Meet Michelle Gattuso of Motorola with Guy Kawasaki

Hi, this is Guy Kawasaki, and I am sitting in the Motorola building in Sunnyvale, California. I have online with me Peg Fitzpatrick, who's in Keene, New Hampshire. She's the coolest girl in all of Keene, New Hampshire. And we also have Michelle. Can I say it right?

Try again. Gattuso. Correct.

And she is in Libertyville, Illinois, in the Motorola facility there. And today's topic is the camera in the Moto X. And Michelle is in charge of that camera. So, Michelle, how about telling us a little bit about your background, first of all.

Okay. Hi, everybody. My name is Michelle Gattuso, and I am the imaging product manager for the Motorola X camera. And my background is a little bit. I actually been with Motorola for 20 years now. I started out as an electrical engineer. I graduated from Iowa State. I received my master's, my MBA at Loyola in Chicago, and I've done everything from development to customer sales, customer support. I was in Asia for four years, and now I'm back doing software, product management and working with the camera specifically.

Is this the most fun you ever had or what?

Everything's actually fun. Every year is a big change. And joining Google and meeting all these new people and these new experiences and launching a really great product. Yes, it's been a really good year.

Okay, great. So can you give us a quick overview and maybe a quick demo of some of the most exciting features of the camera?

Yeah. I'm very excited about the camera, so thank you for the opportunity to give me so we can explain to all the users out there what's new and exciting on the Motorola X phone. The camera, similar to the other features, is all about responding to you. We've asked quite a few users what do they like about their camera. More specifically, what do they not like about their camera? 95% of the people now only carry a mobile device, and so the cameras become very important for their life to capture those moments. The feedback the users keep telling us is that they're missing the moment quite a bit of the time. From the time they pull it out of their pocket, they have to go through and undo their pin and they try to find the camera app. And they're always kind of searching for that, and they're missing that specific moment that they're trying to capture. And then the other one is always about phone quality. So unlike most digital cameras that are quite thick and have huge lenses, everything has to be compressed in here by about 10 millimeters. So we're definitely constrained a little bit from an ID perspective. So what we have done on this one is we've focused everything about quality and speed. Specifically for that, we've introduced a feature called quick Capture. I think everyone on the blogs have already been introduced to it, but just a little bit of background on that one. Last year, we launched a phone called Razer Eye, and we actually put a camera button on it. What we found is consumers were using this camera button over 30% of the time to launch the camera. So we know it's solving a pain point. The challenge we had with XPhone is we didn't want to add any other buttons to this wonderful, wonderful housing. It palms and fits perfectly in your hand. So we brought the designers and the engineers in to say, how can we solve that pain point? What we came up with is this quick capture gesture. With a simple gesture, you just twist the phone, you get a slight haptic vibration, you can see the viewfinder and you can launch the camera. And the camera is up and ready, so within two seconds, you can capture the picture anyway. The second thing we've done is you can see we've created a new ui. I hate doing these live viewfinders. Can you see the ui? So it's very, very clear. The only thing that's on here are two simple buttons at the bottom. And this is a huge advantage in changing the shift of camera apps. Normally you have controls all over and you have settings all over. We've eliminated all that. Consumers have told us that they want to be able to feel part of what they're still taking pictures of. So by putting a camera in between me and you guys, all I'm seeing is this ui. We've eliminated all that. So when I look through this viewfinder, I'm seeing you, and that's what we're trying to capture with this camera ui. Then finally, we have a brand new sensor and it's incorporating a Clear pixel technology. With that clear pixel, we are able to let in 75% more light, which gives us a better capture rate. So the speed is super quick. We can capture things in motion, and it also helps us get better performance in all ranges in different scenes. So with those three features, we think we've really improved the imaging experience all the way from the speed to capture as well as the quality of the capture.

What if I'm one of those kind of people who has put on a PIN and authentication? So do I have to get out my camera, put in the pin, and then do the quick capture?

No, no, no. That's the beauty of this one. So it actually launches in Secure mode. And that's the mode that you can get to the camera, but you can't get anywhere else on the device. So for anybody who has a PIN or a password or a pattern setup, you don't have to go through that. You simply. With the quick capture, the phone is off. Right. You can just twist it and immediately it comes on. So you didn't have to push a power key, you didn't have to enter a pin. Now, to show you all in contrast, the old way of doing it is you'd have to push the power key and you're presented with the pin. So I've completely bypassed all that with a quick OSINT gesture. And you're off and running in less than two seconds.

Okay. Can you go into greater detail about what it means to have a clear pixel?

Yeah, so this one's a little bit more complicated. Motorola is the first to introduce this clear pixel in a mobile environment. What that means is we have, there's four colors. You have a red, green, blue, and normally you have a green, and we've replaced that green with a clear pixel. What this allows is 75% more light to get into the environment, which means in bright daylight, you can capture motion in pictures. So if you were capturing a waterfall or if you were capturing like your son playing soccer, it would actually capture that ball in motion. It's going to go really, really fast. We're about 2x better than normal phones out there for capturing speed in those high light environments.

Okay, what about some other phones have 13 megapixels and this has 10. What's the deal with that?

Yeah, that's a big one that's going on in the web. So a 10 megapixel isn't really common, especially in the mobile industry. As a matter of fact, I think we are the only ones doing a 10 megapixel. The challenge that we have when you go to a 13 megapixel is it takes the 1.1 micron down to a really, really small pixel. And that doesn't allow as much light to get in. So we wanted to stick with 1.4 micron pixel so you get more light in, which gives better overall quality. And then we said with the display size, so everything is optimized for a 16x9 ratio. And for the 16x9 ratio, we said, what's the maximum resolution we can get and still remain with that 1.4? And so what we've done is we've optimized for 1.4 and 10 megapixels. What does that mean to you? That means that we can do 10 megapixel out of box. So even though other people perhaps are advertising that their pixels camera is a 13 megapixel out of box, they're defaulting to a 16x9 as well. And they're really only capturing like 9.6. And you'd say 9.6, Michelle is pretty close to 10. And I'd agree the difference is the micropixel, the really small ones, and they're only capturing at 1.1 where ours is at 1.4. So inherently the technology allows for better light to be let in, more light to be let in in these indoor conditions. I think I lost audio.

Guy, I still can't hear you. Michelle, can you hear Guy or not?

I cannot hear Guy, but I'm laughing. I'm having a small technical difficulty. So we'll be back live in a second here. I can continue talking. I enjoy talking about my camera. So let me go in a couple. Okay, Michelle, you can just talk. Guy, listen. I'm going to walk everyone through a little bit about what the camera allows for. So I mentioned the quick UI or the quick. Now you got me all thrown up. Sorry, Michelle. You're fine. Just talk about your camera. You're good. All right. The quick capture gesture. So what that allows us for is to get quickly to the viewfinder. And what I want to talk a little bit about is once you're in the viewfinder, we have some pretty cool features within it. We can simply touch anywhere. So this is a new concept that our designers came up with and I think it's ingenious. I predict within a year everyone's going to be copying us. And that's obviously the best form of flattery. But no matter if you are taking it with one finger like this, or if you're taking it with your thumb, or if you're taking a self portrait, some of those teenagers love to do this. You can capture and you literally just touch anywhere on the display and it's going to start capturing. Another cool feature. Guy's freaking out. Another cool feature on the back is if you want to take a multi shot picture. So if you see something in action, you're sitting at your kid's soccer game, for example, I can press on the display. It's hard doing this backwards and it will take multiple pictures. So you press on the display and you can hold. You can see the counter going up. So you're taking multiple pictures. We take up to four pictures per second and they're at full res. So some other people. Oh guys back. Some other people may do something at a lesser resolution like just taking a screen print. And those tend to be about 1 megapixel. We're doing full resolution. So you get four 10 megapixel shots and they group them together.

Will that work with Auto Awesome? Michelle, do you know the Auto Awesome?

Yeah. When you back those up to G, they'll string those and curate them all together so it actually provides like a motion within the G viewer online. That's a great point.

That's amazing.

Yes. Another feature that we have, I don't know, I tend to be really busy and always doing something with both my hands. So if I have something in my left hand and I'm doing I can launch my camera, I can zoom in and I'm doing this to show you guys, but you simply zoom up by dragging and pressing down. Can you see that in the upper right hand corner? It's telling me the zoom level. Wow. You can do this all with one hand and then you just press to capture. So all of this can be done completely one handed. Press to capture, zoom up, zoom down and you're off and running. Another interesting feature that again, I don't know if any of you guys are big video people. The video is in the same viewfinder, so there's no more switching modes between taking a picture and taking video. I'm quickly into this viewfinder and my mind says, oh no, I need to do a video. That's fine. You simply push on the button down here in the lower right and we're often capturing video. So you're doing this about, I don't know, five seconds faster, twice as fast as you normally would to capture video in the same moment. I'm still capturing video. And like all the other features we've all introduced, you could do a standard snapshot during that video, but it's still pressing anywhere on the screen. So if you're doing video and you're watching the soccer game, you don't even have to look down. You can simply push anywhere and you're off and running. And then obviously you just stop by pressing that and it goes off to the gallery. The only other button on the front is the front facing camera. And it's a simple twist like that and we're back into the front. It's the same thing. Touch anywhere and you're capturing a picture. Now I'm showing, I'm always touching in the middle because it's just easier. But I can push in the up and I can push in the bottom. It's still going to capture. So it's pretty cool how another one is getting to the settings. So bloggers have been saying that this is a pretty cool feature. So most of the time we've eliminated almost all modes and settings from this. Our data actually shows that most consumers don't ever go into the settings. I think the highest used setting is turning off the flash, ironically in most phones. And so that one chooses roughly 10% of the time. And I think everything else is much less than that. So we've eliminated most of the modes on here. Simply you just drag out from the side and the setting wheel pops out. Within the setting wheel, you can drag up or down to see all the different settings. This phone only has eight different settings. Some of them are like panoramic. Some of them are as easy as I was testing panoramic before. Some of them are flash. We have Slo Mo. I don't know if you guys have all seen Guy's postings. When he was in Vietnam, he took a couple Slo Mo videos. So that's pretty cool. Slo Mo allows you to capture a video at 720p at 60 frames per second. So compare and contrast. In normal mode, we're capturing video at 30 seconds frames per second. This is doing twice as much. And so when you play it back, it actually looks like it's slower than faster. And it provides this really cool effect that a lot of the teenagers are really enjoying. If you pan to the other side. So if you swipe to the left, you get to the gallery. And so the gallery is full screen. You get the full picture. Looks beautiful.

It's so clear, Michelle.

Even on here, I feel like I'm like, monkey can train.

No, it's really clear. It looks awesome. I can see it all.

I can hear Guy again. We're back. I don't know.

There's some noise in the background.

Tell us about Auto hdr.

Oh, yeah. So Auto HDR is a great feature. So we talked a little bit about how we're improving the quality of the camera experience. One of the things that we've done with this camera is a feature that we're really proud of called Auto hdr. And for most people, they actually don't know what HDR means. When we ask consumers, most of the time, they come back and say, oh, HD just means it must be better quality. It's actually a very specific scene. So if you're trying to take a picture of a very bright sky scene, and then down below is your family, and they are in this big shade or they're in a cloud. You'll never fully be able to focus on both of them exposed to both of them. So what HDR allows you to do is to capture a picture. And it's going to expose for the sky as well as expose for the faces down below. And it takes three pictures and they merge them all together. And so you get this one gorgeous, beautiful thing. The challenge with it is because we're taking three pictures and. And you're merging them together. If there's any motion in the scene, it will blur and the picture won't turn out. So we've intelligently decided within our camera when to fire and when not to fire. So if the camera detects any sort of motion, it won't let you fire. So it's just one more thing that the user doesn't have to think about and the phone is doing it automatically for you. Yes. We love this feature a lot.

Sound went out again. Michelle, I think, Guy, we can't hear your question. Michelle, I think that sound is your headset. I think it's your earbuds. I think when you move, it's going. Sorry, Guy, can you try to unmute? Can you talk now? I don't know why we're having technical difficulties on guys and they're. Can we ask. Your sound is like totally out again. Sorry, Vishal. Okay, well, did you have any other things that you wanted to share? Do we want to try any of the questions that came in?

Michelle? Yeah, that would be a great idea. Let's go ahead and fill in for him while he's okay.

Guy, you smile. One of the questions that we had from Mohan Krishnan is why are the photos look like they have a whitish tone?

Oh, okay. We have seen a couple of blogs. So just so everybody on this video is aware, we did hand out roughly 100 Moto X's to a lot of press and Guy's close friends and everybody a couple weeks ago at our live event in New York. And since then we've been getting a lot of feedback online. We've gotten very mixed results. Most of them are very positive. Everyone's really excited. The UI is getting extreme compliments. The gesture also people are trying to figure it out. Once you figure out that twist and you can do it quick enough, it's repeatable and they're all liking that of the camera is really good as well. We have been getting amazing prints and see if I can even go to some of My gallery here. But the colors, I'm just taking pictures around the office. The colors really pop off the screen like any mobile device or even any SLR for that month. There are a couple of challenging scenes and one in particular is probably around clouds. And we know that those are the scenes that we're really trying to push this hdr and so I think it's still very positive. But the pictures on the web, I don't know. We're still analyzing it is new technology and we're still very excited about the potential. So I think we'll just wait and see. But if any of the reviewers, once they get their phones. I don't know if everyone heard the blogs today, but AT&T did announce this morning that it should be in stores by next Friday. So it's coming quickly. The rest of the carriers are yet to are holding back on announcing, but they too will announce shortly as we're going to all the carriers. So the phone will be available for everyone to test and try shortly. The hardware is solid. We absolutely are confident that this is the right technology to go to. The trend will be this way for even digital SLR shortly. So I think it's just a matter of keeping up. The scenes are very bright. I went to a baseball game last night, so you can quickly see Guy took quite a few pictures on his trip from Vietnam. So I suggest you all look there. I saw blogs on Flickr the other day comparing us to a competitive device. And I would say that we're looking really, really good. So I'm excited.

One of the things that Guy and I noticed, this wasn't a question, but Guy and I noticed that when pictures go over to Facebook that they turn blurry. But that's not the pictures on Google. For some reason, pictures are enhanced and even more clear. But sometimes when they go, this isn't a problem with the camera or the phone, it's just when they go to Facebook, they change the quality. So some people need to keep that in mind when they're looking around on the web, that sometimes the social media platform makes your pictures a little bit, it changes them.

Our pictures are looking really, really good on the web. And the other thing too is if you are all Twitter on our Twitter feed, all of the advertisements with consumers holding the phone saying, get this color they have, the orange or the blue. All of those have been taken in advertising and print with the Motorola X. Really? Yeah, they're really fun. We did a whole camera shoot just out in the park and everyone was taking pictures and now they're using most of them for those advertisements and promotion of the really cool colors that are coming out also with our made for Umoto. But those pictures are all made by us. And so your point is correct. When you upload to any Facebook or social networking site, you're actually doing a lower res image, but online you really can't tell the difference. It's not unless you want to print the photos. And I don't know if you can see the pictures behind me, but I do have some printed that are from our camera. With the 10 megapixel you get these really crystal clear. These are all 11 x 14, so of course the quality looks great. But on a little Facebook app, most cameras look good in every situation. Right.

I just wanted people to keep that in mind though. It's not the pictures that it's Facebook. So I like you, Facebook. One question that came in was that someone wanted to know why the Moto X doesn't support a Micro SD card or is it going to support one?

It's not. So we've gone away from the micro SD cards. With the cable camera, we actually have a really cool feature where you can auto upload all your pictures to a Google site. And most people think, well, I don't want them to be shared. It's not a share, it's not a social networking site. It's simply your space for holding the pictures. So we're uploading. I back up all my pictures there. So in case I ever lose a phone or more importantly destroy a phone, it gets dropped in water or something, you can recover all your pictures. So we're always backed up. The point though, with SD cards you're getting 16 or 32 options that you can order online and that's going to fill. I think you can get close to 4,000, 5,000 pictures on that. So it's not a matter of not wanting to. I think it's a design choice that we've made not to include the extendable memory. We also have a really cool application that will be available when we launch next week for everyone to try out and it transfers all of your pictures from your old device to your new device. Historically you would take your SD cards and have to swap between. This one is all automatic and it goes between the phones and no data is required. So I think we solved all those problems for the consumer.

So basically you made it easier for people.

I'm hoping that's the intent. This is all made, it's all designed for you. So everything that we do is about the consumer and trying to make it easier, responding to their needs. Absolutely. That's awesome.

People could also choose to upload them from there to Dropbox or any service that they chose, right?

Yep. Our camera is no different than anyone else's. They can upload from their Dropbox. They can upload to Google Drive. They can upload to their computer or download the pictures directly to their computers. There's no constraints whatsoever.

That's awesome. That's what I like to do when I'm on vacation. Take them and load them wherever I want. All right, I think.

Michelle, I can hear you. Yes.

Now we can hear you guys.

Oh, hallelujah.

We've just been having a conversation. Glad for you to join us.

I feel, like, all left out here. I was going to claim there's, like, you know, there's, like, you know, the men were left out of this picture here. I feel better now.

Good.

So I have to tell you, Michelle, just. I love the slow mo. I did a slow mo that went right around the Restoration Palace.

Like, 29 minutes.

I saw that. It's the longest video.

I think 26 minutes. It never occurred to me that, you know, it's going to multiply by that amount. And I wanted to tell the guy in the go kart, you got to go faster because I'm shooting in slow mo. But it's not like I'm fluent in Vietnamese. You know what I'm saying?

And the traffic around there is not substantially better. So you're limited by the fastest person in front of you.

Yes, I've been having. So someone asked, and I'd like to know the answer to this question. If I'm taking a picture of someone who's standing against the sun, face is not lit adequately. So is this the case where auto HDR kicks in, and now the face and the background will be all like.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so I always think of, like, yes, if you have direct sunlight to you. I remember once we went to the St. Louis Arch, and the arch was all lit up, and it was beautiful, and everybody in front was in this big shade, and I was standing with all my friends, and I'm capturing, and my picture that I captured was the only one that turned out, and so we were all sharing that one. It's a very challenging scene. Like I said, Even SLRs don't really do it well. And so I think everyone will be pleasantly impressed with the quality of the pictures.

So maybe the moto X camera will turn everybody into Trey Ratcliffe, and then.

Everybody will be HDR from that might be a stretch. My goal is to have everyone post every single picture to their Twitter and to their Instagram and to their Facebook. And I'd be happy Google as well.

Well, you know, I think, Piggy, we just discovered this very important point that there are things where you post to Google and it auto post to Facebook and when that auto post to Facebook happens, wow, Facebook just trashes the picture. So now we post individually to each service as opposed to trying to use some of these multiple deployment services.

I see when I'm posting my one or two just family pictures or whatever, I'm not seeing that big of delta, but I'm sure that they have storage concerns as well. Yep, Yep.

So I think you've given us a great overview of the camera.

I'm hoping.

Yeah. Any other last points you want to add?

No. Again, I think we've nailed it on this one. I think users are going to be very happy with it. It's all about responding to you and your condition and your needs and not having to think about taking that picture, rather just enjoying the moment. And so hopefully every consumer will go out and buy one and try it. It's available Friday on AT&T and for all the Canadians, perhaps a little sooner. So stay tuned.

All right, thank you very much, Michelle.

Thank you for having me. Good luck, everybody. Happy photo taking.