What the Bluetooth industry needs now ....
Incisor interview:
Vince Holton meets with Henri Seydoux, founder and CEO of Parrot S.A.
Well, we will come to what the Bluetooth industry needs shortly. Meanwhile, for those Incisor readers that don’t know Parrot, and there are not likely to be many of you, the French company has been deeply involved in embedding Bluetooth in consumer electronics devices since the very early days of the short range wireless technology. The company was founded by Henri Seydoux, and he and I both struggled to think how many years it has been since Incisor first met with Parrot in a hotel meeting room in London – we decided it was way back in 2001. Parrot has gone on to launch a range of Bluetooth-enabled products across the automotive and general consumer electronics industries.
Time, then, that we met up again, and took the opportunity to compare notes on the state of the industry, likely directions and trends. And, it turned out, for Seydoux to make an impassioned plea to the industry to take one step that would make life easier for people on both sides of the fence – developers and CE companies, and also the vast consumer market that they serve and rely upon for their existence. But more of that later.
Seydoux started the conversation by re-stating his company’s backbone philosophy, which is to re-develop classic products using today’s technology. Seydoux explained: “We are not interested in competing in me-too markets, or trying to be the lowest cost variation of a product. I have always looked at product development from the perspective of ‘what can be improved by going wireless?”
Parrot’s roots were in voice recognition – hence the name – and over the past eight years Bluetooth has since been combined with improvements in speech recognition. Parrot’s first success with Bluetooth was in the area of the car phone, and this has remained an important market for the company. According to Seydoux, Bluetooth gave Parrot the opportunity to re-invent the carphone, and to revitalise the whole carphone market.
Seydoux explained that from this platform, Parrot has looked at ways to use wireless to transform products. “As an example, I think that Bluetooth speaker systems can be very successful, and if they are going to be used in the home they have to be good speakers. Our Zikmu speakers, which were designed by Philippe Starck, are a good example. If you look at the basic design it harks back to the speaker device attached to the phonograph in the original HMV logo! The speaker itself is the static element in the music ecosystem today. Everything else is mobile – the music, the MP3 player or iPod, the laptop as a music storage device, and of course the Internet provides endless music streaming opportunities. So, to maintain the mobility, the speaker needs to be wireless, and therefore Bluetooth was a fundamental element of the design concept for the Zikmu speaker. It’s great to be able to come into your home with your laptop or iPod, just press play, and enjoy your music. This is how it should be.”
Seydoux believes that the world is ready for, and now wants wireless. His aim, he says, is not to reinvent the wheel, but to make things easier. Fortunately, Bluetooth is now part of most cellphones. “Most of the technology that has been developed around cellphones is transferable. The TV, PC and cellphone are all content sources, but you are unlikely to turn them on to look at your digital photos, for example,” explained Seydoux. “The digital photo market is enormous – the cameraphone has revolutionised the market and we now all take hundreds or even thousands of digital photos. They are a record of your life, a digital diary, but sadly, the vast majority remain on the cellphone or perhaps get transferred to a PC and archived, but never viewed. I am sure that we all value these images and would like to do more with them.”
Parrot pioneered wireless photo frames to make it simpler to transfer these souvenirs of our lives from the cameraphone onto a device that will allow us all to view them at any time. Although this is still an emerging market, and not one that has yet generated huge income, it is one that Parrot is committed to, as Seydoux explained. “We will launch a radically different product into this sector during November. This product, which saw us once again collaborate with a world-renowned designer, will introduce new technology to the photo frame concept. This is in line with our philosophy – we don’t want to compete in the low-cost part of the market, we want to produce the best products.”
Seydoux added that following November’s photo frame launch, Parrot is working towards a major launch at CES, one which, according to Seydoux “will bring to market a product that couldn’t be more wireless!” For now, this will have to be a mystery and a teaser to encourage us to book our flights for Las Vegas.
Time for the industry to listen
But I mentioned at the outset that Seydoux took the occasion of our meeting to provide him with an opportunity to broadcast to the industry something that he feels very strongly about. Now is the time for the reveal.
So, what message does this industry guru wish to distribute? Seydoux explained: “I want to reach out via Incisor because you go everywhere and to all of the developers and R&D labs in the industry. My message is - combine NFC and Bluetooth!”
Now, it is written in stone that for any technology to succeed in the consumer marketplace, ease of use is all important. It is also generally accepted that despite all good intentions and many years of work by men with beards and corduroy trousers, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth set-up is too hard for non-technical people and that circumstances – e.g. you are in a public place, a cafe, even at home/wherever - make it even harder. Seydoux explained that Parrot is aware that this is so across the range of products that it sells. “NFC is the obvious answer. Handsets need NFC. It is cheap to implement, but it is not being deployed. NFC could massively improve the ease of use situation for consumers using Bluetooth and other wireless technologies.”
Seydoux cited one example scenario – your car’s Bluetooth system. “It’s OK to set it up in your own car as you typically only do it once, but what happens when you are travelling and you hire a car? You’ll typically want to jump in the car and drive off – you don’t want to be spending time trying to pair your phone with the hire car. Bluetooth and NFC would allow you to touch your phone to a place on the dashboard, and this would be the way to simply connect your phone with the car’s audio system to enable handsfree – and therefore legal – calling in the car. Plus, and for many this is just as important, to allow you to listen to your own music in the hire car. One-touch simple pairing with NFC would have you paired in a moment.”
Another example is in the overall music sector. Sharing files is very popular, and more and more people are connecting their iPods and MP3 players to portable speaker systems, to their home stereo systems, their cars etc. “Look at just the file-sharing aspect for now – there are too many steps to go through and it is too difficult for many people to work out how to do this on an ad hoc basis. The music sharing application on its own would be enough to justify the implementation of Bluetooth simple pairing by NFC – just imagine how easy it would be to share music in bars, while on an airplane, and of course between your portable media player and your home systems.”
It must be said that this is true for all use cases. Very often the theoretical convenience – the magic, in fact - of a wireless link is being squandered. NFC would solve it, says Seydoux, as there is no software to download, the wireless link works well and is robust and efficient. And it could all happen very quickly, as a clearly frustrated Seydoux observed: “One day, one of the phone companies will make the decision to do this. It could be as simple as Apple deciding to implement NFC. If Apple does, everyone will follow – Nokia, Samsung, LG etc. The reality is that there is no reason why they couldn’t all do it now.”
As Incisor readers will know, we have been following NFC for some time, and the problem – and it may not be seen as a problem by the NFC community - seems to be that NFC is being developed as a payment protocol, and a smart card/SIM replacement. This is of course a good use for NFC, but it is hard to deploy and is therefore taking a long time to become widely used.
Seydoux conceded that some positive steps are being taken. “Wi-Fi Protected Set-Up (WPS) is heading in the right direction. Although not as simple as a one-touch NFC pairing, there is no configuration or password needed, you just press buttons on both the phone and access point. Wi-Fi Direct now continues the process of making Wi-Fi easier to use. For Bluetooth, this type of simple connectivity is even more important than for Wi-Fi because Bluetooth’s applications are much broader and you want to connect many more different types of device.”
There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that this was a topic that Henri Seydoux felt very strongly about. We will let Parrot’s top man close this piece by re-stating his call to action to the WPAN industry: “It is completely obvious that Bluetooth + NFC should become a standardised solution. If Bluetooth and NFC are still looking for their killer app, then combining the two could make it happen for both of them. Bluetooth + NFC will remove the need for any complex pairing process and both technologies would sell more chips and consumers would come to love the technology. This could all happen if there wasn’t so much focus on using NFC for payment systems.”
www.parrot.com
Vince Holton meets with Henri Seydoux, founder and CEO of Parrot S.A.
Well, we will come to what the Bluetooth industry needs shortly. Meanwhile, for those Incisor readers that don’t know Parrot, and there are not likely to be many of you, the French company has been deeply involved in embedding Bluetooth in consumer electronics devices since the very early days of the short range wireless technology. The company was founded by Henri Seydoux, and he and I both struggled to think how many years it has been since Incisor first met with Parrot in a hotel meeting room in London – we decided it was way back in 2001. Parrot has gone on to launch a range of Bluetooth-enabled products across the automotive and general consumer electronics industries.
Time, then, that we met up again, and took the opportunity to compare notes on the state of the industry, likely directions and trends. And, it turned out, for Seydoux to make an impassioned plea to the industry to take one step that would make life easier for people on both sides of the fence – developers and CE companies, and also the vast consumer market that they serve and rely upon for their existence. But more of that later.
Seydoux started the conversation by re-stating his company’s backbone philosophy, which is to re-develop classic products using today’s technology. Seydoux explained: “We are not interested in competing in me-too markets, or trying to be the lowest cost variation of a product. I have always looked at product development from the perspective of ‘what can be improved by going wireless?”
Parrot’s roots were in voice recognition – hence the name – and over the past eight years Bluetooth has since been combined with improvements in speech recognition. Parrot’s first success with Bluetooth was in the area of the car phone, and this has remained an important market for the company. According to Seydoux, Bluetooth gave Parrot the opportunity to re-invent the carphone, and to revitalise the whole carphone market.
Seydoux explained that from this platform, Parrot has looked at ways to use wireless to transform products. “As an example, I think that Bluetooth speaker systems can be very successful, and if they are going to be used in the home they have to be good speakers. Our Zikmu speakers, which were designed by Philippe Starck, are a good example. If you look at the basic design it harks back to the speaker device attached to the phonograph in the original HMV logo! The speaker itself is the static element in the music ecosystem today. Everything else is mobile – the music, the MP3 player or iPod, the laptop as a music storage device, and of course the Internet provides endless music streaming opportunities. So, to maintain the mobility, the speaker needs to be wireless, and therefore Bluetooth was a fundamental element of the design concept for the Zikmu speaker. It’s great to be able to come into your home with your laptop or iPod, just press play, and enjoy your music. This is how it should be.”
Seydoux believes that the world is ready for, and now wants wireless. His aim, he says, is not to reinvent the wheel, but to make things easier. Fortunately, Bluetooth is now part of most cellphones. “Most of the technology that has been developed around cellphones is transferable. The TV, PC and cellphone are all content sources, but you are unlikely to turn them on to look at your digital photos, for example,” explained Seydoux. “The digital photo market is enormous – the cameraphone has revolutionised the market and we now all take hundreds or even thousands of digital photos. They are a record of your life, a digital diary, but sadly, the vast majority remain on the cellphone or perhaps get transferred to a PC and archived, but never viewed. I am sure that we all value these images and would like to do more with them.”
Parrot pioneered wireless photo frames to make it simpler to transfer these souvenirs of our lives from the cameraphone onto a device that will allow us all to view them at any time. Although this is still an emerging market, and not one that has yet generated huge income, it is one that Parrot is committed to, as Seydoux explained. “We will launch a radically different product into this sector during November. This product, which saw us once again collaborate with a world-renowned designer, will introduce new technology to the photo frame concept. This is in line with our philosophy – we don’t want to compete in the low-cost part of the market, we want to produce the best products.”
Seydoux added that following November’s photo frame launch, Parrot is working towards a major launch at CES, one which, according to Seydoux “will bring to market a product that couldn’t be more wireless!” For now, this will have to be a mystery and a teaser to encourage us to book our flights for Las Vegas.
Time for the industry to listen
But I mentioned at the outset that Seydoux took the occasion of our meeting to provide him with an opportunity to broadcast to the industry something that he feels very strongly about. Now is the time for the reveal.
So, what message does this industry guru wish to distribute? Seydoux explained: “I want to reach out via Incisor because you go everywhere and to all of the developers and R&D labs in the industry. My message is - combine NFC and Bluetooth!”
Now, it is written in stone that for any technology to succeed in the consumer marketplace, ease of use is all important. It is also generally accepted that despite all good intentions and many years of work by men with beards and corduroy trousers, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth set-up is too hard for non-technical people and that circumstances – e.g. you are in a public place, a cafe, even at home/wherever - make it even harder. Seydoux explained that Parrot is aware that this is so across the range of products that it sells. “NFC is the obvious answer. Handsets need NFC. It is cheap to implement, but it is not being deployed. NFC could massively improve the ease of use situation for consumers using Bluetooth and other wireless technologies.”
Seydoux cited one example scenario – your car’s Bluetooth system. “It’s OK to set it up in your own car as you typically only do it once, but what happens when you are travelling and you hire a car? You’ll typically want to jump in the car and drive off – you don’t want to be spending time trying to pair your phone with the hire car. Bluetooth and NFC would allow you to touch your phone to a place on the dashboard, and this would be the way to simply connect your phone with the car’s audio system to enable handsfree – and therefore legal – calling in the car. Plus, and for many this is just as important, to allow you to listen to your own music in the hire car. One-touch simple pairing with NFC would have you paired in a moment.”
Another example is in the overall music sector. Sharing files is very popular, and more and more people are connecting their iPods and MP3 players to portable speaker systems, to their home stereo systems, their cars etc. “Look at just the file-sharing aspect for now – there are too many steps to go through and it is too difficult for many people to work out how to do this on an ad hoc basis. The music sharing application on its own would be enough to justify the implementation of Bluetooth simple pairing by NFC – just imagine how easy it would be to share music in bars, while on an airplane, and of course between your portable media player and your home systems.”
It must be said that this is true for all use cases. Very often the theoretical convenience – the magic, in fact - of a wireless link is being squandered. NFC would solve it, says Seydoux, as there is no software to download, the wireless link works well and is robust and efficient. And it could all happen very quickly, as a clearly frustrated Seydoux observed: “One day, one of the phone companies will make the decision to do this. It could be as simple as Apple deciding to implement NFC. If Apple does, everyone will follow – Nokia, Samsung, LG etc. The reality is that there is no reason why they couldn’t all do it now.”
As Incisor readers will know, we have been following NFC for some time, and the problem – and it may not be seen as a problem by the NFC community - seems to be that NFC is being developed as a payment protocol, and a smart card/SIM replacement. This is of course a good use for NFC, but it is hard to deploy and is therefore taking a long time to become widely used.
Seydoux conceded that some positive steps are being taken. “Wi-Fi Protected Set-Up (WPS) is heading in the right direction. Although not as simple as a one-touch NFC pairing, there is no configuration or password needed, you just press buttons on both the phone and access point. Wi-Fi Direct now continues the process of making Wi-Fi easier to use. For Bluetooth, this type of simple connectivity is even more important than for Wi-Fi because Bluetooth’s applications are much broader and you want to connect many more different types of device.”
There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that this was a topic that Henri Seydoux felt very strongly about. We will let Parrot’s top man close this piece by re-stating his call to action to the WPAN industry: “It is completely obvious that Bluetooth + NFC should become a standardised solution. If Bluetooth and NFC are still looking for their killer app, then combining the two could make it happen for both of them. Bluetooth + NFC will remove the need for any complex pairing process and both technologies would sell more chips and consumers would come to love the technology. This could all happen if there wasn’t so much focus on using NFC for payment systems.”
www.parrot.com
posted by Vince Holton at
5:26 AM
2 Comments:
I am in strong agreement with Henri Seydoux, that NFC and Bluetooth make a marriage made in heaven. You have the power and speed of Bluetooth, with the ease and convenience of NFC. The NFC Forum, strongly supports this marriage and has produced a specification to standardise the handover from NFC to Bluetooth, the specifications name is NFC Forum Connection Handover Technical Specification (to download and more information goto http://www.nfc-forum.org/specs/spec_list/).
The NFC Forum also is trying to encourage the use of NFC for pairing and sharing. There are also some good white papers (http://www.nfc-forum.org/resources/white_papers/) and a great webcast on use cases (www.nfc-forum.org/resources/Webcasts/) to watch and read.
From a hardware manufacturers point of view, NFC is relatively cheap to include but it is still an added cost so hopefully as devices like the Nokia 6216 install NFC in them, demand will increase. With the Apple filing patents for RFID inclusion, we can only hope that the next gen iPhone will have NFC, but I think personally that more devices in 2010 will have NFC. For pairing and sharing it would be good to see CE devices pushing NFC and bluetooth.
Once users try this marriage made in heaven and see how easy NFC is to use with Bluetooth, i think there will be a huge push from the end user to include both technologies in devices.
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Alena
http://bluetoothspeakerphone.net
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