 Hey, this is Jake with The Verge, and we're here at CES Day 1. I'm sitting down with Raj Chaluri from Qualcomm. He oversees their IoT and mobile computing division, and we're going to talk a lot about smart homes and smart cities. Yeah, great. So, Qualcomm, you had your press conference the other night, and you announced chips are pretty much everything, smart homes, smart phones, smart city, cars, drones. Out of all those, which is the biggest opportunity for Qualcomm right now? At Qualcomm, we feel like the technology we've invested in phones, particularly all the connectivity technologies and the application process technologies, we are finding applicability for those technologies in many adjacent markets. And you saw us talk about a few of them, automotive and IoT and healthcare and so on. We think that a lot of those markets are already quite big for us. We actually ship a lot of products in IoT. We ship, I think we said in the press conference, hundreds of millions of chips already into IoT markets. And so what? The home, a big area for us is adding connectivity to a lot of different things around the home. So for example, in China, we sell a lot of connectivity technology, Wi-Fi and processing, into a lot of air conditioners, for example, a lot of thermostats in air purifiers, washing machines and a lot of white goods. Then we also sell connectivity into streaming speakers, into connected TVs and so on. And that ties into a big part of what you announced. You have a whole reference platform for smart home products. It's supposed to scale across these different devices. Is that right? Right. So I mean, if you step back and think about a smart home and think of the products in the home and what kind of technologies are mostly needed in that, what we are finding is that, firstly, they need to have the ability to connect to the internet. And that could be Wi-Fi, you know, to the access point and then to the internet. They also need to have the ability to connect to other things in the house, like a smart hub, or to your smartphone, or to, you know, the other, like lights would connect to maybe, you know, another control system or to your security system and so on. So what we are finding is in the home, there's multiple connectivity technologies. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee are the key ones, right? So how do you deal with the diversity of requirements, both low power and high power and things that need, you know, just an LTE connection versus things that might need ZigBee or Z-Wave, which to my knowledge, I don't think Qualcomm makes chips for? Right. So we haven't announced anything on ZigBee or Z-Wave yet. But what we find is that Wi-Fi and LTE and Bluetooth are actually very big in the home and interoperating from one connectivity to the other. So basically, most of these connected homes, devices in the future will have multiple forms of connectivity. So it'll probably connect to your phone over Bluetooth to your access point over Wi-Fi and to maybe a ZigBee hub over ZigBee. So we think that multimode connectivity is very important. And that's kind of one of the things we announced on our reference platform is the ability to have multiple forms of connectivity supported in one chipset. Interesting. So how do you decide what forms of connectivity to put in? Because to some extent, you're the gatekeeper. If ZigBee connectivity is built into our smartphones one day, that's going to make that platform and all of its smart home products much more accessible to everyone. Yeah, I mean, there's multiple ways to do it. I mean, it's not necessary to have ZigBee into the phone. For example, you know, you could have I think that a lot of the endpoints in the home will actually have ZigBee and Wi-Fi or ZigBee and Bluetooth and some things like that. So to the connection to the phone, maybe through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. And from there, it may be ZigBee to the other one. So that's why I don't think it's important to have all of them in the phone. But it's important to have multiple forms in the endpoints, if you know what I mean. I gotcha. Okay. And so the other thing that you were out there talking about at the press conference today is your smart cities products. I know you announced a lot of low power processors, things that will be able to sit idle for a while at a time. You know, have you gotten to the point where these processors or these chips can last on a very, very low power for a long period of time? Because that's going to be one of the big hurdles. Right. Yeah. So what we announced actually is our next generation modem chipsets, which we announced a few family of them. We announced a version of them a few months ago at an IOT day we had in China. If I step back a little bit, if you think about smart cities, the connectivity in the smart cities is going to be different in the way they use cases. For example, let's say you're like a security system somewhere or you're like a water metering system or so on. What happens is most of the time you have sensors that collect the data and only once in a while you need to wake up and send some information back. So you're not like on all the time like a phone. And the data that you need to send, maybe just a little bursty data, maybe a small part of it, not a lot. So what we've done is build modems now that are able to last on just a, you know, double A batteries for over 10 years. So what happens is you install these things, they live in the field and you don't have to upgrade them for 10 years, but they're not on all the time. They're just only on when needed. And narrow band IOT is a standard that's providing that. So if the processors are here, what are the hurdles still to adoption? Because obviously this is still an emerging field. We don't see it everywhere. AT&T was talking yesterday about how it's testing things in a few different cities, but it's not widespread and it doesn't seem like it's going to be widespread overnight. Well, I mean, I think it will happen and it'll happen pretty fast. You know, I think a couple of things, you know, one, the business models need to get worked out and they're getting worked out like operator data plans for IOT, how does that look like? And then also, you know, there's a lot of product out there and installations have to get replaced one by one, but you see it happening fast already. Like if you upgrade your security system now, you get a new security system that connects and sends you messages and so on. So as the upgrade cycles happen to these products, you will be getting things with a lot more connectivity built in. Do you see these smart city products like water meters and I guess, you know, traffic lights being part of the same internet of things that is part of our, you know, security systems and washing machines and smart phone, do these tie together one day? Exactly. So the way we think about it is we think about what is the underlying technology for all of them. So we look at the IOT as for example, smart body, which is all the wearables you wear on the body, smart home, all the kind of connected things you have in the home and smart cities, all the things that go into the infrastructure. The underlying technology you need for those is basically all the forms of connectivity from LTE to Bluetooth and processing at the edge because many times you need processing to happen at the end point and they can't just be, you know, sensors because otherwise you have to go to the cloud and come back and the latency is too much. So that we think the underlying technology is going to be very similar. The end equipment and the markets will be different. So how does Qualcomm decide which specific products to target? Are your partners coming to you and saying these are the kind of things we need to make or are you trying to look down the road and see, okay, we want to be in healthcare, we want to be in traffic lights? Yeah, it's a very good question. That's kind of what we do, what I do in my job in product management is firstly, the inputs we get are, you know, kind of all of the above. First our customers tell us we want to do that. Then we also look at what's possible with existing technologies and what's possible with technologies a few years from now. So many times we innovate and push the technology forward. Then we present to the customers and say, hey, if we can do this, what kind of products would you have? So it's kind of a combination of both the technology push and market pull. Gotcha. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Raj. It's been great talking with you. My pleasure. Thank you.
 Hey, this is Jake with The Verge, and we're here at CES Day 1. I'm sitting down with Raj
 Chaluri from Qualcomm. He oversees their IoT and mobile computing division, and we're going
 to talk a lot about smart homes and smart cities.
 Yeah, great.
 So, Qualcomm, you had your press conference the other night, and you announced chips are
 pretty much everything, smart homes, smart phones, smart city, cars, drones. Out of all
 those, which is the biggest opportunity for Qualcomm right now?
 At Qualcomm, we feel like the technology we've invested in phones, particularly all the connectivity
 technologies and the application process technologies, we are finding applicability for those technologies
 in many adjacent markets. And you saw us talk about a few of them, automotive and IoT and
 healthcare and so on. We think that a lot of those markets are already quite big for
 us. We actually ship a lot of products in IoT. We ship, I think we said in the press
 conference, hundreds of millions of chips already into IoT markets.
 And so what?
 The home, a big area for us is adding connectivity to a lot of different things around the home.
 So for example, in China, we sell a lot of connectivity technology, Wi-Fi and processing,
 into a lot of air conditioners, for example, a lot of thermostats in air purifiers, washing
 machines and a lot of white goods. Then we also sell connectivity into streaming speakers,
 into connected TVs and so on.
 And that ties into a big part of what you announced. You have a whole reference platform
 for smart home products. It's supposed to scale across these different devices. Is that
 right?
 Right. So I mean, if you step back and think about a smart home and think of the products
 in the home and what kind of technologies are mostly needed in that, what we are finding
 is that, firstly, they need to have the ability to connect to the internet. And that could
 be Wi-Fi, you know, to the access point and then to the internet. They also need to have
 the ability to connect to other things in the house, like a smart hub, or to your smartphone,
 or to, you know, the other, like lights would connect to maybe, you know, another control
 system or to your security system and so on.
 So what we are finding is in the home, there's multiple connectivity technologies. Wi-Fi,
 Bluetooth, ZigBee are the key ones, right?
 So how do you deal with the diversity of requirements, both low power and high power and things that
 need, you know, just an LTE connection versus things that might need ZigBee or Z-Wave, which
 to my knowledge, I don't think Qualcomm makes chips for?
 Right. So we haven't announced anything on ZigBee or Z-Wave yet. But what we find is
 that Wi-Fi and LTE and Bluetooth are actually very big in the home and interoperating from
 one connectivity to the other. So basically, most of these connected homes, devices in
 the future will have multiple forms of connectivity. So it'll probably connect to your phone over
 Bluetooth to your access point over Wi-Fi and to maybe a ZigBee hub over ZigBee.
 So we think that multimode connectivity is very important. And that's kind of one of
 the things we announced on our reference platform is the ability to have multiple forms of connectivity
 supported in one chipset.
 Interesting. So how do you decide what forms of connectivity to put in? Because to some
 extent, you're the gatekeeper. If ZigBee connectivity is built into our smartphones one day, that's
 going to make that platform and all of its smart home products much more accessible to
 everyone.
 Yeah, I mean, there's multiple ways to do it. I mean, it's not necessary to have ZigBee
 into the phone. For example, you know, you could have I think that a lot of the endpoints
 in the home will actually have ZigBee and Wi-Fi or ZigBee and Bluetooth and some things
 like that. So to the connection to the phone, maybe through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. And from
 there, it may be ZigBee to the other one. So that's why I don't think it's important
 to have all of them in the phone. But it's important to have multiple forms in the endpoints,
 if you know what I mean.
 I gotcha. Okay. And so the other thing that you were out there talking about at the press
 conference today is your smart cities products. I know you announced a lot of low power processors,
 things that will be able to sit idle for a while at a time. You know, have you gotten
 to the point where these processors or these chips can last on a very, very low power for
 a long period of time? Because that's going to be one of the big hurdles.
 Right. Yeah. So what we announced actually is our next generation modem chipsets, which
 we announced a few family of them. We announced a version of them a few months ago at an IOT
 day we had in China. If I step back a little bit, if you think about smart cities, the
 connectivity in the smart cities is going to be different in the way they use cases.
 For example, let's say you're like a security system somewhere or you're like a water metering
 system or so on. What happens is most of the time you have sensors that collect the data
 and only once in a while you need to wake up and send some information back. So you're
 not like on all the time like a phone. And the data that you need to send, maybe just
 a little bursty data, maybe a small part of it, not a lot. So what we've done is build
 modems now that are able to last on just a, you know, double A batteries for over 10 years.
 So what happens is you install these things, they live in the field and you don't have
 to upgrade them for 10 years, but they're not on all the time. They're just only on
 when needed. And narrow band IOT is a standard that's providing that.
 So if the processors are here, what are the hurdles still to adoption? Because obviously
 this is still an emerging field. We don't see it everywhere. AT&T was talking yesterday
 about how it's testing things in a few different cities, but it's not widespread and it doesn't
 seem like it's going to be widespread overnight.
 Well, I mean, I think it will happen and it'll happen pretty fast. You know, I think a couple
 of things, you know, one, the business models need to get worked out and they're getting
 worked out like operator data plans for IOT, how does that look like? And then also, you
 know, there's a lot of product out there and installations have to get replaced one by
 one, but you see it happening fast already. Like if you upgrade your security system now,
 you get a new security system that connects and sends you messages and so on. So as the
 upgrade cycles happen to these products, you will be getting things with a lot more connectivity
 built in.
 Do you see these smart city products like water meters and I guess, you know, traffic
 lights being part of the same internet of things that is part of our, you know, security
 systems and washing machines and smart phone, do these tie together one day?
 Exactly. So the way we think about it is we think about what is the underlying technology
 for all of them. So we look at the IOT as for example, smart body, which is all the
 wearables you wear on the body, smart home, all the kind of connected things you have
 in the home and smart cities, all the things that go into the infrastructure. The underlying
 technology you need for those is basically all the forms of connectivity from LTE to
 Bluetooth and processing at the edge because many times you need processing to happen at
 the end point and they can't just be, you know, sensors because otherwise you have to
 go to the cloud and come back and the latency is too much. So that we think the underlying
 technology is going to be very similar. The end equipment and the markets will be different.
 So how does Qualcomm decide which specific products to target? Are your partners coming
 to you and saying these are the kind of things we need to make or are you trying to look
 down the road and see, okay, we want to be in healthcare, we want to be in traffic lights?
 Yeah, it's a very good question. That's kind of what we do, what I do in my job in product
 management is firstly, the inputs we get are, you know, kind of all of the above. First
 our customers tell us we want to do that. Then we also look at what's possible with
 existing technologies and what's possible with technologies a few years from now. So
 many times we innovate and push the technology forward. Then we present to the customers
 and say, hey, if we can do this, what kind of products would you have? So it's kind of
 a combination of both the technology push and market pull.
 Gotcha. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Raj. It's been great talking with you.
 My pleasure. Thank you.