2023-Japan-Mobilus Labs

JORDAN MCRAE: Hello, everyone. My name is Jordan McRae. I'm the CEO and founder of Mobilus Labs. I did my studies at MIT for undergrad in Aeronautical Astronautical Engineering. And I did my masters at Stanford, both in the area of ocean and space robotics. I'm very happy to be here today and talk a little bit about Mobilus.

Our mission at Mobilus is to revolutionize the voice communication, or voice communication interface and experience, and bring it to sort of the digital transformation process that a lot of organizations are going through. The reason for this is because-- which many of you will be very familiar with-- effective communication is key to business. Effective communication is key to productivity. Effective communication is key to safety when safety is a concern in the type of work that you're doing.

There's a $20 billion cost annually just due to ineffective communication. And this typically comes in the form of loss of goods, damage of goods, and quite often, accidents or loss of life. And the source of this is many different things that are incorporated into that voice communication experience-- lack of consistent or reliable communication protocols or communication networks, the inability to do hands-free communication, having to do PTT, or Push To Talk radios, or the interface with protective gear.

And so our solution in our mission is to address each one of these friction points and think about the problem holistically and provide a full-stack solution, hardware and software. So our software is a digital software platform that uses digital communication, cloud-based communication. You can think of it as akin to Microsoft Teams. But trying to make the interface more intuitive like the radio communication that many of our customers in the industrial sector are used to. We also have a device named mobiRADIO, which incorporates an accessory to smartphones that incorporates both radio technology and your typical Wi-Fi 4G, 5G systems that you would use for mobile communication.

And then finally, we have this device that I'm wearing on my head. I'm not just wearing this so that you sort of find me outside in the booth and remember what I look like. This is the mobiWAN. This is a bidirectional bone conduction technology. And the whole goal of this platform is to create a hands-free, ear-free, noise-free safe, reliable, and frictionless communication experience.

So I'll go a little bit more in detail around our IP and the sort of core, the trojan horse to our wearable. So bidirectional bone conduction technology-- if any of you are familiar with bone conduction, and for those of you that are not, the first time experience with bone conduction as a headphone, it's almost like you have voices inside your head. And I invite you to come in and do a demo later. If you haven't used bone conduction technology, it's a very interesting experience.

The idea is that you can transmit vibrations on the side of your head. In our case, this device here that's at the back of my head, this transmits vibrations through the mastoid bone that are perceived at the inner ear, the cochlear. And I perceive that as a voice, the sound or whatever is transmitted, even though my ears are completely open.

Our IP is being able to use that same process and do it in reverse. So right now while I'm speaking, there is vibration going out into the air. And you hear that as sound. But there's also vibration going back through my jaw, connected to my skull. And this same device can detect those micro vibrations, and therefore we use it as a microphone.

And the advantage here is in the presence of very noisy environments. So on the speaker side, if I'm in a very noisy environment, 85 dB or above, I can protect my ears. I can completely close my ears. And I can still hear the person that's speaking to me on the other side. And in the reverse direction, because I'm capturing my voice through vibration on my skull and not through the air, I'm isolating my voice from that environmental noise. So when I speak to you, you won't hear all of that loud noise that's in my environment.

So one of the key use cases that we had early traction with is a partnership with Trimble and Microsoft. We are the exclusive audio solution to the XR 10 HoloLens 2 mixed reality device. When they launched the HoloLens 2 as a builder kit for integrated solutions in industrial environments, it didn't come with speakers. And even if it did, they wouldn't be fit for purpose in those types of environments. So if any of you have used this device, you've used our technology. It's integrated into that XR 10 solution so that you can have ear-free voice or audio transmission when you're in noisy environments.

And last year, we've just launched the mobiWAN that I'm wearing today that has both the microphone and the headphone, Bluetooth 5.1, so it can connect to any digital device, tablet, smartphone, or radio. And the use cases for this are many-- push-to-talk devices, smartphones, or radios, connected worker applications, supported inspections, and voice automated workflows. For example, the devices that you have in your ears right now, you can imagine through both our software and hardware, you'd have an ear-free experience, where the voice in a noisy environment is transmitted to your head. Speech to text is done in real time, and even translation could be done in real time. So you can have complete situational awareness of what's going on around you and receive that translation in real time because the signal is clean and pure regardless of the noise that's in your environment.

I'll give you a real quick taste of what that difference looks like. I'm going to show you a comparison of a standard microphone and our bone conduction microphone recorded exactly the same time with one of our clients, Chevron, in one of their refineries in California. Don't pay too much attention to the words that are being spoken. These are Harvard sentences. They don't really mean anything. They're sort of nonsense sentences, but they test the full range of human speech. So first the standard microphone--

SPEAKER 1: The birch canoe slid on the smooth plain. It's easy to tell the depth of a well. These days a chicken leg is a rare dish.

JORDAN MCRAE: And now our solution in exactly the same environment, exactly same time.

SPEAKER 1: The birch canoe slid on the smooth plane. It's easy to tell the depths of a well. These days a chicken leg is a rare dish.

JORDAN MCRAE: So we're here in Japan today because the product has just received certification to go into the Japanese market. We're looking for partners to do that distribution, and as well as opportunities to trial the technology in the manufacturing and oil and gas and energy sectors. And I'd love for you to come out, have a demo, and experience the technology for yourselves. Thank you very much for your time.

SPEAKER 2: Thanks, Jordan.

[APPLAUSE]

Romero, would you join us on stage, please.