Speaker Interviews

Jump to interview with: Joe Kennedy | Alistair Adams | Partha Goswami

Joe Kennedy
Chief Executive Officer & President
Pandora

Jackson Gates, Director of Business Development, will be speaking on behalf of Joe Kennedy and Pandora at CTS 2010.

Executive Viewpoint

Telematics Update interviews Joe Kennedy, CEO and president of Pandora

Joe Kennedy joined Pandora in 2004 following a five-year stint at E-LOAN, where he was president and COO. From 1995 to 1999, he was vice president of sales, service and marketing for Saturn Corporation, which he grew to over $4 billion in revenue and established as the top brand for customer satisfaction in the auto industry. Joe joined the initial start-up team at Saturn, four months after its founding, as a marketing manager, and held positions of increasing marketing responsibility over the course of his 11-year tenure there. Joe received the Automotive Hall of Fame’s Award for Young Leadership and Excellence. Joe holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University.

1. What does your company do?

Pandora is a personalized radio service, delivered over the Web, cell phones, consumer electronics devices, and—soon—cars that allows listeners to create stations based on their favorite artists and songs. The free service, which now counts over 40 million registered listeners in the US, is powered by the Music Genome Project, a vast, hand-built taxonomy that connects songs based on their similarity across hundreds of musical attributes, enabling users to enjoy music they know and discover music they'll love.

2. How do you differentiate your offerings from your competitors?

Since its founding almost 10 years ago, Pandora has made an enormous investment in the intellectual property necessary to deliver a truly personalized radio experience. That investment has allowed us to create a new kind of radio—stations that only play music you like.

3. What industry milestone did you recently achieve?

We’re very excited that Alpine has just been honored with a CES Innovation Award for its Pandora® Ready Digital Media Receiver (IDA-X305S), the first after-market car audio system to integrate with and directly control Pandora’s iPhone app, enabling car owners to enjoy a great Pandora experience while driving down the road.

Which trends will impact the industry the most in the coming years and why?
Ubiquitous Internet connectivity and the explosion of smartphones will transform consumer expectations for the in-car experience.

Pandora is an integral part of our upcoming Consumer Telematics 2010 in Las Vegas. What key issues will Pandora be discussing with the industry at the show?
Pandora has just passed the 40 million registered users mark and is growing over 2 million new ones a month—just in the US. Over 15 million have already downloaded Pandora’s mobile application to an iPhone or other smartphone.  Already half of these users have used the smartphone app to listen to Pandora in their car, so their appetite for integration into the vehicle has already been demonstrated. We have laid a very strong technical foundation to enable a seamless integration and look forward to working with the auto industry and its suppliers to develop great Pandora in-car experiences.

4. Which gadgets/gizmos/cars are on your Christmas wish list?

Samsung has a great Blu-Ray DVD player that has built-in wireless connectivity along with integrated software to download movies from Netflix and play Pandora. The price is down to $149 at BestBuy and it seems perfect for my living room!

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Alistair Adams
Business Development Manager
Nokia

Alistair Adams is a Business Development Manager for Nokia’s Qt Application and UI Framework product. His responsibility is to promote Qt to industry segments outside of mobile including automotive. Alistair has over 20 years in embedded systems, beginning in control systems and involved in a variety of systems including industrial machinery, ABS for cars, and even the International Space Station. A career switch took him to Openwave, a pioneer in the early days of the mobile internet, where he played a key part in the deployment of the Openwave browser to over 30 different customers, shipping over one billion units.

In January 2007 Alistair joined Fonav, a Silicon Valley startup innovating in wifi enabled mobile devices using IP communication. Fonav was acquired by Trolltech in June 2007 and 12 months later Nokia acquired Trolltech.

Alistair holds an MA in Engineering from The University of Cambridge, UK and is now firmly ensconced in Silicon Valley with his wife and two children.

1. In a nutshell, tell us what your department/company does?

About 18 months ago Nokia bought a Norwegian company called Trolltech, developers of the widely used, open source C++ Application and UI Framework called Qt. Qt is a set of developer libraries for the easy design of software applications and is best known in the Linux community as the basis for the KDE desktop. Qt is also used in a surprising variety of places such as in Google Earth, in the custom software tools built by animation studios for making animated films and special effects, and in all the EDA vendors’ software design tools for designing the latest IC’s. The Qt framework includes a rich variety of classes for application development including user interfaces, application logic, database access, networking, XML and OpenGL. The growth in embedded devices prompted Nokia to buy Trolltech in order to accelerate software development across its range of devices. My job, my department's job, is to promote Qt to customers external to Nokia in order to grow the developer ecosystem and get more people using the software and to obtain feedback to make Qt even better.

2. How do you differentiate your offerings from your competitors? What according to you is your USP? (unique selling point)

Qt is very easy to learn. This is by design. The development team goes through several iterations to make sure every Qt class is intuitive and consistent, resulting in higher productivity for software developers. When I joined Trolltech I was struck by how happy all the customers were with our product. People would walk up to our booth just to say how they loved the product and to share the great things they were building - its not often a product creates that sort of response. One even said that Qt made C++ programming fun.

Qt is designed to work on many operating systems. For example, in the automotive world a variety of OSs are used; Linux, WinCE, QNX, VxWorks, and Qt runs on all of these. Any code written for one OS will run on the other with just a recompile. This flexibility is a great benefit to customers who might be planning an evolution of their OS strategy. They can switch OS but not lose out on their existing software investments.
More than 100 engineers are extending the value of Qt today, including, most recently, animation, multi-touch and gestures, features that are expected by today’s consumer. There are other frameworks, but none have the engineering resources that Qt has.

3. What partnerships are you currently forging? Also, what industry milestone did you recently achieve or are working towards achieving?

We are working towards having the automotive industry standardize on Qt for building Infotainment systems, so we're partnering with companies that know Qt and the Automotive industry and that can help us penetrate key accounts in this space. As an example, we recently worked with Cybercom and Mocean Labs to create the HMI for the GENIVI Reference demonstrator. It was an amazing effort that put the whole HMI together in less than 4 weeks. We also work with all the major silicon providers to ensure that Qt works really well on their chipsets.

4. Which trends will impact the industry the most in the coming years and why?

The connected car’s been talked about a lot so I’ll leave that out for now. What has struck me is the shear compute power being designed into the next gen vehicles. There are some really amazing roadmaps for the CPUs being planned for automotive so it’s what you can do with that that’s going to be interesting.  We're going to see a lot more emphasis on voice recognition as a way to manage potential driver distraction and this will absorb some of this compute power. Driver assistance technologies like radar detection, backup sensors and cameras will also use a lot of this power and then you’ll see virtualization; partitioning the processor to run two OSs, one for safety critical items, the other for Infortainment.

5. Nokia are an integral part of our upcoming event. Could you tell us what key topics or issues Nokia will be discussing with the industry at the show?

There are two key topics. One is that software is becoming more open. When Nokia bought Trolltech it added an LGPL license to Qt and opened up its source code repository so anyone can create a branch, make modifications and submit them back to the core code base. We publish our roadmap and developers regularly blog about what they are working on. This fully transparent way of working is a key part of being a contributor in the open source community. The Automotive industry is quite conservative but it is slowly getting its head around open source concepts. Adopting open source will help it create the increasingly complex systems being designed into cars in a cost effective and timely manner.

A phone is a personal device containing music, photos, navigation. I want to play the music on my phone and in my car. I want to be able to use my phone’s navigation for driving and then switch to pedestrian navigation after I’ve parked the car. Nokia’s vision addresses the full lifecycle of phone to car connectivity from simple Bluetooth interfaces to how to let a phone use a cars’ display and I/O devices. We’re calling this Terminal Mode and will be showing it on the Nokia booth at CES.

6. Lastly, could you tell us which gadgets/gizmos/cars are on your current Christmas wish-list?

I'm prodding my boss to get me the new Nokia N900. Then I'll have to figure out how I can retrofit my old BMW with a modern Infotainment system and connect the N900 to it using Terminal Mode. My other favorite device is the Nokia e71, a rugged and dependable email road warrior.

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Mr. Partha Goswami
Technology Manager, Infotainment and Telematics,
General Motors R&D and Strategic Planning

Mr. Partha Goswami currently serves as the Technology Manager, Infotainment and Telematics in General Motor's R&D and Strategic Planning. He also has the dual role of Lead Technology Planner for GM's upcoming Chevy Volt electric car program. Mr. Goswami has more than fifteen years of experience in the automotive industry, with a rich background spanning product development, brand strategy, engineering finance, concept innovation and technology strategy development. He has been in his current role for the last three years. In this role, he is responsible for infotainment business planning and strategy and is passionately involved in the car maker's transition to the digital age. He holds a Ph.D. in Aerospace/Engineering Mechanics from Iowa State University and an MBA from Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.

1. In a nutshell, tell us what your department/company does?

I am part of the ‘Technology Management’ group within General Motor’s R&D organization. This is a business unit responsible for project/process management of our advanced technology portfolio, strategic planning and insertion of technology in to product platforms. Personally I focus on Infotainment and Connected Vehicle, developing strategic roadmaps and am responsible for technology planning of GM’s electric vehicle platform.

2. How do you differentiate your offerings from your competitors? What according to you is your USP?

Clearly GM’s unique strength is its decade-old embedded telematics services through OnStar. No other OEM has the same infrastructure and nearly fifteen years of experience in Safety & Security services. This competence is now being globalized and extended to several countries outside the US. The same capability is also being used very effectively for a host of advanced diagnostic and prognostic services, largely unmatched in the industry. At the same time, we are steadily proliferating consumer-centric connectivity options for our consumers, be it for the upcoming Chevy Cruze or Cadillac CTS. So I would say that our Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in the space really is our full menu of both vehicle-centric connectivity services and consumer-centric infotainment options.

3. What partnerships are you currently forging? Also, what industry milestone did you recently achieve or are working towards achieving?

Expertise required for some connectivity technology lies outside the conventional automotive supply chain. The business paradigms in this new value chain are somewhat different than what the traditional auto industry is used to. The new GM is certainly exploring collaborations at both strategic and tactical levels to meet needs of our future products.

One product where some of these collaboration will be critical is our upcoming debut of the ‘industry first’ range-extender electric vehicle – Chevy Volt (and Opel Ampera). We are rapidly approaching the milestone of launching this product, scheduled for end of 2010. The launch of the Chevy Volt will usher in an added dimension of connectivity – that of connecting the vehicle to the energy grid and related information network. A production version of the Volt is already being displayed at the LA auto show. So stay tuned for upcoming announcements.

4. Which trends will impact the industry the most in the coming years and why?

Several technological evolutions are already impacting our driving expectation and experience, potentially forcing new innovations from the automotive industry. We are rapidly moving towards a state of ubiquitous connectivity. For instance, WiFi connected laptop users at schools, airports or Starbucks are now as common as mobile phone users. Pervasiveness of GPS is another trend that is single-handedly fueling the Location based services (LBS) industry. Add to that the “iPhone” and “App” phenomenon - that has created a whole new business model and unleashed the creativity of a whole new industry to write and deliver small apps and widgets ranging from silly to sublime. Availability of broadband mobile internet via Smartphone and connected devices like Kindle has taken our content experience to yet another level.

Put everything together and the bottom line is that we are increasingly getting used to customized media, information and services independent of our location, albeit at a price. It’s a natural extension and not a novelty to expect the same experience in your car, hopefully in a safe manner.

5. You are an integral part of our upcoming event. Could you tell us what key topics or issues you are looking at discussing with the industry at the show?

Two specific topics are high on my mind. One is more contemporary and visible than the other.

First the contemporary -  iTunes and iPhones have sparked consumers’ imagination and excitement around the concept of download from “app store”. Many smart minds are now brainstorming and prototyping the concept and its business model in automotive context. Excitements and buzz aside, I am curious to understand the leading-edge ideas around sensible application and appropriate business model for automobiles. Is this a viable revenue-generator or a niche customer delighter? How can this be tailored for automotive business where scale and volume are very different from mobile phone industry?

Second. I am interested in connectivity discussions relevant to electric cars. Exploration of greener and alternative energy is now a global need. So I believe electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrids that will charge batteries off the grids are going to be more than a fad in the coming years. Even if they continue to be a niche in the foreseeable future, they will require unique “connected” services by being simultaneously integrated to both the information grid and energy grid. Therefore, EV-Telematics could very well be the next new growth area in this space. I will definitely like to see some emphasis on this topic at future shows.

6. Lastly, could you tell us which gadgets/gizmos/cars are on your current Christmas wish-list?

Okay, my list is pretty small. I’m considering an Android phone, perhaps HTC Hero. I was also looking for an audio/video player with WiFi for streaming video. I just found a blueray player with Ethernet and WiFi (at Best Buy) that is hooked to Netflix for movie rental via streaming. That is pretty neat.

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