season 1, episode 4 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 roger kibbe senior developer evangelist, viv labs/samsung twitter - linkedin in this episode of pow, i interview roger kibbe, senior developer evangelist for bixby, samsung’s intelligent assistant technology. roger is a tech geek when it comes to voice technology, even launching his own voice startup. join us as we discuss roger’s journey to samsung and the great things around bixby. learn how to get started building capsules for bixby, and the magic that drives viv, the bixby team at samsung. listen download this episode topics covered intelligent assistant technology multi-modality bixby capsules bixby developer studio bixby marketplace bixby developers chat podcast adam cheyer viv labs helpful links bixby youtube twitter github news/blogs podcast more about bixby samsung bixby is a next-generation, ai platform that enables developers to build rich voice and conversational ai experiences for the bixby marketplace, and bixby devices including phones, watches, televisions, smart appliances, and more. check out the bixby developers website at bixbydevelopers.com to learn more about creating capsules using samsung’s bixby developer studio. 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 of the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung. on today's show, i interview roger kibbe, senior developer evangelist for bixby samsung's intelligent assistant technology. roger is a tech geek when it comes to voice technology, even launched his own voice startup. but it was when he entered a samsung hackathon and won, the bixby team said, we need this guy. enjoy. hey, roger, thanks very much for joining me on this podcast. you know, i have to ask you first, who is roger kibbe? roger kibbe 00:44 well, i guess i can answer that question two ways. well, one, i'm a husband and a father to two teenage daughters. oh, boy. but uh, yes, so it keeps me pretty busy these days. but professionally, i'm a senior developer evangelist for samsung bixby and what does that mean? it really means i go out and talk to third party developers and agencies and companies and encourage them to go build upon the bixby platform. you know, i have a long career in technology been doing it for about 25 years and salting. i've been a technology architect, technology strategy i found in my own startup, and i've been in voice for the last several years about the last 18 months or so less than 18 months with samsung, tony morelan 01:27 right about the same time that i did. and interesting. we both have the same title at samsung me being a senior developer evangelist for the developer program, doing something similar to what you're doing, you know, going out and teaching developers and designers how to create for samsung, so pretty cool. we're along the same lines. roger kibbe 01:42 yeah, i think it's an it's an amazing job, actually kind of a combination of you got to be familiar with the technology. but you also have your you know, love to go talk to people and understand what they're doing and figuring out how technology can help solve their problems or help enable them to do something amazing. what a combination. tony morelan 02:03 exactly. so tell me a little bit how you actually got your start at samsung. i heard that you actually won a contest at our developer conference. and that's what put you on the radar at the folks at samsung. so tell me a bit about that. roger kibbe 02:19 yes, i heard about bixby in 2018. it was still a private beta in early 2018. and i was doing my own voice consulting and my own voice start up then. and i thought, hey, there's this new platform. they have this hackathon. i love to play with new technology. i'm one of those people that pies the first piece of new technology too much to my wife's chagrin often. so i went downloaded it and started playing with it. and i realized this is something really cool and doing things in a different way than what the other voice platforms are doing. so i built this capsule is a voice application and bixby terminal technology, it was all about just being a can i recycle this? can i compost this? do i need to throw it in the trash? right question i often get from my daughters is dad, what bend is this going to is and then scratch my head, you know, three bins and i want to be a responsible citizen and put it in the right thing. sure. and i thought, hey, you know, that's a pretty good use case for voice. because you want to know that right away. so built that for bixby. we had this hackathon. i got enough finals. and then in the sdc, samsung developers conference in 2018, all of us finalists were invited to go and then we presented on stage and i ended up winning that hackathon. wow. yeah. and then that led to i met adam shire and a bunch of the bixby people had some good conversations. one thing led to another deeper longer conversations that was in i believe, september 20 18th, and in january 2019, i joined samsung are joined this labs subsidiary of samsung is behind bixby. tony morelan 04:04 you've been in this tech industry for about you said 2025 years assuming then that your education is in the tech field. did you? was that what you majored in when you're in college? roger kibbe 04:13 no good question. no, i actually have a psychology degree. well, that comes in handy with two teenage daughters. it does, indeed actually comes in handy in a lot of ways, actually. because, you know, i think our success personally and professionally is, you know, interacting with people and in a lot of ways, but, uh, yeah, you know, i have a deep interest in human behavior and how that works. and so i decided to major in psychology, but i've always been, you know, there's the geek in me. and i've always played with technology. and so for instance, i took a couple classes pewter science classes for fun, including a lisp class. so if anybody knows lisp out there as a listener, that's usually not such a language that you to equate with fun, but i had a lot of fun with it. tony morelan 04:58 expand a little bit more on listen, what is that? roger kibbe 05:02 well, it's a programming language that is used i would think pretty much only in academia by today, but it's often used to teach kind of the fundamental was i don't know what modern cs classes are probably moved beyond it, kind of fundamentals of programming. and there's a lot of what's called recursion in it, where a function that you write calls itself. so it gets very complicated. if you're a developer, you know what i'm talking about, if you're not a developer, there's kind of this circular reasoning where it kind of just goes in circles and calls itself and calls itself so it's, it gets very confusing in a lot of ways at first, but, uh, it's actually a really good way to learn a lot of the fundamentals of programming. i done programming for that. i started in high school, actually, so graduate college, you actually get right into the tech industry just mentioned a little bit about this startup that you had created, and then how that led you into, you know, your interest in voice. yeah, and you know, a little but it gets back to my thinking about my whole technology career, i served as a consultant and i worked in technology strategy for gapping for many years, and i've always looked for technology to go do something for us, and then get out of the way. and one of the challenges i see with technology today is often yeah, it's incredibly powerful and does something useful for us or something we want it to do, but then it doesn't really get out of the way. um, and when i first saw voice and start playing with voice assistance, i was like, i didn't get it at first. but then after playing with him more and more as like, you know what this is, this kind of fulfills that kind of lifelong ambition of, hey, go get something done and get out of the way. it's the best tech i know for getting out of the way. so in back in 2017, i you know, i had a really good kind of technology job, but the big corporation caught my cushy, cushy, corporate tech job. i decided to get you know, a little bit of an itch, i decided to be a little bit crazy and leave that bounced around a little bit with some startup opportunities and ended up founding my own voice startup with the idea being hey, it's really too hard to build voice applications. today. i'm going to make it much easier for you to do it. or our tagline was wordpress for voice. you know, wordpress is in the web world course. yep, lots of templates makes it easy for small business to get online really easily. we wanted to build that for voice. i will say i think it's still a really good idea. and a lot of ways kind of untapped. but, um, you know, i think there's a saying that ideas are cheap, and execution is hard. i certainly learned that, you know, i think we built a bunch of things, but we weren't fully executing it. so i started veering over into the kind of consulting side and doing my own consulting work and that's when i entered that business. hackathon one nad. and those conversations led to where i currently am. but i'm super happy i did it. it was a it was a great experience. it's something i'd always kind of the back of my head, hey, go off and do your own thing, right? whether succeeds or fails, it doesn't matter. got it. you got to itch that itch. tony morelan 08:17 exactly. i actually once heard that you learn more from failed startups than you do from successful startups. so i too, have ventured into that area. i too, have failed, and lots of great learnings that still come out of that. so you had mentioned adam shire, viv labs, bixby, samsung, kind of tell me this whole relationship, how those all have come together. what exactly is viv lab and who is adam shire? roger kibbe 08:42 yeah. so let me tell you about adam. first, a legend and voice and adam has been working in voice for like 25 years back he worked at stanford sri on voice ah, in the, i guess late 20s. 2008 somewhere around there. they founded a startup called siri and built really what was the first kind of consumer facing voices system? siri most people don't know was originally an app on ios. and then very quickly apple bought it. so adam and his co-founder dead kit law, worked with apple for a couple years and then went to leave because they really wanted to build kind of the next generation of conversational ai and voice assistance. and that's when they founded viv labs and built out the vid labs technology. and then a few years ago, samsung bought viv labs and used it as the foundations of some people called bixby to dotto or the new bixby but the current bixby that's on modern samsung phones, is based upon that viv labs acquisition. so adam is our kind of our technology guru and leader and quite frankly, his vision and where he'd like to see this industry go is a lot of the reason why i chose viv labs because i really, i end is thinking about where voice and conversational ai can go. tony morelan 10:07 wonderful. so let me ask you a quick question about bixby itself. can you tell me where the name bixby came from? roger kibbe 10:14 that's a great question. and i'm going to tell you i actually don't know. why 10:18 don't we ask bixby oh, roger kibbe 10:20 might as well bixby know best. tony morelan 10:24 hey, bixby where did the name bixby come from? 10:28 i've heard that in some cultures bixby means one with great intelligence who raps. maybe that's why samsung chosen for me. roger kibbe 10:35 very good. there we go. so bixby is not a name. that's a samsung invented that name on the original voice assistant. samsung has a little bit of a history there's something called s voice. that then became bixby and the original bixby is really largely focused on controlling the phone and not so much a general purpose voice assistant. and then when they bought vans, it was really to build that into general purpose voice assistant. i will say that the name bixby is a good name for a voice assistant. why is that? yeah, good question. um, so when you say hi bixby or alexa, or hey, google, what happens is on the local device, it has to understand that phrase, and then most of the rest of the processing of anything you say, really is done in the cloud. but you need local processing power on that device to say, hey, i heard that pacific wake up word. okay. and now i'll wake up and i'll start listening. in order to do that, on the local device, you need to be saying something that's kind of got the right kind of syllables got enough syllables and has a mixture of vowels and consonants that make it easy to understand that term, because you don't want to wake up for a false wake word that's a problem in the industry, is i say something and your voices is it wakes up and you weren't addressing bixby is a really good term because of that consonants and vowels and the way they're mixed in there. and then also just, it's short. but phonetically, the way it sounds is pretty distinct. and so whoever came up with that word, they were definitely thinking about this. when they came up with that as the as the wake word for samsung's voice assistant. tony morelan 12:22 got it? and it's a pretty unique word too. so i would think that it's not getting confused with maybe you know, something that could be more common. roger kibbe 12:28 yeah, although there is a bixby there's a city called bixby i believe in oklahoma and then down in just south of us around monterrey. there's a bixby bridge. so it's fairly unique, but there is actually there are other big cities in the world. tony morelan 12:45 i did not know that. roger kibbe 12:48 and build bixby on and bill bixby played the incredible hulk. oh, yes, he did. yeah. so interesting. okay. so not a common word, but there are other uses the word bixby. bixby says interesting. tony morelan 13:03 so now you had mentioned that you know bixby was available on samsung devices. can you talk a little bit about other devices? is it just strictly for samsung devices for their phones? or is it beyond the phone? roger kibbe 13:14 yeah, so is for samsung devices right now. here's the situation right now. so right now you can go and develop a bixby capsule. and you can deploy it on a samsung phone. and there's a marketplace for end users of the phones to go and enable your capsule. think about market. the marketplace is the equivalent of the play store, the samsung store, the ios, the app store, there but it's for voice applications capsules, as we call them. so that's all enabled for a phone so you can build from end to end to get it out to consumers on the phones. and that's the bixby marketplace. that's the biggest marketplace. what you can do right now though, is you can build for the tv samsung is the world's biggest tv manufacturer by a pretty significant margin. the watch, we're the world's second largest smartphone watch manufacturer, and for smart appliances. so we have a refrigerator that has a screen on it. it's a smart appliance. and we're we have huge market share and appliances. so you can build for all those devices, which to my mind is super exciting because i think voice assistants currently have been kind of driven primarily by smart speakers. that's the first thing they introduced and now they're on phones. but that's led to a little bit of kind of smart, speaker centric or phone centric thinking about what you can do. when you add voice to the tv, or the watch or an appliance. you start thinking of whole different and unique use cases where voice can unlock some pretty rich functionality. as you can say, i could wayne go on and on about this i get pretty excited about the opportunities on those additional devices. and so you can develop today in those, and in the marketplace is coming later this year. so super exciting stuff coming from us. tony morelan 15:12 okay, wonderful. so tell me a little bit about you'd mentioned the i know there are their voice assistant, you know, the application software out there. how is bixby different than its competitors? roger kibbe 15:24 um, so first, i already talked about all those different devices. yep. right. and i think that that's a key differentiator. and let me dive in a little bit one because one, i'm particularly excited. i'm particularly excited about the tv. and why i'm excited about that is i look at my so my two teenage daughters, they don't watch tv without their smartphone in her hand. so and they will stop the tv and play with a smartphone. they want interactive tv, and it doesn't really exist today. and so they use a smartphone to enable that. now i generally, you know, a different generation tv is kind of a thing and i listened to it. but i've been thinking about the tv and thinking about, hey, what happens the tv was voice enabled, and i can ask it things even when something is playing. the best example i like to think about a sports course. so let's say i'm watching a sports game like, oh man, i want to hear more about that player. or i don't know i'm watching a football game and they call clipping and maybe i'm new to football, and they're like, what's clipping? wouldn't it be cool? if i could ask the tv? hey, watching the warriors on tv? hey, tell me how many points for game is stephen curry or who's stephen curry it is me overlays some information about stefan curry there. and i can go back to watching the game or a football example. hey, what's clipping and show me what's clipping is and i could better understand the game. i think that's incredibly powerful to bring kind of interactivity, to tv. a in and kind of empower what i see this kind of younger generation seems to want when they have their, their phones with the tv. and quite frankly, i will often say we have we have some smart speakers next our tv and we'll pause and ask it a question. so we want it to, yes, build that right in the tv, build it into where it just shows up and then goes away. if you gave permission, you know, and i think there's some privacy implications to this, but about what you are watching on the tv to the voices, and then it could be really incredibly contextually aware and give you a really amazing information. so i'm really excited about the devices that are that are coming out for samsung, and that's a differentiator. the second big differentiator is really related to those devices. all those devices have screens. so if you look at the voice market today, and you look at let's talk about because they're obviously our competitors, alexa 85 to 90% of their devices are screaming just a smart speaker. okay, on the google side, there's a lot of them, they do have on the phone, a lot of uses on their smart speakers that are in the home. so most of what's being built is voice only with samsung devices, because all those devices i talked about, and it's fair to say in the future, most samsung devices will have a screen you need to build not only for a voice experience, but also a screen experience, that kind of multi-modality, which i think opens up a ton of opportunities. and quite frankly, in some cases, some challenges around multi-modality and building that but it's a new frontier and a lot of ways to build truly multimodal experiences, where you can interact with voice and screen and think about how they interplay with each other. tony morelan 18:49 so i hadn't heard of that term before. so multi-modality that is where you have voice and screen at the same time on the same device. roger kibbe 18:59 yeah, actually, i really refers to kind of you actually are using it today when you use the mouse and the keyboard. so to put a different input mechanism, i say into that is multimodal, you know, i was talking about swiping and typing as the two prompt dominant modalities right now. voice being a third one, i will tell you it's pretty interesting. if you look at kind of the rise of those modalities. we went from kind of keyboard. and then about 10 years later, the mouse arose in the gui and then that and then about 10 years later, ah, smartphones with touchscreens were introduced there. so swiping became and tapping became without, well guess what? smartphones of screens are just a little over 10 years old. so by that 10-year cycle, it's about time for another modality to kind of arise sure and voice definitely looks like a modality. it does not replace typing and swiping what it does is it augments, there's things where voice is the very best way to interact with technology. there’re things we're typing in the very best way to interact with technology, there's things we're swiping in your smartphone, the very best way to interact with technology, it opens up a different way of interacting with technology and kind of powers us to do more with our tech. tony morelan 20:21 so then, let me ask you, where do you see voice going, you know, in the next year, and then even beyond that, you know, for talking five to 10 years. give me give me your thoughts, your ideas of where we really could be taking voice. roger kibbe 20:33 yeah, so voice is in its infancy right now. i like to say that we're at the point where we're kind of barking commands. okay, at the voice assistance. another one, which gives me a laugh, is we're in the fart app stage. so that was the original apps on smartphones were all apps that party, right? yeah. so we're kind of in that stage with voice right now really early. what i think i'd like to see in the next year or two is a little beyond just parking command and actually get some things done. i'm actually pretty bullish about voice commerce. and if not actually going and buying things actually starting the buying process, and actually kind of that top of the funnel kind of marketing. and there's a whole idea of paid marketing by listening to the radio or tv, it's a one way push toward me voice. if i could have a conversation about a product or right, i want more information. i don't kind of more of a pull marketing, i like to call it that. and then i also, um, let me just jump in really quickly. it sounds tony morelan 21:35 like what you're saying that maybe where this could go is like, if i'm actually listening to an ad on the radio, i could, in a sense, have a conversation and ask more questions about that product that's being told to me. yeah, yeah, because that would be amazing. roger kibbe 21:51 yeah. so it's interesting because i'll mention so both spotify and pandora started you know, they have a free ad tier. yes, and many are experimenting just in the last month or two in 2020, certainly, with this idea of, if they're on a device that has a speaker, and that and you're using their client, they'll play an ad and say, do you want to hear more? if you say, yes, get more information, you say, no, you don't. right. and that's really kind of infant kind of simple stuff works. yeah, that's pretty exciting to me is, hey, you know, i, like all, many of us, you know, i kind of tune out the ads when i want to, but every once in a while, there's something i'm like, oh, that is really interesting. i'd like to learn more about that. or i'd like to call book market, of course. so i think there's a huge opportunity there to say, hey, remind me of this. or wow, that sounds really interesting. i'd like to hear more and start a conversation there. so that kind of interactive audio advertising. i don't know when that's all going to happen. but i'd sure like to see that happen in voice in the next few years. i think you did. ask about like longer term by 10 years out there. tony morelan 23:03 yeah, definitely. roger kibbe 23:04 yeah. so i guess the industry likes to call this idea of ambient computing just computing around us. that just does things for us. and sometimes it's just ai that knows we need to get things done and kind of preemptively does it for us. but voice is a big part of that i could just walk into my house and start talking to it, or in my car or in my office and talk and get things done. i'm reminded of there's a funny scene in one of the star trek movies, i think it's one of the early ones. when they go back in time and they go back to earth, in a running lead to a hospital and scotty sees a mouse and he picks it up, he starts talking to the mouse. and of course, he doesn't do it. he kind of mumbles under his breath about, you know, how advanced they are. you know, maybe we're going to get there where voice works well enough, where much of our interaction with tech is done through voice scores. yeah, like i said, i think we'll see keyboards have been around forever, they'll probably still be here in 10 years, and miles on swiping and typing, i just think there's a bunch of things that if we think about it, we can do better with voice or voice is part to that multi-modality, part of that interaction with our technology. so that's what i like to seek out five or 10 years be kind of a, not a novel thing, like it is now in a lot of ways. but it just you expect yeah, tony morelan 24:26 and it's, you know, it's crazy to think, you know, it seems like smartphones have been around forever. but it was not that long ago that truly the first smartphone was introduced to us. and 10 years from now is not much and just think about the advancements that definitely voice will take over that time. roger kibbe 24:42 yeah, absolutely. absolutely. you know, like truly understanding. yep. human voices really hard. i can say something to you in 10 different ways. can you understand i'm seeing the same thing? oh, yeah. that's really hard for an ai to do that. yeah. part of the challenges we have right now voice is when you're developing a voice application need to be pretty deterministic about if a user says this this way, then this is what you do. and here's some variations and how they say, because the ai gets better, you won't have to be so deterministic in your development. they'll just say, when the user intends this is their intention. right? thank you. yes, something like that. that's going to be huge, huge unlock for the industry. but it is a really hard ai problem. tony morelan 25:32 yeah, you know, actually some of the biggest laughs that we get in our house, so it's when we listen to my wife try and talk to one of those voice automated systems that you see on phone systems when you're asking a question trying to be transferred to a different department. and the phone system doesn't understand what my wife says. she doesn't say it any differently. she just says it more aggressively. she gets mad or she gets angrier, but she's still saying the same terms. and it's still sending her to the wrong department. and you know, myself, the kids, we all are just laughing as she just gets have tried to deal with this really, you know, low level ai system. roger kibbe 26:05 yeah, you know, this industry calls us ivr so they mostly been around for a long time and you know that the driver there was cost reduction right so it's expensive for a csr to answer phones cause reduction we all understand it, but sometimes doesn't put people first and i think you saw that with ivr it's funny when you were mentioning your wife getting frustrated and i likewise, um, you know, i will say hitting 0000 in an ivr often kicks you out of it but uh um, there's even websites that actually tell you how to if you're stuck in ivr hell, like this is how you say or this is the buttons you press to get out of that which is pretty funny. but that you caught up in something i think is pretty interesting. we can all feel as humans emotions in our voice, happiness, sadness, excited, bored that the there is a lot of research being done around voice assistance, understanding kind of the emotion in there because just hearing a voice we as humans hear obviously the words we also understand the emotion. they're subtle cues and how we say things. obviously, they're face to face. there's also a body language. one of the challenges and then ai i talked about, is it just understand it's saying, here's the words, what are those words mean? if i could understand the emotion of the user, that could be another input into my understanding, or if you're pissed and angry, and you're talking to an ai voice assistant, maybe you don't want it to be happy, full of personality and cracking jokes. you want it to be direct and to the point and the other hand if you're having fun, maybe the personality of the voice assistant the personas industries likes to call it is more fun and crack some jokes in this kind of friendly. i think there's a big unlock for voices systems to understand kind of the emotional cues that we as humans are giving with the tone and how we say things. sure. tony morelan 28:17 so let's talk a little bit about discoverability. oh, you know, i can only imagine if there's a lot of third-party apps out there. what's bixby doing to help make discoverability? a little easier? roger kibbe 28:27 yeah, there are a lot of third-party applications for all the voice assistance. and part of the challenge is, you have to use the name. so if i use if i call my voice app would say voice, the podcast helper. okay, if i want to use the podcast helper, i have to say something like, ask podcast helper to start or ask podcast helper to play my favorite podcast. the problem there is that ask podcast helper, i have to remember that phrase and i have to remember that term for the name of application. the problem with discoverability is people don't remember that. and so they don't use it. and so if i just say, tell my voices to play my favorite podcasts, it's going to use whatever built in functionality. it has to play podcasts as an example, and not podcasts helper, and not podcast helper. on the other hand, podcast helper may be a better experience. sure i, as a user, feel that podcast helper is my favorite way to listen to podcasts. so what we did with big suzy, introduced late last year, somebody called natural language categories, and it's really to address that. and the whole idea is, is these categories are way categories of interactions. so like playing a podcast, podcast is one of our categories. i'll give you another example and give you an actual real-world example. weather is one of our categories. so if i ask bixby what's the weather like? whatsoever like today, what's the weather like next week? what's the weather like? he will answer that in the built-in weather capsule. i answered that, but i actually in my big city, so there is a weather capsule called big sky that i really like goes into more detail. it's kind of for weather geeks, and i like weather. and so in bixby once i enable big sky what i can do, because it's part of the natural light, the weather natural language category, i as an end user can go and say, i want this to be the default. so the next time i say, hi bixby, what's the weather, big sky answers, built in weather functionality. so what lets you do is choose and personalize your voices system. the closest thing i mean, look, look at android phones. look at samsung phones. if you install two different map apps on an android phone, the first time you go to launch a map, it says hey, you have map app, a or have that be which one you want to use? and do you want to make one-year default? well, bixby has really exactly the same thing. but for voice. so what's the weather? like if i've enabled two of them and say, hey, you have weather capsule a, or you have big sky? which one would you like to use? would you like to make one the default? so i said, hey, use big sky and make it the default. and from then on big sky answers that i can always go into settings and change that. or i can always go back to that old kind of invocation name and say, ask weather app pay for the weather. and it'll override, right because then i'm specifically addressing the name of a capsule, and that will answer. so we've had this in about 20 different categories. we keep on building these and thinking about it. we think it's a big unlock to not only developers kind of solving this discoverability problem, but to my mind, even more importantly, as a consumer. i said, i like big sky over the in weather app, but everybody has their own preferences there. so let the consumer choose what they want their experience to be sure their favorite provider for x, y, or z, and really personalize the experience to the consumer. so suddenly, it may come across in how i'm describing it, but we're definitely super excited about because he thinks there's such amazing possibilities there. tony morelan 32:21 yeah, no, that sounds that sounds great. so let's talk about getting started. if developers or designers want to think about getting into voice, what advice would you give them? yeah, so a couple roger kibbe 32:30 things come to mind. the first is when you're thinking about what you want to build is voice the best interface for it. right. so, you know, obviously, i'm a fan of voice. i think it's amazing. i also think there's areas where typing on a keyboard, or swiping on a screen or better interfaces, right for what you're trying to do. so you need to think about if it's easy are faster or better to do it swiping or typing. i probably shy away from it. okay. on the other hand, if it's hard or difficult, i always like to think about things where i'm like, wow, i got to go through 12 different menus to go do this wow. voice might be really amazing there. so if you're going to replace some functionality, think about stuff that were voices a better interface or where voice is just brand new, it would not work well without voice being the kind of the modality with which you interact with that technology. so that's number one. number two, i'd say is follow your passion. okay, you know, the very best apps, pc, a phone or for voice are typically where the developer had some passion about it. so it really comes through. so if you're passionate about cooking, hmm, maybe there's something cooking voice experience you can build. if you're passionate about exercise. maybe there's an exercise voice experience you can build. so i say, follow your passions, because you're going to build something that passion will come through to people using your app. and you know what? it's going to be a heck of a lot more fun to build. yeah. if it's something that follows your passions, you want to build something that you use. right, exactly. this is fun. i'd use it. this is so cool. i want to share it with the world. tony morelan 34:28 yeah, yeah, i think that's a lot of great entrepreneurs get started as they're doing something that they want, that they're excited about. and then they worry about, you know, the money in the marketing later. but yeah, completely agree with you. so, in doing a little research for this interview, i, i discovered i learned that you actually host your own podcast. tell me a little bit about the bixby developers chat podcast that you host. roger kibbe 34:56 yeah, yeah. so just started that in january. this year, you know how to get started, i went and told my boss and said, i want to start a podcast. he said, go for it. i don't know what that means. i mean, he knew what it meant. but it was kind of like, go for it. let's figure it out and see how it works. and really the genesis is, you know, every time i go to a voice conference, i have these kinds of long in-depth kind of conversations with people around. hey, what are you building with voice? what's your thinking about it? where can you go in the future? and i really wanted to share some of those conversations with the world. you know, i'm passionate about voice and these great conversations with it to my earlier point about what you're passionate about, go share it, so wanted to go share it with the world. and so i think we're done. we've done 11 podcasts right now. we do one every two weeks on breeding, typically people in the voice industry in when we talk about what they're doing, what they've built what they think the future will look like on these our general conversations. we definitely talk about bixby somewhat, but i really the whole idea was a little bit kind of a halo effect is hey, people who are interested in voice would go listen to this podcast. and yeah, absolutely. we want them to go listen and go, hey, i got to go check out that bixby and go try it out or develop something on it. i like what those guys are doing. yeah. but the podcast yep, wide ranging. i've talked to voice designers, i talked to some podcasters i've talked to developers and i continue to think of who would be an interesting guest to talk about it. it's a lot of fun. um, i continue enjoy it. listenership seems to be growing pretty well. so i don't know for one podcaster to another. yeah, i think podcasting is a lot of fun. tony morelan 36:48 yeah, definitely. so for our podcasting fans. how can they find your podcast? where are you guys hosted? what's it called? roger kibbe 36:54 yeah, great question bixby developers chat. so any of your major podcast players, if you start searching for bixby, your bixby developers that'll come across. we're also built in the bixby capsule. so if you enable it you can say hi bixby, play bixby developers chat. and then we're online. if you just search for bixby developers chat, and you can see it and please listen, and then let me know what you like your what you'd like to see in the future. i think a lot of the value of podcasting is listening to your audience and they'll say, i love this. i'd like more of this, less of this love to hear about it. tony morelan 37:31 wonderful. so you've been around voice for a long time. in fact, you know, not just with your podcast, but prior to that with all of your work with voice. i'm sure you've got a lot of experiences around voice. so tell me some of your favorite experiences and why roger kibbe 37:43 yeah, i'm going to say maybe my favorite capsule and bixby is something built in it's the yelp capsule. and why i really like that is i talked earlier about i said, grace is a great way to interface in many ways, but not always. so voice is a really great input modality. so if i wanted to find a chinese restaurant in san francisco, that's open past 10pm on saturday nights. that's a pretty easy you, you can understand exactly what i'm saying. sure, um, there's a lot of information than that. now think about that if i was to search using a typical web interface, right, there's a lot of clicking and typing and things like that and drilling down i need to do there. yeah, but if i just ask the bixby oh, capsule, something like that, it could parse all that input, and then show me the results. so it's great for input modality. on the other hand, i get a list of restaurants and a list of restaurants via voice may be kind of overwhelming. so that's a great place where the screen etc. screen, this list here and then i kind of go back to touch when i swipe through those and touch and find more information. why i like that is it's a great example of multi-modality and kind of using the mix the modalities together. so the yelp capsule and bixby the other thing i'll say one of my favorite things to do on voice is, or just generally is i love trivia. there’re some pretty fun voice trivia experiences. one i really like on a very popular question of the day. it's actually quite simple but really well done. so boom, start question of the day aspects be hi bixby star question of the day, it gives you one question, multiple choice answers. if you get the answer right, you get a bonus question. and you can ask that what's really well done in that is the content is really well done. so the questions are great, the content is great. i'm going to say our content is king invoice and that's a great example. it's incredibly simple what they built but incredibly great because the content so great, there's experience that isn't on bixby i'd love to see come to bixby what's that? it's a trivia game called feel the pressure feel the pressure which is on alexa. yeah. and you've done great content and really great sound effects. the sound effects in that game made me want to play that game more. and i love the thinking of what set sound effects and the impact upon your kind of psyche are so i love that game. but yeah, those are two examples of things that i think are done really, really well with voice. tony morelan 40:22 excellent, excellent laughter definitely check those out. so if people want to learn more about bixby or even you as an evangelist, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you? roger kibbe 40:29 yeah. so for bixby so www.bixbydevelopers.com that is our website. and by the way, that is where you can go i mean, today, you can start developing for bixby so you download the bixby developer studio or id, you can do all your development. there's even a simulator in there. so if you don't yet have a samsung device, you can go and build that simulator. and just from a phone to watch the tv and smart appliance so you can build all that. so that's www.bixbydevelopers.com kind of your home hub for everything big sweet. the other things i'd say follow us on social. we try to be pretty active on twitter. so at bixby developers can also find us at facebook bixby developers search for bixby developers on social myself. i am definitely pretty active on twitter at roger kibbe. i love to talk about voice what people are doing, what's happening, learn about new areas that people are exploring. so let's connect and continue the conversation on twitter. tony morelan 41:37 excellent, excellent. so let me ask you a few questions about bixby studio. so that's the software that's used to create your capsules. tell me a little bit about getting bixby studio is this free? does it cost? roger kibbe 41:49 yeah, hundred percent free. you literally it's on the homepage of bixby developers calm for mac, windows and linux. you download it. it's a full-blown id with develop debug, there's a testing suite in there. there's a simulator, like i said, so you can go from end to end testing and you all do it. in that id, there's no it automatically syncs to the cloud. that's actually kind of a big competitive advantage for us is our idx. some of our competitors require you to do things and kind of sync to the cloud or use two different interfaces. everything in bixby developer studio isn't one you can do it all there and do all your development there until you're ready to submit to the marketplace. and then you start that within that, that studio as well. so is there a process where developers have to be approved to publish their capsules? yeah, so much like what happens with the other voice assistants and happens in various mobile phone app stores. there is a process. so you submit your capsule with information for the marketplace. and that is some information with the reviewers if necessary, and then there's a review process and they make sure you know, there's certain rules around, you know, appropriate content, or have you does that actually work particularly tricky with voice, right? people won't always phrase something the same way. so you want to build over flexibility. you create these things called hints, which are kind of phrases that will kick off your voice experience or capsule. you want those to work. so the reviewers check all that and make sure it all works. and if that's all working, then we'll go live in the marketplace. and if it doesn't, they'll give you some feedback. one of the things we're particularly proud about is our developer kind of outreach in a lot of areas around there. and if somebody doesn't pass, we try to give really useful feedback about hey, here's what you need to fix. and we also get feedback around hey, this, maybe this went live, but this could be even better. x, y or z because it's always in our interest to have really great capsules on the marketplace, so our developers spend our, our capsule review team spends a little more time reviewing things, because part of their job is to give some constructive feedback on sure. you know, good degrade, i like to say, tony morelan 44:18 exactly. so not just does it work or does it not, you know, pass or fail? you're actually giving more insight on how to improve this to get more success. yeah, roger kibbe 44:25 absolutely. tony morelan 44:26 wow. that's great. that's great. all right. so i am going to finish off with our last question here, our last topic, in doing a little research on viv labs and adam shire. i came across this penn and teller video of him doing magic. so and i've been found some other videos of adam doing magic, and i'm wondering, does magic work its way into viv labs. i mean, a little bit about that. roger kibbe 44:53 yeah, so absolutely this so adam is actually this pretty talented amateur magician. he probably kickoff professional if you really put his mind to it. so he loves to talk about magic and he seems to know everyone in the magic industry, he's incredibly well connected there. um, so a couple things happen. one, we have what we call friday magic. so every friday afternoon, kind of near the end of the day, we have a magician come in use of magic, which is really kind of a cool way to start the weekend, you know? sure. all right, you know, the work week is over, well laugh and be entertained with some magic and then we all we all go home. that happens. it's a lot of fun. we definitely when we go to trade shows, we often bring magician in place, sometimes very entertaining results there. but yeah, it's just one of these fun little side things that happens. we had that friday, magic. we talked about it. we do it at trade shows. and yeah, it makes me smile thinking about it. tony morelan 45:59 yeah. no, that's awesome that those things were great. it was a it was a nice discovery. well, hey, roger, absolutely appreciate you taking the time. this has been a great interview. i love getting to know more about you and also about bixby and voice. so again, thank you very much for joining me on today's podcast. roger kibbe 46:13 oh, my pleasure. always love to talk to voice thanks so much. tony morelan 46:17 so before i end this show, i want to do something a little fun with bixby. bixby said she can rap but i want to know hey bixby, can you beatbox? roger kibbe 46:28 check this out. outro 46:39 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 developer 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.

season 2, episode 3 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 amy lee art institutes the art institutes - artinstitutes.edu virtual open house - artinstitutes.edu/open-house the art institutes youtube channel - youtube.com ai live youtu.be amy lee linkedin - linkedin.com/in/amyhawklee amy lee is the vice president of mentorships and career readiness at the art institutes, a collection of private schools located throughout the us. for several years now, samsung and the art institutes have worked together to help students learn how to design, code and create for samsung. amy talks about classes, curriculum and what it takes to be a student at the art institutes, and the close collaboration between samsung, the schools and the students. listen download this episode topics covered the art institutes overview course offerings recruitment scholarships and financial aid covid-19 impact galaxy themes studio galaxy watch studio for tizen galaxy store ai live game development miami international university of art and design global campus job placement alumni success 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 00:01 hey, i'm tony morelan. and this is pow! the samsung developers podcast where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools. welcome to season two, episode three. on today's show, i interview amy lee, vice president of mentorships and career readiness at the art institutes, a collection of private schools located throughout the united states. for several years now samsung and the art institutes have collaborated to help students learn how to design, code and create for samsung. not only do we talk about classes, curriculum and what it takes to be a student at the art institutes, but the close collaboration between samsung, the schools and the students. enjoy! so amy lee, thank you very much for joining me on the podcast today. amy lee 00:50 thank you for having me, tony. tony morelan 00:52 i'd like to start with the first question. and that is, who is amy lee? amy lee 00:57 gosh, that's such a deep question to start off with, right. so i'll tell you my official title. obviously, you know, amy lee, i'm with the art institutes and my official title is vice president of mentorship and career readiness. i like to think of myself as more of a student success advocate, a creative connector, and that bridge for our students between the classroom and their potential career. tony morelan 01:27 you know, i'm really excited about our chat today, because this is the first interviewer i get to talk with not a designer or a developer or even someone from a big tech company, but i get to talk with someone about education. and that is something that everyone starts with, you know, learning, learning new skills following passion starting or even changing a career. and you know, it all begins with education. right. so can you tell me a bit about the art institutes? amy lee 01:54 sure. so the art institutes is a system of eight private schools. we're located throughout the united states, and we offer undergraduate graduate degrees in the fields of fashion, design, media, arts, culinary. and, you know, we're really here to focus on the applied arts, and you know, honing in those skills in the creative industries. tony morelan 02:22 yeah, so you're really covering a lot of the different areas of everything that really you know, means art. so i love that everything from cooking to traditional fine art to even tech, as it's related to art. amy lee 02:34 absolutely. tony morelan 02:35 so when did the art institutes first open? amy lee 02:38 so the art institutes first open their doors in 1921? wow, quite some time ago. tony morelan 02:45 so you coming up? it's 100 years? amy lee 02:48 it is it? is it? that is crazy to think of? tony morelan 02:51 wow, that is crazy. so you had mentioned there are eight campuses? is that correct? that is correct. so can you tell me where are those different locations throughout the us? yeah, amy lee 02:59 so we have campuses located in florida, that would be our miami and tampa campus? we have one in georgia, located in atlanta. we have four in texas, austin, dallas, houston in san antonio. and then i have one in virginia in virginia beach. oh, wow. wow. tony morelan 03:19 so you really are covering a good part of the good part of the country now? are these schools independent of each other? or can students start at one at one school, one campus, and actually at some point transfer to another location? amy lee 03:31 sure, students who begin their studies at one location are absolutely able to transfer to another location of the art institutes, depending on their program of study, and where they are in their study. so if they're, you know, a new student or closer to the end of their degree. so it just kind of depends on where they are and where they want to go. tony morelan 03:55 yeah, when i was starting my college career, i didn't really know what i wanted to do, right. i knew i wanted to be an art, something along those lines. i mean, my first attempt at a career would have been architecture. but i moved on from that pretty quickly, when i realized that i had a hard time with the rulers to be more free forms. yeah, i eventually found my way into graphic design. but i could see where students that that you know, at that young age, when they are trying to figure out really what their career is. part of that also is, you know, where do they find themselves? where do they want to live? right? amy lee 04:25 or where do i want to end after i graduate? you know, where do i want to end up and where do i want to be located for my first career attempt? yes. tony morelan 04:32 so do you see that some of your schools focus more in one area than other areas? like do you see more fashion students, you know, at one campus versus others or, you know, amy lee 04:42 they're spread all over? i will say we probably have a larger population of fashion in miami, atlanta, houston, dallas, some of our larger cities, okay. but not because, you know, the industry is less than one or the other, just because there's more people in the area? tony morelan 05:04 sure, sure. and what about tech, you know, when it comes to more, you know, using computers and whatnot to create amy lee 05:11 our media program is one of our larger programs. so media encompasses our animation, visual effects, photography, audio, film, and they're all over, you know, those students, atlanta with their booming film industry does seem to be a bit of a hub. but we have those programs at all eight locations. tony morelan 05:36 you know, what your school offers is pretty amazing when it comes to that on campus education that you can get that being said, do you offer online courses. amy lee 05:45 so we don't offer online courses as a total degree program, but we do offer classes in a virtual format and in person. so you know, 100% online is not a, an offering that we have at the moment, sure. but because of covid, and commas of, you know, how we are transitioning and being able to, you know, adapt our courses. there’re four formats technically for how students can learn. so they can attend classes from the comfort of their home, within a set core structure, they decide when they want to complete their courses in their course content. alternatively, in this format, students can attend live sessions online at a set day in time. so the instructor goes live, say, tuesdays at two o'clock, and all their classmates join, they might have a guest lecturer, and they're all learning virtually, in that environment. tony morelan 06:43 sure. so it's not it's not like an on-demand type, of course offering it is you are here with the teacher and your fellow students. and we're taking this class together. amy lee 06:52 yeah. so there's that option, and then there is that sort of on demand option, as well as students would be able to go in and look at their course content and, and say, okay, this assignments due on tuesday of next week, here's all my learning videos, here's all of the course instructor notes, here's the videos from my instructor, i'm going to do this at my own pace, and just meet my deadlines or my benchmarks. so gotcha. yeah, that's sort of our virtual learning options. tony morelan 07:19 i see. i could see what that would really work well, for a student who has responsibilities outside of school. right. so maybe someone who has a job, you know, whether it's full time or part time, they may not be able to dedicate a certain amount of time every day, right? amy lee 07:33 i think flexibility is the key, you know, we were trying to take into account different styles of learning, different types of students and different backgrounds, and, you know, really being able to accommodate all of those different things. tony morelan 07:46 yeah. which brings up a good point, i want to ask you do you offer classes that are geared towards people maybe at different points in their career, whether it's a you know, a younger student who is just starting out? or maybe it's somebody who's already had a career, and they're looking for a change or a switch? do you offer programs for those different types of students? amy lee 08:04 you know, i think our program speak to those types of students no matter where they are. so it's not that there would be an adult learning graphic design program. but the course content for our graphic design program would cater to someone who is fresh from high school, someone who's a career changer, someone who you know, maybe has a little bit of skill under their belt, and maybe they want to come back and just do the diploma program, not the associate's, the bachelors or the masters. so there's different levels and different skills and different time periods for everyone. tony morelan 08:36 yeah, yeah, that's what i like about the flexibility of it. how many students would you say total amongst all eight campuses are part of the art institutes? amy lee 08:45 so we currently have more than 3000 students between our eight campuses? tony morelan 08:51 wow, that's a that's a big number. yeah. so are all campuses have like the equal amount of students or is there one campus that is actually a bigger school than others? amy lee 09:00 so they do range in size? and i would say it really depends on the city. so again, the more populous cities, so miami and atlanta, dallas, they are a little bit larger as far as student body than a campus in austin or tampa or virginia beach, or san antonio. tony morelan 09:21 sure. what about faculty? i'm sure that you've got a large faculty group that can administer to all these students. amy lee 09:28 yeah, so faculty are great. our faculty are certainly part of the lifeblood of our institute. they're very gifted instructors, many of whom are respective active professionals in the fields that they teach. so our faculty use a lot of different learning centered methodologies to prepare our students and right now we have approximately 350 of them teaching during any given quarter. wow, tony morelan 09:55 that's, that's pretty big. yeah. so we you touched on covid just for a quick moment earlier. so want to talk a little bit more about that. i mean, that obviously is impacted our country, our world. i mean, in every aspect of life, how has it impacted the art institutes? amy lee 10:10 sure. so, given the current state of the world, you know, we had to pivot very quickly within the art institute to make sure that our students could still be accommodated and still, you know, be able to learn. so we went to great lengths to really ensure that despite what's going on in the world, we were here to help our students keep the applied arts surviving and thriving. so in addition to those earlier courses we were talking about, they could learn virtually or, you know, at set times, we offer hybrid courses with one of two options. so for select courses, students could complete their academic work online, or come to campus for the practical lab component of their courses. labs are offered on multiple dates and times, students can schedule that date and time to attend from the available options via our online reservation system. or students can access the campus outside of those class times via just the online reservation system. so they could come on campus and obviously limited numbers due to covid. but following those cdc guidelines, they could still access and utilize the audio lab or the photo studio or the fashion lab and get that, i guess, hands on piece. sure, in addition to what they're learning in a remote format. tony morelan 11:34 yeah. so i will say i was very impressed with how quickly you guys pivoted when covid hit. i mean, it seemed like it was within just a matter of days that, that we all had to figure out, okay, how are we? how do we can, you know, change our direction so that we can still, you know, help these students? so i was really impressed with how quickly you guys did pivot that, amy lee 11:57 you know, that was something that we really kind of all pulled together on. so, you know, prior to initial lockdowns last year, students attended courses just on ground. and of course, the majority of our employees were based at campuses. so as with other higher education institutions in just a matter of weeks, you're right, it, it really was weeks that we were able to shift our entire operation to this virtual format. and ai virtual learning was designed to really provide students with as much flexibility in their learning and as much content and engagement as we could possibly, you know, get in there for them to be exposed to. tony morelan 12:41 yeah, definitely. so i'd like to jump right into the collaboration between samsung and the art institutes. yeah, because that's when i first met you. when i came out to miami to help teach a workshop. can you tell me how that association first began? amy lee 12:58 so you're exactly right. it began with samsung reaching out to the art institutes and saying, hey, we have these really great game developer and watch design developer workshops. and could we bring that to your students? and we of course, said, yes, i'd love to expose them to industry. that's, that's what i live for, is bringing sort of real-world application into their classroom environment. so we started off with workshops. we had workshops in miami, and we had workshops in atlanta, and we were working on a workshop for houston and dallas and covid hit but in those workshops, gosh, i want to say we had over 220 students between both of those locations. yeah. you know, take that sort of immersive, you know, one day one-and-a-half-day workshop, and they loved it. oh, yeah. tony morelan 13:53 so that was where, like i mentioned that when i first met you and all the faculty at the art institute, when it came out to miami, i helped teach a themes ui, designing class to the students. and it honestly was a great time seeing what the students did. i think one of the best stories that came out of that was that we had students from all different departments at your campus there, right. so we had students that were there in design, or they were doing culinary or they were doing fashion. and we held a little contest. at the end of the day, we were going to select which team designed what we thought was the most compelling phone ui theme. and surprisingly, it was the fashion. yeah, the fashion design group who these people are working with textiles and fabrics. but it was neat to see how they took that sort of concept and brought it into a you know, a digital phone ui theme. amy lee 14:49 but that's part of fashion. right? so wearables is something that we talk about in their curriculum. yeah. and is it you know, and an athletic sort of fitness wearable, is it a fashion wearable? is it technology wearables? and? and how are they going to incorporate that and design for it? for a wide variety of uses? tony morelan 15:11 yeah, definitely. and i think also, another highlight for me was i was given the opportunity to review a lot of the students personal portfolios. so this is just their portfolio of work, you know, whether they were assignments that they've done, or some of them already had been working as graphic designers, and they were showing me some of their projects from the past. and, you know, to be able to sit down with those students and share a bit of my knowledge, that was a really nice tie. that was, it was a great moment for me. amy lee 15:38 yeah, we have a lot of great partnerships and industry pros who are on campus all the time, sort of imparting their knowledge and allowing the students the opportunity to share their work, which is what really excites them and keeps their sort of passion and flames, you know, fueled so that they can see where they're going to progress once they're, you know, done with school and what they're going to be able to do in the industry. tony morelan 16:00 and i think what we liked the most was that, you know, we were given an opportunity to sit down with these students at the beginning of their career and show them about how easy it is to develop for samsung. i mean, there's this sort of stigma that, you know, i have to learn how to code by the tools that we were showing at that time, for phone ui designing, and also for watch face designing. students didn't have to know how to code. so it was easy for us to come in to a group of students that were taking classes in culinary in fashion design and other areas of art, that maybe are not developers that know how to code, right, but we're giving them an opportunity to actually create for samsung, amy lee 16:41 i agree. i think one of those interesting things you mentioned culinary, i remember talking to the culinary student, he was like, i want to design a watch for a chef, you know, what are my times for? you know, my eggs are my deep fryer. and can i build that into this watch design so that i can, you know, use it? tony morelan 16:58 that's great in the kitchen. it was great. yeah. so we had so much success at those workshops that we decided to offer an actual course, correct. this would be a samsung, this was watch face designing. and as you'd mentioned, we were in the middle of just about ready to launch this and then covid hit 17:15 and lockdown. tony morelan 17:16 yes. and we all had to figure out how are we going to take this in person? i think it was a six-week course at the time, right? i worked pretty closely with some of your faculty there on how we could turn this into an online course. and it was actually very successful. i was really impressed with the students in their eagerness to learn this new tool and take that in the actually designed some pretty nice-looking watch faces. amy lee 17:42 yeah, you're right. so the workshops evolved into the course. and, you know, working with you and other members at samsung, we had faculty we had some of our dean's, we had, you know, programmatic experts to really take what samsung had in these half day workshops to expand it into what does a student really need to do to flesh out a full, you know, credit bearing course within our curriculum that would, you know, benefit them and expose them to technology and industry in a more real world application. so, we pivoted very quickly again, it was going to be on ground. it went to this virtual learning format. we stretched it to 11 weeks in the end. yes, i was just looking at the calendar, tony and we're coming up on the one-year mark of offering this class and we have had over 128 students i think is when i last looked at it wow. come through and take that class. tony morelan 18:46 that's amazing. and it's still a class that is being offered criminalists. amy lee 18:48 yeah, it's on the schedule. that tony morelan 18:50 is that is great. so we've talked about ui designing for phones. we've talked about watch face. designing to understand there's actually another area that my counterpart diego yeah, another evangelists that he helped teach game development. amy lee 19:03 he actually did last quarter on the quarter system. so last quarter, diego partnered with our team production, one into class for game art and design. and he was in that class, we had our first instance, i think we had 18 students. and he really spent so much quality time with them, talking about the samsung platform and how they could get their indie games, potentially published the process behind there. and then the students got to ask their questions, you know, so they had, you know, diego as the expert, and he offered to again, as you did look at their work, give them feedback, and really kind of fulfill that publishing fire of how they're going to go about that and get that game noticed. tony morelan 19:52 you know, a lot of the students when they're starting out, they haven't had that opportunity to have real world game development experience. what we were able to as a collaboration with samsung, where diego was able to give them that insight on what it is like to actually develop a game in the industry, amy lee 20:09 right, right. so you're right, they kind of work in a bit of a vacuum. and, you know, they look at different places where they can publish and, and how they can, you know, go about getting their game notice. but, again, having this partnership with samsung has been so valuable for them because they could learn a little bit more, i guess about tips and tricks and sort of an inroad, and getting into the galaxy store for potential publishing. tony morelan 20:36 it wasn't just about creating the game, they actually had to do more than that, which was put together their business plan and also talk about how are they going to promote this game? amy lee 20:45 correct? who is their target audience? what age bracket are they going after? where are they going to publish it? all of those types of things? what's their logo? what's their, you know, font choice? what are their colors? you know, how does it play on different platforms? is it you know, a phone? is it for console? you know, all those different things? tony morelan 21:04 yeah, that's great. it's all part of marketing your brand. so diego also participated in your ai live? 21:12 yes. tony morelan 21:13 so tell us a little bit about what is ai live. amy lee 21:16 so ai live again, was kind of born out of the pandemic, to be honest with you, but a way for us to continue to connect industry professionals, even highlight faculty and alumni of the art institutes to our students. so in the past, we all had guest lectures on campus. with pandemic, we couldn't do that. so ai live was born, you can check out ai live on our youtube channel and see all of those recordings, and diego did participate. so he was an industry professional and talked about samsung, and the partnership and the developer program and game publishing. and he's one of our more popular views actually on the channel. tony morelan 22:05 i want to kind of go back a little bit also and just touch a little bit more on covid. you know, financially, it's really hit a lot of people very hard because a lot of people have been out of work to covid does the art institute, do they have any sort of financial aid or any way that they can assist with students in tuition? amy lee 22:21 sure. so at the art institutes financial aid is available to those who qualify, we are always here to help students understand everything they need to know, to help fund their creative education. we're always looking for ways to make education more affordable. so we offer full and partial scholarships to eligible new and continuing students. and one of our internal institutional grants is called the art grant. and the art grant gives students the chance to earn tuition of up to $17,340 for a bachelor's degree, which is an average of about 18% of tuition, and up to $5,845, which about 13%. for an associate's degree program, of course, we offer all the traditional va funds for veterans all the title for programs and those types of things. tony morelan 23:17 wow, that is that is really nice to hear. what are you guys doing in the way of recruiting new students? sure. so amy lee 23:22 we have an admissions team who helps students in each step of the process, and there's a four-step process to getting started. so first is the interview. and that's going to be where the students would meet with their enrollment counselor. during the interview process, they're going to share stories of the art institutes mission, how we help creative individuals launch their careers and do what they love. talk about range of services provided and that sort of thing. next step would be to apply. and we're serious about creative education and students. applications tell us that they're serious, too. so once accepted, we work with the student to make sure that they're on track to start classes. third step is financial aid and scholarships where a financially aids rep would help the students explore their options, scholarships to help fund step four would be orientation. and that's really the final step. so new student orientation and my team plays a big part in that but orientation is really that chance to explore the campus, which takes place digitally right now we do a virtual orientation, but it's the students opportunity to learn everything from policy and procedures to time management to how to log into their classes, meet with their academic directors to make sure that they're well prepared to start school and know what to expect and how to move very quickly in our very fast paced, you know, environment of how we're learning today. tony morelan 24:57 yeah, that's great to be able to put that information out there for the students to really get a good understanding of what it is that they're about to embark on. absolutely. once a student has completed their degree at the art institute, what is it that you guys can do with help with placing them into the workforce? amy lee 25:13 sure. so again, that falls under mentorship and career readiness, which diego help navigate our students within our team of mentors. so our department student, mentor, ship and career readiness partners with our students, as they, you know, select courses to register up through that career transition piece, they can seek guidance from us in tending a myriad of workshops. so over the course of a quarter, we host workshops on resume writing, interview techniques, salary negotiation, if they, you know, really want to do freelance or be an entrepreneur, you know, pointing them in the right direction for business planning resources, or connecting them with a copyright or contract attorney to do a workshop on intellectual property, and, you know, all of those resources and building blocks that they're going to need to be successful after, after school, we have a job board, of course, we have a lot of self-directed resources, we have on demand resources we have in person resources, all of those wonderful things to connect them with, i can say, i don't know, on the job board, i probably approve 20 to 25 jobs a day really have employers reaching out, you know, to the art institutes to say, hey, i want to hire a graduate of yours, or where can i post this job? sure. tony morelan 26:39 that's great. so you really do have a nice program when it comes to career readiness. amy lee 26:42 we try we really do try to help, you know, set them up. tony morelan 26:45 yeah. so can you tell me about some of the major accomplishments that your graduates have gone on to do after they have graduated from the art institute? amy lee 26:53 i would say, you know, again, check out our ai live series on youtube, you can actually hear from them firsthand. but some of the more recent interviews from some of our alumni, and some of the upcoming ones that we'll be launching by the end of march, you can check out joshua leonard. he is a 2018. graduate from the art institute of atlanta, and he is a character animator for netflix. wow. and we're very proud of him and all of his accomplishments. he's one of our most recent ones. you can look for upcoming on ai live. simone qi. she's a 2012 graduate from the art institute of dallas. she does branding and advertising for a lot of fortune 500 companies, advertising now she's opened up her own creative studio in dallas, and then culinary jamika pessoa. she was on the next food network star in 2009. she's a weekly contributor on the dr. oz. new series the dish on oz, and she's a 2005 culinary graduate from our atlanta campus. wow. so tony morelan 28:04 you really do have some, some notable alumni, you amy lee 28:07 we're very proud of them. we're proud of all of them. but you know, if you want to hear some of the highlights, you know, those are some good ones to check out. tony morelan 28:14 oh, definitely. well, so can you talk about future plans, any upcoming announcements with the school? amy lee 28:20 yeah. miami, international university of art and design, global campus, will most likely officially i'll do some air quotes their official launch in its first full academic year, which would be 2021-2022, which would commence in the fall. could be sooner. but that would be an online education platform. so where we previously spoke about, you know, virtual and hybrid and, you know, we're not totally online, miami, international university of art and design global campus would be an online modality for education. oh, wow. tony morelan 28:59 so this obviously came out of the what, how covid has impacted your school and where you had to pivot? you now realize, you know what, we're going to offer this just permanently as an ongoing right offering. that is that's great. amy lee 29:11 definitely a need. tony morelan 29:13 and yeah, definitely. so what's the best way for people to learn about the art institutes amy lee 29:18 so i would go to the website, you know, that's, that's where anyone interested in our programs can visit us online. and it's www dot art institutes with an s.edu. you can also check out some of our virtual open house events, and upcoming virtual open house events. may the eighth of 2021, from 11am, eastern 10am central, and you know, those are all great ways to interact with our departments, our faculty, hear stories, see resources, and really learn more about the art institutes. tony morelan 29:54 that's excellent. so when you're not working and helping these students plan their careers what is it that you do for fun? amy lee 30:02 you know, my husband and i love to take the motorcycle out on the weekends and the texas hill country. so go for long rides until i can't sit on the back of that bike anymore. love to be out with my dogs, my fur babies i'm an avid artist at heart. my undergraduate degree is in fine arts. so i paint quite a bit, refinishing some piece of furniture or painting something. so that's what tony morelan 30:31 i do. and i will say every time that i've met you, you've had a different hairstyle. a different hairstyle. i mean, right now you have this beautiful slosh of pink coming right through your bangs. and i can tell you are a very artsy person, a perfect person to represent the art institutes. amy lee 30:50 well, thank you. i do change my hair quite frequently. i think i've been every color of the rainbow. tony morelan 30:55 that's great. well, amy, thank you very much for being on the podcast. i really appreciate it. amy lee 30:59 thank you for having me. tony was a pleasure. closing 31:02 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. checkout developer.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.

discover galaxy store galaxy store is a premium app store designed specifically for galaxy device users that offers a boutique store experience. it is where users organically discover amazing games, and exclusive and differentiated applications created by samsung and third parties. galaxy store is focused on providing quality app experiences, app promotions, campaigns, rewards, and exclusive offers. marketing and promotions available in over 180 countries, market your app to the hundreds of millions of active galaxy device users who download billions of apps from galaxy store. reach these users with promotions for galaxy themes. you can request to promote your app in galaxy store when your app meets the selection criteria. you may qualify to be part of a collection of apps that fit a trending topic. example of collections in galaxy store that promote apps samsung also provides marketing resources, such as the galaxy store badge, that help you promote your app in social media or other areas outside of galaxy store. link users directly to your app in galaxy store using the galaxy store badge positive customer reviews can help you grow sales by influencing users who consider other users’ reviews before downloading an app. ask your customers to review your app by directly connecting them from your app to your galaxy store app review page using a galaxy store review link. link your customers directly to your app review page community looking for like-minded people who share your passion for creating apps? connect with other developers in the samsung developer forums by asking or responding to questions or sharing ideas about the samsung app ecosystem. read our blogs or listen to the samsung developers podcast to learn what samsung developers have to say about the latest technology and trends. if you still can’t find the information you’re looking for, contact us by submitting a request to the developer support team. in-app purchase and samsung galaxy sdks with samsung in-app purchase (iap), galaxy store can provide you a new revenue stream and opens the opportunity to diversify your sales. iap is samsung’s payment service that makes it possible to sell items, such as virtual goods or subscriptions, in your applications. samsung provides examples, beta testing, and technical support to help with the integration of the sdk and server apis, reducing time-to-market. samsung also provides a collection of sdks, services, and tools to help you create and develop your apps for galaxy devices. access to galaxy devices if you don’t own a galaxy device, use the remote test lab service to test your applications on a real device. these are actual devices that you access through the web. save on hardware costs and test the compatibility of your app on multiple devices. performance, metrics, and user attribution galaxy store statistics (gss) is a free and exclusive tool that can be used to track and monitor galaxy store app performance and metrics like downloads, conversion, subscription, top seo keywords, attribution channels, and galaxy store badge linking. gss also provides user acquisition reports that measure user attribution and breaks down the numbers by channel, source, keywords, and featured placement (attribution from galaxy store banners or icons). track app performance using galaxy store statistics additionally, galaxy store is integrated with several third-party attribution platforms. app publishers have used platforms such as adjust, appsflyer, branch, kochava, and singular for side-by-side conversion measurement. galaxy games galaxy store has its own merchandising and marketing opportunities for game developers. game developers who meet pre-requisites around quality, downloads, ratings, and reviews can be considered to be featured in galaxy store game collections, banners, marketing promotions, and campaigns. games are featured in the samsung app ecosystem. for example, pre-loaded on most galaxy devices, samsung game launcher is the high-engagement gaming experience where gamers discover new featured titles resulting in billions of page views. games are also featured in galaxy themes store, samsung pay, bixby, samsung daily, and in regional push notifications, creating a high-engagement premium marketing channel reaching the global galaxy user base. game launcher provides links to trending and popular games and exclusive offers for galaxy store users become one of our top sellers and you may qualify for the fast app review process, allowing you to publish your games in galaxy store in five minutes after submission. learn more about the advantages of selling your game in galaxy store and how to get started in galaxy store games. galaxy watch for tizen and themes have an idea for a watch face or theme for your galaxy device? use galaxy watch studio for tizen or galaxy themes studio to develop your designs without having to learn how to code. when you’re ready to start selling your designs, you can direct users to your seller brand page, which is a portfolio of all of your offerings. your loyal customers can check this page often to view your latest creations. your galaxy store seller brand page highlights the newest and most popular designs in your portfolio galaxy store also provides a channel where customers can purchase galaxy watch for tizen apps for a galaxy watch synced with a non-samsung device (the support available in each store channel may differ among countries and between paid apps and free apps). get started are you ready to include your app to be part of the billions of global downloads? get started in galaxy store now! would you like to learn more? contact us by submitting a developer support request at https://developer.samsung.com/support.

get started in galaxy store the following is a list of tasks (required, recommended, and optional), videos, and recommended reading to help you start selling your apps in galaxy store. a link to more detailed information is provided, when available. the icons represent the following: required task recommended task optional task video recommended reading prepare before you do anything, sign up for a samsung account. using your samsung account, you can register with samsung developers and seller portal and apply for commercial seller status. then, understand what you need to do if you are submitting your app to more than one app store, and review the online resources provided by galaxy gamedev. register with seller portal (downloadable pdf). seller portal is used to manage your applications that are distributed in galaxy store. if you want to sell your app in galaxy store, you must have a seller portal account. the seller portal user guide provides more information about seller portal registration. also, watch the video about how to create a seller portal account. apply for commercial seller status (downloadable pdf). in seller portal, you must apply for commercial seller status. the seller portal user guide provides more information about commercial seller status. review apk package naming and billing guidelines. when you are submitting a game or app to more than one app store, you need to keep track of the package name and/or version codes you use in your apk for each app store and, if you have in-app purchases, the billing solution used. add a galaxy store review link. get feedback from your customers by adding a link from your app to your app's review page in galaxy store. positive feedback can influence users to purchase your app. explore the samsung developers portal. samsung developers portal provides access to sdks, services, tools, and guides. you can also sign up for a newsletter that keeps you up-to-date with the latest blogs, news, and events. register using your samsung account. how to create a seller portal account. seller portal is used to manage your applications that are distributed in galaxy store. if you want to sell your app in galaxy store, you must have a seller portal account. explore the seller portal dashboard. check out the top level menus, learn some of the basic tasks, and discover where to find additional information and support for seller portal. learn about samsung seller portal. a basic overview of the major features in seller portal. learn about galaxy gamedev. review technical support options for game developers. monetize learn about requirements for in-app items and paid apps. integrate with samsung in-app purchase (iap) (downloadable pdf). if you are selling your app and/or in-app items, you must use samsung iap as your billing solution. samsung iap includes an sdk, guides, examples, and unity and unreal plugins. maximize your revenue with samsung in-app purchase. learn about the new features and improvements released in samsung in-app purchase (iap) 6.0. monetize your games with samsung in-app purchase. introduction to samsung iap plug-in functionality for unity and unreal game engines. learn more about samsung iap. review the online samsung iap documentation. make the most from your games. discover different ways to generate revenue in galaxy store. launch register your app and in-app items in seller portal, test your app, then launch your app in galaxy store. all apps must be reviewed and approved by samsung before they are distributed to galaxy store for sale. noteare you a developer of a popular game on galaxy smartphones? we can help you go live in five minutes in galaxy store. contact us to learn more about our fast app review process. register your app in seller portal (downloadable pdf, by app type: android, galaxy themes). how to register your app in seller portal, based on the app type. the seller portal user guide provides more information about app registration. pre-certify your app. if you are working with the samsung business development team, your new apps or major updates must be pre-certified. pre-certification helps to uncover issues before an app is submitted to galaxy store. if no issues are found, pre-certification can take around five days to complete. review the app distribution guide. ensure that your app meets samsung's requirements and standards of quality to pass publication review. set a publication date. determine when your app becomes available in galaxy store. your app can be published when it passes an initial review, on a set date, or you can manually control the release of your app. in seller portal, set the publication date in the publication tab using the start publication field. beta test your app. learn how to deploy your app for beta testing and receive valuable feedback from testers. test your in-app item transactions. test your samsung iap integration, such as in-app item offering, purchase, and payment functionality. available for closed beta testing only. get started in instant plays 2.0. bring users directly from an ad click into your game. using our mobile cloud gaming platform, your game becomes instantly available and accessible to all compatible samsung galaxy devices. publish in five minutes. contact us to find out if your games qualify for our fast app review process. review the seller portal user guide. review information about seller portal. use the galaxy store developer api. learn how to manage your apps and in-app items and view statistics about your apps programmatically. seller portal android app binary registration device resolution. lists the device resolutions most used by customers in galaxy store. this is a required field when you register your android app in seller portal. manage in-app items. read more about how to manage your in-app items in seller portal. test your app on a samsung device. test your app on the latest samsung galaxy devices using remote test lab. understand the review process. check out the steps samsung takes to review your app. level up after you app is published in galaxy store, learn more about tracking performance metrics, promoting your app, and tracking user data. engage on social media. promote your content and attract new customers using our social media kits, hashtags, and guidelines. create galaxy store badges. directly link users from your web site or social media channels to your app product detail page. generate badges from seller portal after the publication of your app. request promotion for your galaxy themes. promote your app and increase your downloads by being included in a collection in galaxy store. discover user attribution data. identify how a user finds your app's detail page in galaxy store using galaxy store statistics. integrate with third-party attribution platforms. track user data using third-party attribution platforms integrated with galaxy store. become familiar with galaxy store statistics. galaxy store statistics (gss) is a tool that is included with seller portal and allows you to see the performance metrics of all your apps. learn about the valuable data available to you in gss. u.s. partner onboarding guidelines the pdf content provided on this page was taken from the u.s. partner onboarding guidelines. for your convenience, the entire guideline is provided in a single downloadable pdf for each app type. you must log in or be logged in to your samsung account to download these pdfs. u.s. partner onboarding guideline (android) 407kb (pdf) u.s. partner onboarding guideline (galaxy themes) 3.8mb (pdf)

faq q01. why are my watch apps not available in the galaxy store for upgraded gear watches or new devices? you must specify in seller portal that your binary is compatible with all new devices (a watch with an upgraded os is considered a new device) and republish your app. after your updated app is published, it will be available to those new devices. on gear s3 and gear sport watches, the tizen os can be upgraded. gear s3 can be upgraded from tizen 2.3.2 to tizen 3.0 or 4.0. gear sport can be upgraded from tizen 3.0 to tizen 4.0. if you published your app before these upgrades were available, the option to include the upgraded watch as a compatible device was not available in seller portal. for example, if you published your app before tizen 4.0 was released, your selections for compatible gear sport watches in seller portal would have been for tizen 3.0 only. likewise, your selections for compatible gear s3 devices would have been for tizen 2.3.2 and 3.0. as a result, a customer who has upgraded their watch to tizen 4.0 will not be able to view your app in the galaxy store. in order to have your watch app recognized as compatible with an upgraded watch, you must update the compatible devices for the binary in seller portal. in general, if a new device is released or an existing device becomes upgradable to a new os after you have published your app and you want your app available on these devices, you must update your binary to be compatible with these devices and republish your app. to update the list of compatible devices for your binary file in seller portal: log in to seller portal and open your watch face app. click the binary tab. at the top of the binary section, in the middle is a box with selected device(s) and the total number of selected compatible devices. click on the number. in the detailed device settings window, select each device with which the binary is compatible. if your binary is compatible with all listed devices, click select all. click save. submit your app for validation and, after it has been successfully validated, republish it. q02. create product images for galaxy watch detail pages make your galaxy watch face or app stand out in the galaxy store. samsung recommends that you use portrait-orientation product images for your galaxy watch detail page. users can just tap on a portrait image to open it in full-screen mode, creating an optimal phone experience and allowing your app to stand out in the galaxy store. best practices use detailed, close-up images of the product. we suggest that you use just the product and logo (with minimal or no text) for a strong image that shows the quality of your workmanship. avoid using identical images for the icon, cover image, and screenshot. in this case, the detail page shows three duplicate images rather than three separate views of the product. screenshot resolution we suggest the following resolution guidelines for screenshots: cover image = 1024 x 500 pixels horizontal screenshots = 1500 x 750 pixels vertical screenshots = 550 x 1100 pixels galaxy store asset creator you can use the galaxy store asset creator to easily export the assets you need to publish your watch face to the galaxy store. to use this tool, you need: photoshop version 16.0 (cc 2015) or later a basic understanding of photoshop. download the galaxy store watch asset creator template to get started! lifestyle photo asset packs show off your watch face designs on an actual watch using our "smart" photoshop files. download lifestyle photo assets and save time! examples the following screenshot shows a galaxy watch detail page with three portrait screenshots that show detailed aspects of the galaxy watch face: the following screenshot shows a galaxy watch detail page with landscape screenshots that are cut off on the sides, making them less visually appealing in the galaxy store: q03. find, download, and export galaxy watch images use the lifestyle photo assets to show your watch face designs on an actual watch. or, use the galaxy store asset creator to easily export the assets you need to publish your watch face to the galaxy store. to use these tools, you need: photoshop version 16.0 (cc 2015) or later a basic understanding of photoshop. download lifestyle photo assets and save time! download the galaxy store watch asset creator template to get started! q04. develop galaxy watch faces with galaxy watch studio you can use galaxy watch studio (formerly galaxy watch designer) to design your galaxy watch faces. to download galaxy watch studio (gws), go to /galaxy-watch-tizen/studio/overview.html. to develop watch faces using gws, see the galaxy watch studio tutorial. q05. what is a distributor certificate and how is it used? the distributor certificate is used for signing and verifying your app. it identifies the distributor (for example, galaxy store) and grants privileges to that distributor. for testing purposes, it ensures that your signed application is installed on registered devices only. in order to test your app on a device, the device must be registered in your personal distributor certificate. then, you must build your app, which signs the app using your personal distributor certificate. to generate a personal distributor certificate and register a samsung device, using the galaxy watch studio (formerly galaxy watch designer), from the main menu bar, click project > distribute certificate. for more information, see get your certificates. using tizen studio, from the main menu bar, click tizen tools > certificate manager (the samsung certificate extension must be installed in order to properly generate a personal distributor certificate for your samsung device). for information about the samsung certificate extension, see installing certificate extension. for information about the certificate manager, see creating certificates and managing certificate profile. the personal distributor certificate is used for testing only. when you release your app for sale in the galaxy store, your personal distributor certificate is replaced by an official distributor certificate. if you upgrade a registered device (for example, you upgrade the tizen os), you may need to re-register the device in your personal distributor certificate. for example, if you upgrade your galaxy watch 3 or sport watch to tizen 4.0, you must re- register the device in your personal distributor certificate and rebuild your app before testing it on the device. you may encounter one of the following error messages if there is a problem with the distributor certificate: message message solution account in device profile mismatch with distributor certificate. the device has been upgraded and the duid (device unique identifier) has changed. re-register the device in your personal distributor certificate and rebuild your app. launching appmanagerappid has encountered a problem. the device is not found in your personal distributor certificate or your personal distributor certificate was not created properly. register the device in your personal distributor certificate or re-create your personal distributor certificate and rebuild your app. the application installation on the device has failed due to a signature error! (error code : -12) you used the tizen studio distributor certificate when building your app, not the distributor certificate generated by the samsung certificate extension. select or create a distributor certificate for your samsung device using the certificate manager and rebuild your app. for information about the samsung certificate extension, see installing certificate extension. for information about the certificate manager, see creating certificates and managing certificate profile. for more information about distributor certificates, see getting the certificates. q06. how to test galaxy watch app in different devices? you can register up to 50 devices to one samsung certificate. see creating certificates for more information. developer certificate is made of author certificate and distributor certificate. to change or add a new device to the certificate, you need to create a new distributor certificate again while keeping the same author certificate. for more information, see managing certificate profile. q07. what is the deeplink format to redirect users to download android app programmatically from inside galaxy watch app? linking to galaxy app store: use the format below to deeplink directly to an app’s detail page, where users can see app description, screen shots etc and then install it. to create a link, you need to know app’s fully qualified package name which is declared in android manifest file (for android app) or config.xml / tizen manifest file (for galaxy watch app). from a galaxy watch app to android app’s store detail page: samsungapps://productdetail/ example, samsungapps://productdetail/com.example.androidapp from a galaxy watch app to galaxy watch app’s store detail page: samsungapps://productdetail/ example, samsungapps://productdetail/cnam8ugvz8 from a web site: http://apps.samsung.com/gear/appdetail.as?appid= example, http://apps.samsung.com/gear/appdetail.as?appid=cnam8ugvz8 q08. how to update the tau library to the latest version? you can download the latest version of the tau library from downloading tau. q09. how to launch android app from a galaxy watch app programmatically? see remote app control. q10. when the time zone is changed, the value of the date object constructed in the callback keeps the time zone unchanged. for example: function test() { var now = new date(); console.log("hour:"+now.gethours()); // even when the time zone is changed, it remains unchanged } setinterval(function(){test();}, 1000); to solve the problem, please see retrieving date and time. q11. how to install my galaxy watch application to the device? see testing your app on galaxy watch if your device is galaxy watch s or older, there are 2 ways of transferring your application(.wgt) to galaxy watch device. first way is, create an android application -> copy your .wgt file to assets folder of the android application -> generate apk -> install this apk through galaxy watch manager to your galaxy watch device. second way is, go to command prompt -> go to the directory where the sdb.exe tool is located -> make sure your .wgt file is in this directory -> type command: sdb install .wgt. q12. how to create an integrated/linked application? the integrated and linked type are deprecated on any samsung watch running tizen 2.3.1 or higher (such as gear s2, gear s3, gear sport, and any galaxy watch) and are only supported on gear 2, gear s, or any samsung watch running tizen 2.2 or earlier. see the video how to create a basic integrated gear application. q13. does gear 2 support native applications development? no. it is available from the gear s2 based on the tizen 2.3.1. q14. i want to post notifications from my application to the galaxy watch device. do i need to create a tizen application for this purpose? no, it is not necessary to create a galaxy watch app to send notifications from your phone. every notification that the phone receives is automatically relayed to your galaxy watch device after you enable this functionality in samsung galaxy watch settings. q15. does remote test lab support galaxy watch application testing? yes, more information can be found at about remote test lab. q16. how do i specify meta data master_app_samsungapps_deeplink? see configuring galaxy watch application. q17. where can i find tutorials for galaxy watch application development on the wearable side? see creating your first app. q18. i have implemented tizen notification api in my app. why are notifications posted by my app not shown in the notification panel of my galaxy watch? notification settings of a galaxy watch can be managed from the galaxy wearable app on your phone. if your watch is paired to a phone, check the notification settings in the galaxy wearable app. for example, in the galaxy wearable app, you can enable or disable permission for your app to send notifications to your watch. also check if "show only when wearing" is enabled. if this setting is enabled, notifications won't appear unless you are wearing the watch. q19. can i launch the tizen emulator on a system that runs on an amd processor? no, hyper-v/whpx is not supported by amd processors. instead, deploy your project directly on your galaxy watch. q20. any tips and trick when connecting my galaxy watch to tizen studio? yes, consider the following: the pc and watch must be on the same network. developer options must be enabled on the watch. galaxy watch only supports one sdb connection at a time. the watch cannot connect to two different systems that are running tizen studio at the same time. see testing your app on galaxy watch for more information. q21. do i have to connect my galaxy watch to my pc when i deploy my app from tizen studio? yes, in order to deploy your app from tizen studio to your watch, your watch must be connected to your pc. you can connect your watch over wifi.

season 2, episode 8 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 guests aleksander tyszka, hyun kim, dan appelquist, aaron swift, roger kibbe, sooyeon kim, eric cloninger samsung developer conference after taking a year off due to the pandemic, we recently held our annual developer conference, sdc21. this year’s conference was a virtual conference, with insightful highlight sessions and in-depth tech talks. in this episode, i sit down with several samsung insiders, to recap the many highlights from this year’s show. we'll chat about one ui 4, the samsung incubation program, smartthings, bixby, our partnership with google and the new watch ecosystem, samsung internet and our new podcast platform. listen download this episode topics covered samsung incubation program one ui 4 samsung internet smartthings bixby developers watch ecosystem samsung podcast platform 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 00:01 hey, i'm tony morelan, and this is pow!, the samsung developers podcasts, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools. welcome to season two, episode eight. after taking a year off due to the pandemic, we recently held our annual developer conference sdc21. this year's conference was a virtual conference with insightful highlight sessions in in depth tech talks. in this episode, i sit down with several samsung insiders to recap some of the great moments from this year's show. we'll chat about one ui 4, the samsung incubation program, smartthings, the new watch ecosystem, samsung internet and a new podcast platform. enjoy. so at sdc21, one of the most interesting talk sessions that i watched was the kafir innovator session where they talked about the samsung incubation program. and joining me on the podcast is someone who works closely with that incubation program, alec tyszka, who's a manager technology strategy and partnerships at samsung. yeah, welcome to the podcast. hey, tony, how are you doing? well, let's start with what is the samsung incubation program? aleksander tyszka 01:20 sure. so samsung innovation program is an incubation program that we've launched already in europe a few years back, and that we've expanded this year in the us the program itself has two main goals is one we want our business unit. so you know, different groups at samsung that work on digital appliances, tvs, smartphones, wearables, we want to give them a way to do very sort of rapid prototyping to quickly develop new products and services. but very highly innovative ones things that weren't organically be created. if we just did our everyday work. the other one is to also be able to work with the labs that samsung have done work on, though, on long term projects, we want to have sort of all the brands that that leverage all the brands we have at samsung to create these, these this long-term vision that we have about what are the services that people are going to use? what are the products that people are going to need, and try to find a way to bring these products and services to life? tony morelan 02:22 yeah, so i saw, you know, in that session where they, you know, talked about that, that need to innovate in some of those technologies that came out of those partnerships, where you know, like the health sensors with wearables, z fold, things like that, it's pretty interesting to think that those technologies came out of those partnership collaborations. aleksander tyszka 02:41 yeah, i think when we start working with cutting edge technology, and you mentioned the z fold, especially some technologies i've been that have been developed internally at samsung, for flexible and foldable screens does are quite unique, right? there's only a handful of company that that make them in the world. and then if you talk of, of the scale, by which we work with these, we don't make five foldable phones, right, we make 10s of millions. so sure what when you work at this scale, with those sort of cutting-edge bleeding edge technology, it just takes a lot, a lot of efforts to bring them to life. and samsung alone can't really do it, we need to find partners, and we need to work with them. and those are typically startups and all that all sort of the people that work around startups, incubators, accelerators, venture capitalist industry experts, in we need to find the solutions to improve the product and bring these products to life. tony morelan 03:34 yeah, and i'm sure that, you know, having that collaboration with those, those innovators really help you like think ahead, thinking to the future, you know, where do you need to go? where do you need to focus your energy? so it's great that there is this program to allow samsung to work with these, these innovators. so tell me what are some of the details of the of the program. aleksander tyszka 03:54 so the program itself is a six-month long program, we get we'll provide some funding stun company, anywhere from 20 to 100k, depending on what the companies do, if it's hardware, a software, there's no string attached with this funding, we don't take any equity and like some of the big household names like y combinator is 500 startups. and then we provide a lot of mentoring, mostly technical mentoring from our engineers and our labs. sure. and the idea is just to help them build a prototype help them showcase a demo to our executive immediately after the program after six months, two years, two outcomes we're really looking for and then we'll qualify as successful outcomes is either investment or commercialization. meaning we'll work with the companies will leverage our solution to build a product. tony morelan 04:41 ah, that's great. so in the call for innovator session, what was the key highlight the key takeaway from that session? aleksander tyszka 04:47 sure. the key highlight for us is really that we need partners. we want to be part of the ecosystem and we want to give back that ecosystem. you know, startups are a major part of that ecosystem. they're very forward looking we want to, we want to leverage their ideas, and we want to contribute positively to them want to help them. and we want to be able to connect with the entire ecosystem behind the startups, the universities, the vcs, incubators, we want to work with all these people. that's the main takeaway is samsung wants to remain, you know, very innovative, but we want to do it tony morelan 05:22 with partners. you know, my takeaway from that session was hearing that success story fibricheck, where they created that on device, ecg sensing, that would help detect irregular and rapid heart rate using ai in our in our galaxy watch. and seeing that, you know, it wasn't just that we provided funding, but it was that collaboration where you know, where we helped build the medical grade application, we, you know, helped with the regulatory approval, but then also learning that that we helped with, you know, define what their business model was in their in their go to market strategy that was really neat to see that that success story that was shared. aleksander tyszka 06:02 yeah, i think for especially when companies in the health space, right, we did that, that's a pretty fragmented space, right? there's a lot of device manufacturers in many different countries that have their own sort of regulatory constraints. by working with these types of companies, we provide a very sort of great way, a great go to market strategy for them, it's sort of built in, it's like, here's our wearables, we sell, you know, 10s of millions of them every year. and they're very standard, they're easy to integrate, and well will support older go to market, going through retail stores, and those sort of things. i mean, it makes it easier for the company right to quickly grow their company. and for help, specifically, that fear check is such a great example of the sort of things we're trying to achieve, right. and there's a ton more we can do at that space, people are talking about noninvasive, continuous glucose monitoring, maybe hydration as well in the future, and we want to find a company building these features and try to work with them. tony morelan 07:01 yeah, and, you know, just at large, we've got this enormous ecosystem, you know, with our devices, you know, with galaxy store smartthings, bixby and there's just so many areas that we can be involved with. aleksander tyszka 07:11 yeah, the ecosystem we provide is it's huge. and it's sometimes it's hard for us to prioritize which companies we want to bring in into that ecosystem, right. but going through a program like samsung's incubation program, were able to quickly filter for the best partners and focus our efforts, our efforts, sorry, on the ones that were most contribute to that ecosystem. tony morelan 07:32 so it was great to hear you know, all about the samsung incubation program, what is the best way for people to connect with your team? aleksander tyszka 07:41 so we will have a website up and running pretty soon until then you can email us at info.jump@samsung.com. tony morelan 07:49 so there were a lot of great sessions at sdc21. what were some of the favorite sessions that you saw that developers should check out? aleksander tyszka 07:56 yeah, i think the first one i have in mind is the one on the foldable device, i have a full device myself, i really, really like it, i get a lot of comment when people see it. and then when they know and looking at stuff with it, there's basically different modes, right? you can you can use the front screen and use it like a regular device. but the second you fold it, like a 45-degree angle, you want the app to act differently with the application. so a good example of that is what if it became sort of like a gameboy where you have your screen on one on one ends? and bottom part of your controllers? yeah. and there's a lot more use case like that. what about video conferencing tool where you can see other people in the top screen in the bottom screen is a whiteboard where people can collaborate. so i think there's a lot of use cases that can develop. and we haven't even begun sort of scratching the surface of what can be devops. so i look forward to see more developers. think about that. start developing around that and see what they can come up with. tony morelan 08:49 excellent. that's great. hey, alec, i really appreciate you coming on the podcast today. it was it was wonderful to learn much more about what you guys are doing at the samsung incubation program. aleksander tyszka 08:58 oh, thank you very much for having me. tony was a pleasure. excellent. thanks. tony morelan 09:01 so one ui four was one of the biggest announcements we made at sdc. and i'm excited to have on the podcast, head of the core ux group for samsung mobile, he and kim. hyun kim 09:12 hi, i'm leon kim, and for inviting me. and it's very exciting to be joining podcast. tony morelan 09:19 so when you why is the user interface installed on samsung devices and was originally released back in 2019. for people who are listening to the podcast that might not be familiar with the details of one ui? can you give us a brief overview? hyun kim 09:32 oh, sure. one ui means entire software experience that galaxy devices are delivering to our users, meaning it actually includes productivity experience and watching videos and privacy experience, onboarding experience and all different services and apps and all that our customer can enjoy from galaxy devices. tony morelan 09:56 you gave a highlight session at sdc on the soon to be released one ui four that was really insightful. can you share some of the key takeaways from that session? hyun kim 10:06 sure. ever since we launched the one ui, we've been emphasized our users to be able to focus on what matters at each moment. so focus is one of the highlighted experience that we want to enhance, as well. and when you're a 4.0. on top of it, we also want to deliver the comfort experience as well. especially these days, pandemic gives our users screen for t, meaning the screen time is increasing. and the number of apps that people are juggling, and for period of time that they are looking at the screen is increasing. and then people are having eye fatigue. and we actually really need to deliver more comfortable experience for their eyes and for their peace of mind. so we took care of all those aspects when we design on ui four. so we took out visual lewis's as much as possible, we took out the number of colors, we took out the number of different font sizes, minimize the visual noises, so that user can focus on and consume the important content. and third test that they think it matters at the moment very comfortably. also, we allow extra diem feature, when user see the screen went dark, we want their eyes to be more comfortable. so we collaborate with google make the screen even darker than the darkest level right now. and we believe that would be more comfortable with those new features and new design. tony morelan 11:56 yeah, no, that's great. and i loved hearing about the natural interactions, these intuitive interactions that are being developed into one uio 4 talk about that. hyun kim 12:05 recently, people are juggling more number of apps, and they are facing the more number of features. and they're consuming more amount of content, meaning we need to provide very simple ui, ui needs to be higher level of intuitiveness. so we wanted to put more gesture on the content itself. so that user can feel they manipulate and control content itself without looking at ui component. so then, non-visual component should help users to feel the reaction when user touch the screen. so we put motions, visuals and physical feedback. harmonize together, so that when user touch the content and move the content and drag and drop the content, we want them to feel they are moving the real physical object to one place to another. tony morelan 13:08 yeah, and those vibrations, those are called haptics, correct haptics, hyun kim 13:11 right? every version of you on ui, we enhance the haptics and this year, the direction of enhancement of haptic feedback is not only just adding a right bit back in the right place, but also, we add the haptic feedback with motion and visuals together to create a feeling of natural interaction in the physical world. tony morelan 13:35 yeah, so i know that that that combination of sound animation and haptics will definitely provide for some very, very real-life device interactions. talk a bit about privacy, because i know that privacy was mentioned in your session, what are some of the improvements related around privacy? hyun kim 13:53 basically, what we believe is transparency is very important. so providing peace of mind, for our customer, about the privacy, the basically transparency is really important. the first one is we're showing all the apps list that are using user's personal data. so the user can see which apps are using which data and then user can easily access the individual apps permission, turning on and off. also, on offered right corner of the device. the screen is showing when camera or mic is on then icon is displayed, so that user can clearly recognize okay, camera is on mic is on. and if it's not fair, then you can feel safe. okay, nobody's listening or watching. tony morelan 14:47 yeah, that's, that's great. so coming from one ui three, what are some of the biggest improvements that we're now going to see in one ui for hyun kim 14:55 improvement wise as a new experience is self-expression, the more we research customers, the more we're sure that they're expressing themselves in many different ways and have any fun ways. and they want to express their emotions and thoughts, and creativities and their identities and themselves, as they are in many different places in our galaxy one ui for we want them to enjoy expressing themselves. for instance, we're launching a new tool for them to create a fun emoji pair animation for them to create their own content to express their emotions. but sometimes one emoji isn't just enough for them to express their rich emotions. people can choose two different images to put together and put animation to bring the combo to life. and then there are chosen to emoji can be animated and delivered to their friends and family via messenger. and it'll be very fun content, like exploding head. yeah, you can create your own content. there are many, many fun, any major that we're providing. also, there are presets. so we believe people will enjoy this in samsung keyboard when they communicate each other. and they will express their emotion in a very fun way. also, we enhance photo editor a lot so that people can express their thoughts and creativity when they picture and edit it and share. every year we've been enhancing photo editor video earlier about this year, we redesigned editors so that user can see this very seamless and easy, simple, intuitive editor ux. tony morelan 16:54 and i loved when you spoke about extracting wallpaper colors to be used throughout the ui experience. hyun kim 17:00 oh, yeah, that's, that's another very fun feature, except for expression isn't just about what you send out. self-expression is about your styles, you can style your phone, you can extract the color from your wallpaper, you also can pick your wallpaper from your gallery. so you can choose whatever your favorite pictures from your gallery and put your wallpaper. and then we're providing four different color palette that can apply to your one ui. and you can choose one of the four options, then your ui color will be changed and color schemes will be different or depending on what you're choosing. and this is a little different than other like theming services because when your eyes original usability and identity are still there. but the color keeping the readability usability, the only the color is going to be changing. yeah. and you can still enjoy the benefit of one ui with only the color that you choose from the wallpaper. tony morelan 18:12 yeah, in you get that single experience across all platforms, meaning you know all of your devices, whether it's your phone, your tablet, your watch galaxy book, tell me a little bit more about that cross-platform experience, hyun kim 18:24 we have been putting effort, the device eco system experience. this year, we launched the wherewith for when you watch and more than ever, we put the best seamless experience between galaxy book galaxy watch, and flip and folder and phone and tablet. and we also launched enhanced version of quick share. the experience for sending receiving files between devices, click share allows users to send and receive any type of files to your friends who has galaxy and to your devices and receive as well quickly if the devices are around you. tony morelan 19:14 yeah, that's great. so tell me when will when ui for be available on different devices. hyun kim 19:21 we're really excited to be releasing one ui four update before the end of the year. tony morelan 19:26 and to upgrade is it as simple as going into your menu settings, your software, update menu settings and just selecting the upgrade? hyun kim 19:35 yeah, you can update it go to settings and software update. tony morelan 19:39 excellent. so for developers that want to learn more about when ui for what is the best way, hyun kim 19:45 you can go to websites like www dot developer at samsung.com/one-ui tony morelan 19:56 what other sessions at sdc would you suggest that developers checkout? hyun kim 19:59 sure, there are many, many exciting helpful sessions. but one other person that i want to recommend is one of the highlights session for the title was what's new in foldable. and they're talking about multitasking capabilities and flex mode to help developers optimize their own apps and optimizing web pages supporting flex mode by using the web share device posture api. tony morelan 20:25 yeah, yeah. and there was also there was a tech talk session that i liked, called one ui designing a more intuitive, approachable experience that was by jung woo, you that was another great, great session. hyun kim 20:36 yeah, he's actually a member in my group. and he has been putting a huge amount of effort to prepare that session. and i know the content is very fun and exciting. tony morelan 20:48 well, thanks for joining me on the podcast. again. it was wonderful to chat with you and about the upcoming release of one ui for sure. thank hyun kim 20:55 you. thanks. thanks for having me here. tony morelan 20:58 all right. next on the podcast is someone very familiar with the show who i've had on the podcast several times. now, dan, apple quest from samsung internet. dan appelquist 21:06 hi, tony. it's great to be back on the podcast. tony morelan 21:10 excellent. so dan is the director of developer advocacy for samsung internet. we did an episode last year and actually did another episode earlier this year. so be sure to go check out those to learn a ton about samsung internet, and what dan's team's doing. but for those that might not be familiar with samsung internet, can you tell us what is samsung internet? dan appelquist 21:28 sure. i'm leading the developer advocacy group of samsung internet, our group is based in in the uk, actually. and we're kind of an international team. what is samsung internet? samsung internet is samsung's mobile browser for android phones. it's also available for any android phone, but it is shipped on samsung phones. it's the purple planet. you know, if you're if you're familiar with your normal samsung icon, set your one ui concept. that's us. that's the purple planet. we also just launched a version for galaxy watch, which is very cool. that's hot off the press news right now. so if you've got a one of the latest galaxy watches, you can also download samsung internet for galaxy watch. it's based on chromium, the chromium project, which is the same open source project that google chrome is based off of, a lot of other browsers are based on chromium. however, samsung is also a major contributor into the chromium project into the chromium open source projects. so we're not just taking the chromium browser and slapping our own ui on it that we're actually contributing in to chromium. and we do an awful lot to build our own features and technologies into samsung internet. so in, in particular, we focus on privacy. so we protect your privacy with features like safe browsing, our own in house smart anti tracking technology, and the ability to install third party blockers, ad blockers, tracking blockers, that kind of thing. so those are the kinds of things that we're doing to kind of protect people as they use the web. and that's an that's such a key important role that browsers have. we're also a great platform first progressive web apps. if you have attended any of our previous sessions at previous sdcs. you'll know that we're big fans of progressive web apps just briefly, a progressive web app is a web application that can be installed onto your device and looks to the user as if it is a native application. but it's actually running inside the browser. so good example is twitter has a progressive web app pwa. many other web sites and web properties have progressive web app versions of their other applications. and in fact, we just participated in a separate conference, which just ran recently in collaboration with microsoft and google, and that had a complete focus on pwa. s. and if you're interested in that, it's all streamable from pwa summit.org. tony morelan 24:06 awesome. so there were some great sessions at sec related to samsung at both when it came to foldables. and with extensions, can you tell me what were some of the highlights for you? sure. dan appelquist 24:16 so we're really, really excited to be able to speak at sdc this year about our work with foldables. so as far as foldables go, the exciting news that we're able to talk about is that we're launching an experimental api called the device posture api. it's being developed in the world wide web consortium in the w three c as a proposed web standard with intel and microsoft as partners. this api is launched behind a flag right now, tony morelan 24:47 what does that mean dan appelquist 24:48 behind a flag? it means you have to you have to activate it, in order to make it work. it's not going to work out of the box and that's because it is experimental. the reason it's like that is because we want people to experiment with this api. sure, it may change, right. and usually when api's are in this kind of place where are in a phase of their development where they might change their launched behind a flag, so that developers get a chance to play with it, play with it feedback into the process. and by the way, laura, for my team who gave the talk on device posture api at sdc is also the person participating in the standards committee, the w three c devices and sensors working group and contributing that into that work. all of that is happening on github. so there's absolutely an opportunity for developers to get engaged. and all of that information is in is in laura's talk as well. tony morelan 25:45 oh, yeah, that's great. yeah, i had laura on the podcast earlier this year that she would she was an excellent guest. dan appelquist 25:50 she's, she's great. she's really good. we've also been working with some partners to get their feedback and to get some early implementations out there so that we can get some experience with this. in particular, we're working with youtube. and we're working with a company called whereby, which is a video conferencing company based out of norway. okay. so these are good examples of where you might want to change the ui of your web application when the user folds the device. and that's basically the key element here that we're talking about. and that's also why when we're talking about this new api, we're talking about it in the context of responsive design. yeah, and that was a lot of the focus of laura's talk as well. responsive design, meaning that the application itself responds to changes in the screen size in the orientation, that kind of thing. so you are responding. and being i'm adapting the ui to the to the user's needs. tony morelan 26:52 yeah. and i love the interactive code lab, the laura had been involved with there. dan appelquist 26:58 that's right. and, and that, again, can allow you to kind of sink your teeth into this api, and, you know, with code examples, and, and real tutorial about how to get up and running with this. so yeah, so again, very excited to be able to do this in the virtual sdc. environment. tony morelan 27:20 yeah. excellent. so next, let's talk about the extensions, the session that that was that was given, right. tell me about that. so dan appelquist 27:27 yeah, my colleague cyclon gave a talk on the current state of our extensions api. so we launched a third-party extensions api this year. and we opened that up to a wider developer community. by the way, we're on one of very few mobile browsers that actually allow third party extensions. and we also have within the browser itself, you can go to the extensions menu, and you can find a list of the of the kinds of approved extensions that we have excellent. but those are also they're downloadable from the galaxy store. but once installed, they become part of the browser, right? so the extensions add new features to the browser. right. so just to highlight two of the extensions that are currently available for installation, we have the translator extension, which allows you to translate web pages from one language to another that's actually developed in house really, yeah, very, very cool, very cool stuff. and we recently launched an extension from the web monetization company coil. that is, that's a technology that can make anonymous micro transactions micro payments to websites that you browse from a cryptocurrency wallet. and this is, this is a kind of approach that is seen by some people as a replacement for pervasive tracking networks that currently power advertising on the web. one way of moving beyond that is to pay websites directly for the time that you spend on them. so this is a really interesting idea. we've been tracking this for a while and talking to people at coyle, who are also participants in w three, c, and a lot of the other kind of developer activities that were that we're involved in as well. so we're very excited to be able to launch this extension. it's their extension, but it's launched in the in the samsung browser, and you can install it and then you can start kind of paying websites through coil for the time that you spend on them. it only supports websites that that are subscribed to the coil system, right. so it's exactly yeah, it's early days on it, but it's something that's very exciting. tony morelan 29:34 yeah, yeah. interesting concept, sort of like the pay as you go. yeah, format. dan appelquist 29:38 yeah. yeah. you know, i don't work for coyle, right. but one of the things i think is interesting about it is that those transactions are anonymous. so it's very privacy preserving, and it fits together with our philosophy of trying to enhance and protect user privacy. tony morelan 29:53 yeah, no, i know. privacy is a big thing for you guys over samsung internet. yeah, definitely. so are there any other sessions at sdc21, that developers should be sure to check out. dan appelquist 30:03 well, i would suggest checking out the session called what's new and foldables. first of all, which is a kind of highlight session, give it gives a high-level overview and gives a lot of really good context about flex mode, what flex mode is, or what we're referring to as flex mode, which is, again, adapting the user experience of any application to the conditions of the folding device and how that's so important from a user experience standpoint. and my colleague dongbu actually gives a brief intro in that session to the device postures api, which leads into laura's longer, more detailed talk. got it, and he gives a demo a little demo of how that works as well, which is, which is very cool. tony morelan 30:49 yeah, i love learning about all the multitasking capabilities with foldables. that was that was great to hear. yeah. so if developers want to learn more about samsung internet, what is the best way? dan appelquist 31:00 well, you can visit our page on developer.samsung.com/internet. that's got links to our blog, and we blog on medium as well. but really, if you go to developer.samsung.com/internet you can find links there to all the places on the web where, we're present. you can also follow us at samsung internet on twitter. excellent, where you can always find out what we're doing. and you know, we try to keep that up to date with news about samsung internet, but also just the developer activities that we're participating in the standards activities that we're participating in. our team manages that twitter handle directly. so it's a direct line to our team and our dms are open. so if you do have questions about samsung internet, you can feel free to dm us. they're tony morelan 31:50 awesome. awesome. hey, dan, thanks very much for being on the podcast and giving us an insight into the highlights with samsung internet and sdc21. dan appelquist 31:59 thank you, tony. it's always a pleasure. awesome. thanks, tony morelan 32:01 dan. there were some great tech talks at sdc related to smart things and lots of great new innovations for shared. i'm excited to have aaron swift on the podcast director of customer and partner strategy at smart thanks. hey, aaron. aaron swift 32:16 hey, tony, how are you doing? tony morelan 32:18 doing just fine, lots of tech talks and even a highlight session for smart things. so let's start with the session smart things find from lost to found. what were some of the key points with this session. aaron swift 32:28 smartthings find launched last year as a service to enable customers to locate galaxy devices such as phones, watches earbuds, your s pen pro, like whatever you might leave on the bus or the train accidentally. it comprises more than 100 million find nodes. and over 230,000 devices are located every day. tony morelan 32:49 so a find no just to clarify, find note is that like another device that's this part of this network, aaron swift 32:55 yeah, like a phone or a tablet, a galaxy phone or a galaxy tablet, running the smartthings app with smartthings. fine. and as you saw, philip and moon did a great presentation. talking about other hardware oems can now integrate their products with smart things fine. so we have today our first smart tag device which you could attach to your keys that's available on the market now for everyone. but anyone who wants to can start building their own tag devices or integrating their hardware products into the final. tony morelan 33:29 yeah, i think that opening up the smartthings five network to the outside hardware oems is going to be huge and will absolutely expand the network tremendously. aaron swift 33:39 yeah. and they made a set of tools. there's this fine device sdk and the test suites. they make it really easy for any device manufacturer, whether it's ble, or ultra-wideband, to start integrating their devices. if you're using the nordic dialogue or nxp chipset. yeah, it's really easy to add the fine sdk into your device for certification. tony morelan 34:01 that's going to be that's going to be great. there was a session called smart things build and tell me what were some of the highlights for you in that session. aaron swift 34:09 that session was led by jenny brand. meyer and andy sayer are director of product management and director of engineering. okay, and they talked about extending our platform, which historically has been very end user focus, you are buying samsung tvs and appliances for your home. and now we're extending the platform for multifamily builders and apartment managers to put in the new apartment buildings. okay, there's a new toolset with that, that will allow an installer to go set up hundreds of apartments and hundreds of refrigerators and dishwashers and washing machines and apartments really tony morelan 34:46 quickly. so this is giving them the ability to sort of monitor the like what's happening with the with these devices. if there's you know, you've got some sort of fault that happens within the system, they can detect that. aaron swift 34:58 yeah, so property managers we'll be able to integrate your monitor their fleet of samsung appliances from their property management tool. are there any tony morelan 35:08 apis or sdks? related to this? aaron swift 35:12 yeah, so one of the cool things about this new offering is there's a dedicated set of tools and api and sdk set to make it easy for property management software companies, like in trata, to come integrate and provide fleet management for all of the appliances. tony morelan 35:28 the one thing that comes to mind, though, when you mentioned something about, you know, giving property managers, the ability to sort of monitor all these devices that are in these homes, comes down to privacy, what's in place related to privacy, when you're talking about something like this aaron swift 35:43 user privacy is front of mind to us, whether you are a home owner or a renter. and so what we've done is we put together a new set of permissions on the platform, so that property managers only have the minimum access to data coming off of the appliance is needed to troubleshoot for failures. got it. if there happens to be something wrong, the property managers will be able to pull some information off of the appliances to troubleshoot the air, but they cannot tell that you're getting your 11pm glass of milk before you go to bed. tony morelan 36:18 yeah, the last thing i need is my property manager knowing that i was in my freezer last night going for little ice cream bins. aaron swift 36:24 right, right. and so we've made sure that users are front of mind in this, that's, that's great, and that their privacy is protected. tony morelan 36:31 yeah, that's super important. there was also a session called smartthings edge. and i thought this was really interesting. this is where the execution is done locally without reliance on the cloud. tell me more about that session. aaron swift 36:44 in summer 2020, we announced major changes coming to our platform, this session ended up being such a long session with so many great speakers, because we are really excited to be talking about those changes. sure. a couple of my favorite ones are from zack and vlad talking about smart things edge before, when you use smart things. to turn on a light with a motion sensor, your motion sensor would detect motion in your home, it would send that motion event to your hub up to the cloud, the cloud would tell you to run that automation, send the event back down to the hub to tell the light ball to turn on. sure. and that happened quickly. but it's not quite as natural as still being able to go turn on the light or the local motion sensor in your home. yeah. so what smartthings edge does is it took the device events and the automation event and was able to start processing them locally. yeah. so now when you use that motion sensor to turn on a light motion is detected that goes to the hub, the automation is processed on the hub, and sent back over to the light to turn off without ever having to reach out to the cloud to confirm that event. tony morelan 37:56 like what would be a device where you needed like instant, instant, you know, reaction time between the hub and the and the device. aaron swift 38:05 so all zigbee and z wave and wi fi devices have the ability to run locally on the hub now with automations. okay, so one of the most natural feeling ones is that example i gave with the light you want light to turn on right away? yeah. similarly, if you want to be walking into a room and having the temperatures change, or having the vents open and close, the thermostat adjusts. those are great use cases for local automations as well. okay, what we're doing now is we're investing more features into the rules api to make more automations. run locally. got it. so over time, you'll see more and more complex automations be able to run locally on your hub tony morelan 38:43 for edge devices. is it a closed ecosystem? or is it can anyone build for edge? aaron swift 38:49 great question. so we've released a collection of edge devices on our smartthings developers github repository that anyone can reference. and then any hardware oem can add their fingerprint or their devices to that repository. anyone can build their own edge devices if they want to. tony morelan 39:10 wow, that's, that's, that's great. so i saw there was a highlight session building the future smart home today that talked about the new matter standard. can you tell me what was shared in that in that session? aaron swift 39:21 matter is the foundation for smart homes of the future? over 200 companies have come together to develop a standard that is going to be the basis for smart home devices to integrate in the future. tony morelan 39:34 would you say that like today the is the ecosystem? is it pretty fragmented? aaron swift 39:39 correct. there are all sorts of different smart home standards from all sorts of different companies out there, and each one operates just a little bit different from each other, which makes it hard for device manufacturers to integrate with each platform. mater is going to take that fragmentation and create a common application language and data model that will apply across all the data from smartphone platforms, regardless of tony morelan 40:02 yeah, i think that's going to be great, especially for consumers so that they don't have to like decide between which technologies they want to, to purchase that it's all going to kind of seamlessly work together. aaron swift 40:12 correct. and if you buy a light bulb with the with the matter logo on it, you will know that it'll work with smart things, or any other matters supported ecosystem. tony morelan 40:21 that's awesome. that is super, super great to hear. so you've talked a lot about all these different technologies related to smart things. what's the best way for developers to learn even more about smart things? aaron swift 40:34 the best place to go for more information is developer.samsung.com/smartthings from there you can learn more about building edge devices or cloud devices or stay tuned for future updates on our investment in matter you know all of the sdc sessions on smartthings were great are there any other sessions that you would recommend developers checkout. i'm personally a bit of a tv nerd. so i'm really excited for redefining the experience of watching tv. and what's new in samsung smart tv services. tony morelan 41:04 yeah, no, i know, a bunch of the people over the tv plus and it's a great group and doing a lot of amazing things over there. a lot of great content coming out. that's exciting. excellent. hey, aaron, i really appreciate you coming on the podcast. it was great chatting with you and learning a bit more about smart things and looking forward to chatting with you again in the in the near future. aaron swift 41:22 great. thanks, tony. tony morelan 41:26 so next, i'd like to welcome roger kibbe to the podcast senior developer evangelist for bixby samsung's intelligent assistant technology. welcome, roger. roger kibbe 41:35 well, thanks. you and i talked. gosh, was probably over a year ago. yeah, actually on the podcast. so i'm excited to be back and talk to you about what's new and what we just saw at sdc. yeah. tony morelan 41:47 so it was i think about a year and a half ago. safe to say that a lots happened since then. so tell me what is the latest with bixby developers? roger kibbe 41:55 yeah, so we just announced several things that sdc are highlighted some things that changed. first thing i want to talk about is some of the ways we've made it easier to develop for bixby and these weren't new announcements, but kind of highlighting some of the changes we've made over the past year or so. and so a lot of these are focusing on improving the developer experience, one of the things we did is we created a new training ui. so use the training ui to create natural language training. and one of the great challenges and voice experiences is to get your natural language training, working well. after all, it's the way users interact with all the business logic that you've written. so that's a great challenge. and so we built a new ui to make that more intuitive and hopefully easier and simpler to build great experiences. we also built something we call the component gallery. because bixby is on multimodal devices, there is a ui for bixby experience. and the component gallery is a wysiwyg component editor. so i'm writing some code for what we call bixby views, i can pop up the component gallery, configure something graphically, and it just dumps the code right in. so it just makes it easier. and then finally, we made it super simple to load a capsule directly from github. so we have a bunch of sample code on github. and now directly in the studio. you can load that sample code from github without having to go and clone it or download it and go through all the previous hassles he had to do. so just an example of some of the improvements we made to make it frankly, just easier if your day to day life as a developer developing something for bixby tony morelan 43:32 awesome. so let me ask on the end, that component gallery actually was watching one of the sdc sessions on that is pretty cool. so just to clarify, this is where like on the device when you give a voice prompt, and the device bixby reacts to that you can then have graphic images appearing on the device. is that correct? roger kibbe 43:50 yeah, yeah. so you can either when you're basically whenever bixby is communicating with the user, you can actually have a graphical ui on there that's complimentary. and it also could have things like buttons on it, or sliders or controls, because one of the things is all these samsung devices. so you know, the phone, the watch the television, the tv, all have a ui on there. so bixby is not just a voice experience, but it's really a multimodal experience. so you need to build graphical ui, we built a tool to make it pretty darn easy to do so. tony morelan 44:26 so i heard a bit about bixby on windows. tell me tell me about this new announcement. roger kibbe 44:30 yeah, so brand new. so bixby is available on the galaxy book notebooks. so there's the samsung's newest notebooks. so bixby is right there is a command key to launch bixby can turn on hi bixby so you can talk to your windows notebook. you can ask questions and you can have it control smartthings home automation, you can ask it to find files you can ask them to change windows settings. so right now, you know it's focused on a fairly narrow set of things. but i'm super excited about we have this brand-new device, a windows laptop, what can you do with a voice front end in front of that? and what are ways where we can make it simpler and easier for a user to use their laptop? by talking to it? to my mind? there's a lot to be discovered there. yeah, what we created is kind of step one in a journey toward, you know, making voice a modality that makes it easier for us to interact with our technology, which is what it's all about. yeah, exactly. tony morelan 45:31 and you had mentioned smart things. there was a session at sdc titled enabling intelligent voice control on your iot devices. and i know in that they talked about smart things and a lot about bixby tell me, what were some of the key takeaways for you from that session? roger kibbe 45:45 yeah. so we introduced something called the bixby home platform, and it's a way of interfacing what you've done a big sweet voice with some of the smart things capabilities. and the best way to explain it is for me to give some examples of what you can do. and so first example is i might say hi, bixby turn on the dining room lights. now if i'd set up dining room lights in smart things, boom, work great today. but if i hadn't set up something called dining room lights, today, bixby re prompt you? or say, i can't find dining room lights, that's not a really good user experience. sure. so what you can set up with the bixby home platform is a lot more smarter logics. so hi, bixby turn on the dining room lights, because we can say sorry, i can't find dining room lights, but you have kitchen lights, your bedroom lights, you have den lights? which one would you like to turn on? and so then you kind of the user asked for something that it didn't understand. but at a set of airing out? it's like, well, i know you wanted to turn a light on. yeah, here's the lights i can turn on. and so i kind of prompted the user to, you know, what's the right can you want, much like we would do, frankly, a natural conversation. tony morelan 47:00 exactly. if roger kibbe 47:01 you ask me something that i didn't understand, i'd probably go can you clarify that? right. yeah. and so and this is a little bit of adding that kind of logic there. so i think that's one great example of just a quote unquote, air becoming a success. sure. the other thing i want to highlight, and i think this is where it gets really interesting, and frankly, pretty sexy, to me, is where you're actually taking the voice input. and you're taking what the iot device, its state and what it's sensing and combining them for some intelligent response. okay, so let me let me give you an example. so i could say hi bixby, turn on my air purifier, yeah, buy an air purifier, boom, today would turn it on. all good. but now with the bixby home platform, i can set it up. so when i say hi bixby turn on the air purifier, instead of instantly turning on, i can go query the air purifier and say, hey, you know, what's, what's the air quality? okay, and if air quality was moderate, or acceptable, boom, i just turn it on. and the default fan speed, maybe medium is on. but let's say the air quality is poor. well, then when i query it back and says, oh, air quality is poor. now i can say, well, you want to turn it on. and the air quality is poor. i'll turn it on. but i'm actually going to turn on and turn the fan to high. so you're getting this this feedback loop? it's really, you're getting the user what they asked for, you're getting the state of an iot device. you're combining those together? yeah. and then the action is just smarter. to my mind, this is pretty, i say, sexy and exciting. because if you think about this, this is getting into much more intelligence. sure. the devices know, i know what you asked for, i know the state, i'm going to take the most intelligent action based upon those two inputs. and that's what bixby home platform is all about. it's really a development tool that lets you build experiences, like what i was just talking about. tony morelan 48:59 yeah, i absolutely love that. and i loved when he said in the session, that there's they're planning to open this up to partners and also to third party devices. yeah, reach is going to be huge. roger kibbe 49:10 absolutely. well, i mean, i think that's one of the big things with a smartthings ecosystem, right is it's not just for samsung devices, but it's for, you know, devices from dozens or hundreds of manufacturers. so if i can read some information on the device, i can get that information and i can do something very logical and just make things work more intelligently. isn't that what we all want from our technology? tony morelan 49:32 exactly, yeah. so on that note, you know, something i saw also very interesting in that session was the bixby home studio. i absolutely love the whole idea of, you know, with your mouse, you can just drag and drop it and build out, you know, these experiences, all without coding. yeah, that's on bixby home studio. so like that is roger kibbe 49:50 the tooling behind what the experiences that i just talked about, so that you could intuitively built out, i use that air purifier example. because actually, if you look at the session, they built out that exact experience. and i think except i encourage people to go take a look at that. because that is a really good way to kind of understand what i'm talking about, and hopefully get you excited about, huh, wow, there's something cool that i could build as an end user experience. tony morelan 50:22 yeah. and the demo they gave was pretty in depth. i mean, this is not just a you know, they didn't just skim over the, you know, the concept of bixby home studio, they actually went through and built it out. yes, it was pretty nice. so that was an awesome session. but i know there were a bunch of other sessions all kind of related to, you know, smart things in bixby. what were some of the other sessions that you would suggest developers to check out? roger kibbe 50:44 yeah, so i would definitely check out the two bixby sessions that we that we mentioned. and as you can see, a lot of the focus is on bixby and smart things. yeah. so if you're a bixby developer, i would suggest you check out some of the spark thing sessions and understand that, because i think a lot of the focus of what we're looking at is, hey, how do we get home controller devices to work super, super well with voice so that and that really is a dance between what bixby is doing and what smartthings is doing, and building that together. and that's what the bixby home studio is all about. so understand the two sides of the equation and then you'll understand and hopefully can build some really cool tony morelan 51:27 stuff. yeah, i love the collaboration that's happening between smartthings and bixby so if developers want to learn more about bixby what's the what's the best way? roger kibbe 51:37 i yeah, so first thing would be go to bixbydevelopers.com and that's a homepage for everything bixby that's download the studio, where we have our documentation, and just a bunch of information. the other thing is we have a pretty active youtube channel. so just look for bixby developers on youtube, youtube slash bixby developers, loads and then pretty much everything we do that's new, or we introduce a new youtube video, we would definitely post that to twitter. okay, so that's twitter. and that's bixby developers. and then i do a weekly like tech tip of the week, like a two-minute video tutorial, and that's posted to twitter as well or also facebook so you can find that on facebook. and then finally, i am the host of a podcast. yeah, i guess focuses on all things voice not just bixby it is called bixby developers chat. you can find it in your favorite podcast player or you should be able to ask your voice assistant hi bixby play bixby developers chat, podcast or another voice assistant and all of them should be able to play it. so that is another resource. tony morelan 52:45 that's awesome. and it's a great podcast i have listened to your to your work you do you do an excellent job from one podcaster to another. roger kibbe 52:52 well, thank you. that's the kind of compliment you'd like to hear because we all understand the challenges and what you need to do to make a great podcast tony morelan 53:01 guests and let me remind everyone go check out that episode. we did it was in the first season. with roger, you can learn a bunch more about bixby and how to get started creating voice assisted capsules. roger kibbe 53:11 well, thanks, tony. really appreciate it. and go check out those sdc videos to get a really more in depth understanding of the things we've talked about today. tony morelan 53:19 thanks, roger banks. one of the biggest announcements we made this past year is our latest watches now run on a new operating system called wear os powered by samsung. and joining me on the podcast today is su yong kim, one of the software engineers here at samsung that has worked closely on our new watch ecosystem. hey, sam. thanks for joining me on the podcast today. sooyeon kim 53:38 hi, tony. thanks for having me today. my name is yan qin and i'm a software engineer at samsung. i'm very excited today to briefly recap our sdc sessions on samsung galaxy watch and where it was powered by samsung, which we jointly built with google. tony morelan 53:55 yeah. so there were several sessions related to the new watch ecosystem in the unified platform. what would you say are the benefits of the new wear os powered by samsung? rooyen kim 54:04 so there are many, many benefits. but first, we have created a seamless and deeply connected experience across not only samsung galaxy devices, but also for wear smartwatches and android smartphones. with this new unified platform, we want to expand our ecosystem bring greater scale to our developer community, and at the same time, delight consumers with a variety of choices from watches to watch faces and apps. tony morelan 54:33 yeah, it's true. not only this, the developer community going to expand it but also the consumer reach is going to grow even wider. can you talk about the growth of the smartwatch market over the past several years? sooyeon kim 54:44 well, the smartwatch market is continuously growing. and in fact, according to counterpoint research shipments grew by 35% for the first quarter of 2021 compared to last year. and after samsung galaxy watch for launch before august, we once again recognize this explosive growth and will continue to work hard to meet the demands of this growing market. tony morelan 55:08 yeah, i agree as smartwatches get smarter than market demand is only going to increase. can you tell me what are some of the new and exciting apps available for the new wear os powered by samsung? sooyeon kim 55:19 so users can enjoy familiar samsung apps like samsung pay smartthings and bixby. but now google apps are also available like google maps, and youtube music. we are also partnering with a wide variety of partners and developers on apps that are available for download from the play store on your watch. on your phone. there is also a dedicated category for watch apps, so you can easily browse and download them directly to your watch. tony morelan 55:46 yeah, i love that youtube music is now available on galaxy watch for many people are buying the watch because they like to track workouts and have an active lifestyle and listening to music has always been a key component to working out. can you tell me how is the new samsung galaxy watch for taking advantage of the health and wellness market? sooyeon kim 56:03 so we want to help users keep track of their health status and fitness activities. so we brought groundbreaking health features and sophisticated sensors to our new samsung galaxy watch four. in selected markets. users can check body composition, blood pressure, electrocardiogram skeletal muscle mass based on the tablet grade water, fat percentage, and so on. tony morelan 56:26 yeah, it's absolutely amazing that with this little device on your wrist, you can now check things like skeletal muscle mass and fat percentage and can conduct an ekg test. can current android developers build watch apps for the new wireless powered by samsung and publish just as they've done before. sooyeon kim 56:41 so we aim to make every step of watch app development from ease of bill to market launch as simple as possible with this new unified platform. so yes, android developers, you can continue to build your apps within this familiar environment. using android studio with watch emulators and existing and new wear os specific api's. developers can also deploy and increase exposure for their apps with the watch apps category on the google play store. tony morelan 57:11 yeah, so my background is in graphic design. and for me, my biggest question was, were we going to build a new tool that would allow designers to create watch faces for the new unified platform? and when they learned the answer was yes, i was really excited. so what are some of the new exciting features with the new west powered by samsung watch base design tool, watch face studio, sooyeon kim 57:31 anyone can download, design and publish watch faces for whereas on the play store, you don't have to learn how to code and just need to explore the new design tool watch face studio. for more details. there is a separate tech talk session on this. tony morelan 57:45 yeah, so that session was called introducing the new watch face studio, it was a great overview of the new tool that showed just how easy it is for someone to create a watch face without any coding. what are some of the other sessions from sdc21 that watch face developers should check out? sooyeon kim 57:59 oh, first there is the highlight session watch ecosystem or new era where we cover the new samsung galaxy watch ecosystem at a high level. then there are tick tock sessions, build your app. and the new watch ecosystem is where we specifically talk about watch app development and run through a range of api's by inviting a special guest from google. and there is also a session on a new health platform that runs on where was powered by samsung. tony morelan 58:27 yeah, there were a lot of great sessions all related to wearables, and lots of new opportunities for developers. what is the best way for developers to learn more about the new watch ecosystem? sooyeon kim 58:36 for developers, i encourage visiting the samsung developers and the android developer sites, you can go to developer.samsung.com/galaxy-watch and also developer.android.com/where i really appreciate you coming on to the podcast today and giving your insight in to the new watch ecosystem super exciting times thanks tony thanks for inviting me so. tony morelan 58:51 i'd like to welcome back to the podcast, eric clung injure, who leads developer relations at samsung. eric and i did a pre sdc podcast where we gave a little preview on what to expect it sdc21, and highlights from some of our past developer conferences. if you haven't checked out that episode yet, be sure to go back in and give it a listen. eric, welcome back to the podcast. eric cloninger 59:22 hey, tony, that was a lot of fun. you know, we've been doing conferences for years. and even though sdc21 was a virtual conference, it was a lot of work and a lot of work by a lot of people at samsung, yourself included. and you know, i'd like to really give a shout out to everybody who put in a lot of effort a lot of late nights and all on it. so i hope that the people who listened to the keynote and the spotlight session and all the technical sessions got something out of it. yeah. and hopefully next year, we can do this live. yeah, tony morelan 59:54 no, i'm looking forward to that. but yes, it was. it was a great virtual conference. so i've asked eric to join me on this episode to chat about the sdc session that i gave called grow your podcast audience with samsung. eric cloninger 1:00:06 earlier this year, samsung made it really easy for device users to listen to podcasts. can you share? what is the new podcast platform? tony morelan 1:00:14 yeah, so the new podcast platform, it's super easy to access from your device on the home screen, all you do is swipe left, which is our minus one screen. that is samsung free, which is basically free entertainment from samsung all in one place. there's four tabs there. so there's the watch tab, which is if you wanted to stream tv, there's the read tab, if you want it to read news, there's the play tab, which is playing games. and then of course, there is the listen tab, which is all about listening to podcasts. eric cloninger 1:00:47 so who can access all of that content with samsung free? yeah, so tony morelan 1:00:50 samsung free is available on all of our latest devices. so this is basically the note devices and s series going all the way back to s nine plus all the versions of z fold in z flip. right now samsung free is only available in the us but we are expanding to europe soon. i've been told that by the end of the year, we will be hitting some european countries. eric cloninger 1:01:12 that's great. so why did we launch a new podcast service? tony morelan 1:01:15 samsung's podcast strategy is to make it easy for the millions of samsung device users to listen to their favorite podcast shows and discover new episodes quickly and easily. and also it gives publishers an impactful way to reach new listeners and really expand their audience. eric cloninger 1:01:31 so how do those publishers bring their shows to samsung. so grab tony morelan 1:01:34 your url from your podcast rss feed, and you can find that from your podcast hosting provider, take that rss feed in go to samsung podcast.com. sign up for a free samsung account. and all you do is fill out a short form that allows you to import your rss feed url. typically, it takes less than five minutes for you to fill out that form. and that quickly, your show is now available on all of the samsung free devices. eric cloninger 1:02:00 so what samsung free and the podcast platform doing to help publishers get their shows discovered. tony morelan 1:02:05 so our editorial team is always looking for new and exciting shows to promote. every week, we feature about seven new shows on our homepage. and these promotional features have been extremely valuable for publishers. in fact, there was one publisher in mind recently, marty ray project chats he saw a 2,000% increase in downloads just after being featured on our homepage. so that was really great to see the value in that promotion for him. eric cloninger 1:02:29 yeah, that's incredible numbers there. so you're the host of our podcast, the samsung developer podcast. is that how you got involved with the podcast platform team? tony morelan 1:02:39 exactly. they reached out to me when they were first building the service and eventually asked if i would help promote it. i said, absolutely. that's when they asked me to present an sdc. so you can check out my session and learn much more about the new podcast platform. eric cloninger 1:02:53 right. so the sdc content that is on the website is available for anyone to see at any time. so are there any other sessions on the sdc21 website that potential podcasters and developers should check out? tony morelan 1:03:10 yeah, well, i would say what really got me excited was seeing all of the game focus sessions that we had up there. so there's one session called galaxy store games focused developer friendly. that was a great session on all the new game focused improvements for both gamers and developers. and there was another session called games for everyone that samsung instant plays. it's another great session for game developers to learn how to bring their html5 games directly to galaxy store, making it easy for users to play games without having to download and install anything. eric cloninger 1:03:42 that is an exciting new way for people who are interested in playing casual games to get into something new without having to download hundreds of megabytes of content. so i think that's going to be a game changer for all of us. yeah, definitely. so tony, thank you for giving us some insight on the new podcast platform. and also for sitting down with different people associated with sdc21. it was a fantastic virtual conference. and it was great to hear about the sessions on one ui, the incubation program smart things in bixby tony morelan 1:04:11 yeah. and i also like the interviews that we did on our new watch ecosystem, you know, chatting with dan again on samsung internet. that was great. and, of course, our new podcast platform. i'd like to thank all of my guests today and to you, eric for taking a moment to chat about sdc21. eric cloninger 1:04:27 thank you very much, tony. closing 1:04:30 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 developer.samsung.com today and start your journey with samsung. tony morelan 1:04:46 the pow! podcast is brought to you by samsung developers and produced us by tony morelan

tech sessions dive into the future of connected customer experiences through tech sessions by developers offering further insight into the innovations introduced in the keynote filter filter filter all reset apply there are no results. sessions contents & service, open innovation 8k visual quality and ecosystem in this session, we will present how the genuine 8k contents correctly displayed on 8k display devices could deliver our customers an immersive picture quality experience. we will start with a summary of the previous studies about user perceptions regarding the 8k visual quality. we then will explain why the full-frequency 8k contents are superior to the lower resolution in producing fine details on the image. we will also discuss some technical challenges we face toward adopting and utilizing 8k contents in a real-world environment and describe how we can overcome these hurdles. specifically, we will discuss technologies such as super-resolution and new image sensors to overcome the full-frequency barrier of 8k content. last, we will introduce the 8k association (8ka), a non-profit organization composed of key technology companies in the consumer and professional 8k ecosystem, and briefly mention 8ka's ongoing effects on the research, standardization, and promotion of 8k visual quality. sessions contents & service, developer program, mobile add samsung pay as your payment method in this session, we will share learnings from our experience developing the samsung pay mobile payment service, revealing insights that can be applied to your own platforms. we will also take a look at the samsung pay development kit and how you can use this for your own service. sessions game, ar, mobile ar emoji: your avatar, your experience the ar emoji feature on samsung devices enables users to create a 3d avatar model that can be used in other applications. similar to avatars currently available in games or in the metaverse, our ar emojis are a chance for users to express themselves, their style and their personality, digitally. but this is only the beginning. in this session, we’ll explore the future of ar emojis and how the ar emoji sdk is opening more opportunities for developers to collaborate with samsung to bring to life new services featuring these avatars and optimize them for the metaverse though our collaboration with unity. sessions ai, iot, smart appliances bixby 2022 what’s new what’s new with bixby in 2022? in this session, you will hear about some of the exciting improvements to the nlu and on-device bixby as well as updates to the bixby developer studio, which introduces a brand new javascript runtime that provides a modern, secure, high-performance environment. we will also take a closer look at the brand new bixby home studio, which allows smart device developers to customize and optimize voice control of smart devices, including allowing a single command to intelligently control multiple smart home devices. sessions contents & service, game creating spectacular galaxy game audio experiences with dolby atmos galaxy smartphones and tablets can produce spectacular game audio with dolby atmos. discover how you can create deeper emotional connections with players, keep them playing for longer, and earn their loyalty by unleashing the full power of samsung galaxy mobile game audio. in this session you will hear from dolby’s partner audiokinetic who will discuss how developers can make dolby atmos games, including a walkthrough of how to use dolby atmos plug-ins in audiokinetic's wwise audio middleware. moong labs – creators of epic cricket one, of india's most popular sports games – will also share how dolby atmos benefitted their game and you will find out how dolby supports game developers and other activities on our website. sessions health, wearable expand health experiences with galaxy watch the galaxy watch’s powerful bioactive sensor, together with the wear os powered by samsung, is transforming mobile health experiences. and now, this technology is even more powerful thanks to the samsung privileged health sdk. find out how the samsung privileged health sdk is allowing developers to retrieve raw or analyzed sensor data for their applications, including bia, ecg, blood oxygen level or sweat loss, and help users’ to accurately monitor their health stats. sessions web flexible and private web experience on samsung internet in this session, you will learn how to enhance and optimize your web experience for foldable devices using device posture api and viewport segment media query. we'll also take a closer look at how samsung internet protects users’ privacy online. sessions mobile, enterprise, developer program google and samsung strengthen enterprise ecosystem together samsung’s global mobile b2b team is working closely with the android enterprise team to build a galaxy ecosystem of partners who are bringing innovation into workplaces. discover how partner solutions create unique experiences on samsung devices and how we plan to work together to help future partners step into the samsung android ecosystem for enterprises and smbs. sessions contents & service, developer program, enterprise hdr10+/salt and automatic hdr video creations for productions hdr10+ is an essential technology for premium hdr viewing experience and it is widely reach to consumer displays including mobile devices. in order to provide hdr content services, it requires changing service provider's infra structure or workflows and video processing technology from sdr to hdr with a lot of engineering efforts. then, hdr10+/salt solutions and partnership program from samsung is designed to build an extremely cost effective automatic solution up for content creators, post production houses and ott service providers even including game developers. the solution package is designed with various standalone applications, reference apps, sdks on various oses and partnership programs to help 3rd parties for creation of hdr contents. hdr10+/salt partnership program provides full compatibility to hdr10+ llc certification program and major studios, ott service providers and tool makers are already partners of the program and samsung provides them the best hdr content quality. sessions developer program, open innovation, health healthcare research hub our open source project provides end-to-end solutions such as sdk, platform, and portal for various use cases from medical research studies to clinician services using wearable devices. medical research does not have to stay complicated. anyone can easily build and customize their own research studies or clinician services using this open source. recently, as the accuracy of sensors installed on wearable devices has improved, interest in healthcare research using wearable health data is increasing. however, it takes a lot of time for researchers to develop research applications and server infrastructure for storing and analyzing data from scratch. sr is developing android sdk and data platform solutions that support healthcare research using health data from our wearable devices (watch 4 and later versions) and provide them as open source in order to solve the pain points of these researchers and establish a digital health care research ecosystem centered on our wearable devices. sessions iot, monetization, smart appliances home connectivity alliance introduction of home connectivity alliance and how appliance manufactures can enable interoperability across brands. hear how hca interoperability can benefit consumers and partners including b2b (home builders, mfu, etc). join the hca and become a leader in innovation within the connected iot ecosystem. sessions ai, ar immersive audio we will demonstrate an audio system with dramatically improved immersive 3d audio experience. hardware will be similar to samsung’s critically acclaimed hw-q990b soundbar, but will include several new technologies that will be found in future samsung products. these technologies automatically correct for room acoustics and the location of the listeners and loudspeakers. visitors will compare the sound of the system before and after the system’s unique automated calibration process. listeners will enjoy improved spatial and timbral performance in stereo, surround and immersive audio formats with both music and cinematic content. sessions security & privacy introducing blockchain wallet with knox vault in this session, we introduce blockchain wallet for samsung smart tv. blockchain wallet allows our smart tv users to manage their blockchain accounts and transfer their cryptocurrency to another blockchain account. it ensures to retain a key for blockchain transactions in a secure way. dapp developers can build their tv dapp with blockchain wallet for blockchain functions such as blockchain connection and transaction signing. knox vault is an enhanced hardware-based security solution to protect sensitive data such as cryptographic keys, passwords and personal data. knox vault provides strong security guarantees against hardware attacks such as physical attack, side-channel attack and fault attack. as a core component of the knox security platform, knox vault is an isolated, tamper-proof, secure subsystem with its own secure processor and memory. sessions developer program, enterprise, android introducing samsung galaxy camera ecosystem discover how advanced camera technologies, based on samsung’s leading hardware and software, can enable developers to create more powerful camera experiences for their users. we will take a look at some of the incredible partnerships samsung has already formed with numerous app developers and reveal how these collaborations enriched users’ camera experiences. sessions mobile, android, productivity intuitive multitasking experience based upon android 12l join us to see how samsung continues to enhance the large screen user experience further with fast app switching and intuitive multitasking capabilities. to maximize the galaxy foldable experience, we're expanding flex mode even further with more apps and partners as well as google's ongoing collaborative effort in android 12l. sessions iot, mobile, uwb joint efforts on standardization toward open ecosystem of uwb services the presentation will introduce samsung's joint efforts with industry partners on the uwb tech/service standardization, which is essential for creating an interoperable open ecosystem of uwb products and services. especially, it will introduce activities at fira consortium, which was established by samsung jointly with industry leaders to provide interoperability specifications as well as certification programs. it may also include target uwb services and relevant standardization status & plan. sessions ar, game, tizen journey to immersive interactive exp in big screen with xr and avatar fw xr framework webapis enable developers to build xr applications on the tizen platform. we will go over features of the webapis, share some demos, and provide information on how to get started. additionally we will show you a sample code of how to capture and handle user's gestures and full body movement. avatar framework for tizen is a unified solution providing high level apis that allow samsung developers to easily include the 3d avatar models and features in their samsung tv applications. we will go over all the cool features and options of our framework in this video. sessions connectivity, android, mobile le audio: the future of wireless sound introducing le audio: a new standard for bluetooth technology on galaxy devices. le audio will enhance the performance of classic bluetooth audio and introduce isochronous communication, creating whole new wireless audio experience on galaxy devices. in this session, we will introduce the technical features of le audio, what it means for the galaxy ux and how you could enhance wireless audio experience of your app with le audio. sessions design, ui/ux one ui design principles in partnership one ui creates a unified experience across our galaxy devices, from phones and tablets to watches and galaxy books. in creating and refining one ui, we've followed four key principles: simplicity, effortlessness, consistency, and authenticity. with one ui, we've also made a commitment to openness, which means some of the best things in one ui come from partnerships. in this session, we'll talk about some of those partnerships and how we aligned them with our four design principles to get great results. sessions ui/ux, design, android one ui: customer centric design one ui starts with a true understanding what our customers want. hear more about what samsung have learned from listening to extensive customer feedback and usage data, and how we have adapted our designs in response. we'll take a look at some real-life examples of how the ux design of the calendar, settings and samsung health app has evolved over time to better meet customer needs. sessions enterprise, data, security & privacy our journey to responsibly handling data at samsung, we place personal data protection as one of our top priorities. learn how we responsibly handle personal data in our applications and platforms. we'll share with you our journey in protecting personal data. we'll talk about what it means to responsibly govern and access data in samsung's enterprise environment. we'll cover specifics on how to classify & protect data as a whole. pick up insights on privacy technologies and design patterns we apply in our data intensive applications today. sessions developer program, tizen, ui/ux prism: the new ux development tool and process in today’s environment of rapid and unpredictable transformation, establishing a creative and increasingly collaborative tech culture is one of the most challenging requirements. in this session, we would like to introduce a new method to revolutionize the tizen platform-based app development process. a new development process named prism automates most of the inefficient overheads from design to implementation of app ui, innovatively improving app development productivity. we will introduce prism-based development process and deliver this innovative app development culture to developers through the sessions. sessions developer program, smart appliances, tizen remote test lab: what’s new in tv development environment the current tizen tv development environment, represented by emulator and tv, is a very limited support method for developers. depending on the version of emulator, the latest features currently supported by the tv may not be available, and various models of physical tvs may be required to verify actual operation. rtl tv tries to overcome the limitations of the current development environment. sessions contents & service, monetization, data samsung tv plus: the advanced ad-tech and partnerships that fund free tv samsung’s free ad-supported tv (fast) service “tv plus” has been a breakout success. although it looks and feels like traditional tv, it is anything but! behind the scenes of this slick tv & mobile experience is high-performance technology, vast amounts of data & algorithms, and a thriving partner ecosystem. join this session to learn more about the mind-boggling world of advertising technology, how it works, and how multiple companies come together to provide free tv to millions of consumers worldwide. sessions android, contents & service samsung wallet, it's convenient, personal and safe as the growth of digital wallets skyrockets, samsung recently announced samsung wallet – a new platform bringing almost all of the cards you’d typically find in a physical wallet, as well as important documents, into one easy-to-use and secure mobile application. as samsung wallet rapidly expands its content set, find out more about the future of digital wallets and how open api’s can allow developers to build integrations for this service. sessions iot, security & privacy smartthings edge: the next level experience discover how samsung is transitioning the smartthings-published groovy dths to edge drivers while maintaining a seamless experience for our users. we’ll walk through the process of onboarding edge-based devices and how to set up an automation with an edge device that runs locally. sessions iot, monetization, smart appliances smartthings energy service introduction of smartthings energy service and how partners (energy companies, smart device mfgs, etc) can integrate to provide a seamless energy management service for their consumers leveraging samsung's smartthings energy ecosystem. sessions iot, contents & service, open innovation smartthings find: find alongside 200+ million users smartthings find is samsung’s fastest growing service, powered by more than 200 million galaxy users. discover some of the new features and functions added over the past year and learn how partners can leverage the service to innovate their own solutions to meet the needs of businesses and consumers alike. sessions iot, contents & service, open innovation smartthings platform enhancements for openness and interoperability the smartthings platform continues to evolve to promote openness and interoperability. in this session, we will share some exciting new updates to the smartthings platform to support matter and thread, and discuss the home connectivity alliance. sessions health, tizen telehealth in samsung devices samsung display device (smart tvs & smart monitors) users will be able to launch telemedicine service within the samsung products. once you pick your physician, you can use one of the approved usb cameras to connect to the tv and jump on a video call with a physician via external service provider's built-in web applications. after a few account setup process on mobile / pc, you can easily start your session any time on tv without any additional complicated inputs. at your session, you can also receive a prescription to be filled in at a mail-in online pharmacy (pc or mobile) to receive prescription drugs at your doorstep. sessions open innovation, enterprise, productivity the next generation samsung retail solutions in a mobile-first world, device convergence, simplification, ergonomically designed accessories, sw solutions and the connected galaxy ecosystem are helping to boost productivity and efficiency in the retail industry. in this session, we will explore how the next generation of retail solutions are shaping the industry’s future and will take a closer look at samsung’s three major retail solutions - data capturing, payment, and push-to-talk. sessions developer program, mobile, android the samsung knox partner program: partner success journey the samsung knox partner program (kpp) equips you with everything you need to build ideas and market your mobile solutions. in this session, we will take a look at some of our partners’ solutions and how collaborating with the samsung kpp has helped enhance their user experience. join us to see why kpp is causing a stir in the business developer community! sessions enterprise, tizen tizen everywhere this session highlighted samsung's direction and goals for the enterprise and b2b markets, focused on taking tizen to the next level on so many platforms. various enterpriser displays based on tizen and solutions suitable for business purposes will always be together. tizen enterprise platform will provide all the technology infrastructure you need, including the samsung developers portal for b2b for developer support and the samsung apps tv seller office for custom application support in your own business. after announcing "tizen open" at sdc in 2019, samsung established licensing system to provide tizen tv os to other tv makers. in order for partners to develop tizen tv products faster, samsung prepared reference tv solution. in europe, australia, türkiye, tizen tvs have been released sequentially through more than 10 tv brands since september 22. sessions wearable, design, android watch face studio's first journey and expectation for next a must-have to create beautiful watch faces! watch face studio (wfs) is now a little over a year old. hear the developers of wsh share the highs and lows of bringing the tool to life and meet the designers responsible for creating the eco watch face. this session is an insight into the year-long journey to create wfs – and the story of where we’re going next. sessions iot, tizen, ui/ux what's new in tizen? are you curious about the direction in which intelligent iot platform “tizen” is developing? this session introduces ui assistant technology and extended 3d ui framework for providing advanced user experience, and explains innovative technologies that make run the tizen platform on top of the android hardware abstraction layer to facilitate securing new hws. and introduce the iot standard 'matter', which will be newly supported on tizen. finally, we provide a guide and tip for cross platform application development. sessions ai, iot, smart appliances what’s new in bixby for smart home bixby brings the smart home experience to life with the power of voice. find out how our new tool, bixby home studio, will enable device manufacturers to build more intelligent, more engaging voice experiences for smartthings-connected devices. sessions mobile, design, ui/ux what’s new in one ui 5 one ui 5 pushes personalization and productivity to the next level. explore new features that enable you to build a galaxy experience that reflects your personal style and help you to get more done on all your devices, wherever or whenever you need to.

season 1, episode 14 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 product manager, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guests hyunah kwon, charlotte allen samsung electronics in the season one finale of pow, i interview charlotte allen and hyunah kwon. charlotte is the driving force behind samsung's annual best of galaxy store awards, and hyunah is the director of product for galaxy store. not only do we talk about the history of the awards, past highlights of previous awards, but we chat about exciting new changes to galaxy store, and our upcoming 2020 best of galaxy store awards show. more about the best of galaxy store awards celebrating the year’s top performing apps in creativity, quality, design, and innovation, the best of galaxy store awards are the ultimate achievement for samsung galaxy store sellers! join us on december 9th, 5:00pm pst, as we reveal and celebrate this years' winners! listen download this episode topics covered history of the best of galaxy store awards previous award winners galaxy store enhancements exclusive consumer benefits samsung rewards always-on points earning program pandemic impact galaxy store mobile gaming features growth and revenue galaxy store badges 2020 best of galaxy store awards show new award categories winner selections and promoting awards show trailer helpful links best of galaxy store awards - developer.samsung.com/best-of-galaxy-store galaxy store (consumers) - samsung.com/global/galaxy/apps/galaxy-store galaxy store (developers) - developer.samsung.com/galaxy-store galaxy store marketing resources - developer.samsung.com/galaxy-store/marketing-resources.html samsung rewards - samsung.com/us/rewards/gaming galaxy store badges - developer.samsung.com/galaxy-store/gsb-promotion galaxy store games (developers) - developer.samsung.com/galaxy-games samsung developer program homepage - developer.samsung.com samsung developer program newsletter - developer.samsung.com/newsletter samsung developer program blog - developer.samsung.com/blog samsung developer program news - developer.samsung.com/news samsung developer program facebook - facebook.com/samsungdev samsung developer program instagram - instagram.com/samsung_dev samsung developer program twitter - twitter.com/samsung_dev samsung developer program youtube - youtube.com/samsungdevelopers samsung developer program linkedin - linkedin.com/company/samsungdevelopers tony morelan linkedin - linkedin.com/in/tony-morelan charlotte allen linkedin - linkedin.com/in/allencharlotte hyunah kwon linkedin - linkedin.com/in/hyunahkwon 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! podcast 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 charlotte allen and hyunah kwon. charlotte is the driving force behind samsung's annual best of galaxy store awards. hyunah is the director of products for the galaxy store. not only do we talk about the history of the awards, past highlights of previous awards, but we chat about exciting new changes to the galaxy store, and our upcoming award show where we will celebrate the amazing apps that will win awards during the 2020 best of galaxy store award show. and what better way to celebrate our season finale of the power podcast. enjoy. hey, charlotte, nice to have you back on the podcast. charlotte allen 00:52 i know it's been a while. tony morelan 00:55 so for those that don't remember, or might have missed the episode, charlotte actually interviewed me at the beginning of the season so that our listeners could learn a little bit more about me, you know, find out who their host was. and a lot has happened since then. i think we've actually recorded about 12 episodes, but it has all been during this pandemic that we've been going through. so it's been a crazy year, needless to say, but the galaxy store has been going strong. this is the last episode, the season finale and what better way than to discuss the best of galaxy store awards for 2020. so i would love to talk a little bit about the history of the awards. charlotte has been working on this awards program since its inception. can you explain to the audience what are the best of galaxy store awards? charlotte allen 01:44 yeah, absolutely. the b best of galaxy store awards were created to recognize apps that have stood out amongst the crowd in the us galaxy store. we look for excellence in innovation, design, creativity, quality and performance. so i've been with samsung for several years now. and they know that we've been doing this award show during that time. but when did the awards first start, the program was launched in 2018. as a pilot, recognizing just five galaxy store publishers. our goal in creating the program was to acknowledge and celebrate the contributions of designers developers to samsung's ecosystem. tony morelan 02:23 this will be the third year then charlotte allen 02:27 right we are now in our third year, as you said, we increase the awards to five categories in over 20 winners. so we've come a long way in three short years, and we expect to continue to grow the best up galaxy store awards program in the future. so where were those previous award shows held. the inaugural best of galaxy store award ceremony in 2018, was held at the samsung developer conference at the moscone center in san francisco. last year's award ceremony was held at sdc 2019, at the san jose convention center. and we recognize 25 developers and designers from around the world. and 21 of those winners were in attendance, which was great to see. and he showed us how important this recognition is from samsung. tony morelan 03:14 yeah, i was actually the host of the award show last year in san jose. and that was my highlight was actually meeting these developers for the first time, you know, we've been communicating with them, you know, throughout the year, but to actually meet them face to face, and to see how rewarding it was for them to receive this award. that was definitely an amazing moment. charlotte allen 03:34 yeah, i agree. it was also, i think, rewarding and inspiring for us to see, you know, their excitement and just how much effort they put into getting their work. yeah, definitely. let's talk about some of these past recipients. but where's the best way for people to learn, like who won in 2018, who won in 2019. so we have a great list of winners now, having done this for two years and going into our third. so a list with our past winners can be found on samsung's developer program site on the best of galaxy store landing page, and it features over 30 step galaxy store award winners and that is tony morelan 04:12 developer.samsung.com. and if you go there, you can navigate over to the to the galaxy award page. yes, charlotte allen 04:19 yes, you can. tony morelan 04:21 so having done this now for several years, i'm sure you've got a highlight tell me you know if you have a special story about maybe a past winner, charlotte allen 04:28 yeah, there are several that come to mind. but one that i'll share is we awarded bergen for best new watch face designer, and his award was picked up by the uruguay embassy who tweeted a congratulations to bergen and i thought that was really amazing. tony morelan 04:44 that is and bergen is honestly an amazing designer ton of success. he was the designer when i was first looking into starting myself selling watch faces. i was seeing his work and i thought my god this guy is putting out you know; insanely creative watch faces. and my goal was to try and you know, do something at his level. i mean, he just amazing detail amazing depth, amazing features. so when i was starting out, he was the one that i looked up to trying to emulate, you know, his success. so great to see that he was awarded that year. charlotte allen 05:20 wow, pretty, pretty amazing. tony morelan 05:22 so who qualifies for you know, potentially winning a best of galaxy store award? charlotte allen 05:27 all galaxy store publishers qualify for bigger well-known brands to indie developers, designers, they all qualify. tony morelan 05:33 that's, that's, that's great. they'd love to see how open samsung is that? you know, it's not just a developer that is a big brand name. but you know, we'd like to recognize even the small person, the indie developer, who is absolutely, you know, maybe doesn't have all of that experience, but it's still putting out great content. so i thought it would be exciting if we actually brought somebody from the galaxy store team onto our podcast today. so i would like to welcome hyunah kwon hi, hyunah. hi, tony. hi, charlotte. thanks for inviting me. so you are director of product galaxy store and games? can you tell me how long have you been in that role? hyunah kwon 06:13 i've been in this role since this year to work for galaxy store and games. i've been in samsung for about 13 years, starting with my experience in mobile devices in different product management in this domain of mobile. and we're very excited to expand to service businesses in samsung, and i'm in charge of galaxy store app as well as gaming ecosystem tony morelan 06:42 in samsung. i had no idea you actually had been at samsung for that long. can you tell us what is new with the galaxy store? hyunah kwon 06:48 yes, this year has been a full of exciting news and updates and changes with the galaxy store, we just launched a new version introducing an enhanced game discovery experience. as you know, samsung has been fully committed to offer an excellent mobile gaming experience with our hardware. it could be like this stunning screen experiences long battery and very powerful performance on a mobile gaming. and now galaxy, gamers can actually visit the galaxy store to discover new games. and they can view these stunning videos to learn more about the new games, they can pre-register for the upcoming seasons of their favorite games, and so forth. for that we can also share more details. and we also had interesting gear for all types of apps and content. we've been seeing a growing consumption of digital contents in the context of endemic as you know. so on the other hand, some people say that they're having a digital fatigue, if you will, caused by these exceptional circumstances. so we worked on simplifying this experience and make the downloading experience really quick and easy for our consumers, helping users to find the content they need with the better fit recommendations, as well as our editors recommendations for them as well. and we also refreshed our design with a clean and harmonious look. for example, now you will see it very reduced banner sizes here and there, we ensure that pleasant browsing experience and downloading. and the best part is the exclusive benefits that our consumers love about galaxy store. so we offer new promotions events almost every week. for example, in the us market. remember, we integrated samsung rewards last year so that users could spam their points against their purchase in our store. earlier this year since july, we launched an always on points earning program. so now users can earn three points for every dollar spent with whether you purchase an app or a theme or enough items in your game app. so the more they enjoy galaxy store, and the more they can get rewarded. tony morelan 09:09 know that is specifically for us customers, correct? hyunah kwon 09:14 yes, so many other countries could have some different programs. but this is in the us. that sounds amazing. tony morelan 09:21 so i thought it was interesting. you said that because of the pandemic because of covid that you've actually seen an increase in people using their apps, and then they're starting to get the fatigue with it is that that's correct. hyunah kwon 09:33 yes. so the pandemic has been overwhelming for everyone, for sure. but it also was a great opportunity for some in many app developers. so we could see gaming industry, for example, has been really booming. utilizing this opportunity and media, the chance watching videos, or checking on news and healthcare app that user can you know, i actually spend a lot more time on the at home. so things like health care at home improvement apps has been actually pretty popular too. and overall, we had really great and busy year, we'll collaborate with our developers this year to help them really growing. tony morelan 10:18 yeah, that's, that's great to see that, you know, even though this is, you know, an unfortunate thing that our world is going through with a pandemic, that you found ways to help people out more, you know, considering that they are having to better devices and access this information. so you had mentioned also that you're involved with the gaming aspect of it. can you tell me, are there any new features for gamers? hyunah kwon 10:38 yes, so we have simply fire up in two parts. one is the gaming. another part is the access all the collection of the contents that we provide for galaxy users. so in that game tab, you will see an immersive the game discovery area. if you think about gaming in general has been developing, you now see a games that are very spectacular, they have a story in it, you can interact multiple players all together, you can create a history or you can, you know, be really in a deeper side of your action. all of that is pretty similar in movie industry, if you think about it. so when you watch a movie, you generally check a minute the trailer just to make sure you are watching a good movie, it's the same for games, we're providing our gamers the ability to discover what this game is about, and how they would play the download this game. another party's our game introduction page, what we call the detail page of the app has been recolored. refreshed, so that they can actually see some very valid information about the games, we are providing a tag information, it can be something like this game is about a multiplayer game. it's a strategy rpg, or if it's casual gaming, or this game is featuring a medieval setting, with all kinds of information like that we are including more than 300 pack information, so that you can really see what these game is characterized for. also some real time stats-based information, like you can see all these games, some are very popular, there's 10,000 users downloading this game at the moment right now, or it can be you know, 300 people are actually playing this particular game. and i think it's very important to highlight the personalized information is very key for our success. as we mentioned earlier, this is very important for any user to enjoy their experience not spending too much time making their efforts, there's this fatigue about finding the right apps for me, etc. so we also use a lot of user database recommendation that they can find the relevant game for them. and lastly, our galaxy store has been very appreciated by our speed to download and installation. so our consumers really love about our quick download feature, we actually feature this little button that you can directly install and download from what you're previewing from, you don't need to go through the detail page and click another time to download. we're just giving them a direct access to download. so we call we call that a quick download as well. tony morelan 13:37 that's great. i know that that is a feature that i would definitely appreciate. so for developers that have joined the samsung developer program, how can members grow their user base in their revenue hyunah kwon 13:52 share our strategy is to empower our developer partners by enhancing our platform that support them. so obviously, there's many ways to grow their apps and their performance. there are many resources available, so publishers on the galaxy store to support their success. and one thing that i'd like to highlight is these days, in particular, the app discovery is really diversifying. so customers are learning about their new app that anymore in their app store like we did 10 years ago. and they're actually learning from their friends and social media, a lot many different channels. so the optimization of the contents inside our store is still being very important. but managing growth from multi-channel approach becomes even more important galaxy store is having our batch feature galaxies or batches that drive customers from their multiple channel of discovery to galaxy store pages in a single click. and that improves a conversion by optimizing your discovery channel as well as all the listing information, you're providing a nice detail page. and we are going to provide more and more resources for you to optimize that listing information and grow the app developers revenues. to help our developers succeed in their acquisition campaigns with the galaxy store or optimizing their customer journey from discovery to download. we are also working with the leading mobile measurement partners so that developers can measure their campaign performance and to end with the accurate data. and generally, what we would recommend as tactics for growth will be things like, you know, generating more traffic and top of the funnel traffic, and from there, how to optimize their download conversion. and, as you know, download is not the end, most partners are frustrated, i get so many downloads, what i'm not where why am i not growing from there? i think we also can help on our developers to manage their paid conversion and retention, because retention also is a key for your success and growth. and i would always advise people to lean into the customer lifetime value, rather than focusing on the download number itself. tony morelan 16:21 can you tell me how developers can learn how to maximize their growth with the with the galaxy store? hyunah kwon 16:26 yes, sure. so as i mentioned before, there's lots of packets of growth available. so in terms of generating traffic, you can rely on us campaigns, it can be digital campaign, it can be social media campaigns, and we're going to be supportive on all your campaign executions. if you need a specific resource to optimize your campaign, please reach out to our team. as well, as very importantly, users are browsing from their search engine. so obviously, the search engine optimization techniques, or search engine-based advertising, all this traffic and also come into our store. and we can optimize that flow for your growth as well. in terms of download conversion, which is happening within our app, we are continuously improving our detail page optimization tools, as well as we would encourage our developers to manage their own reviews of their apps. so we are providing the way that the developers can prompt their reviews, and allowing their users to write the positive reviews about their apps so that we can also optimize our conversion that way, so that way, we are continuously updating our product. and we believe it's important to provide our updated information on what developers can do with us. so we are planning to provide all this further information through block past webinars and dedicated resources. and now developer portal. as soon as our new features on our platform is available. so i would encourage all developers to visit our developer@samsung.com and stay tuned for more updates. and you can also sign up for our newsletter so that you can get this information available from galaxies tony morelan 18:25 yeah, in the in the link to sign up for the newsletter is developer samsung.com/newsletter. and i'll be sure to include all of these links that you've mentioned in the in the show notes. so hyunah, i absolutely appreciate you taking the time to join me on the podcast today. love seeing how the galaxy store is evolving and super excited with what's coming up in the near future. so thanks again for joining us. hyunah kwon 18:49 thanks, tony for inviting me to the podcast. it was a pleasure. tony morelan 18:54 so charlotte, getting back to the awards for this year. i know that the pandemic obviously has affected everybody in in many different ways. can you tell us how it's actually impacting the award show for this year? charlotte allen 19:07 it is in fact in many in person events this year as we know, including our best of galaxy store awards 2020 award ceremony, which is typically held at sdc. our developer conference, this year's best of galaxy store awards 2020 ceremony will be held virtually, and premiered on youtube on december 9 2020 at 5pm. pacific standard time. so stay tuned to the best galaxy store awards page. if you're not a member of our samsung developer program or bixby developers, now is a great time to register to get all the updates and features i just shared. tony morelan 19:44 excellent. so i know in the past, in order to attend the award show you had to attend our conference, which meant you had to come out to the bay area here and admission into the conference this year though, is that going to be different. charlotte allen 19:55 the exciting thing for me is this year for the first time anyone can and attend and like you shared, the awards are typically held at our conference and even then, sometimes sessions conflict with our award ceremony. but this year, anyone can attend. and so we're really looking forward to having a great crowd attend this year's awards. tony morelan 20:15 yeah, no, i am excited too, as well. we talked about how the award show has been growing from originally, it was just the five awards. and now we've expanded we're up over 20 awards. can you talk about some of the new categories for this year? charlotte allen 20:28 yes, this year's awards will acknowledge over 20 winners in five categories. and the categories include best app, this game best the best watch, and we've added bixby to this year's best of galaxy store awards. and we're really excited about that. tony morelan 20:44 yeah. earlier this year, i did a podcast interview with roger kibbe, at bixby on the viv lab team. so super excited. they're going to be joining us and in awarding their developers. yeah, that is very exciting. talking about the winners. can you tell me how are winners selected? charlotte allen 21:01 winners are selected by our galaxy store team who do a yearly editorial review of all apps published to the galaxy store? tony morelan 21:09 what would you say is the biggest challenge with the with the award selection? charlotte allen 21:14 i would say narrowing down the list of winners. the galaxy store offers expertly curated quality apps, which means we have a lot of great apps on the galaxy store. tony morelan 21:24 yeah, i know because i've been involved with the with the selection and awarding process. and it is a challenge because you know, we've got a team that goes through all this and it makes their nominations and, and their selection as to who they think should win. and sometimes you know what your favorite app may be different than my favorite app. so we get to battle it out. yeah, to figure out who is the winner for that award? yes. so what is it that the samsung developer program team is doing to help promote the winners, charlotte allen 21:54 winners are featured in galaxy store merchandising for the award ceremony, we have a best of galaxy store press release that samsung does. one winner per category is chosen to be featured in that press release. however, winners can write a press release with a quote from samsung as well. we do post winner developer marketing newsletters, blogs, and podcasts interviews. tony morelan 22:16 yeah, i'm actually really looking forward to next season in the podcast where i get a chance to interview some of some of these winners for the best of awards. that should be a lot of fun. now that you and i and our team has been involved with a selection process for the awards. can you tell me what is your favorite award? charlotte allen 22:36 hmm, that's a tough one. i would say if i had to choose, i would say that collections, the theme collections and the watch collections because it shows a body of amazing work. right. and so i think that if i had to choose, i would say that be my favorite. what about you? tony morelan 22:55 you know, my favorite, i think it's the fact that we do recognize those indie developers. so it's the small, you know, new independent designer, that's they've just put together this amazing app. and we're recognizing that. so you don't have to be this big brand, you don't have to have, you know, a large collection, i love the fact that we are awarding those large collections, because it's an amazing, you know, opportunity for us to recognize when a designer has just got this amazing library of work. but i'd love the fact that we also recognize that individual, one key design that just stands out. so you know, you can even be the little developer and we're still going to find yeah, and then recognize you for your great work. so what advice do you have for developers hoping to be considered for future awards? charlotte allen 23:45 the biggest advice i can share is marketing your work digitally socially, as it drives awareness, it drives, downloads, ratings, and reviews. and if you have not already done so, download the galaxy batch, it supports marketing your ad driving users to the galaxy store to download or purchase your app. so my biggest advice is, if you have not posted it to your site, i encourage you to do it today. tony morelan 24:12 yeah, definitely. and in the reason being is that we need you to show up on our radar. so if you put out a great app, and it's not showing up in our in our analytics of you know, top selling apps or apps that are being downloaded, we're not going to find it. so it's a great way for us to find your app is when you're doing all of that marketing push behind it, then once we see it, then we can dive into a little deeper and see if it's worthy of the award. but yeah, you definitely have to get traction on your app. from a social standpoint, that's a huge way for us to discover your apps. so what's the best way for people to learn more about the best of galaxy store awards. charlotte allen 24:54 we have a galaxy store landing page on our samsung developer program site. and there, you'll find details about the program updates on the best of galaxy store awards 2020. and highlights from past year's awards, including winner interviews. yeah. tony morelan 25:09 and as a reminder, that is developer.samsung.com. and from there, you can navigate over to the galaxy store awards page, all the links that we were mentioning, and the podcast will be included in the show notes. so you can check there. can you tell me, are there any upcoming news that you can share that's related to the award show? charlotte allen 25:29 we have some upcoming blogs, we're going to take a look back at some of last year's winners, highlight some of their successes, and really begin promoting the best of galaxy store awards 2020 as we get near to the virtual award ceremony, and we really can't wait. tony morelan 25:47 yeah, and one thing i'd like to share is that we are working on a trailer a little teaser for the award show. the trailer will be released exactly 30 days before the award show. so on november 9, we will be releasing our little teaser trailer for the award show. so be sure to stay tuned for that. so charlotte, thank you very much for joining me on the podcast today and sharing all of the information about the award show. really appreciate you coming on the podcast. charlotte allen 26:16 thanks. it's great to be back again. tony morelan 26:18 and just to sign off, this is our final episode of season one of the podcast i hope you all have enjoyed not just this episode, but the prior 13 episodes that we did that make up season one of the power podcast. we look forward to having you join us next year. we're going to start the new year off with season two and we are really excited with the shows that were lining up. and you definitely will be hearing from some of the winners of our best of galaxy store awards for 2020. so thank you very much. outro 26:51 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 developer.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.

season 2, 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 guests samsung internet advocacy team samsung internet dan appelquist, director of developer advocacy, samsung laura morinigo, developer advocate, samsung lola odelola, developer advocate, samsung ada rose cannon, developer advocate, samsung kevin picchi, developer advocate, samsung listen download this episode topics covered the benefits of samsung internet browser web standards and user experiences foldables and responsive design privacy and security ar/vr (augmented reality / virtual reality) android developers immersive web weekly 5g tours w3c helpful links samsung internet website samsung internet blog samsung internet meetup twitter – samsung internet developer advocacy 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 00:01 hey, i'm tony morelan. and this is pow, the samsung developers podcast where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools. welcome to season two, episode six. on today's show, i'm joined again by dan appelquist from samsung internet. but along with dan this time will be several of the developer advocates that work with dan that help developers build for the samsung internet browser. during our chat, we'll talk with experts on building responsive web experiences for foldable devices, privacy and security on the web, and exciting new technologies related to web xr in the samsung internet browser. enjoy. hey, dan, welcome back to the podcast. dan appelquist 00:48 great to be back. thanks for having me back. tony morelan 00:51 yeah, so i've already asked who is dan appelquist on the earlier episode. but for those that don't know, you are the director of developer advocacy for samsung internet. and i would highly recommend that you go back and listen to our episode from season one. dan appelquist 01:05 it was great. i loved doing that. tony morelan 01:08 yeah. so last season, we had you on the podcast, we talked about the samsung internet browser web standards, the importance of privacy and security in things like progressive web apps, dan appelquist 01:18 right. and you'll probably hear some of the same things that you heard last year. but hopefully, i'm going to give you something new as well. tony morelan 01:27 in this new episode, though, i understand that you actually have some of your few of your experts from your team that are going to join us and give us a deeper understanding of samsung internet, as well as some new and exciting topics. correct. dan appelquist 01:37 that's right, developer advocacy for us as a team effort. so i'm really excited to have the team here talking about the different areas of expertise that they're that they're working in, and the different technologies that they're playing a part in tony morelan 01:50 for new listeners. let me ask again, what is samsung internet. dan appelquist 01:55 so samsung internet is a browser, it's a web browser, it's a browser, that samsung ship on all android devices. so if you have any kind of android device from samsung, your default browser is going to be samsung internet. we're the purple planet that you might see on any samsung android device. we are also available on other devices besides samsung devices. so you can actually download us from the play store, you can download us from the galaxy store as well. so that's pretty exciting. because it means for developers especially it means that you actually don't have to have a samsung device in order, you know, we certainly encourage you to have a samsung device. but if you don't have a samsung device, you can still load and test your website in samsung internet, which is definitely something that we suggest you do. tony morelan 02:49 so what does samsung have a browser in the first place? dan appelquist 02:52 well, i think it comes back to the question of why do we have multiple browsers the web is enriched and is in continues to evolve. because we have a dynamic in the web where users can choose people can choose which browser they want to use the web with. and they can make that choice based on what they perceive to be the browser that gives them the best user experience the best features, you can access the same websites with all the browsers, that's the idea. we'd never want to see a web where you go to a website, and it says, can only be accessed in google chrome or can only be accessed in microsoft edge or can only be accepted samsung internet, that would not be a good web to live in. so when it comes to interoperability, the web is extremely interoperability for the web is extremely important. however, it's at the level of all the features on top of the web browser that helps you to experience the web, where web browsers differentiate and compete. and that's that is a really important dynamic because it helps the web to grow. we've seen in the past how when one browser dominates the entire web innovation on the web stagnates. and we never want to see those days return again, that was early 2000s. when i he was like the single i think that 90% market share or something like that. so strategically, we're pretty certain that having multiple browsers out there and having this dynamic and this conversation about what the best features are, is really important for the web, and it's really important for people who are using the web at the end of the day. tony morelan 04:39 yeah, yeah, definitely. i think that sort of competition is what helps, you know, drive these companies to come up with new and innovative ways to improve the technology. absolutely. so um, so let's talk about the chromium project. so i understand that samsung internet is based on chromium. chromium is the google led open source browser project to build a safer, faster more stable way for internet users to experience the web, correct? dan appelquist 05:04 that's correct. yeah. so i mean, google chrome is based on chromium. there are lots of other browsers that are also based on chromium. so microsoft edge is based on chromium. samsung internet is based on chromium. there are a lot of other browsers that are based on chromium. brave is a great browser for desktop that is based on chromium that has a real strong focus on privacy and vivaldi is another one. that is, again, they have a focus on serving developers on desktop. so there's a real good ecosystem of chromium-based browsers out there. and we're very happy to be one of the most used, if not the most, i think we are the most used chromium browser out there besides chrome. well, so as for what our role is, in the chromium project, we definitely take the basic chromium build. and we, we put samsung internet on top of that, however, we are also contributing back into the chromium project. so we're, we're a strong contributor into the open source chromium project. and we also take the chromium project, and we build samsung internet on top of it, which means building a lot of our own user interface on a lot of our own features. and some of those features are the things that we're going to talk about today. so what's tony morelan 06:26 the role of the developer advocacy team? dan appelquist 06:29 so we have a small team, we are based in london, what we do is, we talk to developers, we blog, we write code, we are at heart developers, who are technologists, who know how to speak developer because we are developers. and we all have experience building production websites, production code. and we also are, so we're out there, we're communicating. but we're also listening. and part of our role is to listen to the developer community channel. the feedback from the developer community back into our engineering group. we're very adamant that developer advocacy is an engineering effort. we work most closely with our engineering team, both in seoul and in the us. and we also play a role when it comes to internet standards or web standards. so a number of us are playing leadership roles in different w three c working groups, w three c is the web standards organization, the world wide web consortium, which was founded by tim berners. lee, i co-chair something called the technical architecture group there, which is like a review board for new web technologies. ada, who you're going to hear from is the co-chair of the immersive web working group, which is working on web xr. all the team members are playing some kind of role when it comes to web standards, which is important for us as well. so having said all that, i'd like to first of all, introduce laura to the podcast, who's going to tell you more about what we're doing with foldables. and with responsive design. tony morelan 08:14 hey, laura, welcome to the podcast. laura morinigo 08:16 thanks, tony. how are you? tony morelan 08:18 very good. very good. so let me first ask what is your role at samsung? yeah, so laura morinigo 08:24 it's going to be two years that i'm part of the developer relations team. so i'm a web developer advocate for samsung internet. wonderful. and tony morelan 08:33 you are based in london. is that correct? laura morinigo 08:36 exactly. in london, uk. tony morelan 08:38 now, i will say that you don't sound like you have a british accent. so where are you originally from? laura morinigo 08:43 really? i don't. i'm originally from argentina. yes, tony morelan 08:49 yes. and i do know that you actually are working with my counterpart, diego lizarazo. who speaks spanish as well. you two are doing some webinars together. is that correct? laura morinigo 09:00 yeah, exactly. we're doing samsung and española. that means samsung in spanish, where we do workshops, and things like that. and actually, we're going to have something in june. so stay tuned, guys. nice tony morelan 09:13 looking forward to that. so we're here to talk about foldable devices and samsung internet first, can you tell me what exactly is a foldable device? laura morinigo 09:21 well, yeah, full levels are devices in which the screen falls and you have an inch, and there are mainly two different physical form of factors. so you have devices with a single flexible screen. those are called seamless and devices with two screens, which seem and samsung lund two main devices which are seamless, the galaxy see sleep and then sec four, two. what does this mean for developers? yes, so everything that is new for users is new for developers to because for develop first means new ways to create content. with foldables, you have the chance to do multitasking, open more than one up at the same time and take advantage of the biggest screen. it's like you have in the tablet inside your pocket. so developers now you can create new ways to reach out to users, including from multimedia to different types of websites. tony morelan 10:29 sure, sure. now, i know that, obviously, when, when you've got your phone and you're holding it vertical, and then you rotate it sideways, you know, the content generally changes. and that's called responsive designs. yeah. how is that related to foldable? laura morinigo 10:43 yeah, responsive design means that you create your web app, and the web app should be adapted to whatever the screen size of the device is. so it doesn't matter. if you open your web app into a smartphone, or in desktop, it should look good, right? so developers that are familiar with responsive design, they're not going to find any difficulties adjusting the content to this new devices. because right now, foldables, as allows you to have more than one screen at the same time, that the size of the viewport change. so you still need to apply responsive design, responsive design is a must that will help your web app, improve its seo and make it accessible. and weight foldables is going to bring new functionalities that can be a productivity game changer and even make the tablet experience more portable, and even explore are the different features. tony morelan 11:44 now i know with this new technology, it's got to be difficult to start developing for it without having standards. so is that something that you're working on for foldables? laura morinigo 11:55 exactly. so we know that it's really important for developers to have a certain kind of guidance, and for the users so they can have a really good user experience. so in order to do that, we started exploring, which are the right approaches to develop web apps for foldable devices. and in partnership with other companies like, for example, microsoft and intel, we started to take up and lead to thinking about responsive design, to take into consideration the different form factor of the screens of the device itself. there is currently a standard working draft, that is called device poster, where we actually show to the developer, which is the current posture that the device is having, for example, if it's flip, if it's just in a vertical position. also, the developer can take advantage of that information and create cool stuff, of course. so what's the best way for developers to get started with developing for foldables? yes, so again, if you already have some experience with responsive design, you still need to apply the same rules to start developing web apps for foldables. but besides that, you need to keep in mind that there are new things that you need to implement. in order to do that you have some resources in our blog posts, we usually post most of the things that you have to keep in mind new rules or testing that we are doing with these new devices. follow the standards that we are actually doing, be part of the conversation. and samsung recently launched in its remote test lab, the test to actually test with a ritual foldable device so you can check your web app in that device. tony morelan 13:54 so you actually don't have to own a foldable device. exactly. yeah. it's an actual real device. from what i understand you're just controlling it online. exactly. do you have any examples of use cases where developers are taking advantage of foldable devices? laura morinigo 14:09 yes, of course, as i mentioned before, if the user can take advantage of this device, for example, doing multitasking, and so on, developers can do and that's the idea. one of the new ways that these phones take advantage to developers are for example, with games. users are really excited when they have the chance to play their games in bigger screens. so developers are trying to take approach of these advantage and make their web apps will fit into a better screen size to improve the user experience. the other way that foldables are changing the game and is like an innovation is the dependent of the posture of, of the device, you can do different things. for example, if you have a flip, and if it's in a flip mode, you can actually use your one on one screen to watch video, or even make calls. and then you see in the in the in the front screen, the camera, and then in the other screen, you see the console. so it's made a better use of currently, what you can do in your web app. tony morelan 15:35 yeah, sounds like you can really turn your device into being much more versatile. so are there any features coming in the near future that we can get excited about? laura morinigo 15:43 yeah, i think, you know, these initiative was started by samsung, and then other companies followed. and i think that's a good case, because it means that it's not just a trend, i believe that these things related with responsive design, and hardware innovation are coming further. so even when we talk about dual screen or the way that you sir can see their content. so the very first part, i will say, let's see how their users react at these foldable devices, i think most of the feedback is really positive. so that means that new things are coming. tony morelan 16:28 so what's the best way for developers to follow you and learn more about what you have to offer related to samsung, canada and foldables? laura morinigo 16:36 great, so we usually write our blog posts in samsung internet blog posts, and you can follow us at in our social media samsung internet. the same with medium, you can find our articles there in some of the events that we participate soon. in my case, you can follow me on twitter, my twitter is paul, this is lada, okay. tony morelan 17:01 and i will include all of the links to this in the show notes so you can easily get to those with laura, it was great to have you on the podcast and just wanted to say thanks for giving us a little insight into samsung internet and foldable devices. laura morinigo 17:14 amazing. and thanks for having me. dan appelquist 17:16 by the way, tony, i'm also really excited about the work that laura has been doing with diego from your team around spanish language developer outreach. that's a whole another area that we're very committed to in terms of reaching out to more to wider developer and the wider developer community. tony morelan 17:35 yeah, that's one thing that i've realized too, is how well we are expanding our reach with not just you know, us or people based in, you know, in in the uk, but we really are reaching out to this global community of developers. so it's great to see what diego and laura are doing as far as the spanish speaking developers. dan appelquist 17:53 yeah, that's really good. so. so next, i would like to introduce lola from my team, who is focusing on privacy. she has been, amongst other things, participating in the privacy community group in wcc, which is one of the forums in which we talk about emerging privacy technologies that are being added to the web. and she's going to tell you a bit about what we're doing in samsung internet when it comes to privacy. tony morelan 18:29 hello, and welcome to the podcast. lola odelola 18:31 thank you for having me. tony morelan 18:33 yeah. so tell me what is your role at samsung. lola odelola 18:36 so i am a web developer advocate on the samsung internet team got it. tony morelan 18:41 so let's talk about privacy and samsung internet. knowing that just about everything we do online can be tracked what privacy features are integrated into the samsung internet browser experience that gives users more control over their privacy and their data? lola odelola 18:53 yeah, so the samsung internet actually has a lot of features baked into it that kind of highlight its private nature, if you will. one of those features is the privacy dashboard, which shows you the number of items that were blocked in a certain time period. it shows you where that blocked backward reis directions or pop ups or apps that open you know, sometimes apps will just try and open the internet, it will show you if there are any apps like that, that it blocks as well. so it's quite detailed actually in that regard. and it also it also allows you to set settings about if you want warnings about malicious sites, or if you want to block automatic downloads, and is actually in this dashboard where you would set smart anti tracking too, which is another feature. basically, smart anti tracking is samsung internet's way of giving the user the ability to say that you don't want to be tracked online. so it automatically renews tracking cookies, which are way for basically websites to track your behavior and things online. so if you want to switch that setting on, you can do that from the privacy and security dashboard. and you can have it to always be in on you can have it to never been on or you can have it to secret mode only, which is like when you have incognito mode or, like when you're in incognito, you can switch off tracking in there, as well. so yeah, tony morelan 20:27 so what about ads? how does, you know, i get a lot of ads that always pop up when i'm visiting websites. lola odelola 20:33 yeah. so the cool thing about the samsung internet browser is that we have the ability to download third party ad blockers. and what makes that unique is that you don't have to go to the galaxy store. or you have to go to any app store to download these ads. because the app store is very heavily integrated into samsung internet, you can actually download them directly from the browser. whereas with other internet browsers, you'd have to download from their tony morelan 21:04 app store equivalent. sure, sure. well, it makes it really easy, then. lola odelola 21:07 yeah, straightforward. tony morelan 21:09 how can developers learn more about web standards? no, that's pretty important when it comes to developing. lola odelola 21:13 yeah, so like, as the web advocate team, we are very involved in web standards. and developers can like get to know more about that by following our work, particularly work we're doing. so like in the privacy community group, which is public and open to everybody. where we discuss things like the global privacy control, it's not yet a web standard, but it's something being worked on by a host of different organizations, different people, from people from the new york times to the bbc, to, you know, lots of different orgs. and the idea behind the global privacy control, is that you have a one stop shop to indicate your tracking preferences. tony morelan 21:55 so does that mean that users really have the ability then to decide what they want to be tracked? and what they don't want to be tracked? lola odelola 22:03 i'm not quite what it means is that so you know how you go on a website? and it says, hey, do you want to be tracked? and you might say, no, and then you go to another website? and it says, hey, do you want to be tracked? and you're like, no. and you know, if you answer no, for one place, you probably mean no, for, you know, everywhere, you probably don't want anywhere tracking you. so what the global privacy control says is that instead of having all these different, you know, pop ups that come up, every time you visit a website, that is a one stop shop in your browser, that you can say, i do not want to be tracked, or i do not want my data sold, or whatever the case may be. and when a website, when you visit a website, that website should read that signal from that control. and then it shouldn't even show you that box, it should even show you that pop up of do you want to be tracked? because it should have already read it? got it? okay. okay. tony morelan 22:55 okay, great. yeah. so do any scripts run on the browser or the device? lola odelola 23:03 so no, which is? that's like, what gpc that's kind of what makes it cool that no scripts need to be run on the browser, or the device for this to work is going to be something that that is not going to be reliant on that, basically. tony morelan 23:19 so is there any other work that you're supporting within web standards? lola odelola 23:22 yeah, i mean, there's loads. and, you know, we don't have time to list them all off now. but something else that we are really backing is the private click measurement, which is a way for users’ privacy to protected to be protected by removing tracking data, while still supporting click attribution across sites. and it's basically saying, we are not going to allow cross site tracking, but we are still going to collect those clicks. but there won't be any unique user data attached to those clicks. so you won't be able to follow tony, through his browser history, essentially seen what he's clicked on. but you will be able to know that somebody, person t has clicked on these links. and you can collect analytics in an anonymous way that way. tony morelan 24:11 so i've noticed this sometimes, like, i'll go to a website. and next thing, you know, i go over to facebook. and now i see that there's an ad that is related to you know, something previously, lola odelola 24:22 yeah, it's kind of similar. so basically, what these ad networks do is say, you know, you've got ad network.com has an ad on twitter, and you click that ad on twitter, and then you go over to facebook and accident, same ad network.com has an ad on facebook, and you click that link, both of those clicks go to ad network.com servers, and they are not able to build a profile of you based on the ads that you've clicked on to see what you're interested in. so now when you visit you know these sites you do now get ads related to those like these, i mean, basically creates like this like mesh network of clicks around the internet of things you've touched around the internet and build a picture of who you are. tony morelan 25:05 so in other words, what you're saying is with private click measurement, only the ad companies know that their ads been clicked, but they're not able to really follow you know, my journey on yeah, okay, gotcha. okay. so how can developers become more aware of web standards to influence the influence of their work? lola odelola 25:23 um, yeah. so as i said before, the best way would be to get involved with wcc, and the web standards work that's happening there. now, i will say there is a bit of an accessibility issue because it is member only for some for like the working groups and stuff and you have to pay to become a member. however, there are public open free groups, you can be a part of such as the privacy community group, where a lot of web standards get discussed before then we've to work in groups. so for example, gpc private clicker measurement are both currently being discussed in the privacy community group. and there are other similar community groups as well. tony morelan 26:02 right now it says something. can we include the link to that in the in the show notes for this podcast? lola odelola 26:06 yes. tony morelan 26:07 excellent. we'll make sure to do that. so what's the best way for developers to follow you and learn more about what you have to offer? yeah, so if anyone's interested, lola odelola 26:17 you can follow me on twitter, i am at lola delilah, and you can check out my writing on the samson internet blog. and i think those are the best two places. awesome. well, tony morelan 26:27 lola, thank you very much for being on the podcast today. and just wanted to say thanks for giving us insight into samsung internet and privacy. lola odelola 26:34 thank you so much for having me, tony. dan appelquist 26:36 it's been great, really great to hear from lola there about some of the things that we're doing to help keep users experience of the web more private. so i'd like to introduce ada, from my team who's been focusing on web xr, she amongst other things, is the co-chair of the wcc immersive web working group where she's actually helping to build these standards. and she does a lot of work when it on building demonstrators began conferences and events, etc. to demonstrate the value and the exciting types of user experiences that can be built using these technologies. joining ada, we also have kevin, who will be talking about 5g tours, which is a project that we participate in. and we're very excited about putting webex r into action in that project. tony morelan 27:34 ada kevin, welcome to the podcast. ada rose cannon 27:37 thank you so much for having us. it's great to be here. kevin picchi 27:40 yeah. nice. nice being here. tony morelan 27:44 so ada, let me first ask what is your role at samsung? ada rose cannon 27:48 so i'm a developer advocate for the web browser samsung internet. i'm as well as that. i'm also co-chair of the wcc immersive web groups. these are the groups that deal with making web xr work in tony morelan 28:01 the browsers. and you're located in the uk. is that correct? ada rose cannon 28:06 yeah, based out of london. and kevin, what about you? what tony morelan 28:08 is your role at samsung? kevin picchi 28:10 so i'm also developer advocates, and i'm also based in the uk office as a doctor. but i do understand that tony morelan 28:17 at this moment, you actually are not in london, is that correct? kevin picchi 28:21 exactly. i'm in switzerland right now, in doing this. tony morelan 28:25 what exactly is web xr? ada rose cannon 28:28 so what they saw is a browser api that lets you access the sensors and displays of immersive hardware. via immersive hardware, i mean, things like virtual reality headsets, or augmented reality headsets. even your smartphone is an ar capable device, provided it's like a pretty recent one. often, modern fast smartphones are able to use machine learning in order to work out your surroundings to do good augmented reality. so what the axon lets you build a single experience that runs through the web browser that works on all of these different devices? do you tony morelan 29:04 have to install any applications or plugins or anything, ada rose cannon 29:09 it's great all the user needs to have installed as a browser. sometimes if it's not already installed as a requirement by the browser, ar core or ar kit on smartphones may also need to be installed. but usually it should just work without needing to install any additional things to save on desktop computers or on particular, headset-based browsers. they will also have a built in. so if you go to a website, it will show you a scene that's 3d, maybe web gl, you can then push a button and the auto immersive you're in vitality or enter the scene or an ar or let you put the 3d content over your environment. and they'll just work with one click of a button you're immersed straightaway. and that's really the power of web xr. tony morelan 29:57 nice. so tell me what would some of the benefits for webxr, ada rose cannon 30:01 there are many benefits from doing xr on the web. so one of the really powerful abilities is that because you don't need to install anything from an app store, if you need to charge any money for what you're doing, you won't have an app store taking a cut. and that's always just a huge benefit. yeah. on top of that, you're getting the instant engagement. so for example, if i wanted someone to check out a demo i build, i would send someone a url, they would click the url, the page would load in a few seconds, and they push the button and they're able to view it in augmented reality on whatever ar hardware they were using. whereas if i don't do a native app, they'd have to download it from an app store. they'd have to install it, remember that it's installed, tap on it, open it up, request the permissions, and then they'd be able to enter ar. and just to all that process, you end up losing a lot of users. so not only is it a better experience for users, but as a as a product owner, you will also have much higher engagement. and that's really incredibly powerful. tony morelan 31:12 yeah, it sounds like it makes it really easy for people to experience ar and vr. so let's talk about some of the equipment that that's needed. so how does it support headsets. ada rose cannon 31:22 so the headset at the most popular device you'll find today is probably the oculus quest two, which is the latest oculus quest device that came out over christmas. it supports virtual reality through web xr out the box through the browser. and they're one of the browsers that are really pushing the envelope when it comes to the web xr standards. they're doing some really amazing work. if you've got a headset, which you would tether to you to your computer, then you'd use it with chrome. tony morelan 31:51 if you're worried about something as simple as google cardboard, oh, yes, it actually ada rose cannon 31:55 works out of the box. if you have a cardboard headset, and you press enter vr on the phones, it will use the vr core part of android to deliver it through virtual reality, which you can just put into a cardboard headset. so that will actually work really well. and of course, if you're using any kind of smartphone, whether xr works great on chrome and samsung internet on android devices. tony morelan 32:20 so the other day i came across this, what i thought was a really cool website, it was had little dinosaurs that i could click and get inside their cage and actually, you know, scroll around with them and see all the different angles is that a good example of webber? ada rose cannon 32:34 yeah, that's xrdinosaurs.com. this is a really fantastic example of everything web xr can do. it's actually maintained by one of the editors of the webex r spec, which is really cool. xr dinosaurs lets you experience the dinosaurs like flat 2d on a computer using normal web gl. but if you have ar or vr equipment available, such as a smartphone, you can place the dinosaurs in your environment. so if you open it up on a phone, you can push the button and you can view the dinosaur standing around in your living room, which is incredibly cool. or if you have a vr headset, you can put it on, and then you will be inside the cage with the dinosaur. and then you can walk around it. this is a really powerful example of the of the ways where the xr can support multiple different modalities of xr with a single build. like there's not running different code for each one, like much of the code for vr and ar is still the same. you know, tony morelan 33:36 another example i just realized was, i was shopping for furniture the other day and was on this this website where i could select different lamps, chairs, tables, and actually walk into my living room and place these different items in my living room and turn around and see exactly what it would look like in this environment. so again, good example of a web xr ada rose cannon 34:00 that's a perfect example. this is the kind of thing that web xr really excels at. so anything where it's really small, so where the user probably isn't dedicated enough to actually go out and download an app. but they probably still be interested in ar, if it's available anyway, anything like shops or promotional materials, that kind of thing is great, because then they can see it, enjoy it. and then when they leave, there's nothing left on their device to clutter them up. so there's much less reservation when it comes to actually trying it out. and that i think that's really powerful. i think the technology used to build that particular demo you were talking about was google's model viewer project. and model viewer is fantastic for stuff like store pages and product views. you add the script to your page, and then you use the model view or tag to display a 3d model on the page which is already ready to go for augmented reality. so if you couldn't get it 3d model of your product in the gltf model format, then it's ready to go. and that's really powerful. tony morelan 35:06 what i really enjoyed was the fact that there was nothing to download, i clicked a few buttons, and there was, so i can definitely see the benefit where webex are, there isn't that hurdle that somebody has to go over, which is the whole download installation, just to experience it, what would be the best way for developers to get started with web xr? ada rose cannon 35:26 well, if you depend how quickly you want to get started. so if you want to get started, and you just you already have the 3d model, and you want to just be done straight away, model viewer is a great place to start. it lets you just with a single html tag and a script tag, you can have a 3d model, augmented reality ready in your browser and in your website. so that's really great. if you want something that's like still html based, and a great way to start if you're more of a beginner, and a frame is a fantastic place to start. i'll be honest, i've been doing graphics development for years. and i also still use a frame for almost all my products, just because it's so quick to get started. but also lets you dive in deep. because a frame is based on the library three j s, which is a javascript 3d library for working on web gl, which has been around for a long time is extremely powerful. and so a frame kind of gives you the best of both worlds. but if you really want to get stuck in with the javascript and really get in with the nitty gritty, working directly with three js, or with babylon js is a great way to go. but if you want more of an of a fully like integrated development environment for this kind of thing, so if you prefer the kind of all in one it solution, then there's actually quite a few solutions here. so there's amazon sumerian, there's play canvas, which is a fantastic engine. and there's a really new one that seems really powerful wonderland engine. and of course, as the old classic unity, which has a unity export for what xr tony morelan 37:07 excellent. sounds like there's a lot of great tools for developers to get started with, with web xr. kevin, let me ask you, how is samsung internet involved with web xr? kevin picchi 37:18 well, we shipped web xi by default inside of browser. and we always make sure to ship the latest modules out so the developers can benefit all the good from the tony morelan 37:32 api. and what about samsung phones? how well do they work with webxr? kevin picchi 37:37 all of them are compatible? as long as you have the samsung internet browser installed on your phone? you can experience webex are tony morelan 37:45 excellent. in ad, i know that you're working also on web standards. can you tell me a little bit about web standards, maybe some of the challenges with that? ada rose cannon 37:54 yeah, so as i mentioned earlier, i'm co-chair of the immersive web groups. these are the groups that are working on the standards that get built into web browsers that become the api's developers work with to build these experiences. and working on the web standards can be really challenging, because people have high expectations for the privacy you'd get from the web. like you don't go to a website and expect them to immediately start spying on you through your camera, or doing anything really super dodgy. the web browser is there to protect you. and because we're adding new api's to the browser, we can't do anything that's going to breach this expectation of privacy and security. and because it's the web, it's also got to work for as many people as possible. so accessibility is also an incredibly important task. so these are the kinds of constraints you've got to work in. but on top of this, as graphics developers, we really want to get people working with the very latest features you can find in immersive hardware. and we want people to build the kinds of experiences that rival what you can find on native. and so balancing these privacy and security expectations against letting people have the most access to the hardware is a real challenge, because a lot of the hardware to do with immersive hardware, such as augmented reality is to deal with revealing more information about the environment and letting the developers work with it. so for example, for something like working out where the user can place 3d models in the environment, the underlying engine actually can fully scan your environment and work out what the exact shape of stuff is and its color. but this is a lot of information, which is too much that a lot of experiences don't actually need. and so it would very easily let someone write an abusive application without giving too much additional functionality. so actually the early versions of real-world sensing in web xr just let you query a single point from a single ray at a time. so this lets you do stuff like placing a single object on the floor on the walls. but we're not exactly scanner through someone's room. and this is the kind of balances we have to make. and because we have had developers come back to us and say they do need like higher precision, more wide scope, scan, like room scanning. this is the kind of thing where we can build an additional api to, to let developers have this. but at the same time, we can warn the users that what the developer is trying to do might potentially be more dangerous. just like when a website is trying to turn your camera or microphone on, it will warn you. yes, in the same way, if the website is trying to get a 3d scan of your entire apartment, we want to warn you about that, too. and so this is the kind of balances we have to make. tony morelan 41:04 so i know that is one of the big benefits around samsung internet is all of the privacy that you get when you use samsung internet. nice to see how that's carrying over to web xr. how stable would you say vr is on web xr? ada rose cannon 41:22 so vr itself is very stable, vr was one of the first parts we completed in. in web xr, there's actually been vr in the web for like a long time, there was an old api called web vr, that was deprecated. last year, but since then, web xr, we pushed very hard to be able to totally replace web vr with web xr with the same capabilities. so what vr is pretty stable, i doubt there'll be any more changes to it at all. so if you write something, targeting vr, yeah, lots will probably stay the same. ar is a little newer. and there are newer api's to help with augmented reality. so some of the more hit testing, depth sensing stuff, some of this is like a little newer, there may still be some privacy issues that need to be resolved, which may have some interface changes. but generally, these are also getting pretty stable. a lot of the stuff that might be arriving in the next couple of months, or have arrived in the last month or so might have a few changes. so it's important that developers do continue testing that stuff. and do keep an eye out for when the api's do change. because occasionally, we will get feedback that some that we've developed has a major security flaw we've missed. and we can't just leave that out in the wild, we do have to change the api to fix that issue. tony morelan 42:50 so are there any new features that you can share related to web standards. ada rose cannon 42:55 so there's new features being developed all the time. and the really nice thing about web standards is that the develop totally in the open. so if you want to see all the latest work that's going on, you can check out the immersive web github, where you can see all of the issues that are being worked on in real time on web xr and all the related modules. there’re a few modules i'm really excited about. one, which is still super early days would be some kind of dom layer, api that would let us put dom content into a web xr scene. so like html elements, and css, this is like kind of a tricky thing to do. and it's something we've wanted for a long time. and i'm hoping it won't be too far in the future when we eventually get it. so what tony morelan 43:42 it is, is, since i am new to web xr, myself, what is dom content? ada rose cannon 43:47 so dom content is like html and css content. so like, the normal stuff you'd see on a website, so like, forms, images, buttons, you know, that kind of thing? links, okay, so is this where if i am in either a vr and ar environment, this is where you can actually have like buttons that are clickable within that space? yeah, exactly. so in addition to making your 3d environment where the user can grab stuff and pull stuff, and have 3d models, you can also have part of a web page in the environment. and that may sound quite boring, because it's just going to be like a 2d rectangle with content in it. this lets you use the heck demand css api's that are already available in browsers to build 2d interfaces in vr and ar as well. so for example, if you had html form reimplementing, that whole thing out of rectangles and shape in 3d modeling application is kind of a pain, sure, but just being able to write some html and take advantage of all the really powerful 2d layout capabilities of the web is just a fantastic feature and will let developers make the most out of both 3d and 2d. tony morelan 45:03 nice, nice. yeah. so what are some other technologies that go well with web xr? ada rose cannon 45:08 so the first one that comes to mind is like web rtc. so this is what lets you do video sharing and audio sharing over the web. tony morelan 45:17 in web rtc stands for real time communication, correct? it does, yes. ada rose cannon 45:21 so this lets you, for example, if a means kind of some kind of social vr situation, i could do some kind of cool between me and another person. so i can chat with them in an efficient manner that's peer to peer without needing to go up to a central service. okay. and another thing that's really useful for social vr stuff is websockets. so websockets lets you do incredibly high bandwidth, very, very fast data connections between your client and the server. so you could have many people in a single room, or with having all their positions and rotations shared over websockets. so you can see people moving around and walking around in real time. and so using their free web rtc is like the kind of the two things you need to get a really good social web experience. tony morelan 46:15 so what about the technology, web audio? how was that working with web xr? ada rose cannon 46:20 so web audio is a really interesting api. so web xr doesn't actually bother dealing with any audio stuff out of the box. there's not like specific information you need for working with audio. but the really powerful thing about web audio is that it has stuff like a 3d panner node with hrtf built in. so you can already do 3d audio in the web long before web xr came along, which is incredibly cool. so you can have correct 3d audio, using the web audio api using the web. and it's something that's like a little tricky to set up. there's a really great library by google called the resonance project. and it lets you like define the surfaces around you. so you can say the floor is hard. there's no ceiling is where the walls are, and will correctly work out the echoes and the reverb. and so you could have multiple sound sources, that will sound really good. and you'll be able to know where they are instinctually? because they're done in 3d. wow. and this is really powerful. tony morelan 47:22 yeah, cuz i could see where if you're like moving throughout that environment, your audio is going to be changing the sound reflection from within the room to be able to experience those changes. yeah, that seems really powerful. ada rose cannon 47:35 yeah, so you can take the information from web xr, for example, the position of the user's head, and then you feed that into a library like resonance. and that will automatically handle the correct sound from the user's perspective, which is pretty amazing. tony morelan 47:53 yeah. so what about 5g? how is webex r and 5g working together? ada rose cannon 48:00 so 5g is totally amazing. and this is definitely kevin's cup of tea. so he should answer this one. kevin picchi 48:06 so 5g would essentially improve your experience using webex. so for example, you could have way bigger models downloaded on your phone with a higher quality, and it would simply load faster. you could also imagine having multiplayer experiences and having almost zero lag or latency. tony morelan 48:29 now, i know that you're working on 5g tours, what exactly is 5g tours. kevin picchi 48:34 so 5g tour is a european project in which samsung participates. and we test the 5g performances in different environments, in which the first one is touristic environment where we try to enhance the experience of tourists while they're visiting a city. there is another one which is the mobility one, we try to enhance the way people move in the city. and we also try to improve and create new experiences in a way that we make the city safer. so let's say there is an evacuation, we can provide guides and we basically use 5g in all of those verticals to improve them. tony morelan 49:19 so to talk a little bit more about making cities more secure or safer. what exactly do you mean by that? kevin picchi 49:24 so we have a use case that we're working on internally to take all of it is making evacuation easier and faster by leveraging 5g, for example, have some sort of augmented reality application lunch instantly on the phone after people in the airport and the application would basically guide the people out of the airports in a safe way. so let's say there would be a fire and you would be guided around the fire and in the right direction. nice. tony morelan 49:55 so can you tell me how is samsung internet involved with the with 5g tours? kevin picchi 49:59 well, it's so we're working on basically three sub projects in the 5g tour, where we take advantage of web technologies. so what would those technologies be? we're using web xi web rtc, web sockets, and web each id. those are the web api that ada just talked about. we're trying to fuse them with 5g to improve those verticals. tony morelan 50:25 so tell me a little bit more what is web rtc. kevin picchi 50:28 one of the use cases we're working on is making museum experience experienceable by multiple people. so the goal of it is having two or three persons in a room in a museum room with a piece of art, and being able to have them both in the room and been like letting them experience the artwork, take a look at the artwork, maybe move things around the room. and all that taking advantage of 5g, which reduces latency and people tony morelan 51:01 feel better. nice. and this is in a vr environment is what you're referring to correct? kevin picchi 51:05 yes. tony morelan 51:06 so what about web h id, which i think stands for human interface device? is that correct? kevin picchi 51:12 yes. that's kind of like the gamepad api in a way that this api lets us send probe packets to the devices. so to put it in a simple way, let's say you'd have a remote controller that is not compatible with the gamepad api, you could use this api to basically send bro comments to a controller. and you could have some kind of communication going. and we're using that api with the remote controller that we're using in another use case, in which were basically communicating with remote and getting sensors data. and we're using them as a controller basically. tony morelan 51:59 nice, nice to see the versatility of it. is there any news coming out that you can share that's related to webex r and samsung internet? ada rose cannon 52:08 web xr is evolving really quickly. the best way to keep up to date with new news and events. and all the cool stuff that's happening in web xr is to subscribe to the immersive web weekly newsletter. it's a newsletter that comes out on tuesdays and is a really great way to stay up to date with everything that's happening in the immersive web world tony morelan 52:26 nicely. and we'll include a link to that newsletter in the in the show notes. what advice do you have for developers looking to start building for samsung internet and in webex are? ada rose cannon 52:39 probably my best advice is to find an environment you're happy working with. i really like a frame, there's quite a few out there, i have a few getting started guides on a website i maintain called immersive web dot dev. so it's a great place to look at the different ways you can try out building web xr. there's also some really useful tools out there, such as an emulator that lets you emulate immersive headsets in the web browser. so you can test your site without needing to actually put on a headset, which is a really great way just to like experiment with stuff as you're building it and is a tool that i use an awful lot. right. so that's great to hear. tony morelan 53:18 so are there other ways for developers to follow you and learn more about by what you have to offer? kevin picchi 53:23 yes, surely. we're mostly active on twitter at samsung internet. and you can also find our blog and our samsung internet page on the developer samsung.com slash internet website. you can also follow us here and i on twitter. my ad is kevin peaky. p icc h ii. ada rose cannon 53:46 and mine is at ada rose cannon. tony morelan 53:49 well, even kevin, it was great to have you on the podcast just wanted to say thanks for giving us a little insight into samsung internet and web xr. ada rose cannon 53:57 thank you so much for having us. it's been really good. kevin picchi 53:59 yeah. thanks for having us sunny. dan appelquist 54:03 yeah, so good to hear about what we're doing with web xr and the immersive web i it's a technology that i think is really game changing, especially in the way that it democratizes xu, democratizes, ar and vr and really brings the value of that technology to more people across different types of handsets different types of devices. it's really, it's so important. we've talked a lot about different aspects of samsung internet, what would be the best way for developers to even learn more? well, you can first of all, visit us on our homepage, which is developer.samsung.com/internet or you can just click on samsung internet once you go to developer.samsung.com. there you can read about our latest releases, you can read about the team. you can have links to all our social media. we are samsung internet on twitter, our dms are open there and now account is managed by our team directly. so if you're dm’ing, samsung internet, the entire team here will read it. and we will try to get back to you. but also, if you have bugs or if you have problems, you can use that as a great channel to reach us. or you can just add mention us on twitter, and we'll be happy to have a conversation with you there. we're also on linkedin, if you search for us on linkedin, samsung internet, you'll find our linkedin page and we're happy to interact there as well. we're on medium. if you search for samsung internet, again, that's linked from our page at developer.samsung.com/internet. we blog on medium and we also reflect that blog on developer.samsung.com so that you can see us everywhere you go. hey, dan, it was great to have you on the podcast. just wanted to say thanks to you and your team, for all the great and exciting things that are coming with samsung internet. thanks for the opportunity. and thank you for all the work that you've put in. closing 55:59 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 developer.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.

season 3, episode 4 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 chris benjaminsen, frvr games, galaxy store chris benjaminsen, founder of frvr, the super successful game publisher with over 70 titles on samsung services. not only do we chat about monetization and game revenue strategies, but how the frvr platform has allowed them to scale their global reach. all music from today's show is from frvr games, composed by rasmus hartvig. listen download this episode topics covered frvr publishing on galaxy store marketing discoverability monetization generating revenue in-app purchase (iap) in-app advertising (iaa) interstitial ads galaxy badge best of galaxy store awards acquiring games/studios diversity and inclusion helpful links frvr - frvr.com frvr careers - careers.frvr.com frvr linkedin - linkedin.com/company/frvr frvr youtube - youtube.com/c/frvrgames galaxy store (gold digger frvr) - galaxy.store/digger1 gold train frvr - goldtrain.frvr.com chris benjaminsen linkedin - linkedin.com/in/chrisbenjaminsen/ chris benjaminsen twitter - twitter.com/benjaminsen galaxy badges - developer.samsung.com/galaxy-store/gsb-promotion samsung iap - developer.samsung.com/iap samsung developer program homepage - developer.samsung.com samsung developer program newsletter - developer.samsung.com/newsletter samsung developer program blog - developer.samsung.com/blog samsung developer program news - developer.samsung.com/news samsung developer program facebook - facebook.com/samsungdev samsung developer program instagram - instagram.com/samsung_dev samsung developer program twitter - twitter.com/samsung_dev samsung developer program youtube - youtube.com/samsungdevelopers samsung developer program linkedin - linkedin.com/company/samsungdevelopers 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 00:01 hey, i'm tony morelan. and this is the samsung developers podcast, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools. welcome to season three, episode four. on today's show, i'm joined by chris benjaminsen, founder of frvr, the super successful game publisher with over 70 titles on samsung services. not only do we chat about monetization and game revenue strategies, but how the frvr platform has allowed them to scale their global reach. and the music from today's show is from frvr games, all composed by rasmus hartvig, enjoy. hey, chris, welcome to the podcast. chris benjaminsen 00:50 hey, tony. thanks for having me. yeah, so tony morelan 00:52 so i'm excited to chat with you. because, you know, we've had game developers on the podcast, but never a game publisher. let me first ask you though, who is chris benjaminsen? chris benjaminsen 01:02 like? that's a good question. like, if i were to define myself, i think there's like two defining characteristics, like one is i must make things. and the second one is, i detest repetition. so if you come to my place, it's not unlikely i will cook. but it's very unlikely i'm cooking something i made before. so you know, it might be good might not be good, right? but you know, that, that drives and making things like it, it can be origami, it can be computer games that can be like, doesn't really matter, as long as i'm sort of producing something, and then i really don't like doing things twice. right. you know, like, anything that's routine is just boring. tony morelan 01:41 so you're an explorer, then? chris benjaminsen 01:43 i guess. so. i guess so. yeah. tony morelan 01:47 so you're with frvr? what exactly is your role? and what is frvr? chris benjaminsen 01:53 like, like, i'm the i'm the original founder, the company, right? you know, and my role today is mostly around working together with massive companies such as samsung, i lead a team at frvr that does that. and if you're, if you were to describe frvr, as a company, we're a platform and a publisher. okay, so we have a platform that allows game developers to make fantastic games and with all the services that they need to do to do so basically, anything in between a, a game developer and a consumer, and then we also the publisher, we actually make sure that the games get in front of the right user, and they have an opportunity to play those games. tony morelan 02:29 okay, what does frvr stand for? it's an acronym, does it have a deep meaning? chris benjaminsen 02:35 no, it's not like, like, a lot of people are sort of asking us if we have french vr company, which we're not. yeah, but, but like, like, if rbis is technically forever, without the vowels. okay, you can trademark frvr you can trademark forever, at least, not unless you have apple liberal money, right? so. so if we say if i'm yeah, because if you could locally use you sort of the full pronunciation you can actually use the trademark. so there's a bunch of stupid rules there. tony morelan 03:07 interesting. interesting. so before we dive into frvr, tell me about your journey. what led you into the mobile gaming area, and then specifically into creating frvr, chris benjaminsen 03:17 i've been in the, in the games industry for like, more than 20 years, my first job, sort of professional job ever was to make a real time multiplayer games in javascript. and if i'd be honest, my seventh startup in total and my second year, and my third platform company over also have like a long history of sort of building companies in this space. and i've been very fortunate. i never managed to go bankrupt. but one of these companies so far, right, you know, so little bit proud about that. tony morelan 03:48 oh, that's great. it definitely plays into you know, when you first started, you had said that, you know, you're not going to repeat much. so you said seven companies that you've started, chris benjaminsen 03:58 you had all very different companies, and some of them were like, like, like, very small and, and never got successful, anything like that. right? it's just like the companies apparently gets bigger and bigger every time i try. yeah, there might be there might be new startups in the future as well. but for now, if rbis is a very exciting company to work at, and definitely want to want to spend my time. tony morelan 04:20 so i know one of those companies you had started you actually, it was a pretty successful company that you ended up selling. but you came away with that from with a lot of lessons learned, i would say is that correct? chris benjaminsen 04:33 yeah. so like, like, in a previous life, build a platform company that did infrastructure for cash or mobile, social. and in that company, there was a lot of people building games on top of our infrastructure and 1000s of developers right and, and there was there's a few significant learnings from that. so one was that building a company that just charges other people for services is not a particularly good business, a lot of money was made by the developers on top of our platform where we are not making quite a lot of money. so you know, make sure that that you actually participate where, where the value is if you want to be a publisher. and then the second learning was that the successful developers were not the ones who had the best at making games, right? so there's, there's not a strong connection between sort of making games that are fun to play and the economic success that those developers were able to see. so if you want to be successful in the game space, and this is particularly true in the in the mobile game space, you need to be good at a lot of other things that has nothing to do with game development, such as a user acquisition, and revenue optimization, and data and all these things. and that, you know, i don't think there's anything wrong with that. but if you are somebody who really loves making kickass games, you're missing the 90% if you also want to be successful at that. tony morelan 05:57 it's interesting you say that, you know, i had on the podcast a few weeks ago, peter and tobias from biodome games, they have their game gold digger, frvr. yeah. and it was peter, who had a great quote, saying that he was chatting with one of his partners, who had said, you know, for once, can you stop trying to be so artistic in your games and just build a game that can be successful? and, you know, we all had a good laugh at that. chris benjaminsen 06:23 yeah. and, you know, i think all industries are like that, right. you know, you probably have to be good at a multitude of different disciplines to be successful. but, but the games industry, being one of the most valuable entertainment industry, two worlds is, of course, also one of the most competitive and that competitive landscape. it's a very, it's a very hard place for, for most people to compete. and, and the market sentiment is sort of dominated by survival. bias. yeah. right. you know, like, like, the people who won the lottery. yeah. you know, like, like an among us are like flappy birds. so like these, these small teams that had an outsized hit, right, but that's like winning the lottery. good luck with that. yeah. and tony morelan 07:04 i think a great example of that right now is wordle, in the phenomenon behind that. chris benjaminsen 07:08 absolutely. fantastic game, right. you know, and i like these small puzzle games once in a while to come along. i was like, 2048, as well, which was also originally made, i think, by an italian game developer, you know, just as a small example, fantastic, fantastic game as well. yeah, tony morelan 07:25 definitely, in kind of going back to, you know, what i mentioned, peter, and tobias, they said that for them, you know, the key to their success was partnering with someone like frvr, so that they could just focus on creating the game and let everybody on your team handle everything that when it comes to publishing and marketing, so i think there's a huge value with where you guys are in this space. chris benjaminsen 07:47 i hope so. like, that's what we're trying to do. we're trying to allow developers focusing on making fantastic games. and then we took care of all the nitty gritty details of making those games available. and i think we published the 39 platforms. and then while also helping those developers make sure that the right users come into the games. yeah, yeah. because it's not it's not only just about the volume of people who play a game, it's more important to make sure that the right user plays the game. sure, to get the kind of games that i like, it's not necessarily the kind of games that you like, right, for tony morelan 08:17 sure. so let's talk a bit about the history. how long has frvr been in existence? chris benjaminsen 08:22 so i think i think technically, they were written, sort of in the integration of the company was founded in must be 2016. okay. and their written version of frb apps was decided to be the biggest, baddest lifestyle company you have ever heard of, and sort of sort of allowed me to go and travel the world without having to worry about expenses. and it did that it did that very well. like, very successfully. however, like i'd had a corporate job in corporate america, i had moved to san francisco at this point in my life after having sold a previous company and i sort of managed to convince myself that everything that was wrong with my life was working. it turned out everything that was wrong with my life was working for corporate america. and it took me it took me like three weeks and a whole bunch of success to realize that and decide, oh, wow, there's a big opportunity here in what inevitably came if ivr that exists today. yeah, i teamed up with a guy called brian meidell. they joining co-founder came in and we started sort of getting serious about the company a few years after the original founding. tony morelan 09:28 and it was brian actually, who had told peter, hey, for once, put artistic stuff aside and let's focus on you know, how to be successful here. chris benjaminsen 09:36 yeah. and like he's a fantastic executor. right, you know, and that's, like, due to building big teams and sort of running productions. a lot of repetition stuff i don't like right, yes. really good at that. tony morelan 09:48 that's great. so how many employees are at frvr? chris benjaminsen 09:52 yeah, so i think we are 130 now. so as of today, but yeah, like we find ourselves in a situation right now, where we are onboarding around 11 new people a month, so you're growing? yeah, every time you ask that question, the number would have changed? tony morelan 10:08 no, are these people are you focused in one headquarters? are you guys you know, all around the globe? chris benjaminsen 10:13 we have most of our people in in lisbon in portugal. and that's predominantly where we are focusing on hiring okay, you know, post covid, the world has changed. and, you know, we absolutely accept that some people want to be wherever it is they want to be. so we also we also have offices in denmark, we have offices in united kingdom and we have a small office in malta as well, and a small office in spain. so we have we have sort of different opportunities for people who wants to work in an office got it. and then the majority of people are now in in disband portugal. and that's also where we are mostly doing a tony morelan 10:50 hiring you yourself, though you are in the uk. is that correct? yeah, i'm chris benjaminsen 10:53 in london, right? you know, i get to i get to be a special snowflake and decide where i want to live. so i live in. tony morelan 11:01 wonderful. now under the frvr brand. how many game studios do you guys have that you're working with? chris benjaminsen 11:07 we are publisher. right? you know, so? we i think presently we work with around 20. okay, yeah. other studios, right? so it's a non-insignificant amount. but we have high aspirations, we want to get to a place where we can work with hundreds, if not 1000s of developers sure to do fantastic things. tony morelan 11:28 so how many monthly players? do you get playing frvr games on all channels? chris benjaminsen 11:34 i get to it various, right. like, like a lot of our success comes from viral traffic. right. okay. so active users can range from i got a really bad month, 50 million to get month where we were we peek into, like, like 100 plus million mark. wow, tony morelan 11:50 monthly active users. that's crazy. yeah, it's chris benjaminsen 11:53 a lot of people. so far, i think. like, like it's a number we track. we think we've had around 1.6 billion absolute unique for the lifetime of the company. tony morelan 12:03 wow. and that is just in you know, you said the 2016 was the start of frvr. chris benjaminsen 12:09 have you? i failed to remember it might have been 15. right. but yeah, like plus minus a year. sure. tony morelan 12:16 so now let's talk about samsung and galaxy store with frvr, what are some of the popular titles that you guys offer on galaxy store? chris benjaminsen 12:24 so particularly on the galaxy store, like we have, i think we have like 12 games live, their most notice would be it's called tigger, frvr which, which is built by peter and team. and then we have sort of our higher end games like a basketball and a hex. and however, we do work with samsung in other ways, as well, they have this instance type product as well, where we are also present. and we have i don't know; i think we've done like seven or eight different integration with samsung along the year. so we are sort of everywhere on a samsung phone, including the galaxy appstore. tony morelan 12:57 okay, so not just the galaxy app store. but there's other different platforms that samsung offers frvr is involved in. chris benjaminsen 13:04 yeah, so we work with, we work with samsung about building an experience in our first integration with what's in the product called bixby minus one home screen. so when you swipe left on your on your phone, like we will be wearing, we had a cart where there was sort of quick links to our games, okay, we build an instant games type product together with samsung, we work quite a lot of that together. and we have our games live there. we also have integrations with the with the browser. and like we exploring, basically, a big part of what frvr is, rather than trying to drag the user to where we want them to be, say, a mobile app store, we try to take the model and turn it inside out and bring people great games wherever they have already decided to want to be because it's very costly to drag a user somewhere else, right. tony morelan 13:50 i see. so if they're already there, you want to make your game available to them. chris benjaminsen 13:54 yeah, yeah. it's like, you know, if you're, if you're starbucks, right, people won't care if you can only get it in the airport, you actually have to be on a street corner close to where people sort of walk around, otherwise nobody is ever going to drink their coffee. tony morelan 14:05 yeah, that's true. that's true. so how did this relationship with samsung for start? chris benjaminsen 14:10 we met samsung at a at a conference. and they were like, can you give us games in like, four months? i think was the was the original question. and we got the games to them in two days. so wow. so the answer was yes. yeah. tony morelan 14:24 that's a great way to start the relationship. oh, yeah. so why would you say it's important to offer your game on galaxy store? chris benjaminsen 14:31 like, again, you know, that those users there who love the galaxy store, and we want to have our games available to those users in that space and galaxy store is actually well performing? right. you know, it's a samsung product and samsung phones are very high-end devices generally. it's very, not only is it it's great to meet a consumer where they are they are also very high value users when people are playing from the front of samsung galaxy app store. tony morelan 14:54 yeah, in what ways would you say galaxy store has helped you promote frvr games chris benjaminsen 14:59 for is the organic installs a fairly competent product? and it has all the features you would expect as a game developer, right? you know, so, so great access to in app purchases, great access to notifications, great access to distribution, right. but we've also, we also really enjoyed working together with the samsung galaxy team. and we have, like, among other things, we have an frvr category in the galaxy store that sort of exclusive to us. it's only our games. oh, no, no. and we work together on seasonal featuring and to give feedbacks to us, you know, saying, hey, we think it would be fantastic if we could do some something around easter, for instance. and then we go and work on that together and sort of find a, a process that works well together for both of us. tony morelan 15:42 that's great. and i'm sure that banner promotions are part of that. is that chris benjaminsen 15:45 yeah, banner promotion, and i can promotions and like there's a lot of tools that samsung has in the toolbox to help out. right? yeah. and then we also push on the galaxy team to do more. like we, we've sent a lot of feedback on the on the back-end tools and things like that. and fantastically, it has impact, like we get better product. right. so for us, that's a fantastic partnership. tony morelan 16:09 yeah. and that's one of the things that actually pulled me into working for samsung was how open they were to feedback in wanting to improve their platform. fantastic. you know, you'd mentioned gold digger, frvr. those are the guys they won our 2021 best of galaxy store award for best instant play game. awesome game. awesome. guys, we were so happy to give that award. tell me what it did mean for frvr to have one of your games win a best of galaxy store award? chris benjaminsen 16:37 it's a privilege, right? you know, and the credit goes to the game developer, they made that game? yeah. right. you know, we supported them along the way. and, and of course, came with a lot of feedback and help them with technical issues and things like that. but at the end of the day, you know, we have to be honest about the fact that the great games are made by the great developers, right, and also, as a platform publisher, provide the tools to make that a possibility. but games are fundamentally a creative endeavor. and you need massively traded people to make to make those games. sure. i'm, i'm a game developer myself as well, right. you know, and i'm almost more proud of some of the games i've built. and, you know, the very successful company that and if rbis, right, you know, because, you know, so it's sort of like an expression of something where you sat down and said, here's the thing i want to create, and now i've gotten it out. right. and i think to be as impede completely deserves getting that, that recognition from galaxy. tony morelan 17:35 yeah. success for a game definitely revolves around revenue. tell me as far as frvr, what has been your strategy for generating revenue? chris benjaminsen 17:46 like so. so from a, from a technical side, right, you know, we try to we try to make all avenues of generating revenue available in our platform, right. so that means interstitial-based advertisement, it means reward the best advertisement? it means in app purchases, it means subscriptions. it actually does not mean, banner advertisement, we don't do that. because i don't like it. no, really. but you know, yeah, other than that, like, like, we sort of have all the technical capabilities, and then what we find and what we try to optimize for, it's not revenue, we try to optimize for engagement. okay. and there's a multitude of reasons for that, like so. so like, one is the fact that i can't remember the specific number, but it's more than 90% of all value that is captured in the game is made by people who play the game more than once. yeah, right. you really want to have these long engagements with people, right. and another fairly simple reason is it's a lot easier to take a game that has huge engagement, and turn it into a good business than it is to take a game with a with a strong monetization model and turn it into a great game. right? so fundamentally, everything we focus on all our kpis, all our visions, and missions are around building experiences that people want to engage with for a long time. and then revenue is something that happens as a result, they're off, rather than being sort of a driving factor. and because we are good at distribution it because we, we are not sort of participating in the race to the bottom that is cost positive user acquisition on app stores, we can take the privilege that it is to be less aggressively monetizing than some of our competitors. tony morelan 19:22 yeah, yeah. so let's talk about some of the specifics here, when it comes to, you know, different ways to generate revenue. you know, there's developers out there that may just be getting started in this space. and so i want to help explain what some of those are. so ip is in app purchase, kind of explain, like what is in app purchase. chris benjaminsen 19:39 so new in app purchases, if you can somehow convince a user to pay for something in the game, right, you know, and, and how they pay. it's actually quite different across the world. so northern europe or usa, right? america has a distributor for a credit card, okay. but if you're talking about a consumer in india, it's typically through a gift card or something like that. why? they've gone into install and sort of funded a wallet, right. but the fact of the matter is, what essentially ends up happening is you have you have an experience in your game that the user feels is worth the value of paying for. and again, you know, like, like, like talking about engagement in games, right? why would a user be willing to, to sort of exchange money for something in a game? and that's typically related to the user's expectation of also playing this game two weeks from now? right? yes, they're investing. yeah, you're investing in your future experience in this game? right? you know, so. so it's another place where this this long-term engagement becomes very important, right? but a lot of times what people are buying are like, simple things, like more lives, or an item, or whatever it is that sort of, and in some of our games that are multiplayer, we even have people playing for things that are purely sort of cosmetic, buying a different hat, because then other people can see the hat that hat, but the hat, the hat has no function, right? sure. tony morelan 20:57 so it's just being able to create their own identity, you know, within that game, chris benjaminsen 21:02 it's no different than people buying clothes in the real world, you know? tony morelan 21:05 sure, sure. so how do you look at your player demographics for getting the best returns on iap? chris benjaminsen 21:10 i? well, first of all, that's a per game thing. right? you know, we have, we have games that appeal to 50 plus women. and we have games that appeal to like, like, a young male audience. right. so that's, that's very individualized per game. fundamentally, though, there are some there are some core mechanics that always worked really well, if you can proposition a user to, to exchange money for time. yeah. so something where they can progress faster if they if they put money in is typically a very strong mechanic, regardless of who the consumer is. and then, like we do the thing that successful game developers, do, we spend a lot of time looking at data and looking at, you know, what are the flows that leads to a conversion? so somebody's actually putting money into the system? how do we how do we balance those metrics such that we sort of get the most statistical value of, and we use, we use tools such as ad split testing, okay, where you run, run two versions of the game at the same time, and then you measure which one performs better? and then you make that diversion that everybody plays? tony morelan 22:16 yeah, yeah, no, that's great. i've heard that that is a pretty important aspect, not just in the gaming industry, but just with, you know, ads and marketing to do a b testing. chris benjaminsen 22:26 yeah, we even do something. it's called multi variant testing, right. and we should not go into the details, but it becomes very complex very quickly. tony morelan 22:33 sure, sure. so what other mobile game monetization models do you consider like, you know, premium paid apps or paid user acquisitions, you had mentioned that chris benjaminsen 22:43 we did experiment a little bit with premium paid apps, but it's a very, it's a very tough market. and, and it's not, it's not something where we found a lot of a lot of success, like we generally see more successful, and we can just sort of allow anyone to play the games, and not without having that limitation, right. and we do both interstitial based advertisement, which is unprompted and then rewarded video type advertisement, where the user gets a reward for watching an advertisement. but when a user sort of opts to watch an ad, right, you know, so you could imagine that, so this tony morelan 23:14 is during gameplay, there would be a moment where then a video would play, and they would watch that. chris benjaminsen 23:18 yeah. so a simple example could be you know, that you have just died. yeah. and you can revive by watching an advertisement and not paying a coin. okay. right. so giving the user the choice between, say, watching an advertisement and spending a bit of time versus spending a bit of their money, right, you know, so. and it's a very high value format. because the user has elected to watch an advertisement. so you know, the users there, yes, you know, they're engaged. and they're just sitting there waiting, right? so advertisements are typically willing to pay a high price for that type of advertising. tony morelan 23:54 and you'd mentioned interstitial ads. so explain what that is for someone who's new to game development? chris benjaminsen 24:00 yeah. so it's a bit like to have to get on television. so something is happening on your screen, and then suddenly does an advertisement and something else is happening, right? you know, so it's an ad that is that is shown to the user, like interstitial technically means an advertisement that runs before something starts, right. but it's used interchangeably in the games industry to mean like an ad before something starts on ad in the middle of something on that after something happened. okay, we try to be cautious of using those type of advertisements sort of out of order. like we don't want to interrupt a user while they're playing. yeah. so we will typically only put those in. so like, for whatever reason, your game session has ended, and you have just elected to press play again. and that's where we would put in those type of advertisements. you do have games out there, which are you can imagine you're playing a solitaire game and then put an ad pops up in the middle of it right and you have to sit down wait till you can continue your game and we try to stay away from that. tony morelan 24:55 i see. i see. what about subscriptions. have you guys read any subscription models on your games? so, yeah, we've chris benjaminsen 25:00 run a, we run a few experiments here. and it's a relatively new area of monetization for us. but we have run experiments where our games have been sort of presented as a games club. so rather than having advertisement or having, you know, purchases in the game, you can just play them completely for free if you had a subscription through a third party, right. and some of our debug games to the kind of stuff we're building now definitely lends itself well towards being able to support subscriptions. subscriptions to free to play games these days, mostly expresses themselves as season passes. so you like buy a season pass subscription, and then you get like, extra rewards while you play for a period of time. and then that time period is up. and then you know, you can buy the next season pass as well, or continue your subscription or whatever it is, right. you know, that's, that's the model of like, a, like a fortnight or those type of games. tony morelan 25:52 got it. so we've talked about in app purchase, aap, you know, there's another category to monetization called ia, which is in app advertising. and i think, under that falls, the, you know, the rewarded videos, these interstitial ads have also heard of something called offer walls. can you explain what is an offer wall? chris benjaminsen 26:11 yeah, we actually don't think we have any games library or footballs anywhere. but it's, it's basically, you know, you can get a reward in your game for doing another action. right? so again, it's user opt in the use of one something and find alpha wallets typically, like extra coins, or whatever in the game. and to get a get sort of a list of different options for things they could be doing right now to have some level of value. and that can go all the way from, you know, signing up to a website, all the way up to you know, committing yourself to four years of sirius xm radio in the us, oh, really, you know, or whatever. right? you know, and as there's different types of reward levels of that, right. so but they can be significant, right. so like that. it's, it's sort of a way for other companies to interact with that consumer and get them to do something that has value to them and date and pay you for that service. so it's a bit sort of a direct affiliate program or something like okay, okay. yeah. okay. tony morelan 27:11 interesting. so, you know, a lot of what we talked about now have been in game, you know, advertising for monetization. so what about paid user acquisition? so actually going out there and advertising for your game? so you guys are active in that area? chris benjaminsen 27:23 not particularly, it's something we are exploring, and it is something that i believe it's going to be very important for the future of frp. yeah. but historically, it's not something that we done to a huge extent. however, it is an area where we actually partner with the samsung galaxy appstore team, where we were looking at what is the best path for somebody who is publishing on the samsung galaxy app store to find sort of pockets of uses that can be that can be purchased. right? tony morelan 27:51 okay. okay. so of all these different ways that we've talked about when it comes to monetization, what would you say is the most effective way in why? chris benjaminsen 28:00 and so there's many answers to that what has been the most successful for frvr suffice advertisement, that has mostly down to the kind of games that we have been building historically. and the kind of games we've been building historically has mostly been the result of the capabilities for the platforms, our games has been available on, which, by and large, have not supported in app purchases. however, if you were to look at where is the most potential value, it's most definitely in the in-app purchase space, right? like the potential value that you can derive from a single user is larger in app purchases than any other way you can monetize that user, even with subscriptions, right? make some simple math, you know, rewarded video is considered valuable, right. but if you have a player, sort of watching 1000 ads a month, that might sort of in the united states be worth $20, or thereabouts, where $20 is not an uncommon average transactions for a central user to spending in app purchases, right. and people typically buy more than once sort of the opportunity to create a great business around in app purchases is much higher, and opportunity to create a great business purely from advertisement. tony morelan 29:08 got it? what would you say would be some advice that you can give for a developer looking to integrate iap? chris benjaminsen 29:15 like, like, it goes back to what we talked about earlier. right? you know, build deep experiences, right? sure. for like engagements, yeah, long engagements, and then then allow people to buy something that they, you know, feel like they're going to get value from a long period of time. right. and i think an important thing there is you must be trustworthy as a developer. yeah. right. you know, like, like, like, the player must trust you to not to screw them over. so if you have all kinds of other stuff into games, where they feel cheated, they're not going to give you their money. or if you cheat them, they're only going to do it once. right? yeah. you know, so you actually have to provide something that brings real value to the user. otherwise, they're, they're not going to engage with that thing. right. like they're not, they're not stupid. they are very clever. tony morelan 29:57 yeah. so let's talk about a how you guys go about acquiring games for frvr? what do you look for? chris benjaminsen 30:03 like we look for, for great teams. and i think it's important here that we are publisher, right? so we work with developers who take a fair amount of that total risk of building a game. sometimes you find the games, right. but predominantly, we work with great teams that is passionate about the game that they're working on. and that's, that's mostly what we look for. okay. and then we help though, those developers to go and, and build fantastic games, right. but due to the nature of our platform, at least how its structured right? now, you must basically build the game from scratch on top of stuff. so. so we're not a publisher that can sort of accept a game that somebody's already built, and say, yeah, we'll publish that it's more sort of a cool collaborative co development process, where we work together with developers to create fantastic things that work on top of our platform. tony morelan 30:51 you know, i heard somewhere that between 50 to 1000 games are added to the app store's every day. so i know it's a huge competition when it comes to games. what's your strategy for discoverability? chris benjaminsen 31:03 i like as we talked about, go to the user where they are, rather than trying to drag them to the app store where it's very competitive, right. and, like we use, we use all the tricks including branding, like we now have significant volume of people just searching for our games every day, both in app stores and on google, right. and i truly did that basic strategy of saying let's bring our games to where the users are, has been very, very successful for us, and allowed us to sort of get in front of all of these consumers without diving deep into cost positive user acquisition and things like that. and dental labs though, say they're hyper competitive, it gets very, very hard to get your game there, right. and people talk about all of these things like influencer, marketing, and whatever. and they don't call it user acquisition, but that's just what it is. right? you know, it's just a different way of doing it. right. you know, it's all of these hacks to try to get in front of the user. tony morelan 31:54 so are you using tools like creating promotional trailer videos and posting them on youtube? chris benjaminsen 32:00 we do we do that for some of our debug games, like a game like wells frvr. yeah. there's like there's a content team that creates content for social media. that being you know; youtube and facebook and i think we even have posts on tik tok. okay, tony morelan 32:14 so you guys have a ton of experience. now, when it when it comes to publishing games? i'm sure you faced a few challenges. can you share some stories and how you overcame those challenges? chris benjaminsen 32:24 a lot of our challenges is around scale. right? you know, so we have 70 games on 39 platforms. right. wow. and that didn't that in itself is a big number, right? to sort of, sort of manage this, like, that's more than 2000 combinations, almost 3000 combinations, right? we also have all of those games in 20 languages. so when you when you sort of factor in those combinations, that's 50,000 combinations, right? and if you want localize screenshots, yeah, that's no way you could do that with humans, right. and a lot of ways we try to solve with technology, right? that's what the what the frvr platform does, okay, encapsulate just the complexity of trying to do all of these things into sort of a unified platform. and that goes for what is a good experience on the samsung galaxy appstore, like the samsung galaxy appstore has specific capabilities and specific api's and specific sort of things that work particularly well on a platform. and if every developer had to consider that for all the platforms we were on, they would be spending none of their time making great games. so we encapsulate that complexity into our platform. and that's sort of the recipe that makes frvr work. that's sort of removing humans from the equation, basically, tony morelan 33:42 that's interesting. i mean, i can totally see how you guys are able to scale your reach with having so many games, but you've got quite a team behind. so it's not all automated, you still do need to have those employees to support that. chris benjaminsen 33:56 yeah, but like, 95% of those people work on the platform, right? to build the to build the infrastructure, right. and frvr is also a company that's been growing quite a lot, i think, okay, two years ago, we were we were fewer than 20 people right? so a lot of the people who actually worked at frvr now people who joined us in the last year tony morelan 34:15 so what are some of the trends that you've seen in the in the gaming industry chris benjaminsen 34:19 or hotels that there's a lot of them right you know, there's a like i think the status trend i see is when you have say and among us or a fall guys or a flappy birds come out and be successful, like, like older people who try to get success by just following that recipe. right? not realizing that the reasons those game were successful originally were sort of a bit of luck and timing. and typically some external factors, like among us grew with discord and discord grew it among us. yeah, right. and that was sort of sort of the game to play on that platform, right and all the other games in that in that category. by and large failed because it was just like it and not again. but that right and, and a thing i think a lot of people have forgotten is that the game industry is cyclical, right? so you get a new channel it comes out. it's very cheap and easy to get users on it initially. and then that's the value of that platform goes up, it just becomes more and more expensive, right. and people have sort of forgotten. that's how the games industry used to work because mobile came along. yeah. and stuck around for a very long time to do to sort of these stores that were tied to specific devices. right. which, which is something you didn't really have on a on a pc, where there was more open competition on who could sort of have an app store. tony morelan 35:40 yeah, yeah, for sure. so tell me what is in the future for frvr. chris benjaminsen 35:45 a lot more high-quality games? like that's basically our focus right now. we are very fortunate, we just closed out a round funding. wonderful. yeah, thank you. and like, the entire theme of that funding is we need, we need games of a completely different quality, right? so we are we are looking for fantastic studios who can come in and build games with sort of that depth that can support in app purchases. that's the thing that we really want to focus on. we want to want to have games that can have people play for years, not just once, right? tony morelan 36:18 yeah. so as far vr is seeing this growth, what are you guys doing related to diversity and inclusion? chris benjaminsen 36:26 and we do a lot of things, right, like diversity and inclusion is something that we try to sort of have both across our games and across our company culture, right? so it can be everything from i personally created the hex frvr game. so yeah, i got a nice email from somebody said, i love this game, but it can they call us i can see the different things, right. so making sure that you're aware of the different kinds of colorblind people can be sure, sure. and it also it also means a lot for hiring, like, like, what's the best candidate for the job is not necessarily the person that fits the checklist, the best that you see that you put on your yeah, other requirements. yeah, in like diverse teams perform better. so diversity is a is a virtue in the hiring process. and it can be advantageous to hire the more diverse candidate if you have an opportunity to hire too, and like, but it means a lot. like you have to be mindful of it everywhere. those like natural biases, right. now, a simple example of that is that the more bullet points you put on a on a job post about specific requirements, the less likely it is that females would, will apply for a job interesting, like a male candidate would sort of look at a long bullet point and see two things that good and go, yeah, i could totally do this, right? where if fema will see a long list and sort of say, i can only do two of these things i shouldn't apply for this. right. so you have to be mindful of those things all the way. tony morelan 37:52 interesting. yeah, i think giving someone the opportunity to really talk about their personality, and their value is probably the best way to go about finding that that good candidate. chris benjaminsen 38:02 yeah. and it's a big part of our it's a big part of our sort of, sort of, sort of hiring flow is the values. right? you know, we also a, a company in portugal, that doesn't behave like a portuguese company, this particular company, company structure in particular is very hierarchical, right. you know, some people might call it a bit old fashioned. that's not the company we are, that's not the company we want to be. so we want people that resonates with sort of a more flat structure, modern ways of working tony morelan 38:34 wonderful. so if someone is interested, either in working for frvr, or their a game studio that want to bring their games to you, what's the best way for them to reach out to frvr? chris benjaminsen 38:45 like, like, send me an email first, right? you know, and, you know, i'll redirect you to the right person, my email is chris@frvr.com. so it's fairly straightforward, right? like, always happy to chat with people who do fantastic things. tony morelan 38:57 yeah, that's great. and we'll include links in the show notes too much about what we talked about today and into frvr websites. so chris, i got to say, it was great to have you on the podcast. i love learning all about frvr and what you guys are doing but let me ask when you're not working for frp or what is it that you'd like to do for fun? chris benjaminsen 39:15 i find most of my spare time is taken up by you know, walking the dog, or, you know, cooking food if it's some like i'm probably not good at cooking food in the winter but you know, like i like to grill outdoors and whatever right you know, and i actually try to keep a fairly strict work life balance wonderful. so you know i am one of the people who like go into the office but mostly yes a way to not work while i'm at home. tony morelan 39:40 that's great. well hey, we're just about to hit the springtime of the year and soon will come summer so i'm sure you're going to enjoy lots of outdoor grilling when the when the season comes. chris benjaminsen 39:49 hopefully, you never know where they're somewhere in london. right? you know, that might be like two days where it's impossible. that's tony morelan 39:56 awesome. hey, chris, really appreciate you coming on the podcast today. chris benjaminsen 39:59 no, thank do so much for having me. closing 40:01 looking to start creating for samsung, download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding it all. sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store. check out developer.samsung.com today and start your journey with samsung. tony morelan 40:17 the samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu.