great stuff. Who thought there would be this much excitement in collaboration? Well, I think we would.
Let’s move on to another type of topic here and that is data center, enterprise data center infrastructure. IBM announced its first Power10 based server called the E1080. You could read my Forbes article to get all the details but essentially in my opinion, it reinforces fit for purpose stacks out there in the industry. And whether it’s an iPhone doing its own Silicon OS, middleware and applications, you have this new server that has the new Power10, which is very good at specific big data workloads. And now inference, machine learning inference on those workloads.
But IBM is doing what people now see as really cool. Heck, even AWS with Graviton and Trainium and Inferentia and all the stacks they put on that. And the Power 1080 is not good for all environments but the environments that it is really good for, in my opinion, is SAP, SAP HANA. It set a world record SAP benchmark with eight sockets. And I believe there’s going to be a 16 socket design in the wings that’s going to pretty much blow everything else out of the water. I was really happy to see IBM show benchmarks directly going up against HP and Google Cloud. I like when companies do that, it gives me a level of confidence.
As it relates to licenses and efficiency with Oracle, they put up some very credible numbers as well. And then finally, FOREX more containerized workloads in Red Hat, which surprisingly IBM owns that company. And it makes total sense to me. I don’t think they’re making up any of these numbers. They might be comparing to Cascade Lake but from an availability standpoint, it’s kind of hard to get even a hold of Ice Lake and that SAP benchmark, if AMD and their partners or Intel and their partners want to put up a better number, they certainly can do this.
The one, I wouldn’t call it a critique or one thing that I wish IBM would do is I really want them to go straight after x86 business from a sales and marketing perspective. I feel like on one side I applaud IBM for servicing its clients. They literally are one of the best companies at delivering what their clients want them to deliver, which is why we see the success of things like IBM Z. The IBM Z is the best at what it does. It’s the most secure, it’s an east west transaction engine but can you gain share doing that? IBM has less than 1% of the server market share out there. And I really want to see them with this platform go after the x86 market. Is that because I don’t like Dell or HP, HPE or Lenova? No, I just think we need more competition to stir up the pot. That’s what I’d like to see them do differently.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, Pat, your write up was really good and we’ll make sure to throw that down into the show notes. I didn’t have the chance to attend. I did capture some of the postmortems from different analysts and some of the different journalists. I think you made a couple of really interesting points that we should double click on really quickly. First is, IBM continues to put really, really good hardware out there in the marketplace. But your point that you made about the marketing still befuddles me a little bit. Why does the company do so much work to develop such good hardware and then allow that hardware to take so little market share? And I do understand part of their thing is they have specialized applications and customers that they are almost building this stuff for. When they deliver it, they succeed with it. But at the same time, it’s like, if it’s built this well and it’s this useful, there must be other applications in the market. And like I said, you’ve got this massive almost 400,000 workforce out there. Build that market, even get to 2%. You’re talking about a huge growth of the business.
The second thing I did really like and you have a good section in your article about it was the hybrid cloud story. This is IBM’s story. IBM is not, despite the fact that it has public cloud, is not building its narrative around public cloud. It’s building its narrative around the hybrid cloud. Well, Power10 is really built with that in mind, it’s built for this frictionless architecture, frictionless hybrid cloud is how they’re coining it. And the idea is, taking power virtual servers, OpenShift, IBM cloud and creating seamless, frictionless migration of workloads between public and private. And I think it’s not universal and it can’t do it for every application but it showed in its story, in its rollout that it is addressing this early and often with the Power10 story with these new servers.
Again, if you keep in mind what IBM is trying to do, the story here is about building something that’s useful and hybrid. If you look at Pat, it sounds like you and I share an opinion as analysts, you have a great product, sell more. You have a great product, you have the architecture, you have the infrastructure, you have great benchmarks, let it be known. Tell the world. Keep talking about it beyond the launch day. But congratulations on a successful launch. I think you ended your article by something like, I’ll tell you in a year. Let’s come back to this in a year and see if this good product is matched with good sales.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Let’s move to the next topic. We just talked about general compute for SAP and Oracle and OpenShift. Let’s move to a different type of compute and that is IonQ. IonQ scored a $20 million deal with the University of Maryland and then two days after, made an announcement that said they were tripling their order expectations for 2021. First off, I just want to say I’m kind of smiling because we hear often that there’s no money in quantum yet. University of Maryland actually charges enterprise customers to come in and use their stuff. And they are known as the most lauded university for quantum in the United States. But I couldn’t help but to grin when I saw the triple their order. And the reason there was a couple, that I talked to the CFO at IonQ and basically the reason there was a two day offset between these two announcements is that tripling of order is just not just University of Maryland. And he didn’t say this, these are my expectations that we’re probably going to see a couple more design wins, some revenue. This company is on a roll. A podcast that you and I enjoy listening to the All-In podcast. I think the word was quantum is uninvestible. I forget exactly which one of them was.
Daniel Newman: One of the moms that actually said that, but I could be wrong, but I think they all agreed actually.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. And it’s funny. I was surprised to see at least one of them say that, the scientist of the group. But I think what they’re disconnected from is first of all, none of them understand infrastructure. There’s not a single person in the All-In pod who understands infrastructure. They all have their different swim lanes. You and I understand infrastructure. And when I see Google Cloud, AWS and Azure laying a bet on a company like IonQ without even having to understand how Paul Smith-Goodson, my quantum principle analyst, he understands it, but I don’t understand it nearly as well. There’s something that’s going on there. Overall, this is good for the industry. I feel like right now, it’s almost a three horse race between IonQ, IBM and Honeywell slash Cambridge. A lot of cool companies coming out with some different ways to skin this cat that I’m super, super excited about. One a note here I think in the next couple months, there’s going to be a SPAC marriage between DMY and a IonQ. It’ll be the first time that public investors can actually invest directly in quantum and $DMYI.
Daniel Newman: De-SPACing, will they be punished like every other SPAC on the planet? That’s okay. Just think long and don’t take anything we say as investment advice. Real quickly I’ll touch on this because we got one more topic and we’ve only got a few minutes left on the show. Look, we are seeing a important marriage take place between classical and quantum computing. These things are not going to act independently for a very long time but the reason Azure Bracket, the reason Microsoft has put Azure quantum into the cloud, this is happening because there are complex problems that cannot be defined or solved using the current state of classical computing in a timely fashion. Companies like JPMorgan Chase have partnered with companies like Honeywell and they’re making very large spends and investments. This isn’t an uninvestible and nonexistent business. The problem is, is it is a business that is taking a very long time to mature, to reach critical revenue mass.
Some businesses are exponential growth. And so when VCs and venture capitalists talk about it a lot of times they’re looking at what can go from zero to a billion in a couple of years. For quantum, this is one that is more iterative. The improvements are being made every year but there are architectural improvements. There’s been huge movements in terms of the state quality and error ratios of the qubits in terms of their ability to stay in a useful state longer. And as that continues to happen, the problems we’re going to be able to solve are going to become greater. And especially with the marriage with true cloud computing, that’s where we’re going to see value. IonQ here showed another win. Good for them. Good for the industry. Good for the state. Quantum is going to make a difference. Don’t turn your back on it. Keep watching it, pay attention, more to come.
Patrick Moorhead: Good adders, Daniel. At some point we can get Paul on here to actually riff about the core tech, which just blows my mind. Let’s get to the last topic here. This is a Mobileye, Intel Mobileye, and Luminar for a Moovit robotaxi. First of all, who is Luminar, Daniel? You might want to start there.
Daniel Newman: All right, let’s go. And talk about de-SPACing. LAZR, Luminar is Lar, actually 26 year old Austin Russell and I got to spend about an hour together at the IAA mobile show. He took me into a couple of different demonstrations of LIDAR, which if you want to kind of simplify what this is, is it’s the third set. When we talk about L2 driving or what Tesla does, Tesla effectively uses computer vision. Other L2 solutions use computer vision cameras and radar as their sensing technologies. But the problem is, and some of these companies that are trying to go to this full self-driving or even partial self-driving, Pat, like the car that you drive, it allows you to take your hands off the wheel for a minute, up to a minute at a time, supposedly using the sensing of L2. But we’ve seen a lot of problems with that.
We’ve seen a lot of fiery crashes and we are still at a point where most of it is more about assisting than it is about truly self-driving but the holy grail is self-driving. Well, LIDAR is a very expensive technology, at least up to this point. When you think about that Apple car, those Google cars driving down the road with the crazy spinning hood on the top, that’s LIDAR. That is how at least most of the world sees LIDAR. Most of those systems cost tens of thousands of dollars per vehicle. It’s up to this point, been considered almost an unusable technology at scale. And so it hasn’t really been put into place, but what Luminar has built is essentially a LIDAR, which Russell told me can be done at about a $1,000 dollars a vehicle at scale right now and it can be put in.
And so what Intel Mobileye has done, and Mobileye is radar and computer vision. Has a very holistic set of maps and integrations and camera systems in a whole economy for its L2 system. But the holy grail of robotaxis is that L2 plus system that’s out in the marketplace is not going to work in a densely populated urban environment. You all hear the story about the carriage and the babysitter and the coffee shop and the crossing the road and the car has to make an instantaneous decision. Well, with LIDAR it has eyes further down the road, it’s able to see more, it’s able to do more. I’m going to give one more little thing here on this about Luminar, Pat, and I’ll let you talk more about the Intel Mobileye, Moovit partnership so that we can split this one up.
But they took me on the test track, Pat. They took me in a Tesla model 3 with the full newest software update and they did this detection with a small child in the middle of the road. And then they basically took the car to speed about 50, 60 kilometer. Had it detect it in the Tesla with the computer vision and it could not stop from hitting a kid that was in the road about a 100 meters in front of it. It was static. The kid was static and I took it, I put a video of this on Twitter, so we can put the link in the show notes to that video. The second demo they did was the same demo with LIDAR. Using the Luminar system and voila, with the LIDAR, it was able to detect further down the road. And although the braking was very abrupt, it was able to do that.
There was a third demonstration where the kid comes running out from in front of a parked car, which we all know that’s the kid chasing the ball out of the driveway. We all learned about this in driver’s ed. Well, it was also still on this kid moving in front of the car able to detect it and stop. And then there was a fourth example, by the way, worth noting of when that it has a false ID of a possible person running out in front of the road that it is able to stop where it doesn’t have the car slam, meaning it slows but actually keeps going smoothly. Because obviously every time you slam, you do jerk the driver, you create risk. LIDAR, this third sense, adds a ton of capability and the Moovit, Intel Mobileye, Luminar partnership adds a technology that can truly potentially get us to this holy grail by having enough sensing to be able to put these taxis into densely populated urban areas. This is really exciting. By the way, Moovit is part of Intel ventures portfolio.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Real quick, you put these two company’s technologies together, Mobileye and Luminar and you get a service that is actually owned by Intel called Moovit. And the big announcement was they’re going to start fully autonomous service in Tel Aviv and Munich starting in 2022. What I really like about this is first off getting a company that very few people know into the spotlight. And I also like to see that Mobileye is taking a much more aggressive stance here beyond L2 Plus. If you think about where Mobileye started, it was all about L1 and then I went to L2 and L2 plus. In fact, one of the market leaders in there and a lot of trucks have their technology already but the big question was, and I think Nvidia stirred up the whole, no, you really want to be L4 or L5 if not.
And then it’s not that Mobileye didn’t have the tech or the know how, they just had to work with Intel and what Intel was doing for L5 and L4. And now we see most of the industry kind of resetting itself on L2 plus, while looking to robotaxis and L4 here. All exciting. We think quantum is slow, looking out long, we’ve been talking about self-driving cars being right around the corner but this is a good proof point that maybe we aren’t as far away as we think we are.
Daniel Newman: We’re getting close. It’s going to happen faster though, the gears are going to start turning.
Patrick Moorhead: I know. Hey Daniel, we’re at the end of this show and I just want to thank everybody who joined in here. If you like what you heard, hit me up on Twitter. If you disliked something, hit Daniel up on Twitter but regardless hit that subscribe button, regardless of where you are, whether it’s video or audio, punch that subscribe button right now. With that, I’m going to brings us to a close. Want to thank you for joining us for episode 93 of the Six Five podcast. Have a great weekend.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
