CES 2022: Flying Cars Take a Backseat to EV Demonstrations and More

BlackBerry 2022 CES Video Transcript

Matthew Chandler:
Hi there, I’m Matt Chandler from BlackBerry’s Corporate Communications team. I'm coming to you from Las Vegas, Nevada at the 2022 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show®. We know it’s a bit of a different year, this year, and a lot of you couldn’t make it, so hopefully this is the next best thing so you can feel like you’re here. 

This year, we’re showcasing BlackBerry® QNX® technologies and a couple of demos that really helped to bring BlackBerry IVY™ to life, one of which you can see on this Jaguar I-PACE right here. Make sure to follow us on all the social channels over the coming days so you can see what we're up to in the booth.

Let me introduce you to Mattias Eriksson, President of BlackBerry’s IoT business unit. Mattias welcome. 

Mattias Eriksson:
Thanks Matt. There is obviously a lot going on at CES® 2022. Our tagline for this event is “Foundational Software for the Intelligent Edge,” and you can actually see it on the wall here behind us. Let me say a few words about that before I get into the exhibits themselves. Simplistically, we believe in a world where there are an increasing amount of edge devices being deployed. In addition to that, each of these devices are becoming more intelligent and almost by definition, as they become more intelligent, they become software defined. 

If you believe in that, you have to invest in a foundational software stack for the intelligent edge, and that is precisely what we have been doing for the last several years. That is what we're doing today, and what we're doing for many years to come. Here at CES 2022, we are picking a few select examples of roadmap progress that we've had in the last 12 months, and we are showcasing that in demos. For example, we are showcasing BlackBerry IVY here.

You might remember, BlackBerry IVY is the joint venture we announced with AWS last year and I'm very happy to say over the next 12 months here we have progressed a very aggressive roadmap together with AWS. We actually have “live” jointly integrated code running here on automotive grade hardware. In this particular case, the NXP IMX8 is sitting on top of a Linux® stack to prove the point that this is now an agnostic solution.

For this use-case that we’re showcasing, we have integrated several of our ecosystem partners. We have Car IQ for vehicle identity and payments. We have Electra for their AI based battery managed solution. We have HERE for location data. That would be one example of what we will have in the exhibits. 

Another example would be our BlackBerry Jarvis® solution. We launched a rapidly progressing product in the second half of last year called Jarvis. It is our software composition analysis tool that allows anyone building an intelligent edge device to create a comprehensive software bill of material and analyze that software stack without having access to source code, just using binaries, and thus secure the software supply chain. Very important for many of our customers and partners and we've gained tremendous traction over the last six months with that solution. 

There are a couple of other things we're showcasing, but another important point for us here at CES 2022 is to reconnect with customers and partners and talk to them about the next three to five years, what they're doing, and how we can help them in their software road maps. 

At the end of the day, we are investing very heavily in the key components for this stack. We're investing in performance and safety and security and reliability. Ultimately, we want to help our customers and partners drive time to market down, decrease costs, and obviously secure the IoT edge. 

Matthew Chandler:
Thanks so much for that overview, Mattias. I look forward to doing a bit of a deeper dive into each one of those demos that you just described. But first before we do that, let's find out a little bit more about what BlackBerry QNX has been up to these past 12 months and learn more about some of the progress that they've made.

I'm here with Mike Hamstra, Director of Automotive Sales for BlackBerry QNX. He's going to tell us a little bit more about what the company's been up to these past 12 months.

Michael Hamstra:
Absolutely. From an investment perspective, we've invested significantly into the BlackBerry QNX foundational software. Part of that investment has resulted in new products on our roadmap focusing on our core tenets of safety, security, performance and reliability. From a hypervisor virtualization perspective, we have received great traction. As you can see here, we have many automotive OEM programs. We have some in production, production programs, as well as many more in development. 

From a professional services capability, we are pleased to announce we have increased our capabilities and our capacity. The capacity increase is up to 30%, so this will allow us to focus on our customers, help them bring their QNX based platforms to market, and meet their startup production timing. 

Matthew Chandler:
That's great Mike. Thanks so much for sharing an update on the progress that the company’s made over the past 12 months. Now let's get into the demos.

We're here with Jeff Davis, Senior Director for BlackBerry IVY, who is going to tell us a little bit more about this Jaguar I-PACE and the technologies that are in it. 

Jeffrey Davis:
Hey Matt, how's it going? As you know our theme for CES this year is the foundation for the Intelligent Edge. What we want people to be able to do is not just come here and talk about details and about the technology, we want people to actually see how that technology would work. 

To do that we use the Jaguar I-PACE – allowing people to use an augmented reality program and look at the I-PACE to see where BlackBerry QNX is currently working in there – and then see how our latest product BlackBerry IVY could actually work on a common architecture system. As they use the augmented reality device, they then can scroll through, learn about IVY, and see how data is moving through the car in real time. Then they can take a deeper dive on a particular BlackBerry IVY use case with our demo. 

Matthew Chandler:
That sounds great. Thanks Jeff. Let's go take a look.

I'm here with Tarun Shome, Product Management Director for the BlackBerry IVY business unit, and he's going to be showing us a little bit more about this demo we see right here. 

Tarun Shome:
Thanks, Matt. So, we've got BlackBerry IVY here, running on automotive grade hardware. Now as Mattias spoke about earlier, BlackBerry IVY has been co-developed with AWS, but what we're also showing in this particular demo is how we can integrate partners to build synthetic sensors on BlackBerry IVY. 

What IVY does is it takes vehicle signals, and it abstracts those vehicle signals and then allows them to be used to generate insights that can then be provided to applications on or off the vehicle. What we've actually got here is a cluster that's running on QNX and we have an entertainment system that is running on Android™ in a QNX hypervisor.

Then we have BlackBerry IVY, and IVY is actually running and taking data that we gathered from a trip to the beach from Italy to Nice. And all of that data, we've got battery management data, fed up to a synthetic sensor that's been developed by our partner Electra, Electric Vehicles. That allows us to show a very accurate battery state of charge and also to be able to show the range of the vehicle. Range can change depending on who the driver is and what that driver profile is. If they have a heavy right foot, for example, that range will be shortened.

We have a machine learning model running an occupancy identity synthetic sensor, and that has a forward-facing camera. We’re running that here with video that we captured. What it does is show the different driver and occupants of the vehicle, how we can adjust that range, and how Electra Vehicles’ synthetic sensor can show a really accurate range for that driver. 

In this demo with our partner Car IQ, they're able to constantly authenticate the vehicle using sensor data that's coming up through IVY. They have a synthetic sensor that does that and allows the vehicle to be used to make payments such as tolls or parking charges and so on.

What all of this shows is how we can develop that ecosystem where you have partners who are writing synthetic sensors that can be reused over and over again for different applications. That really is very, very powerful when you're trying to build out applications and use cases on your vehicles in terms of scalability and the cost of development. 

Matthew Chandler:
That's great Tarun. Thanks so much. It really helps bring BlackBerry IVY to life. Really appreciate it. 

Tarun Shome:
Thanks Matt.

Matthew Chandler:
We've obviously got a lot going on this year at CES. It's a different type of show. It's a different type of year. For anyone who wants to see the full demo videos, we have those available, so make sure to reach out to your BlackBerry IoT representative. Thanks very much.