It’s been a hell of a day for Dave Hakkens the 25-year-old Dutch inventor of a Lego-like phone called Phonebloks. Late last night he was outed by Google’sMotorola division as their partner in a new project to create modular phones, and today he successfully completed a massiveThunderclap campaign to broadcast his message of open-sourced hardware to nearly one million people.
"It’s a totally new way to build a product," Hakkens told me in a phone interview this afternoon. "Motorola will do the development. I will come with my crowd and we will start working on their phone."
Hakkens said it was Phonebloks' popularity that inspired Google to "develop the phone with the world." But, that the companies don't have any contractual obligation to one another—he's even asking for donations to help him remain financially independent from Motorola—so at any point in time they leave the partnership. Though he doesn't expect that will happen.
“We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software,” wrotePaul Eremenko, Hakkens' new colleague and Motorola’s vice-president of advanced technology. “Create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines."
According to Eremenko, Motorola has been working on the newly christened Project Ara, for over a year but it wasn’t until recently that the team met with Hakkens, who as oftoday successfully completed a “crowdspeak” campaign on Thunderclap in which 979,362 supporters will broadcast his message to “Show the world we want a phone worth keeping.” The potential social reach of the message is 381,822,319 people.
“Turns out we share a common vision,” wrote Eremenko. “To develop a phone platform that is modular, open, customizable, and made for the entire world. We’ve done deep technical work. Dave created a community. The power of open [-sourced technology] requires both.”
Project Ara consists of an endoskeleton, or “endo” that is the structural frame holding together the modules, and the modules themselves which can be anything, from an application processor, a display, a keyboard, a camera, an extra battery, not to mention the yet-to-be conceived inventions of the future. Not only would the design allow fully customizable phones, but reduce waste by allowing users to replace just the broken part, instead of the entire phone.
The Project Ara team with be working with the Phonebloks community gathered by Hakkens throughout the development process and in a few months they will send an invitation to developers to start creating modules.
This phone concept is so different from the status quo that the newly announced partnership could make the Apple vs. Samsung epic patent battle over rounded corners and pinch-to-zoom technology look outright childish, not that it doesn't already look that way.
When we spoke to Hakkens in September he told us he was considering a crowdfunding campaign after the Thunderclap, and that he’d like to develop Phonebloks on his own, but that it might be “smart” to partner with another company.
“I made this project by myself,” Hakkens said. “But at this stage if I raised a million dollars I wouldn’t know what do to with it. So I thought I’d do it the other way around. Let’s show the interest and let the companies come to me.”
Mission accomplished Mr. Hakkens. Motorola anticipates an alpha release of the Module Developer’s Kit (MDK), for those who want to build components for the phone, sometime this winter.
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