http://www.imtmotors.com/technology.htm
Technology
The IMT motor is a single sided axial flux permanent magnet (PM) brushless motor with a slotted iron stator.
Axial flux motors are disc shaped, rather than the more commonly available drum shape that is typical of radial flux motors.
The disc shape is the result of the stator and rotor being placed adjacent to each other rather than the rotor spinning inside the stator cylinder.
Axial flux motors are usually described by industry as axial air gap or "pancake" motors.
Increased availability and reduced cost of both power electronics and magnetically strong materials (such as neodymium iron boron) has enabled the development of the IMT motor design.
The combination of these technical advances allows dramatic improvements in efficiency (particularly of small machines) and/or variable speed drives that remove the need for geared transmissions in some applications.
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Hub motors are extremely heavy as well as inefficient. The switch to an external motor connected through a chain and sprockets actually is an improvement. The axial flux application to the hub fits somewhere between the two in performance.
This particular axial motor is just one sided... so it's only half of the potential. Likely the stator is fixed and a single set of magnets spin with the wheel. This is less than ideal.
Applying the axial flux concept to the bottom bracket would be innovative. I'm not sure if anyone has done it yet.
They have multispeed bottom brackets now:
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