Episode 6, Ash Nazir
season 1, episode 6 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest ash nazir iot gadgets in this episode of pow, i interview ash nazir, editor in chief for the website iot gadgets ash was an early advocate for tizen os, building a huge following, tizen experts with that success, ash and his team launched the website blog iot gadgets as a way to expand their coverage of hardware, software and all things internet in addition to iot gadgets, ash also runs the largest facebook group dedicated to samsung galaxy watch with over 75 thousand members listen download this episode topics covered tizen os maemo meego linux foundation tizen experts writing for iot gadgets facebook group, samsung galaxy watch more about iot gadgets based in manchester, england, iot gadgets is dedicated to bringing you the best internet of things iot news directly to you we are living in exciting times and are proud to be part of this new technology transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 02 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow! podcasts of wisdom from the samsung developer program, where we talk about the latest tech new trends and give insight into all the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung on today's show, i interview ash nazir, editor in chief for the website iot gadgets what started out as a small blog related to the tizen operating system ash and his team have built a super successful news and information focused website featuring articles on the latest software hardware and all things internet including a facebook group dedicated to samsung smartwatches that has over 75,000 members enjoy so tell me who is ash nazir? ashiq nazir 00 46 so that that's quite a deep question, but i'm going to keep it quite light and you know, you know, not too philosophical as fashion is as i'm basically a network engineer that's my background, and i'm from manchester in england as you can probably tell from the tony morelan 01 01 accent okay, now have you lived in manchester your whole life? ashiq nazir 01 05 yeah, yeah born and bred tony morelan 01 06 so when you were in school did you study network engineering? ashiq nazir 01 10 so i studied, wait for it the mathematics statistics and computing ventures in you'd probably spit them out by then but it was really my work life the jobs that i went to into after that, so i do love it support i did networking, implementation, network design, network infrastructure, and lots of other networking related jobs that was me fully immersed in that field tony morelan 01 42 so you learned after school, when you really dove into the workforce, that's where you got off your experience so when you're not network engineering, what do you like to do for fun? ashiq nazir 01 51 so this is one thing that not a lot of people will kind of understand, but i like fitness i like training and i don't work on the guns or the pythons as much as people think but i have got a modest you know and so for anybody who doesn't know, pythons guns, that sort obviously refers to your arms, which is what most guys, they love building the humps you know, they'll neglect the rest of the body 02 24 phenomenal tony morelan 02 26 yeah which is i'm kind of thinking that's not actually a typical engineer the physique of the typical engineer i think you stand out a little bit at some of these conferences ashiq nazir 02 35 um, once upon a time when i started doing a lot of this thing, and it support it sport was once the forte of the nerd yes, the computer geek in the in the closet you won't let him out when your computer's dying or near death, and then you lock him away after you use fixed your computer and i broke that mold i can tell you that so even a lot of the conferences that i attended over the years yeah, i did stand out a little bit tony morelan 03 08 yeah, definitely, definitely so i want to talk about iot gadgets so iot gadgets is a blog that you run that i know came out of your excitement for tyson os so can you tell me how you first discovered tyson and why you became so passionate about it? ashiq nazir 03 24 okay, now, so this is a little bit of a big question forgive me, i'm going to have to expand on this slightly once upon a time, there was an operating system called miko, and there was this mobile phone that they brought out, which was the nakia and 900 now, this was one of the first linux based true phones and there were lots of things that you could do you had a built in terminal, he had a real web browser that supported flash now, most people don't really know what that entails but once upon a time, you couldn't play flash animations in a mobile web browser it was just unheard of in the likes of apple and other things, you could not do those things so i started following this operating system and i started promoting it on twitter and, you know, unbeknownst to me, i became sort of a bit of an evangelist and before i knew it, i had sort of 6000 people that were following my twitter account wow and a year or so and then, you know, i was invited over to a conference in dublin now, and that was the point where meemo was becoming meego and this was when intel partnered with nakia and then it was a natural fit to me to follow on to meego and, and there's lots of wonderful things that operating system could do unfortunately, there's a change of direction and amiga was discontinued, but then intel continued with it and samsung came on board what we found was tyson which was favored by the linux foundation now for myself, i'm one of the few people that have traveled the world to almost every single ties and conference and summit all over the world being involved in ties in and helping promote it now at that time, i started a website called to ty's an expert's yes, that was to obviously promote tyson tony morelan 05 25 about what year was that? did you were started tyson experts that was back in 2011 so tyson experts at the site, they started how did you go from tyson experts to specifically iot gadgets? ashiq nazir 05 40 well, at the time were tyson experts we covered a lot of blog articles about tyson sdks ids so anybody who doesn't understand so sdks software development kit, ids, integrated development environment, and then what we wanted to do is broaden a bit of the coverage of seidman things that we were involved in and then in 2018, we started iot gadgets and started more dooms some blockchain cryptocurrency stuff, and more stuff related around iot or the internet of things tony morelan 06 16 got it okay so obviously, you've got a lot of writers that are writing for iot gadgets i'm assuming you've got some staff writers i actually did understand, though, that you do welcome guest writers so can you give me a little bit of background about your writers? and if someone wants to submit an article, how did they become a guest writer for iot gadgets? ashiq nazir 06 33 so basically, we've had lots of writers come and go over the years now and what we found is a lot of writers tend to be found on iot gadgets so even samsung themselves, they have hired a few of our writers over the years as well, tony morelan 06 53 really so they're being discovered on iot gadgets that's it that's it so ashiq nazir 06 58 yeah, we welcome people join in and, you know, if people have got the passion, love for writing and computing, by all means they can contact us and an easy way to join in is if you go onto the website, which is www iotgadgets com and just click on write to us, or write for us, shall i say, okay, you're straight through to us tony morelan 07 21 that's excellent so tell me personally, what are some of your favorite topics to cover? ashiq nazir 07 26 and so for myself, we've been very much involved in a lot of smartwatch stuff so that that's a lot of our focus is still smartwatch, based around smartwatches, the apps, the watch faces software updates, now, that kind of thing okay tony morelan 07 45 so another thing that i then when i was doing a little bit of background research on iot gadgets was that you run a pretty big facebook group that is focused on the samsung galaxy watch that i think you've got like almost 75,000 members so talk a little bit about that facebook group and tell me what it has to offer ashiq nazir 08 05 so, with the figure of 75,000, that you mentioned, we're up to actually, let me just have a quick look we're actually over 77,000 tony morelan 08 17 now really? ashiq nazir 08 19 wait not for nobody and neither does our facebook group it's a great place for people to meet each other, who are obviously smartwatch enthusiasts, and developers to showcase their apps, showcase their watch faces, and get relevant feedback you know, we all need to know what works, what doesn't work and it's an excellent place for people to promote themselves tony morelan 08 44 that's wonderful i mean, because i know that's one of the challenges, you know, when i was developing some apps, was you know, you've created this great app, but then how do you get people to, to discover it? and so always trying to find different ways to make yourself known out there is a huge challenge so, you know, knowing that you've got this facebook group with such a huge active community, that's going to be a huge benefit for developers just starting out so that's absolutely amazing to hear so tell me what's in the future for iot gadgets? ashiq nazir 09 16 well down the road, we're actually hoping to start doing a lot more wearable reviews and obviously, at the moment, people are staying at home a fair bit, for some reason, not sure why aren't doing lots more home fitness apps, and okay, for myself, i've got the background i've got the thing to sell that because hey, i love fitness so, just for me, tony morelan 09 43 that's great that's great so tell me what are some of the benefits for developers looking to create apps using tyson? ashiq nazir 09 49 so tyson, one of the propositions right from the outset, was this was going to be an operating system that you can use on a variety of devices, but on smartwatches on the mobile side, it has excellent battery life now, for a lot of people, you they might not comprehend what a brilliant battery life means until they actually try using a device when they're trying to use some fancy app and you know, they can only get half the day to assault so that was something that was brilliant right from the start and you've got solid performance, where like, say, for my smartwatch you know, i've never really known it to crash or have any issues it just performs and that's what you want from a smartwatch you want it to perform you don't want it to be another bane of your existence sure you don't want to be on the phone to tech support hey, what's wrong? you never want to talk to tech support you want to break that relationship and that's what i love about it tony morelan 10 53 that's great that's great so you've been doing this you know iot gadgets for a while i know that you've been experiencing a lot of different tyson app so you got to tell me what is your favorite type of tyson app you know what surprised and impressed you ashiq nazir 11 08 saw myself, i'm going to call back to a bit of that health and fitness stuff so obviously with samsung, they you've got the samsung health app that integrates very nicely with your titan, smartwatch and a lot of your apps that count your calories that count your steps, that they're all that information, then get stored into some health so for myself, i love that thing of, of being able to see things on my watch and then it's all collated and it's available at my fingertips to see how fast i was and what was my heart rate and, and from that data, you can then obviously, analyze your performance and figure out hey, what do you do next? exactly tony morelan 11 53 that's great so can you tell me do you have any ideas of a type an app that you would love to see a developer create ashiq nazir 12 02 you're going to call me boring i'm just going to say, perhaps but so i think it'd be great for having fitness apps where to watch us could actually chat to each other so, you know, for yourself, if you're doing a particular workout somebody else who's doing a particular workout, you can actually it'd be great to see two apps showing you performing against somebody in real time mm hmm i'm not sure obviously, that the use of the screen is really small on a smartwatch, but, you know, just look at some small metrics that can show you who's beating him i'm sure that'd be quite exciting tony morelan 12 39 that would be that would be so you know, i was doing a little bit of a research on this topic recently and saw that it was interesting a lot of the community when it comes to using a smartwatch as it relates to fitness, they don't want to be told that hey, great job you've walked, you know, so many steps today are a great job you've got it chair, you're doing exercise so the information they want to receive is that, hey, it's time to get moving that you haven't reached your goal so it's more of that motivation so it's not the encouragement that, you know, awesome, you did good today, it's more like, get out of the seat and let's get rolling so what's your thought on that sort of approach with an app ashiq nazir 13 23 um, so with that sort of functionality, we've actually got that in the titan smartwatches so every periodically if you haven't moved for a while, it'll actually tell you, hey, head up, do something and they'll give you a little, there'll be little suggestions that will show that, you know, you might want you to swing your torso around, or stand up or flap your arms around and the whole idea is that it can, you know, motivate you to start moving, because they say, you know, a, a journey of 1000 steps starts with one so even if you get up and you start doing something that is obviously a step in the right direction so that's built into the os so something that builds further onto that, another app, that state takes it another step further so then it can collate the number of steps you've possibly done that day and compared it to other days and just giving you a similar sort of, or slightly more encouragement to get you moving tony morelan 14 27 exactly think that'd be really good yeah, no, i completely agree so i know that iot gadgets is put out a lot of different articles, a lot of different blogs can you tell me which article or blog that you're most proud of? ashiq nazir 14 42 so i love the excitement in the ties and community of lights been on devices so we get a huge amount of interest in upcoming devices we're really proud of the fact that we are one of the blogs that come first with all the latest information have, you know what's happening out there? and what are the new devices that are coming out? so, no, soon, there might be some more galaxy watch devices coming out so you just have to go to www iotgadgets com, and you'll find out more that's a shameless plug so tony morelan 15 19 love it, love it so, you know, doing these for all these years, i know that you've had to face some challenges so talk a little bit about some of the challenges that iot gadgets has had to face ashiq nazir 15 30 wow so i think one of the biggest ones that and that we were fortunate enough to face and there's not a lot of websites that have this sort of issue is the amount of traffic we get so initially, like any other blog, you know, you set up, set yourself up with somebody servers out there and is able to handle your traffic and then we'd put some news out there, bang the website's dead is just way too much you know? traffic coming in to too many visitors so then, you know, you upgrade the server and then next time you have some big news, bang, that one's dead and you think, wow, this is deja vu so we've had that situation, unfortunately or fortunately so always good in the blogging world to get lots of traffic that, you know, there's so many times we had to upgrade ourselves to get to the point where we can click something and we're confident the surfers not going to die i'm going to say something i mean, we're going to publish a particular post, and the server is going to be able to handle the traffic so that's been the one unfortunately, that's been one of the biggest hurdles we've had to overcome tony morelan 16 41 and it's obviously a good challenge to have to face i mean, yeah, yeah, yeah ashiq nazir 16 48 yeah, you know, it's one of them things you might you've definitely doing something right if you've got that problem yeah tony morelan 16 55 so tell me what is the best way for people to contact iot gadgets? no, you'd mentioned the website are there any other ways that people can contact iot gadgets? ashiq nazir 17 05 yes, certainly so we've we're obviously on the web emails that are very good one so if you fire off an email to contact@iotgadgets com is a mailbox that's always monitored we're obviously on social media, which twitter, facebook, instagram, and they're all monitored as well so tell me what those your social media handles are so it's iot gadgets across all of them and yeah, they're, they're all monitored and you can see you'll hopefully get a reply within 24 hours, possibly instantly i'm awake at three o'clock in the morning wonderful, which hasn't happened in the past now tony morelan 17 48 yes, when you when you put out a big blog in the in your, your monitoring your servers, i'm sure you're up at all hours ashiq nazir 17 54 well, the world the world doesn't sleep unfortunately so even i've gone to some conferences i've got introduced to people and they've turned around and say, do you ever sleep? because they realize what time zone i'm in, what time zone they're in and the two things don't match tony morelan 18 13 i think what you're saying is that you want a developer to create an app for you for your smartwatch that says, hey, ash, it's time to go to sleep now couldn't sleep just ashiq nazir 18 21 yeah and it just automatically switches everything off there we go tony morelan 18 25 so excellent ash, it was wonderful, chatting with you and getting to know a little bit more about not only you but also iot gadgets, super excited about what you guys are doing and looking forward to reading some more blogs about upcoming information so again, thank you very much for being on the podcast today ashiq nazir 18 39 hey, tony it's been really great being here and thanks for having us on and thanks for taking the time once you appreciate it outro 18 48 looking to start creating for samsung, download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out develop samsung com today and start your journey with samsung the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan