Developer Conference 20

Learn Developers Podcast

Episode 2, Dan Appelquist

season 1, episode 2 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 dan appelquist samsung internet developer advocacy in this episode of pow, i interview dan appelquist, director of developer advocacy for samsung internet dan first got involved with web browsers way back when the internet first got started, and he was heavily involved with the web standards movement that was established at that time soon after, dan relocated to london, england, and remains there today, working out of the samsung uk office listen download this episode topics covered the beginning of mobile web web standards and user experiences the benefits of samsung internet browser privacy and security web developer ecosystem progressive web apps samsung internet and ar/vr augmented reality / virtual reality android developers 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 of the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung i sat down with dan appelquist, director of developer advocacy for samsung internet dan first got involved with internet browsers way back when the internet first became a thing and he was heavily involved with the web standards movement that was established at that time soon after dan relocated to london, england and remains there today working out of the samsung, uk office hey, dan, thanks for coming on to the podcast i'm going to start with a real simple question who exactly is dan appelquist? dan appelquist 00 47 well, first of all, thanks for having me on the podcast i really appreciate it so i am director of developer advocacy for samsung internet, which is samsung's web browser i'm also somebody who's been working on the web since before there was a web so i have a background i started working in startups in the early nine, early and mid 90s, that were kind of working on web sites and web services for the publishing industry i went on and became a com, cto, being sent over to the uk from new york, to be cto for the street com at uk, which was this the uk arm of the street com i became a com refugee and because i was here in europe at the time in the early 2000s, i became involved in a lot of projects that were helping to bring the web to mobile, and were happening to helping to create digital mobile services, which was something where europe at that time was a lot farther ahead than the us so it's very interesting and exciting time to kind of be working with companies like vodafone, later telefonica to help build these kinds of services, emerging services for emerging devices and handsets and that kind of thing tony morelan 02 10 yeah, that must have been pretty exciting to have been, you know, working on technology, really, at the very beginning of something that was going to, you know, honestly, change our world forever so why is it that you would say that europe is further along than the us when it came to the start of the whole mobile web? dan appelquist 02 25 well, when in say 2001 2002, there were already color web phones that were coming onto the market here in the uk and elsewhere in europe that we're delivering digital services, like very simple digital services, but still digital services, news and online information on that kind of thing whereas i still had to really explain to my parents what it is that i was doing you know, people at that time in the us who really didn't think of their mobile phone as being for anything besides calling, even text messaging was not very well understood as a medium because the interoperability wasn't there between the different carriers around text messaging and it was only later that mobile digital services started to really develop and then the mobile internet came out of that whereas in europe, i would say my experience of it anyway has been was that with the standardization of gsm, across the continent, you had a much stronger base for delivery of mobile services across a standard range of handsets, standard range of networks, all that all that kind of thing all the technology was pretty, it was pretty standard tony morelan 03 36 and gsm is global system for mobile communications that's right dan appelquist 03 39 yeah yeah tony morelan 03 41 so the samsung internet, what exactly is samsung internet? dan appelquist 03 44 right so first of all, samsung internet is a web browser and for those who are familiar with web browsers, immune to other commonly known commonly used web browsers, especially on desktop computers, include google chrome, mozilla firefox, internet explorer from microsoft, which is increasingly being subsumed by microsoft's new browser, which is edge and then apple's safari browser probably are the biggies, the ones that people most people have heard about when it comes to market share, and especially on mobile samsung internet is also a browser that has a very strong market position and that's because we ship by default with every samsung device we're also part of the chromium project we're a browser that's built on top of the chromium, open source, project and code base that is the same code base at google chrome is built on top of it's also the same code base that microsoft edge is built on top of so there's a community of companies and organizations that are contributing into that into that open source project, including samsung and what we're doing is we're taking that and we're delivering samsung internet for android which is our kind of premium browser for the provides what we think of as the best user experience for the web on definitely on samsung devices, but we are also available across all android devices so any android device, you can download and install samsung internet and use it as your as your primary browser tony morelan 05 21 you know, of course, my android phone is a samsung phone so i didn't know that that a samsung internet browser is available for all android phones that's pretty cool yeah do you have an idea of how many people use the sampling internet browser? dan appelquist 05 34 on samsung devices? we're very high on other devices we're not that high but part of the point of being on other devices is that we it's it was very much a developer play to get it was a minimal extra effort i shouldn't say that because our engineering team it's probably gritting their teeth and saying are you kidding me? this was not minimal effort but anyway, it was it was it was definitely worth the effort? because one of the key things that we go out to developers and talk about is testing and the importance of testing on samsung internet one of the things that we're hearing very early on when we started work in 2016, on developer advocacy for samsung internet was, well, we can't test we don't have a samsung device can you lend us a samsung device? well, being available on non-samsung devices really made that conversation a lot easier, because we could just say, look, just download samsung internet and run it on whatever device you have and you'll get the get that experience and you'll be able to test and testing across browsers is so important when you're building any kind of application or any kind of web application tony morelan 06 41 and that was the reason why the whole web standard movement started, wasn't it? because we had so many different browsers that, you know, often developers were having to create different versions of their website just to be compatible with the different browsers dan appelquist 06 51 yeah, certainly the adherence to web standards has been a constant issue across the web i think that things are a lot better now than they used to be there are still differences in, in how the in the user experience of the browser itself, it can cause issues i'm going to be one example like, we have a feature on our browser, which is a scroll to the top of screen, which is a little button that appears over overlaid on top of the web content that allows the user to wherever they are to scroll right back up to the top of the screen now, if the web developer didn't test their application in samsung internet, they might put a key piece of ui underneath that section of screen where we overlay the button so it you know it things like that are these little micro issues that testing really helps and that is not necessarily about web standards compliance it's more about how you make sure that your web application runs correctly and all the ui is correct for the ui choices that that browser has made and how it displays it to you you know, tony morelan 08 01 i actually have a lot of experience with designing watch faces for samsung watches and the same is true yeah, it's best to design around the system icons that may appear under certain circumstances so that you don't have any, you know, usability issues 08 13 yeah tony morelan 08 15 so what is samsung internet done to drive awareness for developers? dan appelquist 08 19 so a lot of the work that we started off with when we started the team in 2016, was trying to drive market awareness of something and we already knew that, because we had some stats that we had strong usage numbers so we are roughly 10% of all mobile browsing in europe, for instance, the issue was actually driving awareness amongst developers that they really needed to, to understand those numbers and therefore pay attention to testing and you basically why they should pay attention to us as a browser so we started off by working with people like stat counter, that actually is one source that people use recordable stats of different browsers we then went on to work with google analytics so we after we've gotten counter to kind of separate us off from google chrome, we then went to google analytics and we got them to separate us off from google chrome and amazingly, after that happened, we started to get all these calls from different people uk government was one example where they started to say, hey, we've just had this amazing jump in usage from samsung internet, while they didn't actually have a jump they had, they always had very high usage of samsung internet but they just never knew it because google analytics was lumping us together with google chrome so and that's the problem with a lot of these stats keeper sites is that they weren't if they were just if they were not paying attention to that your specific browser, they were lumping you together with the particular engine that the browser based on so getting that right was like a key element and then we can take those numbers to other places and we can say like, look, this is how many of your users or what percentage of users using samsung internet, we really think you would benefit from talking to us or you would benefit from testing on samsung internet would you like to come do some joint projects with us all that kind of stuff we also have been working with places like mdn so mozilla developer network, or mdn, has recently or within the last few years has changed from a very mozilla specific website into basically a documentation website for the web, across browsers and what's underpin that is that they now have a product advisory board, which includes people from microsoft, samsung, mozilla, obviously google they also have people from a couple of smaller organizations such as boku, which is the north kind of open source development shop so they have been doing a lot to, to kind of create, and to reinforce the understanding that developers have it that's a cross platform development site so as part of our work there, we made sure that when there's a documentation page about a particular api, and they have a list of browsers underneath that documentation, that is the listed, supported browsers, versions for that particular api that said, some internet appears in that list can i use comm is another example of a website that people use when they want to find out if they can use a particular api and a particular browser, they were also not separating yourself from chrome so actually working with them, and then working with them through mdn we actually got them to use all of the mdn compatibility data, which is data that we update, that's data that our team goes in the background and updates through github, through an open source procedure, so that all that data is up to date both on mdn and on can i use so that developers have up to date information about which api's they can use and which versions of which browser and then in general, we've been doing a lot of things like writing blog posts, we write a lot of technical blog posts about the use of different api's, the use of different technologies, opinion pieces about topics on the web, we tend to focus on things where samsung has some kind of engineering investment so things like progressive web apps, that's one area where we've done a lot of work recently we've also done a lot of work on web xr and the immersive web and things like web payment, that kind of thing we also sponsor conferences, and we go out and speak at conferences and events these days, we're obviously we're doing a lot of virtual events and we're really trying to play a leadership role in how the developer advocacy community deals with the current situation with a lockdown by showing how you can very effectively engage with the developers and create conversation with developers using virtual needs tony morelan 13 04 you know, i couldn't agree with you more, you know, the timing with the launch of our new podcast here is actually right in line with probably what's going to be a huge change for all of the industries as we move forward in this new world of information sharing virtually, yeah, you know, i actually attended one of your virtual office hours and it was nice, because, you know, you brought in some outside people, some industry people to participate dan appelquist 13 28 and that's, and that's something that we that's the kind of ethos that we have had from the beginning we actually ran a two-day event in san jose a couple years ago, called samsung create and the whole idea of that was to feature samsung people yes, but at least half the speakers that we had were front were third party speakers that we brought in from the industry and we had an mdn speaker we had a microsoft speaker, later google speaker you know, it also fits together with the fact that our team besides doing the developer advocacy and outreach we're also doing a lot of industry work so we do work in w three c, i co-chair, a group in w three c, which is the world wide web consortium that sets standards for the web, i co-chair a group there called the technical architecture group, which is a kind of technical steering group for web standards my colleague, ada co-chairs, the immersive web working group, which is working on technologies that bring ar and vr to the web so we're not only playing a role in terms of getting the word out about these technologies, but we're also playing a role in terms of setting the standards tony morelan 14 40 is simply internet just for android dan appelquist 14 42 the work that we're doing is on samsung internet for android and the team that we're attached to a samsung internet for android if you have a samsung tv or if you have a samsung watch, you may also know that there are other versions of samsung internet they have the same logo and they are also based on chromium, but they're actually built by different teams within samsung divisions so there's some cross working between those different groups, especially because they're all using the chromium base and so they share a lot of knowledge and they share a lot of information but actually, the work that we're doing, we focus on samsung internet for android, tony morelan 15 20 when you have improvements that you want to make to the samsung internet browser are those released at the same time when new devices are released dan appelquist 15 28 so one of the things that we did very early on, and i think this was right around the time when i started in 2016, is we unlinked browser releases from device releases, we're now rolling out on a regular cadence, new releases of the browser that are released through play store and also through galaxy store and we do sometimes do releases that are timed to device releases, but those are still in the in the context of our of our regular software release schedule so and that's really important for the web, because the web needs to be evergreen when there's a security vulnerability, or some kind of new feature that web developers want to use, they don't want to have to wait for a new device to come out in order to be able to use that feature likewise, when there are features or technologies that are deprecated, from the web stack, you really want to, either because they're vulnerable, or they're, they're difficult to use, or they're just not very performant or however, you want to be able to make sure that you can update all the browsers to remove that feature tony morelan 16 31 and that's great to hear that, that the updates are not tied to new device releases, you know, because i'm sure that developers are wanting to get those updates just as soon as soon as possible and you can get those features out to the to the developer community that's right yeah, yeah so tell me what is the benefit of using samsung internet over another browser, like say google chrome, dan appelquist 16 51 one of the things that we pride ourselves on is a focus on user privacy so we think that we have better privacy features than google chrome and that's certainly a goal that we have and something that you can see, as evidenced through a lot of the features that we ship with the browser so for instance, we have secret browsing mode, which is secured by knox and also linkedin to our to biometrics on the device, so that you can secure it with your fingerprint or your face id or however, we also integrated into samsung pay currently, that's only in the us but there's a web feature called web payment, which integrates into samsung pay for us customers that allows you to pay directly from your web page using samsung pay using the on-device payment technology, we integrate into one ui so that's the samsung specific ui across the device, which our browser is based on top of as also as part of the whole privacy consideration we allow our users to download and install ad blockers we allow to download and install extensions, which can be privacy helping or can be other things like shopping related for instance, we also allow you to choose your own default search engine so we have for a while now allowed you to choose duckduckgo is a search engine, which is a very privacy focused search engine but with the release 11 2, that's about to come out we've actually even increased that list for and we have way more search engines that you can choose as your default search engine you can't do that with google chrome and we have our own built in smart anti tracking technology that uses machine learning on the phone to in a very privacy focused way shield your browsing activity from an unwanted tracking on the web, which is a major issue right now, for a lot of users tony morelan 18 49 you know, it's pretty safe to say that just about everybody at some point has had something hacked whether it's you know, a credit card or maybe it's an online account, so always happy to hear about, you know, new technologies that will definitely help keep the internet safer tony morelan 19 03 can we talk a little bit about revenue? tony morelan 19 04 how does samsung internet create revenue? dan appelquist 19 07 well, we are getting revenue from search referral that's the same as every other browser that's out there i mean, how do browsers make money browsers usually make money from search referral we also have opportunities for business development when it comes to our quick access bar, which is region specific so when you first load the browser, you're going to see a number of links that show up, you know, on your kind of quick access screen, that all of that is user configurable, and the user can change those whenever they want to it's about what the defaults are those are really how samsung is making money i think the other part of it is more of a strategic play there are billions of users using the web why would samsung want to see to that territory to somebody else? instead of being able to control that user experience and provide the best user experience, and we can, that's great so how does the web developer ecosystem differ from other developer ecosystems? one thing that is important to think about what the web developer ecosystem is that it's inherently cross browser, cross device and cross ios, and that's true of the web in general, the web needs to be able to exist across different browsers across different classes across different form factors you need to be able to bring up your web page and have it work on your television as well as your laptop screen as well as your phone responsive design and progressive enhancement have been some of the key technologies that web developers have been using to ensure that that can be the case, feature detection these kinds of things are really important when it comes to building websites you're not just building for one particular device you're not just building for one particular vendor you're you've really got to be listening to and paying attention to a lot of different voices, when you enroll in a developer program for a specific platform, you tend to be focusing on one particular device or one particular brand, one particular os and that also provides some clarity, you know, which can be a good thing however, when you're developing for the web, you need to pay attention all these different platforms and devices that's where something where mdn can come in, and why we're putting so much energy into that because it can be a place where developers can come and find out information across different platforms tony morelan 21 36 you had mentioned a little bit about progressive web apps for new developers out there can you explain what exactly is a progressive web app? dan appelquist 21 42 so a progressive web app is i mean, i mentioned technologies like progressive enhancement and responsive web design, which help developers build web applications that can that can work well across different browsers, different oss, different devices, different form factors the idea of progressive web apps brings that to the next level where we try and learn a little bit from the success of native applications on the mobile platform in particular, and are able to provide a very app like user experience for the web application itself so a really good example of a progressive web app, probably one of the best ones out there is the twitter pw a lot of people are removing twitter from their phones entirely and simply using you're removing the native app, i should say, from their phones entirely and just using the progressive web app, because it provides almost all of the same features, but in a much more lightweight and much more privacy centric kind of kind of way because when you're using the twitter progressive web app, it's been saved from the browser, and therefore it runs inside of the browser even though from a user perspective, it appears like any other application on the phone, it's actually running inside of the browser so it's running in the same context, as saw the other browser tabs that you have going so it's a bit like, i've called it having your cake and eating it too in terms of being able to build something really easily build something cross platform, but also be able to enjoy that real estate on the phone home screen push notifications that keep bringing the user attention back ability to have through a service worker kind of offline experience, all the kind of features that users expect from a regular native application they can begin to expect from these kinds of progressive web apps tony morelan 23 35 yeah talk a little bit about ar and vr as they relate to samsung internet can you share a little bit about what you were doing in those areas? dan appelquist 23 42 so samsung internet was one of the first browsers to launch the web vr api that api has actually been recently deprecated in favor of the web xr api, which is the api that my colleague ada has been sharing working group to create webex r is a way to bring ar and vr into the browser now, if you are familiar with kind of ar and vr, in a kind of game, console type environment or scenario, or with various specialized equipment, then you might be scratching your head and thinking, well, why? why do i need ar and vr in my browser is the target it's because the target audience for these kinds of ar and vr applications in the web are a little bit more like casual games are to the gaming industry we fully expected we have seen the development of web applications in the gaming space and also in the kind of enterprise space where they take advantage of the technology in the browser to enable you to deliver a kind of virtual environment, a shared virtual environment that provides a lot of those kinds of advantages to a rm vr experience, but you don't have to download any software, you don't have to make sure that your, your whole set of download software is correct and it works progressively across different environments so a couple years ago, we worked with bbc here in london to deliver a doctor who gave that was coming out alongside of the launch of one of their seasons of doctor who it's basically like a very simple navigating the tardis it was called the time vortex, navigating the tardis along a vortex and avoiding obstacles and that kind of thing but the reason they were they were so interested in web vr at the time, was that it's available across multiple browsers they have a public service mandate where they're trying to get that application into as many hands as possible into the hands of kids that may have like a, you know, an older phone that aren't going to have the latest up to date technology and an ar headset or a vr headset those are the kinds of use cases that i'm interested in how do we get these tools have ar and vr into everybody's hands? and i think the web is well positioned to be that platform definitely tony morelan 26 08 let's talk a little bit about success and challenges can you first tell me about some of the challenges that samsung internet has faced? dan appelquist 26 14 i think one of the challenges and i alluded to it before maybe is just recognition recognition of samsung internet as a as a key browser we know we are, we are increasingly driving that awareness amongst the developer community but we still run a cross a lot of people who just never heard of us or if they heard of us that kind of dismissed us alongside of all the other oem browsers we like to say we're not actually like any of the other oem browsers because first of all, we have enormous market share compared to our market share it doesn't even near mcateer doesn't compare to ours second of all, we put a lot back into the web platform and that's extremely important to us we put a lot back into the open source side of it and we put a lot back into the and standard cipher so driving that has been a challenge and continues to be a challenge but it's something that we took on and we understand that and i think we're turning that corner on that one tony morelan 27 11 sure and there's a huge value when there are multiple browsers out there i mean, if you go back to when internet explorer dominated the market, and then firefox came on board, that's when we started to see a much better browser experience correct? dan appelquist 27 23 yes and in fact, that's another kind of philosophical point that drives the work of our team is that we strongly we strongly believe in browser diversity it's not a web where one browser dominates, is not actually going to be a healthy web ecosystem we are based on top of chromium but we have made different ui decisions and different decisions in terms of browser features than chrome and that's something that we think is important and helps drive the ecosystem forward we also work with people through standards and through web developer advocacy in companies that are competitors, i mean, i work with people from apple in the context of web standards, and wcc quite often and choices that they make in safari help to drive the web forward in different areas than the choices that we make in samsung android, the choices that google makes in chrome it's a good example tony morelan 28 23 definitely so what are some of the areas of success for samsung internet? dan appelquist 28 28 so from the beginning, when we started things off in 2016, we, we started off with some ideas around how we were going to treat developer advocacy differently one decision that we took was to ensure that our team is attached to the engineering group that is producing samsung internet and so we have a strong connection to our own engineering team and we work very closely with them and we do joint work and when we've done our own events, for instance, we've had members of our engineering team come over from korea and speak at those events and we have a strong relationship with them and we see ourselves as primarily web developer engineers that are also doing advocacy so that's one element and i think the other thing that we're very keen on is promoting diversity and inclusion in the tech community in general and in the web developer community specifically so for instance, we have a diversity inclusion statement about conference participation many organizations have these now i'm very glad to see that many do we started rs in 2016 when we put that in place, i actually used as a template, a statement that the uk government digital service had come up with which so we were basically using, what they had put in place and adapting it for our needs with reference to their work, obviously, where we will not participate in an event that doesn't have good diversity credentials that isn't doesn't have a code of conduct an enforcement policy, that kind of thing that's why very often, if you attend any of our virtual meetings and meetups, you'll always see me at the beginning talking about the code of conduct and just reinforcing the enforcement procedure for it so we take that very seriously and we also put energy into events and activities that are specifically focused on driving better diversity and inclusion in tech so there's something called global diversity cfp day, which is a yearly event that happens across the world where you were people who are new to speaking on tech conferences can come and get mentorship from people who have more experience speaking in tech conferences about how to submit their proposals for tech conferences, and it's specifically focusing on getting more diverse speakers out there, and driving more diversity and inclusion into the tech conference circuit in general so that's something we participate in and we also sponsor events that are focused on particular on inclusion queer js is a very good example where we were we sponsored that and then we, we sponsored that in berlin and then we were very happy to see that it grew into a bigger thing after that, yeah, that's something that we're putting a lot of energy into and we've seen that come back to us in the form of, i think people really appreciate that anyway, the kind of developers that we want to work with appreciate that and we really appreciate that kind of feedback cycle tony morelan 31 31 that's great so what advice do you have for developers looking to build for samsung internet? dan appelquist 31 36 sure, you can follow us on twitter, first of all, at samsung internet you can also follow us individually i'm at torgo always talking about i'm torgo on twitter, to our geo and i'm always talking about web standards and other web technologies you can go to our developer hub, which is samsung inter dotnet and then links off to all kinds of places like our blog, we actually repost articles from our blog onto samsung into dotnet our blog is on medium so you can follow us on medium at samsung internet dev, you can attend an office hours event so if you go to meetup calm, and you subscribe to our meetup group, so we're running a series of events through that meetup group other than that, the best way to kind of keep tabs on what we're doing is to pay attention to our twitter and we're also by the way posting all of those events on the samsung developer platform on developer samsung com and you can pay attention to our linkedin page, we have a linkedin page, we search for samsung internet, you'll find it on linkedin and we're actually posting all of those blog posts and event notifications and all that kind of stuff there as well trying to engage with that community tony morelan 32 50 that's excellent but hey, dan, i really appreciate you taking the time to sit down and do this podcast with me, you know, yeah, it was a lot of fun to not only learn about you, but also learn about samsung internet dan appelquist 33 00 thank you really appreciate it outro 33 03 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

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s01e02-dan-appelquist.html

Learn Developers Podcast

Episode 12, Prasad Rayala

season 1, episode 12 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 guest prasad rayala product manager, samsung electronics in this episode of pow, i interview prasad rayala, product manager for dex, the samsung technology that allows users to extend their galaxy mobile device into a desktop computing experience not only do we talk about the advantages for developers optimizing their apps for dex, but how easy it is to get started listen download this episode topics covered what is dex devices that run dex compatible operating systems optimizing apps for dex dex resources dex sample code security dex features getting started with dex helpful links learn about dex - samsungdex com develop for dex - developer samsung com/samsung-dex samsung dex overview - developer samsung com/samsung-dex/overview dex insights - insights samsung com dex code lab - developer samsung com/codelab dex forum - forum developer samsung com/c/samsung-dex/26 dex whitepaper - insights samsung com/2020/02/12/the-beginners-guide-to-samsung-dex-4/ youtube dex playlist - youtube com/playlist more about samsung dex samsung dex is a new user experience that extends the functionality of your android device to a pc-like environment connect your galaxy to your monitor or tv to bring it to life on the big screen an extension of android n's multi-window mode, there are no proprietary samsung apis needed to launch apps in samsung dex with just a usb cable, unlock your phone's possibilities on pc and mac through samsung dex and now with the note20, you can connect wirelessly to your smart tv using miracast 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! podcasted 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 prasad rayala product manager for dex, the samsung technology that allows users to extend their galaxy mobile device into a desktop computing experience not only do we talk about the advantages for developers optimizing their apps for dex but how he traveled to australia just before covid-19 hit, and with the borders closed he can't come back enjoy so i am super excited to have with me prasad rayala on the podcast i need to first ask who is prasad? prasad rayala 00 48 hey, thanks tony for having me i'm a product manager at samsung electronics america i cover knox mobile enrollment and knox managed products and recently i picked up dex as well and in my role i work with our internal teams to enable them with what's new with these products, how they can be offered to customers, and what challenges customers are facing in implementing these solutions on the other side, i work with our r&d teams to enhance these solutions based on feedback we receive from our customers and partners tony morelan 01 28 so how long have you been at samsung for? prasad rayala 01 31 a total of six years three years with samsung america and three years samsung dubai tony morelan 01 38 i didn't realize that she worked in dubai prasad rayala 01 40 yeah, but three years and then i moved to samsung us tony morelan 01 44 did you study tech when you were in college? prasad rayala 01 48 i am an engineer, but i studied civil engineering, how to construct buildings and bridges but i moved to it i started my career with as a programmer on the midrange systems is foreign during the y2k era, i then moved to java programming language and i've been working outsourcing company in india for over a decade while i was with them, i was posted to dubai, to manage the customer relationships there while i was in dubai, i came across an opportunity to join samsung to manage a large scale smart learning project where about 400 classrooms across the country need to be digitized with large displays in the classrooms and also provide devices for students to consume the content that was in 2013 and after completing the project, i moved to the mobility side and the knox was just launched at that time, and i was cast to spread the awareness of narcs work with partners the ecosystem, just take it to the market and i continued in that role for about three years and in 2016, i moved to the us and joined a global knock solution engineering team and since then i've done different roles like solution engineering, partner management, project management, and now product management tony morelan 03 21 you know, i recently did a podcast interview with the knox partner program prasad rayala 03 25 yes, those are excellent yeah i mean, it's a great initiative, how to help partners, build their solutions, get support, and actually work with samsung in promoting those solutions it's a nice platform tony morelan 03 39 see, it mentioned that you eventually made it to the us tell me where are you based out of right now prasad rayala 03 44 i work out of our mountain view office in the bay area we also have the north america or us r&d team also operates from majority of the knox r&d teams, engineering, product managers work out of that office as well tony morelan 04 00 is that where you're at right at this moment, prasad rayala 04 02 as of this moment, i'm in melbourne, australia my family lives here and i came to visit them, middle of march and since then, i'm stuck here because of the border closures on both sides so i continue to work remotely leveraging all the technical capabilities my company provided, including decks, tony morelan 04 24 like i can imagine what that must be like, you know, glad to know that you and your family are safe and that you're able to continue working hopefully soon, the borders will open and you'll be able to come home but i'm just not sure when that's gonna be let's talk a bit more about dex now, what exactly is dex? prasad rayala 04 41 so samsung dex is a software platform that extends your smartphone or tablet into a desktop computing experience it is built into many of the latest samsung smartphones and tablets it's free you don't have to buy anything lily to get started using decks is just a monitor, hdmi adapter and peripherals like keyboard and mouse and with our latest galaxy note 20, you can use decks wirelessly on most of your tvs that support mirror cast the best part is while you are running decks on the monitor, you can continue to use your device at the same time so you're attending a video conference on the biggest screen, but you can also take notes or browse through your emails on your device at the same time tony morelan 05 33 so i know my first experience with decks was a little over a year ago and back then i actually had to stick it into a cradle so you're saying now it's prasad rayala 05 43 it's miracast? yes, you connect your larger display to mirror cast wirelessly when dex was launched with galaxy s eight yes, there were a couple of hardware accessories like cradle was required to plug it in we graduated from their two wireless connectivity now there are certain limitations like how many number of apps you can run while you're connected wirelessly but you have the option of just going into a meeting room connecting to a display wirelessly and running your presentations off your phone tony morelan 06 18 so can you tell me where did the name dex come from? what does that mean? prasad rayala 06 22 yeah, anything ending with x is very catchy, right? but dex is a short version of desktop experience so when you activate it by connecting your phone or tablet or monitor you get the familiar look and feel of a desktop environment with features and functions you're used to like multiple and resizeable, windows, keyboard shortcuts, and drag and drop etc tony morelan 06 51 do users need to install any special apps or using these special api's to enable samsung dex on their devices? prasad rayala 06 58 no, no special application required, it's pre built on the device firmware you don't have to install anything we just need to connect device to a monitor with the cable and dex will launch automatically an it administrator on the other side can control the text experience like allowing or disallowing enabling decks and choosing which applications can run index mode okay, this can be done using their preferred e&m solution tony morelan 07 27 definitely for security that's an important aspect is dex only compatible with android? or is it compatible beyond android os prasad rayala 07 36 so dex can be used in three different variations to meet various needs first, you can use it by connecting your samsung android device to a monitor or you can run it in standalone mode on the tablet screen without connecting to a monitor or you can use your pc or mac by installing an application on the mac or pc and connect your device through usb cable and run dax on your existing laptop or mac but the experience itself is powered by the software in both on samsung smartphones and tablets, tony morelan 08 15 so what applications can i use index mode? prasad rayala 08 18 pretty much any android application that's running on your device can be run in dex mode, all your favorite business applications like microsoft office, mobile suite, adobe apps for creative professionals, video conferencing apps like microsoft teams, webex, zoom bluejeans, etc wow, okay yeah, and if you are relying on legacy windows applications that do not have mobile or web versions, you can use virtual desktop applications like vmware or citrix within dex to access a full windows desktop from your phone and it's not just all work, you can have some fun too you can play your favorite games on a biggest screen and use your keyboard mouse gaming keyboard and mouse to play to control the game experience on a bigger screen tony morelan 09 14 wow, i didn't know that that's, definitely a great advantage yeah so let's talk a bit about developing for deck so if i'm a developer, why should i optimize my app for decks? prasad rayala 09 24 yeah, based on some market research, we found the majority of it workers use two or more devices for work, phone, laptop, tablet, laptop, desktop, etc at least two when multitasking between these devices, productivity is lost due to compatibility between the operating systems and applications samsung dex minimizes this fragmentation by bringing pc like experience to your mobile devices applications optimized for dex can take advantage of android's multi window features where users can open multiple apps in the same session to work, connect, and interact seamlessly together because these applications will be running on a larger screen index mode, you can use additional features like drag and drop files between windows copy paste between multiple applications and navigate between apps with your familiar keyboard shortcuts tony morelan 10 29 you know, we talked a little bit about covid how you're in australia at the moment because of the borders you know, pretty much the country is working from home so can you talk a bit about the benefits of developers optimizing their apps considering that people are now working at home more? prasad rayala 10 45 yeah, i mean, the the obscene shift in many things that we are usually doing say working from home for an hour is different from working from home for six months teaching kids for a couple of hours from home is different from remote learning toward the day so enabling the secure and productive work from home setup is one of the core use cases of tech's imagine you're about to jump onto a video conferencing call with your team on your laptop, and it decides to go through a noise tony morelan 11 21 yes, yes, prasad rayala 11 22 right at that moment, or you get a blue screen you don't have to reschedule your call, you can just connect your phone to the monitor and fire up your decks and join the call you can continue checking your emails, take notes or even collaborate with your team by sharing your screen while you are on the video conferencing kind of launch through decks if you need access to windows native applications, yes, you can fire up video solution like citrix or vmware and if you have an application running in education space to say students will be able to utilize a large screen to access your solution and use the s pen on the tablets to take notes while attending a session tony morelan 12 08 that's great with this whole distance learning, any sort of tools that we can offer to our students to yeah, to help is prasad rayala 12 14 definitely a huge benefit so my son school is using google classroom and they share a lot of material for kids to work on some math worksheets, etc he's been printing them and writing on them and scanning and sharing with their teachers i told him, why don't you use your s pen so now he's converting it into a pdf? he's editing writing on the tablet itself, just saving it locally and sharing with his teachers we're reducing a lot of printing at home and saving some yes, tony morelan 12 52 definitely definitely that's great so what has samsung decks done to drive awareness for developers prasad rayala 13 00 yeah since the launch of deck samson has worked closely with the developer community in enabling business applications to take advantage of the benefits offered by decks every year at samsung developer conference there are dedicated talk tracks and hands on labs were offered a lot of articles and videos around how dex is enabling certain use cases in verticals like public safety, health care, and education these are published on samsung insights portal and there is a dedicated section on the developer website for samsung to help developers start the journey and optimizing their apps for tax tony morelan 13 43 that's excellent any chance that there's some sample code out there for developers who want to take a look at it and understand a little bit more? prasad rayala 13 49 absolutely there are hands on videos on the developer samsung com how to optimize the applications and there is some sample code explaining each optimization they can do these videos are great like, you can just pause them and make changes to our app and there are instructions on how to test your application, how it's running on dex, etc there are a lot of resources on developer samsung com tony morelan 14 18 that's, that's great so we talked a little bit about your experience with knox so let's talk about what has dex done related to security prasad rayala 14 27 so dex doesn't really interfere with security it fully complies with the policies set by administrator through the mmm say you want to attach a picture you took on your phone to your email and if your administrator has blocked access to the usb ports on your laptop, for security reasons how will you send your picture to your email you will either email it to yourself or to a third party cloud store is both are not productive enough not secure enough so with decks, you'll have that seamless access of your local files on your device, which you can just drag and drop these files onto your email client running on your device itself so no more emailing it yourself or uploading to a third party file sharing system you can also leverage your biometrics to set up samsung pass on on your device to access your online accounts without having to type in your password every time on the personal side if you are using the secure folder where you might have installed sensitive applications, like banking or you store sensitive information, you can continue to use it dex won't interfere with secure folder tony morelan 15 49 so i had mentioned earlier that the version of dex that i had was where i put my device into a cradle so i know that dex has evolved so talk a little bit about where dex originated from and but it's become prasad rayala 16 00 yeah then so the mobile devices is not designed to run multiple applications at the same time right so yes, there can be background applications running but user typically interacts with to one application at a time there is no multi window but as dex enables this multi windows feature, the device can heat up pretty quickly so the first version of dex when it was introduced on galaxy s eight, there was a docking accessory called the deck station or a dex pad was required to start the desktop experience and connect to peripherals so these accessory had a little fan inside to keep the device cool and ports to connect your keyboard and mouse and hdmi back your monitor with node nine, the need for these docking accessories really was eliminated by introducing the next hdmi adapter simple cable or a multi port adapter if you need to connect your peripherals in 2019 with the launch of node 10 decks for pc was introduced i talked before where you can install an application on your pc or a mac and access decks right from your computer with no today don't need any wires, any cables, you can just connect your phone to your miracles supported this tvs wirelessly tony morelan 17 29 so you had mentioned a little bit about multi window are there any other specific types of optimizations? that can be done? prasad rayala 17 36 yeah, i think minimum decks optimized application should support multiwindow keyboard mouse inputs and handle runtime configuration changes generally, if an app follows best practices of android programming, it will successfully run index mode without any code changes okay? there are no samsung specific sdk to integrate our api's to call multi window support enables minimizing, maximizing and resizing the application window only the manifest file needs to be updated to support this feature to enable keyboard and mouse support, you just do not explicitly declare touch screen support in your manifest and keep in mind that when an application switches between mobile and dex mode, runtime configurations change, this is similar to an orientation change from portrait to landscape these runtime configuration changes may result in forcing the application to restart when switching between mobile and x mode you don't want a webex session that you joined from phone to restart when you launch decks mode to avoid this, just follow androids guideline on handling configuration changes and best practices for building a responsive design that seems tony morelan 18 51 pretty straightforward what about some new decks features like finger gestures are drag and drop? prasad rayala 18 57 yeah, so drag and drop, copy paste these features have been there, right from the beginning the finger gestures you're mentioning is how you use your device screen as a touchpad when you are in dex mode by connecting your device to the monitor if you do not have a mouse, you can convert your device screen as a touchpad to interact with decks and run just like a traditional touchpad on a laptop a single tap on your phone screen is same as your mouse left click, a double tap is like a right click, you can pinch your fingers to zoom etc tony morelan 19 35 so what types of apps then are developers optimizing for decks? prasad rayala 19 39 so any application used in a workplace setting right? productivity suites, your vdi applications video conferencing, or specific vertical focused applications like say healthcare or education these are all applications that can be optimized any application that can benefit from a desk stop experience running on a larger screen is a candidate for optimization it's not just limited to, again, work apps, you can optimize some of your games as well, if you will, that games can be educational my daughter is learning how to count by twos, threes, fours, she just started her multiplication and there are a lot of lessons out there router gamified and instead of watching those on a seven inch screen or a 10 inch laptop, i'm letting her watch those things on my samsung tv on a larger screen, and she's happy with it tony morelan 20 41 oh, that's that's excellent so let's talk about some of the challenges is a dex had to face any challenges that you can share? prasad rayala 20 48 yeah, so with dax, our goal is to close the gap between desktop and mobile computing experiences it won't happen overnight we need to build an ecosystem around next to support different use cases, we are pretty confident about meeting their mobile workers needs but we know we have some work to do in other verticals we are investing heavily in enhancing the core capabilities of the device itself to support different vertical use cases, along with live raising capabilities of our partners there are some exciting things on the roadmap so watch this space through this year and early next year tony morelan 21 30 excellent so let's talk about some of the areas of success then what can you share that that you're proud of the dex has accomplished prasad rayala 21 37 so we've seen dex adopted in almost all industries, saying healthcare of patient experiences improved to seamless continuity from doctors workstation to patient rooms and back again in retail the associate can use a single device to say browse through inventory, check prizes, or ask assist customers with checkouts all with a single device say in public safety officer can use his mobile phone while in the field or inside the vehicle or at the station, say in a insurance or construction space, you can consolidate your hardware so you have access to everything you need while in the field without having to go back and forth between devices so we we continue to work with our partners and customers now to identify different use cases in retail bank branches there's a nice use case where the bank associate can interact with the customer to a dual screen kind of mode where associate will be accessing, say presenting different loan options or critical options to the customer and the customer will be using a tablet or filling his or her personal information, both sharing the same device so they're nice use cases we are discovering our customers are help improving the product with the use cases they have in the specific vertical businesses tony morelan 23 15 yeah, and i, you know, i can totally see where you know, we're in the middle of this pandemic with covid it's pretty obvious that even when we get beyond this pandemic, i think our society is going to be making a shift towards how we're conducting a lot of our, you know, day to day business so just your example there of how working with bank institutions, and being able to share screens, but yet, stay within your device, i think is very, very advantageous, right so what advice do you have for developers looking to get started modifying their apps for decks, prasad rayala 23 49 so if you have never experienced vertex, you don't know how your application looks and feels on a larger screen just start simple enabled multi window keyboard shortcuts and just connect your device, launch your application and just see the magic these changes do not require any change in your core and just the manifest file, you can just make some changes and run it once you see how it runs on a larger device with resizable, windows and drag and drop, etc, then it'll force you to think outside that seven inch screen your application is designed to run on or you can then go on and explore more and provide unique features like the contextual menu, or using their mouse wheel to zoom in, say you have a map solution in your application you can use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the map, etc that's great tony morelan 24 45 so for a developer that wants to get started, what's the best way for them to learn more? is there a website that they can go to? prasad rayala 24 53 yeah, i mean, to understand what specific solutions are best optimized for dex checkouts samsung dex com it gives an overview of the solution itself, how it runs, how to enable it, what device is it run on, etc and while you're there, just go to text for business section to understand how it's used in different verticals you may be operating in a specific industry, it will help understand how dex is enabling use cases in that industry and there are a lot of videos on youtube on just decks both from samsung team and independent analysts users out there who tried decks for different use cases and finally, when you ready to start optimizing your application, go to developer samsung com and go to the deck section and follow the instruction start simple and just start optimizing your app tony morelan 25 49 that's that's great that sounds actually pretty darn pretty darn easy yeah so are there any news or any events coming up that we can get excited about from decks? prasad rayala 25 58 so as much as we wanted to be in front of our customers and partners but we couldn't do so with covid so we are going as much detail as possible have we had a two day virtually experience event in july where industry experts advised how businesses can adjust to the new normal we have also launched a series of online events called samson together, where we host one hour session with our partners to introduce new solutions we are bringing together to help our customers navigate these difficult situations we covered decks in detail in the last episode, very hands on demonstrations and use cases discussed etc so check out samson together this a series of one hour sessions and the last session covered decks in detail tony morelan 26 52 that's great that's great thank you for that and i will be linking to all of this in the show notes for this episode so make it easy for for our listeners to find those pages if people want to contact you or the decks team, what is the best way for them to do that? prasad rayala 27 06 so the instructions www developer samsung com are pretty self explanatory, a lot of videos and sample code, etc but if you still need help or send in a request with your question inside that portal, there is a dedicated team around the clock to help you with your classifications wherever you are in the world, there is a team in your timezone of answering your questions, make use of that contact form on the www developer samsung com tony morelan 27 36 excellent so a couple of last questions for you so the first thing i want to ask is, when you're not working, what do you do for fun? prasad rayala 27 44 so can you really say when you're not working now that you are at home and you're always hooked on to work? there is no there is no distinction between you're at work at home, you're always tony morelan 27 58 okay, so when you're outside and you're under plugged prasad rayala 28 00 so yeah, mostly i spend my time with my family also my work my toolkits keep me busy helping them with these remote learning or just keeping them busy when when they're not learning but if i can still sneak out some time, while mostly be exploring my neighborhood by walking, i love to go on slow, long walks and probably some hikes tony morelan 28 28 so the last question you had mentioned that you were studying as a civil engineer, and then you actually got to spend time in dubai what was that like with the i'm sure you were amazed with all the buildings that you saw there prasad rayala 28 40 to divide goes to the cycles of real estate boom and bust right when it's booming you you could see thousands of these cranes set up they do go vertical, because they need to make use of the limited the space they have they can't spread out so they go vertical in minimum you'll see like 3050 floors and all that so samsung office was on 51st 52nd floor and we could from there the palm jumeirah, clearly it there are a lot of engineering marvels a lot of great architecture there is a twisting and rotating tower so builders are competing to meet new and unique designs of their most challenging work environment, right, the temperatures constantly about 130 140 sometimes, it's very challenging sometimes it's just fun tony morelan 29 40 well, hey, prasad i absolutely appreciate you taking the time to join me on the podcast thank you very much prasad rayala 29 44 thanks, tony thanks for having me outro 29 47 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 the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s01e12-prasad-rayala.html

Learn Developers Podcast

Episode 4, Roger Kibbe

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

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s01e04-roger-kibbe.html

Learn Developers Podcast

Episode 10, Chris Shomo

season 1, episode 10 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 shomo infinity watchfaces in this episode of pow, i interview chris shomo from infinity watchfaces chris was one of the first designers to start selling watch faces on galaxy store and has become a very successful app designer along the way he has inspired many other designers to start creating for samsung with his willingness to share his knowledge and expertise listen download this episode topics covered galaxy watch studio for tizen galaxy themes studio galaxy store galaxy store badges social promotion jibber jab reviews jibber jab reviews live chat iot gadgets samsung galaxy watch facebook group tap reveal galaxy watch3 asset creator lifestyle photos chris shomo sdc17 video presentation 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 0 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, trends and give insight into all of the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung on today's show, i interview chris shomo from infinity watch faces chris was one of the first designers to start selling watch faces on the galaxy store and has become one of the most successful along the way he's inspired many other designers to start creating for samsung with his willingness to share his knowledge and expertise in fact, it was a video i saw of chris who inspired me to start designing watch faces, which eventually led me to my gig at samsung so it is an absolute honor to bring him on to the podcast and let me warn you chris, and i'd love to talk and sometimes we go off on a few tangents, talking about how his house was not only featured in an episode of ghost hunters, but was also used in a big time hollywood movie and of course we talk a lot about designing and marketing apps for samsung enjoy tony morelan 0 58 i am super excited to have on the podcast today chris shomo from infinity watch faces so let me first actually start by asking who is chris shomo? chris shomo 1 05 hey, tony, thank you so much for having me on the show who is chris sharma i'm, i'm a lot of things i am a designer, which you know, initially, you know, when someone is a designer, they can be quirky, they can be geeky, sometimes they can be introverted sometimes or they can be outgoing it depends on my mood and the time of day, i can be a little bit of everything so, but you know, i can be the shy person in the room, but you get me talking about something that i'm interested in, and then sometimes you can't get me to shut up so i can absolutely relate to that, that you've pretty much have described my personality definitely, you know, being a fellow designer, and that's why i'm really excited about this podcast is that we can kind of geek out a bit as we're talking design cool so how did you first get your start in graphic design? oh, geez well, i guess it goes all the way back to when i was a little kid my mom always had me doing artistic projects for school actually, i would always find a way to make some sort of artistic project if i could for homework, i would always go to the art route it was a lot more fun and then in high school, i did a project it was a pennant drawing of the shakespeare globe theater and i did it for an english class and i decided to take an art class as an elective and mrs martin, my art teacher in high school, she asked for some examples of my previous work and out of my bookbag, i took out a folded piece of paper and then i just like unfolded it to this, this gigantic poster size of the shakespeare globe theater it was that that artistic drawing i did, and then she said, okay, lesson number one, do not fold up your artwork so, that's how i kind of got started and that drawing was pretty awesome and she kind of excelled me through she put me into the higher level art classes real quick they kind of skipped me a couple classes and i want a lot of awards against other students and some regional awards in the area and then afterwards, i decided to go to art school and my brother discovered the savannah college of art and design down savannah, georgia and yes, so yeah, i attended there wow so for a good while to almost like a van wilder experience but multiple degrees tony morelan 3 33 wonderful again, i could relate to that i definitely took the long route through college so straight out of college, then did you work for a large company? did you start your own your own gig? what did you what was your first step coming out of college? chris shomo 3 46 okay, well, i graduated with my undergrad in computer art with a focus on 3d animation and that was in 2005 and right after the i interviewed for some companies, and i just really did not want to be stuck in a cubicle, just you know, for the jobs that i was offered so i ended up taking a job for a contractor and helping build a house from ground up oh, wow and after that, i decided i was interested in architecture and i put together a portfolio and scad gave me a portfolio scholarship to come back and they paid for the masters and i got my masters in architecture tony morelan 4 21 wow i did not know that chris shomo 4 23 yeah so and of many secrets, i guess, some hidden talents there but i did graduate after the economy crashed, and it was really hard to find a job in architecture so i started a website design company and from there, i just kind of, you know, word of mouth i just kept on gaining clients until eventually i had clients all across the east coast so you went to school in savannah, georgia are you currently in savannah? is that where your offices based out of? yes, savannah is where my heart is i love the city and i'm actually president of the neighborhood association for the neighborhood that i'm in, and it's one of the largest neighborhoods in savannah okay and southern living magazine actually ranked the number one neighborhood to live in in the south as well right before all the craziness this year, we got that nation sure so it is quite interesting because it there's so many local businesses and residential neighborhoods in this neighborhood so just dealing with everything from alcohol licenses and giving our blessing and, you know, zoning issues and, you know, just figuring out what's going on with crosswalks and trash cans and all that kind of stuff you know, it's interesting tony morelan 5 40 so i actually heard a very interesting note about not just the neighborhood but the house that you live in yes, you once told me that it is actually haunted chris shomo 5 50 it is haunted and it's documented on a ghost hunters’ episode i believe it's 2010 home is where the heart is okay yeah, it's all about the current a family that was living there and their experiences with a ghost they say they've seen this ghost this little girl apparently, her name is tony clark and she's been appearing i guess for the past hour well, the previous owner salt or 200 times that's what they said 200 or more times, and ghost hunters did believe that there were dual entities in the house as well think okay, well, monique clark she is the daughter of the guy who built the house back in 1896 and he owned a lumber mill and he inherited this lumber mill from his father when he was 26 years old and he built a house known he was one of his daughters and apparently, she was one of the first women to receive a pacemaker for her heart and that led to her dying somehow i don't know what happened to it but she died when she was in her 50s but supposedly she's coming back is like a 12 year old girl i've never seen i've had some strange things happen in the house door slamming things disappearing from one place appearing in another place not my imagination other people have experienced things too but how she was identified is that the lady across the street had apparently, i recognize the description of the nightgown that she appeared in because she had made that night gown for her when she was young so getting a little cold chills thinking about it right now but it is interesting, but yeah, i don't feel scared in the house i think the house accepts me i have never had to smudge it or whatever you call it or you know, try to clear spirits out of there but it's an interesting story and it's always fun when somebody else experiences something tony morelan 7 46 oh, that is absolutely wild to hear you know, and we'll circle back to the whole aspect of design in this podcast i will note before i'm going to jump ahead just a little bit your designs have a little bit of a quirkiness to it and sometimes i'm seeing, you know, ghosts and aliens and the crazy thing so i think that may be where you're getting some of your inspiration chris shomo 8 08 yeah well, i mean, you live in a dynamic city, it's actually one of the most haunted cities in america sure you know, and it's one of the most wild cities in america too i mean, you have this, this local field, but then, at the same time, you know, it's one of the few places in america where you have an open cup, and, you know, take a drink from one bar to another downtown so it leads to a little bit of craziness but i myself pride myself in being a little crazy, you know, you have to be in this crazy world and i love surprising people with designs to light like one second yeah, you'll have a butterfly that looks realistic landing on your, on your watch and then the next moment, you know, you have some zombies that are appearing with your step, go biohazard z tony morelan 8 57 that's a great one yeah, definitely so we were fortunate actually to come out and visit you at savannah college of art and design where we came in hosted a session with your students, teaching them all about theme designing for phones and watch faces and that connection actually came through you so that was my opportunity to come out to savannah and get to meet you in person what a beautiful city i mean, it really in the campus itself to is pretty unique because from what i understand savannah college of art and design, they're like the number one occupancy of buildings in downtown is that correct? i mean, as far as the campuses is put together, chris shomo 9 32 yeah, it seems like it's every other building and it's really amazing what they've done for savannah they encouraged a lot of businesses to move in as well to cater to the students and they really played a huge role in where savannah is today you know, we get millions and millions of visitors every single year and schools to thank for a lot of that, you know, just the restoration projects and encouraging restoration and then of course, we have a great hit preservation society alone just in savannah being the oldest plant city in america, and in a genius plan to just how it integrates with all the giant oak trees that are in all the squares and people are really jealous of those, those oak trees and, you know, as a person living there, i always try to make sure that i go out and i do what the visitors do, just to remind myself, you know, what a beautiful city it is and then, you know, just going to school in those historic buildings as well it just it helps with the creativity and yeah, the location definitely helps with the whole artistic side of things tony morelan 10 39 yes, and for those who don't know, savannah is actually the city where they filmed the scene of forrest gump on the bench yep, that iconic moment in forrest gump where he's sitting on that bench that was in savannah at one of the squares i actually walked by that to take a look at that for myself just an amazing city chris shomo 11 00 and it's actually known for a lot of movies as well like the lady in the tramp that's on disney plus that was filmed they actually looked at my house to potentially film it there but they said that the lot was too big so they actually filmed it a few blocks down and yeah, and then also, my house is where the movie legend of bagger vance was filmed there's a scene where it's where the little kid lives the caddy and there's a whole scene at the dinner table where they're, they're talking and stuff that's my dining room oh, wow it was one of the houses the few houses around there that had a dining room with a view to the kitchen as well and they needed that for the scene so robert redford picked out the wallpaper it's kind of cool tony morelan 11 47 absolutely crazy yeah oh, wow i knew this podcast would be fun, but i have no idea so let's circle back around and let's talk a little bit about design okay, tell me how you first heard about the sample galaxy watch chris shomo 12 00 okay, well, i'm a tech geek i love any type of mobile tech, especially before the watches came out on i was like a cell phone fanatic like, you know, first we wanted them to get small and now they're getting bigger yes now we need the biggest phone ever, which i absolutely love but i was eyeing smartwatches for a while and finally i was like, okay, i'm getting one at the time i'm like, i couldn't really afford it but you know, i don't care i'm getting one so i went down to the best buy and i got the first gear s to sport i just loved it it was great but there was one thing that bothered me i needed more watch faces i was bored with the watch faces that were available and went on the it was galaxy apps before but now the galaxy store and you know, i even paid like i think it was like five or $10 for a watch face it looked like the coolest one out there then like, alright, how do i make my own? so that's when i just googled and i found it was the galaxy watch designer well, at the time, it was the gear watch designer 1 0 wow and, like, right when it first came out, i mean, i think i might have actually caught it within days of it coming out and i downloaded it, and i just started playing around with it and i never even planned on releasing any of them for anybody else i just, you know, wanted to make some for me and then i'm like, alright, look, i can, i can load some and see if i can make a few dollars let's do it so i think i made like $17 off of two watch faces the first day and then i'm just thinking to myself, like, you know, what if i have like 300 watch faces on there, you know, how much how much can i make her? so i mean, sure enough now gosh, i have about 394 watch faces and themes published wow, that's amazing and how long would you say this has been? oh gosh i started in i think it was february, early february of 2016 okay, so when i started, and you can actually kind of look back at some of my very early designs, and see how the design has improved over time sure the very first one that i did, i just called it gear spin and i didn't really know much about the designer, the software and everything i was just getting into, it didn't really think that i could even put a graphic on, you know, a watch hand and use it other than a watch hand at the time so i even animated a gear using adobe flash exported the frame animations out and threw it in there just to get a gear spinning sure now, i'll just put it on a second hand but i'm thinking coming from a designing standpoint, not a watch standpoint and, and that's something that you that you really have to start doing it start thinking, you know, i'm also a watchmaker in a way exactly, you know, so you got to start thinking, that language and that starts you know, meshing with the creative ideas and then you start, you know, you got to focus on functionality at the same time that you're trying to focus on dynamics and what it looks like, that sort of thing so tony morelan 15 11 that's true and you know, i do a lot of teaching to students just learning how to watch design and the challenges are that they've got this tool that can allow them to just do amazing graphics and amazing animations and then they forget that really, this is a time piece where people need to quickly tell what time it is so even though you can have a lot of fun with your graphics in your animation, you still need to make it where you know on quick notice, you can actually tell what time it is i mean, that's the whole the function of the watch and that's what i love with your designs as well i mean, you've got some amazing, fun, quirky, crazy designs i mean, everything from dogs and butterflies to spooky, eyeballs and reapers so let's talk a little bit about your approach to design and some of the tools you're using you had mentioned adobe flash so we're going back in the day oh gosh, yeah chris shomo 16 03 well, i don't use that anymore but i used to use that all the time tony morelan 16 07 so tell me kind of that your workflow, you know, when you know, from concept, your tools, are you sketching on pencil and paper when you have an idea, or do you just dive right into a software program? chris shomo 16 18 well, i guess this is where professors are going to want to smack me and i should be sketching more than that you know, scat always says, you start with the basics, and you start sketching, and i need to carry around a sketchbook but no, i kind of jump into the software first but in a way, i kind of sketch digitally i'll start with a program like adobe illustrator, just to get the basic shapes done and i'll move them into photoshop, of course, to get the nice effects to get the textures, some of the shadows or to create the shadow layers that you'll export separately later you know, those are our two the main tools of getting i guess, the framework of the of the watch, but of course, i like to do animations, so using a lot of after effects and premiere, and sometimes when i have to maya and all that kind of stuff, and then you know, getting it out to the, the frames, and also being very cautious about file size as well you know, we are dealing essentially with an app, even though it's very focused around design, which i'm very thankful thank you samsung for giving me awesome design software, where i don't have to code everything but, but you do have to remember that, you know, people will get frustrated if you have a, you know, a 50 megabyte watch face, which i mean, i could easily make one that large but it's all about understanding the compression and understanding your tools to make sure that when you deliver that watch face, it's fine, it's dynamic, it has all the effects but it doesn't take forever to install or it doesn't, you know, someone doesn't have an issue with it so understanding the technical side but really understand or design software tony morelan 18 02 that helps, you know, and you had mentioned a little trick that i may have actually learned from you in that where you had said that you know, your first animation was done using flash and bringing those in as animated gifs but you then said, hey, i could have just made this a watch hand and that's one of those tricks that when you realize that watch hands don't actually have to be watch hands it's the watch and feature is basically just a rotating graphic that you can then set its direction that it rotates, you can set the you know, the time that it rotates so again, another tip that came from chris that helped me in my, in my success as a watch face designer and i'm actually going to take this moment to thank you again, because it was your you had mentioned, you started in 2016 i think it was at the developer conference in 2017 that samsung invited you out to actually speak at the event was that correct? yes, that's right so tell me a little bit about that that experience, because it was after that conference, they posted the video online and that's how i first learned about designing for samsung it was finding this video of chris shomo from infinity watch faces speaking at the conference, that then got me excited so tell me a little about that chris shomo 19 20 uh, that moment, the whole experience was awesome at first late, like when you get an email saying, hey, would you like to come to the samsung developers conference? i'm like, what, at first, i'm just kind of like, samsung sees me this is cool you know how to play i'm getting so excited the experience was great meeting the team was wonderful and just, you know, the team itself were, you know, the designers of the software, the galaxy watch designer, and all that they were so embracing of everybody that came it was such a wonderful experience and then also talking with them and understanding, you know, their process and what goes into creating the software that was amazing too but i guess one of the, the most awesome and rewarding parts of this is all the designers led you, to me that have come to me, it's just like, just been like, thank you for giving that presentation because you guys showed me that, you know, anybody can do this and, and, you know, and then if you have some fun and, you know, wonderful designs that people like then then you can really succeed at it as well and i just i love that yeah, that i could influence someone to start a watch face design career there's another one in particular, that is with usa design he started a little bit later he was doing some games for the watch and he was there at the presentation as well and now he's like one of the top sellers it's amazing he jumped into it he founded as a design formula that works really great with the active two, especially when that came out without the bezel at the time, and is doing phenomenal and i just absolutely love to see that and the fact that i might have played a part in pushing him in that direction is just, it's rewarding it's humbling it's, it's cool tony morelan 21 28 yeah, no, that's, that's great it was you know, when i watched that video of your presentation, and you had mentioned, the first thing was that you can create these watch faces without coding you know, i've done a little bit of coding, but my experience is a lot like yours i mean, i had my own freelance design company i did a lot of website designing but when i learned that you could create these watch faces, really without doing any coding so it's just such an extension of photoshop or illustrator in using like after effects with the timeline you can have so much fun doing it you had mentioned earlier little secret again, just like the watch hands rotating how you could actually have buttons that you could tap and reveal things by using a transparent png that didn't have any pixels in it, you use that as sort of like a cover button well, when i learned about that, i then dove into this whole idea of being able to tap certain areas of the watch and have it reveal new things like, you know, if you wanted to show your step counter, you could tap an icon and it would then show the numbers so you could customize the look of the watch face, cleaning it up by not having all the graphics show, but tapping to reveal whatever sort of data you wanted to see your heart rate beats per minute, i mean, all sorts of different elements and it was from you the that i learned about that i then have totally expanded on that creating videos on tap reveal, that are shown on youtube and doing a whole thing around that and i've seen that a lot of people really enjoy, you know, learning about that and that again, came from you in that presentation so thank you a big thank you from the crowd of designers that really appreciate what you've what you've inspired chris shomo 23 09 thanks yeah, i mean, it's fun and that all kind of spawned from figuring out a solution to putting all this information on a watch face, but not making it look too busy and so kind of hiding it and revealing it there, it kind of making use with the tools that are given to you, and how can you make it work to simulate something when you when you don't have all the code underneath it so tony morelan 23 35 that's great so we've talked a lot about watch faces i know you also are doing theme designing so what was that progression? you first were designing for watches and then learn that you could actually do something very similar with theme studio and creating themes for our phone devices chris shomo 23 52 yeah, no, the whole idea is matching your watch face to your theme and having total continuity between the two and for example, the shock theme that one's actually a free one just called shock, you can look it up that's the most downloaded theme that i have and it has a matching much face called shock as well so you just be shocking everybody with the shock but, but yeah, in those i also like to i like to make fun and exciting something that you wouldn't expect from dancing frogs to lightning bolts to oh gosh, and i got so many more that are just about to come out i'm not going to ruin the surprise, but y'all are gonna love them tony morelan 24 34 wonderful i'm looking at your website and the one that jumps out to me is martian bash i know it's a great dancing alien you know, how is that is there been a lot of success behind some of these quirky dancing cuz i've seen like santas dancing and you've got a lot of fun ones chris shomo 24 48 well, yeah, because i want to reward people for taking some steps a lot of these characters that are on there, they change what they're doing based upon step gold percentage so if you want the aliens dance you're going to have to meet your step goal so in the morning, he might, you know, he's standing there, he's waving at you and then as you proceed during the day, he's running one direction and towards you that another direction and then finally, yeah, he's dancing whoo, you just read your step goal one of the points of these watches is for health and to encourage people to, you know, get out of the chair and you know, move around, and so why not make something that's fun and exciting and encourages that at the same time? that's great so even the one called bolt that has lightning bolts that go across it starts as like a tiny little bolt and as you proceed through the day with your step, go, more electricity comes out and i'm getting ready to release another one with a fun little loving alien that does a lot of other stuff to your step goal as well so that should be fun tony morelan 25 45 super excited about that tell me watch face designing and theme designing is this your full-time gig or do you actually still go back and do some of your website designing or anything beyond design? chris shomo 25 55 oh, this is actually full part time gig chris shomo 26 00 between that and website design and i'm also the cto and creative director of the picker joe's brand you probably heard of antique pickers, vintage pickers, they go around and find really cool stuff and bring it to people yes so yeah, there's a store in savannah, georgia called picker joe's antique mall and it's 10,000 square feet 25,000 items that change daily, about 65 antique pickers that go out and find all this stuff we like to say that it's an experience like no other because it really is we have people that come in from different parts of the world, from across the country, and they go, wow, this is the best antique mall experience that i've ever had and we've also been on oh gosh, i don't know how many interviews so far with the same production company that does american pickers and so they are still considering us possibly for that show oh, wow but, but i designed the branding and do all the advertising and we do crazy videos usually filmed with the latest samsung phone as well and if you go to our instagram if you look at our youtube and stuff, you'll see some of the, the wild and insane advertisements that we do all the time and that's one of the things that really sets it apart from other stores i mean, if you ever heard of an antique store that you know for halloween has monsters invading us and appearing everywhere and like all sorts of things, no, probably not but i encourage everybody to check it out and if you're in savannah, you've got to experience it you really did tony morelan 27 31 definitely in i can see in your designs you definitely have a lot of fun humor happening i'm looking at the watch face for joe, joe's, your character of the dog that seems like his tongue is actually bigger, bigger and then his head and wagging more than his tail yep, chris shomo 27 53 yep and i actually have a dog named joe and that's actually what picker joe's is named after do oh, that's great figure so he's a jack russell and he actually looks very similar to joe and he likes all the time he's always happy and always mischievous as well, too so, again, he'll react to your step go, he'll, he'll do some fun stuff at 50% as well so definitely check that out tony morelan 28 18 so, are you doing all this design work yourself? or do you have a team of designers that work with you in producing watch faces and themes? chris shomo 28 25 most of this stuff is just me but i do have a another a friend and fellow colleague that graduated with me, jonathan maillard he's over in denver right now so i do pull him in on tons of different projects we're working on some right now some interesting apps and hopefully in the very near future, some game designs as well oh, that's great that's great yeah, games are a big push for samsung so super excited to hear that you're going to bring your brand over to that side and let's produce some amazing games it's going to be fine do you work out of your house? do you actually have an office space? okay, i have multiple locations that i can work out of i definitely have the house set up and with the cool gaming computer and all that kind of stuff and then we have the office which is actually right above a florist it's really cool you can walk up the stairs and you smell roses love it always say i always get to stop and smell the roses every day and, and then also working out of picker joe's as well in the side office there tony morelan 29 26 so we talk a lot about savannah is that where you were born, or were you born and raised somewhere else? chris shomo 29 33 born and raised in the mountains of virginia and pulaski, virginia? oh, wow yeah so a little town called pulaski it's in the middle of the blue ridge mountains and it's your cool i guess mainstreet hometown recently it's been hit kind of a little hard from the economy my master's thesis in school for architecture was actually called the polanski institute of art design, which was taking the million square feet of the pulaski furniture plant and change it into a design school, which would in turn, hopefully help the economy and encourage businesses to open up to cater to students and yeah, that's pretty much what my master's thesis was first seen on my hometown but then, of course, i moved to savannah in 2000 and i've been there ever since tony morelan 30 29 so let's talk a little bit about marketing i mean, you are definitely one of the most successful designers for samsung tell me some of your tips and tricks when it comes to actually marketing your watch faces in your themes are you using social media? are you doing any additional advertising? what's your what's your approach to marketing? chris shomo 30 49 okay, so first off, i started out with the website, and just really making sure that it crawled on google so i'm always getting some sort of traffic and so either way website at any given moment can get like 200 to 500 hits a day, which, you know, that really helps just get the brand out there tony morelan 31 08 and share the url chris shomo 31 10 oh, it's www infinitywatchfaces com, and also social media, instagram and facebook we used to use google plus a lot it was a big designer community, but of course that's gone but that has shifted over to the facebook groups now and like the facebook group, that ash with iot gadgets, runs, it's one of the largest facebook groups out there and they have great moderation some good people are definitely running it and it's a great place to really show off your designs and spread the word to everybody and it has just a great following so i always recommend you know, get on social media and you just scream out your brand's everybody i actually tony morelan 31 55 interviewed ash iot gadgets on the podcast nice if you haven't listened to that yet, go back a few episodes it was a great, great time he's an excellent interview, great person doing amazing things and yeah, that facebook group is huge it's crazy chris shomo 32 11 yeah, it's crazy it's got to take a lot of time to moderate i'm sure it does but um, oh, and also on youtube we got our favorite watch face reviewer andrew tony morelan 32 22 jibber jab reviews yes and again, that came out of your presentation when you spoke at the conference you'd mentioned jibber jabber, and first thing i did when i became a watch-based designer was track jibber jabber reviews down on youtube and get him to review some of my watch faces i have just done a live chat with andrew, that we published last week great interview, he talks a lot about strategies, not only using youtube, but even beyond youtube for marketing your app so and i know you've got a great relationship with andrew, can i say this? can i share this? you're helping him with a new website that he's launching is that correct? chris shomo 32 59 yeah as the website is in the very beginning stages, it's going to grow over time doing some interesting work on pulling his youtube channel and all over the place and yeah, it's going to be something you're going to want to visit very often cause he's going to have some cool giveaways and a bunch of other stuff so, yeah, andrew is great to work with and it's interesting, because, you know, in the very beginning, he's tracking down watch face designers to do a review, and now everybody's tracking him down, of course, which is wonderful but, um, but yeah, he's done a phenomenal job and he's just, he's very vital to the community i totally agree i mean, andrew is a great guy and a lot of watch face designers owe their success to, to andrew so your watch faces and themes have a lot of animation so i want to ask about instagram a lot of times people just post pictures on instagram are you utilizing videos on instagram? oh, probably more video than anything else and a lot of that video is just taking my galaxy phone and just reading according the watch on my wrist, this is the first thing i want to do actually, as soon as i have a design, like even almost done, it's a work in progress and it's fun sometimes for your customers to see works in progress to see the early stage and, and all the work that goes into it as well and you'll find that you'll get a lot of a lot of following on there, which is great and, and a lot of times customers will, will critique it and you'll end up getting a better design in the very end because they kind of helped with the design process ah, that's awesome i think the first thing i do, of course, is i post on instagram and then the next thing i do is i head on over to that large facebook group and i started announcing there and, you know, i'll do some, you know, some works in progress, like post and that sort of thing you know, making sure that i replace that post as opposed to adding another one with, you know, the final, you know, work and just, you know, keep on updating that that sort of thing because you know, everybody's notified at the end another picture to a post they like so, yeah, just knowing these little tricks with social media and with instagram, knowing how to use your hashtags, it's all about hashtags on instagram, yeah, then you don't have to, to pay essentially, we're on facebook, you know, you might want to, you know, every once in a while, on paid advertise a little bit, sometimes it works but the main thing is being active with those groups, getting people to recognize your brand and getting repeat customers that also want to share your stuff, too tony morelan 35 30 and glad you mentioned the hashtags, we actually posted on our site, which is developer samsung com if you go to the galaxy store page, we actually posted a long list of valuable hashtags that you can use, whether your marketing your watch faces or your themes or apps or games so it's a great place to start to go take a look at some really good hashtags that could work chris shomo 35 52 nice and i just need to give a huge shout out and thank you to everybody with the samsung developers program because like i've also seen that grow over time and the resources available are just amazing and it's so helpful and you guys have yeah, even great every step along the way thank you tony morelan 36 13 yeah, no, you're welcome you're welcome you know, one of the things that we've done to try and help designers like yourself promote their apps is galaxy store badges, which i know that you use so a little bit about your experience with that, and where are you using those galaxy store badges? chris shomo 36 31 well, these badges are great because first they make you look legit they make you look professional, because they know, you know, it's 100% hey, this is available on the galaxy store and also being able to track the clicks and where people are coming from you can you can make a link specifically for a facebook promotion and you know, how many people you know clicked on that to participate in that so how do you know how where to grow unless you know where you stand and that helps you understand this statistics and where people are coming from so it's a valuable resource tony morelan 37 03 what about banner promotions? i love chris shomo 37 06 banner promotions you will see your best downloads during then that when you have one of those and ron is great yes, yeah, he helps guide you along just making sure that the banner looks great definitely everybody needs to take in his comments, everything that he tells you because i mean he, he's saying him for a reason so he will help your sales tony morelan 37 29 my biggest success came from a watch face that i had done that was featured on a banner promotion and it was crazy the amount of downloads and sales that were generated by having that banner promotion so for designers out there, once you've got a collection of strong designs, then you can approach samsung about being featured on a banner there is no cost to the banner, but there are a lot of people requesting it you have to be approved proved to actually have your designs featured on a banner but definitely worthwhile pursuing for sure chris shomo 38 07 and make sure that you have your social presence as well and all your facebook page and instagram page and all that when you submit for the banner because you know it's going to make you a better candidate for one tony morelan 38 18 yes, definitely they actually look at that they want to see previous downloads how much success you've already had so once you've got some experience, it's definitely worthwhile to at that point to reach out and then apply for a band promotion going back to your video, so you do have a lot of animation in your watch faces and your themes and i know you leverage video so talk a bit about youtube are you taking like all of these designs each time and posting them on youtube creating videos to expand your reach? chris shomo 38 44 most of them the main reason to do the video for me on youtube is to really have something dynamic to show on the galaxy store when someone sees that video after they land on your listing it really can be the difference as to whether they're going to buy it or not, and since most of mine offer animations to them, it makes sense to have a video to, to show it off one thing that i, i wish that the galaxy store had was an animated preview, like on like where the icon is, that was really cool because then everybody would be gravitating towards mine and other animated faces instantly but, but yeah, the youtube video is what really makes a difference and there are some watch faces that need to actually go back and make some videos for sometimes you finish the face and then of course, you're like, oh, now i have this whole production i got to make tony morelan 39 35 sure i totally agree with that and let me explain a little bit further about what you were talking about creating the video so that people can see it when they're viewing your galaxy store page so on the galaxy store page for a watch app, you have what are called screenshots and these screenshots show still images of your graphics that you use your marketing graphics however, there's also a way for you to include a little link to a video on youtube so you grab your youtube url, place it into your, your application for the, for this app and the very first screenshot will actually show your youtube video instead of the still image so it's a great way for users like you had mentioned, that want to see the motion, they can actually click on that screenshot, and it will launch the youtube video so it's a great way to market, you know, motion in your graphics so you had mentioned that your top theme is a free download so let's talk a little bit about the approach of offering apps for free because i know a lot of designers utilize the ability to you know, give away their apps and some designers are a little tight with that and they hold on to them and they don't do it where do you stand? i mean, are you using this as a marketing tool? do you just want to like get your brand out there? chris shomo 40 43 well, it started as a marketing tool, because you know, there's also a free section on the store, and if you don't exist on it, then well, it's just another avenue that people are not going to find you so you definitely need to make a free one and a good free one too just don't pick your worst design and be like, oh, i'm just going to make it free no, no, not at all it's not going to do any good so, for example, actually i did a watch face for jibber jabber reviews for andrew and that turned into my top downloading free watch face and that one at one time oh my goodness i think it was downloading like one to 3000 times a day tony morelan 41 22 wow so this is a branded jibber jabber reviews watch face yes so you so i actually remember when he posted his review of that i didn't realize that you were the designer behind that that's awesome yeah, chris shomo 41 35 but my name snuck on there like a little bit, but i wanted that to be mainly about him sure but yeah, not that one still gets downloaded like hundreds of times a day and stuff that very solid one and it gets reviews every single day to love it so having some free faces you can get discovered from people that you would have never discovered you before as well if you can get your watch face up to, you know, a certain section of the free section, which means it has to be good, essentially so, having done this now for several years, i'm sure you could face some challenges will first has been just the challenges of, you know, just growing with the software and understanding what you can do and taking advantage of updates to the software, like when the gyroscope became available and you could use that, oh my gosh, i was so happy when we could do that because that just adds a whole new level of dynamics to the watch faces and so it's really just, you know, learning your tools, but then also encountering that the watch face market has gotten a little bit congested with you know, there's a lot of people, you know, so you definitely have a lot more competition than when i first started out and, you know, i was just thinking the other day, i was like, wow, if i knew what i knew now, right in the very beginning, would i've been designing more sophisticated watch faces and have like a whole monopoly in the market or something like that, you know, you always think back like, oh my gosh, but no, no, i grew at a great rate with the software with the other designers you'll find that a lot of the other designers have become, you know, friends we all talk with each other yeah, we help out each other but yeah, it's a great community it really is tony morelan 43 22 talking about some of your favorite designers and who are the designers that you follow that you're inspired by? chris shomo 43 27 oh gosh, like jeweler broda like oh my gosh bergen of course like, those are great such clean watch faces i love those chris shomo 43 41 md matteo dini oh my gosh, like a little jealous there we'll have to say, but, but yeah, he's, um, the those are just a few of some of the amazing designers out there and a lot of great designers and, and again, the main thing is you know, everybody communicating and kind of working with each other? you feel like you are part of the community regularly tony morelan 44 07 yeah, that's what i've noticed i'm not too long ago actually did a podcast interview with tomas yes check from vienna studios yes yes great person yeah and he's done some amazing designs yeah, he's taken a different approach to watch face descending, where he designs extremely high end, very expensive watch faces that are in the hundreds of dollars and he is one of our top whitespace designers i mean, he has found a way to you know, make amazing revenue off of these high-end watch faces so yeah, i love the community it's been a lot of fun for me to not only be inspired by them when i was a watch face designer, but now being fortunate to be in a position working at samsung, i now get to have these conversations and then help out where i can with some of these you know, the rock stars of the watch facing design community chris shomo 45 04 that's awesome and i promise you that we all appreciate you too thank you so much tony morelan 45 09 thank you tony morelan 45 11 you've used galaxy watch studio for some time now, i'm going to ask you, what sort of features would you like to see added to it? so you'd mentioned about adding animations, maybe as a preview in the galaxy store but what other features would you like to see added to the galaxy watch studio, chris shomo 45 26 probably some little nitpicky things like being able to start and stop an animation with a click of a button that would be great to be able to have an animation react while your mobile for example, if i could have a guy that starts to run while i'm running, that would be cool to sure that would even take that joe watch face to another level, which would be awesome and then maybe in the future, and i think that someone was talking to me about this, but having the ability to do 3d and be able to put like a 3d mesh in there and have real shadows and that sort of thing who knows that that's really thinking into the future, that sort of thing sure and then if we look over to the theme side of things to my main one that i want right now is to have gyroscope action to have parallax effects i think that would add another dynamic to the theme designs tony morelan 46 25 yeah, i love that suggestion chris shomo 46 27 yeah so just, you know, just having like, you know, three to five layers that you could work with that could react with the gyroscope to mess with for like the regular background image people are looking at their phones, i don't even know how many times a day so let's make it like the best, most awesome dynamic experience ever and that would just be great tony morelan 46 48 that's what i mean wishes for that you know, and you were the first designer that i saw that truly leverage the gyroscope on the watch, where i can't remember the name of the watch face you had but as you rotated your wrist because of the gyro functionality these like metallic, big doors just like opened up to then show you know, the like data, you know whether it's the digital clock or heart rate, but it was so cool i could rotate my wrist and have these metal doors on my watch, paste, you know, collapse or open so that's how i first learned about the gyro is from your from your watch face design chris shomo 47 26 yeah, that as soon as they came out with the gyro is just like, oh, how can i use this to do like, tons of different things and i was thinking like a cuckoo clock, you know, when it opens up and that sort of thing so that kind of started at all and trying to think what the first one that i did using that is think it might have been digit glow spark tony morelan 47 45 that sounds right yeah so do you have any tips for designers when publishing on the galaxy store? i mean, we've mentioned a lot about marketing, but when it actually comes to, you know, creating the graphics behind their apps, what sort of tips could you give people and publishing on the galaxy store? chris shomo 48 05 definitely bone up on your photoshop skills, you got to design those thumbnails, don't just throw, you know, watch on a white background with the watch face on it because you really have to grab someone's attention talking from my website design experience, on average, you have about three seconds before someone clicks the back button or continues to read on the website it's kind of the same thing with watch face listing you know that you can have written information, everything, people aren't going to read it they're their visual, they want to look at the thumbnails and it starts with the icon as well make sure that icons looking good tony morelan 48 40 that's great are you familiar with the tool that i created called the asset creator? chris shomo 48 45 yes and i've actually been through it and i've used some of it to create some of my thumbnails and, you know, pulled some stuff out of it and threw some stuff in and that sort of thing so tony morelan 48 54 that's awesome yeah so super excited you know, we just announced galaxy watch three yes and so i spent a bit of time recently updating the asset creator to include all of the new watches for the galaxy watch three i just checked, you can actually go download the new updated version of the asset crater that includes all that that was just published recently so, in addition to that, i also have created what we call lifestyle photo packs, using the same tools within photoshop that allow you to use smart objects to quickly copy paste your design into a watch and have the perspective change and have the blurred change so that it truly just simply photoshopped right onto the watch i am madly working on new photos that show the galaxy watch three i will be publishing those very, very soon so super excited those have been a big success, a lot of help for people because it's not just showing your watch face on the watch just on a simple straight, you know, top down picture we're actually taking the watch and putting it into a scene so whether it is, you know, sitting on water drops, or it's on a slab of granite, or you know, some high-tech texture, these are great pictures to help using your screenshots when you're publishing your app so, look for those new galaxy watch three lifestyle photo packs coming out very, very cool chris shomo 50 22 i'm excited and one thing that's cool about that is it allows the customer to relate to the watch and wearing that watch face more by having photos like that so that that's great you can get your customer to relate to your product, you're golden, an architecture professor actually told me one time that a building or a product, any type of product, it is 10% your ideas and 90% the way you present them so if you can't present it right then your product is not going to mean anything tony morelan 50 55 so what is in the future for infinity watch face design tell me what can we get excited about? what's happening? chris shomo 51 02 oh gosh, what is in the future? we got so many things in the future, we're going to have some games come out, you know, break into the, the other part of the app world still continues with wearables of course, we're going to expand our video production as well working on that and infinity watch faces is going to be getting really involved with local businesses really soon, and helping promote their businesses to other local people and visitors ever since this whole pandemic, things going on local businesses have been hit so hard, we've lost a few in our neighborhood i just don't want to lose any more so i'll be going out and you know, just really doing what i can to tony morelan 51 49 help that's wonderful yeah, these are definitely challenging times you know, it's been a while now that we've all kind of been in this sort of lockdown and we've realized the effects that this has really had on our economy, it's also been an opportunity for us to try and find new ways to, you know, to still do the work that we do and in the reach that we do so it's nice to hear that you're, you know, finding ways to sort of help out in all of that aspect so, going back to the fun designs that you create, i need to ask you right now, which if you have to pick one, and then you've got 390 plus, i want you to pick one design, what is your current favorite? chris shomo 52 36 i know this is going to sound a little goofy, maybe a little girly the butterfly named fred love it's not very i think because the way the flowers interact with your wrist and then that that butterfly just landing perfectly right there on it every single time it makes me happy and the dude's name is fred come like fred butterfly tony morelan 52 59 how did you come up? fred for the butterfly, chris shomo 53 02 i don't know i was just kind of looking at an insect one day and i named an insect fred and then i was like, ah, this butterfly should be named fred now, i mean, i could have called it something like beautiful butterfly or blue butterfly or you know, just some sort of whatever name but let's give him an actual name and let's make a character out of this yeah wow, that is a great story i'm going to close this podcast though by asking what does chris sharma do for fun when you're not designing these wild themes and wild watch faces? oh, i live in the city of fun i mean, just going around and you know, going to experience the different restaurants and just the atmosphere in the summertime, i guess staying indoors more because it's so hot and humid down there someone asked me one time what's it like living in the south during all this heat because like just the other day that heat index was like 105 degrees that's of course, when you combine the humidity and the actual temperature, that's what it feels like and i told him when i was like, alright, take the hottest shower that you can now get out of the shower, do not dry off and put your clothes on that's what it feels like oh, so it's a sauna out there tony morelan 54 22 that's crazy you know, and i will say i have to share we've had to reschedule this interview numerous times, because there was a hurricane going through savannah and you were losing your internet connection so yeah, living in the south, i think definitely has a lot of excitement chris shomo 54 37 well, the hurricane is actually one of the normal things for 2020 chris shomo 54 43 we were very fortunate that the hurricane mainly missed us we got some wind from the outer bands and locally, my internet was like, it was all over the place we didn't have it and we had a flood yeah, it's just something that we got to deal with but i'm glad we were fine hazleton connect and get this interview done tony morelan 55 03 yeah, this is great this has been a lot of fun so chris, thank you very much for joining the podcast much access to you at infinity watch faces and looking forward to all the great new designs i know they're going to be coming down the road for us so thanks again chris shomo 55 15 thank you, tony and thank you, samsung, you guys are awesome outro 55 18 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

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s01e10-chris-shomo.html

Develop GameDev

Event Archive

event archive 2022 event date/location session presenter s gdc2022 may 21-25, 2022san francisco, usa unfolding your gaming potential with galaxy gamedev gdc vault michael barnes, head of game ecosystem at samsung research uk gdc2022 may 21-25, 2022san francisco, usa game performance optimization with causal models gdc vault hesham dar, senior data scientist at samsung research uk gdc2022 may 21-25, 2022san francisco, usa what if your phone's avatar is in the game or metaverse? gdc vault jinho lim, principal engineerjeoungju kim, principal engineersanglae kim, staff engineer gdc2022 may 21-25, 2022san francisco, usa new gpu, the ultimate reality! gdc vault gary keen, engineer, samsung research uk 2020 event date/location session presenter s unite seoul 2020 201203online how to optimize sustainable gaming performance in mobile devices using adaptive performance video munseong kang unity korea webinar 2020 200730online how to maintain stable gaming performance, adaptive performance video inae kim, jihyun oh unity unite now 2020 200723online build aaa games with adaptive performance video benjamin mitchell 2019 event date/location session presenter s unity webinar seoul 2019 191212seoul, korea adaptive performance video_korean junsik kong, jihyun oh unity reboot develop red 2019 191030banff, canada mobilizing call of duty bringing a blockbuster title to android video benjamin mitchell sdc 2019 191030san jose,usa a deep look inside games gamesdk and unity adaptive performance video junsik kong, david berger unity sdc 2019 191030san jose,usa vulkanized mobile game optimization techniques pdf igor nazarov,yao wei sdc 2019 191030san jose,usa galaxy gamedev bringing maximun boost to mobile gamesⅱ video jungwoo kim, seunghwan lee, richard huddy unite copenhagen 2019 190923københavn,denmark bringing call of duty to mobile video/slide jungwoo kim, anton syniavskyi casual connect london 190528london,uk next level mobile graphics video munseoung kang,oleksii vasylenko unite seoul 2019 190521seoul, korea technique of mobile game optimization-vulkan and unity adaptive performance video junsik kong, seunghwan lee, david berger unity unite seoul 2019 190521seoul, korea keynote pdf jungwoo kim unite shanghai 2019 190512shanghai,china gamedev partner practices pdf yao wei unite shanghai 2019 190512shanghai,china keynote pdf joonyong park google i/o 2019 190507mountainview,usa making high fidelity android games possible with vulkan video jungwoo kim, francesco carucci google , tom olson arm unreal summit seoul 2019 190503seoul, korea vulkan mobile optimization white book video/pdf-korean joonyong park, dohyun kim reboot develop blue 2019 190419dubrovnik,croatia some seriously explicit lessons in vulkan video alon or-bach, karlo jez croteam unreal fest europe 2019 190411prague, czech republic vulkan! powering aaa experiences on android video oleksii vasylenko,michael parkin-white gdc2019 190318-190322sanfrancisco,usa bringing 'fortnite' to mobile with vulkan and opengles presented by khronos pdf/video kostiantyn drabeniuk, jack porter epic games gdc2019 190318-190322sanfrancisco,usa a quick look inside your game gpuwatch & gamesdk presented by samsung video hyokeun lee, junsik kong, david berger unity gdc2019 190318-190322sanfrancisco,usa galaxy gamedev bringing maximum boost to mobile games presented by samsung video jungwoo kim, dohyun kim, sangmin lee gdc2019 190318-190322sanfrancisco,usa all-in-one guide to vulkan on mobile presented by samsung and arm michael parkin-white gdc2019 190318-190322sanfrancisco,usa making use of new vulkan features presented by khronos video lewis gordon, dr matthäus chajdas amd , tiemo jung gaijin entertainment 2018 event date/location session presenter s sdc2018 181107-181108sanfrancisco,usa going into the new era galaxy gamedev -update,secrets and leaks video jungwoo kim, richard huddy sdc2018 181107-181108sanfrancisco,usa a quick look inside your games gpuwatch tutorial + gameengine talk video hyo-keun lee, niklas smedberg unity sdc2018 181107-181108sanfrancisco,usa fortnite behind the story road to android and vulkan collaboration with galaxy gamedev video sangmin lee, jack porter epic games siggraph 2018 180812-180816vancouver, canada moving mobile graphics mobile graphics 101 pdf andrew garrard vulkanised!2018 180522cambridge,uk the low-level mysteries of pipeline barriers pdf/video frederic garnier, andrew garrard android game developer summit 2018 180507mountainview,usa vulkan game optimization video jungwoo kim, ito kosei luminous productions , yoshimasa enji summertimestudio unite seoul 2018 180502-180504seoul,south korea keynote pdf taeyong kim vulkan developer day in montreal 2018 180430montreal,canada overview and vulkan 1 1 recap video alon or-bach gdc2018 180319-180323sanfrancisco,usa vulkan on android gotchas and best practices presented by the khronos group video frederic garnier, inae kim, arseny kapoulkine roblox gdc2018 180319-180323sanfrancisco,usa getting explicit how hard is vulkan really? hosted by the khronos group video alon or-bach, dustin land id software , dr matthäus chajdas amd , hai nguyen google , arseny kapoulkine roblox gdc2018 180319-180323sanfrancisco,usa perfdoc optimize early with vulkan validation layer tools presented by arm link jungwoo kim, hans-kristian arntzen arm 2017 event date/location session presenter s gcon g-star 2017 171117busan,south korea future mobile game ecosystem and high fidelity android gaming pdf meeso kim, jungwoo kim sdc 2017 171018-171019sanfrancisco,usa developing high-fidelity android games collaboration best practices video eunsil cho,ethan choi hound13 ,ito kosei square enix ,ebato takahito square enix sdc 2017 171018-171019sanfrancisco,usa vulkan game optimization deep-dive case study video daemyung jang, jungwoo kim sdc 2017 171018-171019sanfrancisco,usa level up your game! new insights and tools for game developers video jungwoo kim, jongheun yoo game republic mobile games special 171018sheffield,uk samsung game ecosystem pdf david pither html5ct forum 171013seoul,south korea introducing vulkan with practices pdf jungwoo kim unreal fest east 2017 171008yokohama,japan developing high performance games for android pdf jungwoo kim, hak matsuda google khronos-vulkanised!2017 170525cambridge,uk bringing vainglory to vulkan pdf fred garnier khronos-vulkanised!2017 170525cambridge,uk panel discussion worst practices! lessons learnt from game devs pioneering with vulkan video alon or-bach, tobias hector img , fred garnier, dean sekulic croteam ,hans-kristian arntzen arm , tom olson arm google i/o 2017 170519mountain view,usa developing high performance games for android video jungwoo kim, bill bilodeau google , donghyun kim netmarble android game developer summit 2017 170516mountainview,usa game optimization pdf jungwoo kim, jonas gustavsson unite seoul 2017 170516-170517seoul,south korea keynote pdf joonyong park ndc 2017 170425-170427pangyo,south korea developing vulkan game with unity pdf seunghwan lee, inae kim, daemyung jang gdc2017 170227sanfrancisco,usa vulkan game development in mobile pdf soowan park gdc2017 170227sanfrancisco,usa refocusing on vr innovation can standards simplify cross-platform virtual reality development? pdf/video alon or-bach gdc2017 170227sanfrancisco,usa mobile the future of vr pdf/video alon or-bach casual connect berlin 170208berlin,germany optimizing high-end games for premium mobile devices video jonas gustavsson, joe davis hci korea 2017 170208-170210jeongseon,south korea future of vr with vulkan pdf daemyung jang 2016 event date/location session presenter s gcon g-star 2016 161118busan,south korea vulkan and the future of mobile gaming pdf meeso kim, jungwoo kim khronos-vulkan devu 161021seoul,south korea vulkan tutorial pdf hyokeun lee, minwook kim khronos-vulkan devu 161021seoul,south korea vulkan case study video soowan park, joonyong park cedec 2016 160824-160826yokohama,japan the vulkan™ new generation graphics api – an introduction and overview pdf jungwoo kim e3 2016 160614-160616los angeles,usa samsung e3 press conference pdf jungwoo kim khronos-moving to vulkan 160525cambridge,uk swapchains unchained video alon or-bach sdc2016 160427sanfrancisco,usa introducing the galaxy gamedev program video taeyong kim, rob dyer, ray tran, carl callewaert sdc2016 160427sanfrancisco,usa introducing vulkan for galaxy s7 video jungwoo kim, valentyn kulikovskiy sdc2016 160427sanfrancisco,usa unreal engine developing console-level games with vulkan video jungwoo kim, niklas smedberg epic games

https://developer.samsung.com/galaxy-gamedev/event-archive.html

Learn Developers Podcast

Episode 1, Jong Woo

season 1, episode 1 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 jong woo samsung game services in this episode of pow, i interview jong woo, vice president of games services for samsung electronics in the u s jong’s got a great story not just what he is doing here at samsung related to the gaming industry, but his time before arriving at samsung where he helped take a little game offered on facebook to become one of the successful mobile games of all time, candy crush saga listen download this episode topics covered building games for galaxy store revenue sharing and monetization driving engagement with samsung game launcher gaming culture, past and present helping businesses grow with samsung next android developers 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 of the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung on today's show, i interviewed jong woo, vice president of game services for samsung electronics in the us, jong's got a great story, not just what he's doing here at samsung related to the gaming industry, but his time before arriving at samsung, where he helped take a little game offered on facebook to become one of the most successful mobile games of all time, candy crush saga so i'm going to start off with a real basic question who is jong woo? jong woo 00 47 i'm one of those lucky guys i'd say that gets to do professionally what i'm also very passionate about, personally, and that's gaming i am an avid gamer i love playing games all sorts of games from board games to console and pc games so you know, i've actually had the opportunity to work in the gaming industry for the past 15 plus years or so so most recently, i headed up business development and partnerships for king digital entertainment and i was actually kings first us based hire and they moved me from new york to california, back in 2011 and at that time, king was a web-based sort of casual game developer and they were looking to make the pivot into social and eventually mobile so i opened up their san francisco office and helped that helped the company pivot through from the web based into facebook initially, and then into mobile and it was a pretty fun and crazy time getting to bring candy crush saga to market launch that game and be a part of that games, explosive growth tony morelan 02 04 how many years were you at king? jong woo 02 06 so i was at king for almost three years and after that three-year period, i moved to head up business development and marketing for a game publisher called machine zone and at that time, machine zone had just launched a game called game of war and, you know, i watched that game climb the top grossing charts very quickly and this was at a time when, you know, people and pundits in the industry, were saying that, you know, mobile gamers in the west like in the united states, they said they will never gravitate towards hardcore mmo rpg games, right? if you looked at the top grossing charts on mobile during that time, it was casual games and social casino games, predominantly, and you know, everyone once said that these were these hardcore genres of gaming they were for, you know, the asian markets like the korea, china and japan but he was game of war sort of, you know, at least proving the look like they were proving the pundits wrong and so i had an opportunity to meet with the ceo of machines zone, got to understand, you know, what the company was about and, you know, made the determination for myself that this wasn't necessarily an exception to the rule but this was sort of a trend, a sort of a trend that was happening in the mobile gaming space and so i made the move from king to machine zone and yeah, got to really see firsthand what live operations really means for those gaming as a service, right, this type of live operations that typically you would see for sort of pc large pc mmo rpg games you were starting to see that sort of live operations machine being replicated on mobile and driving tremendous value and so you know, that's sort of, i was able to sort of witness sort of both ends of sort of the mobile gaming genre spectrum from sort of casual puzzle games, to really hardcore, massively multiplayer synchronous rpg games tony morelan 04 24 so we understand that, after those years working for two very influential gaming companies, that you then got out of the gaming space and actually got into the charitable space jong woo 04 37 that's right the charitable project was sort of a passion project of mine and about around 2017 you know, i came to the realization that the mobile gaming landscape was changing, and not necessarily changing for the better, right? i think less than less people were organically going into the app stores right like, we don't go to the app store's just to go in and see what's new that week anymore right? that was a, a large, a very big phenomenon when, you know smart form smartphone adoption was still sort of, you know, hockey sticking, right? you got a new iphone or a new android device, and you wanted to go into the app stores and see what cool new apps were there but nowadays, you know, even when we upgrade our smartphones, we just back up and, and restore, right, and we're not going into these app stores anymore and we have sort of the seven or eight apps that we have just sort of so much integrated into our life, that we're not really looking to expand beyond those services or games, right and because of that, you know, you start to see discoverability die with regards to games you know, the viral hooks that helped games like candy crush saga scale massively they were being replaced by you know, some ad tech and this ad mobile advertising ecosystem and so in order for you to critically build a massive players, you needed a massive war chest of marketing funds, and the most successful games in mobile gaming were not necessarily the most innovative or even the most fun, right? they were the ones that had, you know, a marketing plan and a marketing budget to go and execute scale and so you got this weird split in the industry, you got hyper casual, which was sort of a genre that got introduced in the midst of sort of this landscape shift and so you're talking about low risk, low cost games really designed to retain users for minutes and not days or months anymore and you know, it was quick revenue you, you got somebody to play a game for 10 minutes, and in that 10 minutes, you showed them 20 ads, and then if they deleted your app, that's okay there was always another one waiting in the wings and then the other side of that spectrum, you got, you know, games that were getting super aggressive with monetization practices where, you know, free to play started to feel more like play, pay to win you know, and, you know, i can understand why these game publishers are adopting these more aggressive monetization practices, because they had to keep up with the rising costs of the marketing, you know, in order to sort of continue scaling and so that was the time when i decided maybe it was a time for a change for me and i left the gaming industry and started a charitable giving app and right around the time i was adopting this idea, fintech was booming there were companies and mobile applications trying to help people do everything related to their finances, right like from saving to investing, budgeting, like you got venmo and peer to peer payments, but i didn't see anyone really thinking about utilizing the fintech infrastructure and the tools to help people give back and you know, particularly for millennials, who are the most socially conscious generation right now, this was something that they have always said is super important to them right? when they think about what companies they want to work for, they think about sort of the social responsibility of these companies, right, they have causes that they care very passionate about and the disconnect that i saw in the marketplace was that charitable organizations had a hard time sort of marketing and soliciting funds from millennials because the truth be told, like the roi wasn't necessarily positive, right? it's much easier to continue hitting up the sort of the older generation, the 50 pluses who will attend your gallows and you know, right there sort of like annual giving checks to you, right so that's, that's the way tribal organizations are marketing and so those sort of this disconnect that i was hoping to bridge with, with this initiative, that i that i had started post machines tony morelan 09 03 so from there, though you then decide to get back into gaming that's right it's about that time that i understand someone from samsung then reached out to you to try and get you to come join join the folks over here is that correct? jong woo 09 17 that's right so like samsung had reached out probably, you know, five, six years ago, when i was still starting out at machines or, you know, they were, they've been looking to build out a gaming business pretty early on, i think and at that time, i had always told the hr recruiter person from samsung, no, i'm good, i'm good and most recently into that in early 2019 this person had reached back out to me right around the time of gdc, which is the game developers conference in san francisco, asking if i would meet him for a cup of coffee and so i went and met with him and he told me about what samsung was thinking about with regards to gaming and building a services business around gaming and so, you know, in, i agreed at that time to continue the discussion and this was sort of in now this landscape where, you know, games like fortnight had launched right, and fortnight was sort of this new the embodiment of this new genre of game, right, that wasn't monetizing from a pay to win standpoint anymore, right? like, there is nothing inside a game like fortnight that you can pay for that helps you play that game better, right? it was purely sort of cosmetics inside that game and then, you know, fortnight crafted a partnership or epic games that developed the publisher of fortnight crafted a partnership with samsung and samsung's galaxy store was sort of the exclusive android app store distributing fortnight on mobile right and so this made me think maybe there's an opportunity here for me to come in and help samsung really grow a gaming ecosystem because samsung has tried and there has been a lot of stops and starts here but i think, you know, the i felt like the timing for this was not right, where samsung could really become a meaningful player in the gaming space tony morelan 11 37 so, as the vp of game services for samsung, tell me exactly what does that cover for samsung? jong woo 11 44 sure game services covers the galaxy store and game launcher within our mobile device ecosystem tony morelan 11 52 so tell me why is it beneficial for developers to build for galaxy store when really, they could just have their apps available? on the google play store? jong woo 12 02 yeah, that's a great question and the question that, you know, we get from all the developers that we talk to right and, you know, we certainly don't believe that it's necessarily an either-or situation, right? you know, but what we want to do is we want to provide developers a story ecosystem that allows for better discoverability, right? we want to sort of create an ecosystem that is curated for the best in class games the google play store is generally bloated with a lot of content and for an individual developer, particularly a game developer to get noticed within this ecosystem is nearly impossible right? and, you know, like we mentioned, people just aren't going in looking for new content on their own anyways, like most of that traffic, going into the google play store, is being driven through paid media from you know, facebook ads or what have you, right so we wanted to build a thriving ecosystem inside the galaxy store that isn't bloated with content that is really curated for the best in class the galaxy store is one part of the samsung mobile ecosystem, right that it also includes things like samsung pay and samsung daily there is a, there's a whole suite of owned and operated services within your galaxy device that has a lot of users, right and a lot of engaged, people are opting in into these services on a regular basis and so, you know, our ecosystem is really designed very well to drive discoverability of new content within our ecosystem and we sort of share that inventory across all our owned and operated properties and so this really strong value proposition that i think the value the galaxy store brings to game publishers is that we are able to augment the marketing initiatives that they are doing with some of these discoverability mechanisms and channels and because we also work with fewer game developers, because it is sort of a curated game store we get to build relationships with these developers and work closely with them to craft promotions and marketing initiatives on a regular cadence right? we're and we're, as part of that we're able to also activate a myriad of other businesses within the samsung ecosystem, from samsung members and rewards, as well as our device marketing initiatives to really help drive game awareness, engagement and monetization for our game publishing partners tony morelan 14 35 and i'm sure developers want to hear about the revenue sharing can you share a little bit about the revenue share model and why it's unique to samsung? jong woo 14 42 yeah, so i mean, i think, you know, obviously, the revenue share for you know, app stores generally you know, we talked about 7030 now, i think tim sweeney from epic games has very publicly said that, you know, the revenue shares for these app stores should not be 7030 and i think the entire sort of development developer ecosystem has responded, well, initially, it was wait can we really say that? and then sort of quickly followed by? yeah, i think that's true right and i think, you know, samsung has is in a position where we can be flexible with our revenue shares, we can work closely with our publishing partners to determine the revenue shares that will allow them to really thrive within our ecosystem, right and build businesses that are sustainable within our store platform so there is a want on our side to work closely with our game publishing partners to determine what the right revenue share is going to be, you know, given their marketing activities and given the engagement of our audience to those games that's going to allow both the platform as well as the game and the publishers to really grow and thrive tony morelan 16 07 so you had mentioned that game services also covers game launcher? can you explain what is game launcher? and why is it? why is it so special? sure jong woo 16 15 so game launcher was initially designed to help mobile gamers aggregate their game icons into like a single location so it's sort of like this really nice game folder, if you will and the utility of that was that it really decluttered your home screen and so you can imagine sort of the level of engagement with this app, right? the average game launcher, user opens game launcher more than 80 times a month and so that's like, nearly three times a day, right? so definitely high engagement and what's really sort of special about game launcher is that this is now a property that people are opting into or sort of launching on their own voluntarily, multiple times a day so we've got this really deep engagement here but that engagement right now, or the utility of that engagement really centers around sort of getting access to the games you want to play and so we want to expand the utility of game launcher to drive deeper engagement within this ecosystem around gaming right? and we believe that there is more than just playing games that you know, avid gamers do, right? they are engaging, and in communities, they are watching other gamers play via livestream they are checking out youtube videos to get tips and tricks they are, you know, reading about games, through a myriad of different publications and content sources they are, you know, on reddit communities, they are on discord like there is this whole ecosystem of games outside of the game itself, right and so you know, what, we're looking to do with game launcher and truly make it special and unique is because start to become a hub for all of that gaming activity outside of actually playing the game tony morelan 18 12 i want to kind of circle back to something you'd mentioned earlier and you were talking about how monetization you know, there's some drawbacks to that tell me about like, creativity wise, do you see that it's limiting people's, you know, developers ability to create, you know, unique games? jong woo 18 26 i do at the end of the day, you know, when you are, you know, starting out as a game developer and build, you know, you make a decision to build a game company, right? you are looking to find that balance between doing something creative and innovative right as and also generating revenue from it to sustain your business but i think when costs of scaling and marketing your game are driven by the market from you know, real time bidding and programmatic, sort of ecosystems on the mobile advertising side and then the revenue shares remain at 7030 there's sort of a squeezing of margins, that's tends to happen, right? in order to maximize that equation, or optimize that equation, you need to start getting more aggressive with monetization right? and when you start getting aggressive with monetization, you start to lose i think, the creativity inside your game when you have to start focusing on how do i ensure that i can scale up this game and really focus on the revenue you realize you need to take less risk, right building a game they say is sort of a hit driven business, you know, very much like hollywood studios and moviemaking and to a certain extent, i think that is true and so you know, when you are in a situation where the costs of marketing your game are so high and you know what kind of critical mass you need to really scale your game from a player's perspective, taking a lot of risks in terms of pushing the envelope for innovation, it becomes prohibitively expensive, right? because there is a likelihood that the game might completely flop and so that's why, you know, our hope with the galaxy store and the samsung gaming ecosystem is that we can provide a value proposition back to the, to the developers and whether that be in sort of, you know, better marketing, through our discoverability channels that is designed to help augment whatever marketing you know, these publishers are trying to do, as well as you know, potentially better revenue share on the back end we can we can start to unshackle the shackles if you will, of sort of this this business machine and allow people sort of the flexibility and the breathing room to be more creative with their game design, and their gameplay tony morelan 21 03 so you had talked a little bit about gaming culture, and you know, knowing that you've been in this industry for so many years, i'm sure you've seen that culture change and evolve tell me a bit about like, what was the culture when gaming first started, you know, started coming onto the scene here, and then how it's evolving and where it's going jong woo 21 20 yeah it's been a really interesting shift from sort of this underground basement, sort of nerdy boys only kind of sort of culture phenomenon, right where there was also sort of a stigma around gaming being sort of like that good for you you know, like, nothing beneficial really comes from it you know, some people have even said, you know, i've tried to try to tie gaming into sort of, like, you know, real world phenomenons like gun violence or whatever it is, right, like, people have tried to put gaming and sort of there's negative light and it's now become sort of this aspirational lifestyle and oh, and it's expanding beyond the actual games themselves, right? like you are now starting to see personalities, people, you know, almost celebrities coming from sort of this gaming world and you're seeing things like esports and live streaming they they've moved from this sort of niche underground thing into sort of full mainstream pop culture legitimacy, right? you're seeing content creators from twitch or youtube are esports athletes becoming these celebrities with these massive fan bases who are extending beyond just you know, their gameplay it's going into you know, instagram and it's going into twitter, and twitch and youtube and these people are becoming full blown influencers and celebrities right a lot of them even have hollywood agents, right? who are negotiating, you know, variety of different deals on their behalf so with this, you're starting to now see sort of fashion and lifestyle also being heavily influenced by this gaming culture and a massive group of young gen z gamers and even non-gamers who are aspiring to this lifestyle right and i kind of equated to the skateboarding culture where skateboarding used to be very underground, right? and very niche and then it sort of translates now into this mainstream cultural phenomenon where it's very sort of equivalent to it like street wear, where people wear vans, and you know, wait in line for hours for you know, drops from supreme and they've never owned a skateboard in their lives it's fair right, so yeah, so you know, i think it's and i think the social distancing sort of environment that we are in now is only sort of like accelerating this change, right, like gaming, and socially hanging out and sort of like an online environment is, is sort of feeding more into this culture and, and breeding more legitimacy into it and it's sort of, frankly, it's really exciting to see tony morelan 24 26 yeah, definitely i mean, my son's a big-time fortnight player, and some of his best friends he's never met i mean, they live in hawaii, canada, germany i mean, it is really neat that he's got this this social group that really spans the globe, that you know, truly are some of his best friends jong woo 24 44 that's right and i think you know, and the same as it has been for me as well in the past, right, like there are people like when you play a game every day, you engage with the same people, whether they're in your guild or your clan or you know, your squad you engage with these people that you've met actually inside the game on a regular basis right on nearly daily and oftentimes spending hours with them, you probably spend more time with these friends that you've never met in real life before, then you do your actual friends right? and so yeah, it builds this sort of, like new network, as well as this sort of new definition of i think what friends can be and it's really cool i think that they all get to socially hang out inside of these games, right? like, you could be playing fortnight with your squad and it's not necessarily about you know, getting that victory royale and winning, right? it's just sort of about doing this really fun activity together, chatting and hanging out while you do it and so i think i love the idea of games becoming now this sort of like social platform for hanging out tony morelan 25 52 so tell me in what way is samsung moving beyond the galaxy store and game launcher on mobile devices? jong woo 25 57 yeah but there are a lot of initiatives from the services standpoint around gaming beyond the galaxy store, but it's still relatively early days right now, for example, we are thinking about, like, what is the leanback gaming content look like, given that there's so much viewership on twitch, you know, particularly with sort of social distancing and covid these days now, most of gaming tends to be lean in where you're sort of like engaging with this content interactively but you know, twitch is now demonstrating that there is this massive and captive audience who is willing to sort of lean back and just watch other people play games and so what does that necessarily mean? and how does that translate into, let's say, tv screens? you know, does that mean that, you know, people are willing to do this in their living room, as opposed to sort of like on you know, laptop screens and i think we also sort of think about how samsung can stay ahead of the curve with regards to upcoming gaming trends that we're starting to see, right and, you know, i personally am trying to figure out how samsung can lead the charge in things like cloud gaming, or vr and ar, right these, these technologies and these platforms that are around and people have talked about some for many, many years, but haven't really gotten into sort of like mass scale yet so you know, we're definitely thinking about a lot of these things right now tony morelan 27 34 so i want to talk a little bit about samsung next so samsung, next is a division here at samsung that helps build and grow software and services from entrepreneurs and organizations that complement samsung's hardware tell me how they're getting involved with game services jong woo 27 49 so we work closely with samsung next so samsung, as you mentioned, is sort of that early stage venture arm of samsung and part of their remit is to invest and build sort of early and growth stage startups that can complement samsung's existing business initiatives or actually even jumpstart completely new strategic initiatives that, you know, we, as a company decide to expand into and i think sort of given the strategic priority that gaming, from a service standpoint, has within the entire organization of samsung, and it's not just the mobile, right you know, the visual display division, the pc divisions, you know, the r&d and hardware division, there's a lot of different potential stakeholders are who are very interested in and gaming, what gaming can look like for samsung and so, you know, we engaged really closely with samsung next, to figure out what kind of companies are doing really innovative things in the gaming space that might help us jumpstart some of these gaming initiatives, particularly around you know, some of the things that i just mentioned before cloud gaming ar vr ar, you know, as well as you know, complementing existing businesses like the galaxy store, you know, we, we, i try to work with samsung next to identify those needs that we might have as we think about the strategy of go to market for some of these various initiatives and then samsung next also helps us to better understand sort of the landscape of early stage companies and the really cool, innovative things that they're working on tony morelan 29 28 so what advice do you have for gaming companies looking to build a relationship with samson? jong woo 29 32 yeah, you know, i would say, definitely reach out to us we do want to know what you're building and the more innovative the better right the galaxy store and the gaming ecosystem that we are striving to build we are building it because we want to foster innovation, right? and, and so you know, we want games that can push the envelope of gaming on mobile devices can be we want companies to be thinking about you unique technologies, you know, housed inside of our devices like 5g and edge computing, and what can that enable from a gameplay standpoint? and so, you know, we love seeing what the development community comes up with and so, you know, definitely, i would say, reach out to us and you can reach out to us through our website, which is developer samsung com tony morelan 30 22 excellent well, hey, jong, i want to thank you very much for taking the time to join me on this podcast it was a lot of fun to chat and get to know you yeah thanks a lot outro 30 29 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

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s01e01-jong-woo.html

Learn Developers Podcast

Episode 1, Drazen Stojcic

season 2, episode 1 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 drazen stojcic urarity urarity links urarity facebook - facebook com/urarity watchfaces/ urarity instagram - instagram com/urarity watchfaces urarity twitter - twitter com/uraritywatch urarity youtube - youtube com/user/romulicstojcic drazen stojcic linkedin - linkedin com/in/drazen-stojcic drazen is the 2020 galaxy store award winner for best watch face collection not only do we talk about his rise to becoming one of the top watch face sellers on galaxy store, but also his fascinating career path and it all started when he became an award-wining author, after writing his first novel at the age of 16 listen download this episode topics covered galaxy watch studio for tizen galaxy store galaxy store badges social media photography videography animations sdc19 best of galaxy store awards 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 one on today's show, i interviewed drazen stojcic, the super successful watch face designer behind the brand, urarity, drazen is the 2020 best of galaxy store award winner for best watch face collection not only do we talk about his rise to becoming one of the top watch face sellers on galaxy store, but also this fascinating career path and it all started when he became an award-winning author after writing his first novel at the age of 16 enjoy tony morelan 00 48 so i have to start by saying i am extremely excited to kick off the new season of the podcast with one of my absolute favorite designers drazen from urarity drazen stojcic 01 01 hi hi, tony thank you for having me tony morelan 01 04 yeah, excellent i'm so excited to have you on the show let me first start by asking who is drazen stojcic? drazen stojcic 01 13 so well, i guess i could say the basics you know, i'm 38 years old i'm from europe, from croatia, and married and i've spent last four years designing watch faces for samsung devices and after a lifelong career in all sorts of media related stuff, i found myself in something that i really enjoy doing and it turned out i was pretty good at it and so now four years later, i'm i've received the award for the best watch face collection and is it's been like, you know, a crown after all that hard work and, and time and effort put into it tony morelan 02 07 so you're saying that if you started about four years ago, doing watch faces, that means you pretty much started at the beginning of this whole opportunity for designers to create watch faces for samsung so tell me like, how did you first learn about samsung wearables and, and then ultimately designing drazen stojcic 02 23 so i think it's a similar story with most early developers, you know, we are all a bit of gadget freaks and so i've had samsung, the very first samsung smartwatch was because i had a samsung phone as well and so when samsung made their first wearable, i was like all over it, you can customize it, you can do anything, it was just a device that could like measure your heart rate and stare at some very basic stuff, and had a camera on it correct and it had a camera on the wrist yes and you know, at that time, my whole life was around photography and so having, you know, a camera and a wristband that was like, awesome, you know, i just, i loved it and so when the new versions came out, obviously i was, i was upgrading and at some point, a friend of mine, who was my work colleague, actually mentioned, you know, you're pretty good at design and you all you have all this previous experience with i had some experience with designing mobile apps, for like 15 years ago, for before even android existed, you know, it was like, the very first touchscreen phones that showed up and i teamed up with a with a programmer, and we made a mobile keyboard and so i was doing the graphics and the design, and he was programming and so he knew all this because we talked about it and he said, you know, you have to watch you have the knowledge, why don't you try, you know, there's this cool software where you can just you don't need to know programming because i'm not a programmer and there's this cool software, you can download it and you can like make your own designs for your watch and so i downloaded the galaxy watch designer, and now it's a galaxy watch studio so and i loved it i loved it i within a week i had like, watch face ready, and i want to publish it yes it just started from that just you know, pure luck tony morelan 04 51 yeah, that's very similar to how i got my start i mean that you know, i attended this event at samsung where they you know, told everybody about gear watch designer yeah and came home that night and was so excited to be able to, in a sense, do programming without any coding so i could use all my graphic design skills, but yet create this, you know, interactive watch phase i mean, it's just, yeah, i bought in real quickly to it so i know that you've had quite the journey to get to the point where you are now as a watch face, designers doing lots of different, you know, jobs, but all within the same sort of family of everything related around media well, yeah so tell me how you got your start indesign drazen stojcic 05 37 so i guess i've always liked you know, even as a kid, i had like, these artistic tendencies so i would like draw a lot and i would paint and i would write and do all sorts of stuff, you know and so my first experiences were basically with computers, you know, and those were computers where you didn't even have an os on them i come from croatia, which went through an armed conflict war in the 90s and i was just a kid at that time, but after the war, my elementary school, got to the nation in, in computers, so none of the teachers had any experience with that and us kids obviously, never even seen a computer at that point and so i think it was like a un donation or some sort of a charity program and so yeah, and so they set up a classroom for us, that was like 15, or 20 of computers, and a teacher from arts and crafts was assigned to do something useful with those computers and he was an older gentleman who didn't know english, who didn't know it was just the oh, you figured this out and so he asked kids in the school, it was anybody interested and i always was fascinated by technology i think it was like four kids from the whole school that signed up for this that was like, first contact with, with computers and everything i did later on was, in some sense connected to it you know, i when i got my first home computer, i was just like, drawing stuff, all the all the time, i was just like learning software, sketching, stuff, making, i don't know, school, newspapers, stuff like that, you know, everything was, you know, one thing and then the next thing and so, after high school, i was into music at that time and so i ended up being on local radio station yeah and so because the station was part of like, a network that had newspaper and radio and, and a tv station, i spent next couple of years moving from one to the next and so i moved from the radio where i worked as a as a dj and tony morelan 08 07 so a dj, spinning music i mean, yeah, drazen stojcic 08 10 yeah that's great yeah, i actually really did some, like, nightclubs stuff so i would work during the day on the radio station and at night, i will be working like cocktail bars and really, tony morelan 08 22 dj drazen drazen stojcic 08 26 yeah, and so and, you know, this is all time before internet so there's no internet at this point and so obviously, being in a radio station gets you new music, and then you can, you know, use that music to put on parties and so, yeah, so it's like, using one job to make money on the side and so, and then i moved to the newspapers where i worked as a as a journalist, because i always enjoyed writing tony morelan 08 58 and i think i heard that you actually received an award when you were much younger for you you actually wrote, yeah, drazen stojcic 09 07 yeah, i wrote a novel when i was 16, actually and i, when i was 17, i got two major prizes for best first novel in croatia that's great from like, really a respected, you know, people in croatia who are basically in our top of the crops and so that was also a push that led me into journalism eventually, right and, and during my journalist days, i had a situation where we were a photographer that was supposed to cover an event with me, he couldn't make it and there was no one else and because at that time, people from my newspapers already knew that i was like into computers, and i have a like, always chasing something and so my editor said, you know, we just got these funny new digital cameras, maybe you could pick one up and just take two shots, it'll be fine for the print, you know, just try to keep people in frame, you know, it was and so that was my first experience with digital photography and i was instantly in love with that and so, actually, that day, i would always ask that i take my own shots and basically, i would, i would take photos of what i'm supposed to do, and i wouldn't, then i would spend the rest of the day shooting like, anything i could find and i would, i would intentionally only leave some of the photos that i thought were good i would leave them on the cart for photo editors so they can see that tony morelan 10 55 they can see your work that's great yeah, drazen stojcic 10 56 exactly and so after a while, i got a call from the from the photography editor and it was all like this transitional period where they were moving away from film and classic film cameras into digital yes and so he said, you know, are you? are you leaving these photos on the cards? because i kind of liked them? and i said, yeah, well, you know, i liked this thing you know, this digital photography seems to suit me and within a month, i wasn't working as a journalist anymore i just really, yeah, i just moved on to photography overnight wow and so my photography work, then, you know, i learned a lot of stuff from the, from the more experienced photographers there but i was also able to get on this train really early of, of this digital photography that was just coming in a lot of older photographers had a problem with this, they couldn't adapt so well so, so quickly, you know, it required working with software and all of that stuff that i basically was used to and so a few years later, i, i partnered up with a very senior and well-respected photographer here in my town and he had a big production company that was basically multimedia we had like a video cruise, we had cgi designers, we had sound crews, we had, you know, full multimedia production along with design and so i did basically the same thing i did before i did here so i would move from one to next position and i just kind of learned along the way, too, i have no formal education in either of these things yeah so it's all just learning from other people and learning on your own trying to, you know, get something new, i had a desire to express myself and so it was always something media related, and now share all of these things from the past and especially i don't know, there's a lot of, in my past a lot of work with marketing so working with marketing companies with like, production teams, and you'll learn what clients want, how they think how all of this kind of came together and lead into, into urarity tony morelan 13 34 yes, yeah, that's, that's, it's amazing i mean, i have to say, i'm extremely surprised to hear that you say that you don't have formal training yeah, but hearing about the experiences, all of the years, and all these different areas that you've, you know, had an opportunity to work in, it really shows because i think that's where you urarity stands out from many of the other watch face developers, it's all of the other assets that are required to be successful you know, when you see your videos in your photography, you can tell that someone with excellent expertise is putting this together, because it's not just a computer rendition or a 3d model that's rotating i mean, you actually are taking a camera on a dolly and doing rotation with it and to me, that's what really stands out because that's pretty unique to see from a from a developer, you know, marketing on samsung platform it gives it such a realness, you know, where you actually see the product and it gives confidence when you're thinking about it, should i make a purchase? so i think that is probably one of the biggest factors for your success when i see the work that you do i agree and that's basically the whole logic i started doing this right from the beginning because drazen stojcic 14 51 i kind of knew that it wasn't enough to make just the watch face itself look good so everything else to look at the same level, yeah, so, and obviously over the couple of last years i've, i've, i've advanced further and my, my designs have become better and my marketing materials as well but the core idea is still the same, you know, if you make, you can make the best watch face ever yeah, but if your presentations is not good, it's just the customers won't get it tony morelan 15 30 exactly so i understand that you've already is not just draws in that you actually have partnered with someone who has expertise in, in these areas of like social media and marketing and whatnot, that's helping you so tell me a little bit about the other person that is involved with, with the urarity success drazen stojcic 15 51 so at first, it was just me and you know, for probably first two years, i did all of this stuff on my own but then, as i advanced and as i got more and more customers and more and more of this production behind this, i realized that i needed help and my brothers do dumb, ugly he just came fresh out of college that had marketing as one of the major classes in it and so he knew about my watch faces, and he would frequently helped me he and i came up with the name the urarity tony morelan 16 35 yeah, so tell me that tell me the history that you came up with that name drazen stojcic 16 38 yeah so because my brother has this knack, for, for coming up with funny names for stuff and so we would frequently do that for like, all sorts of statements will make up names for the products or for name for names for companies or find, you know, funny word plays and stuff like that, when i figured out that i needed the brand, and i couldn't just, you know, be just me, it needed a brand name and so we're just talking about this and so a lot of people think that your urarity is basically you and urarity, which it is but the main idea behind it is basically because the first four letters of the word urarity actually mean watchmaker in creation tony morelan 17 29 that is great drazen stojcic 17 31 yeah, so we started from that, you know, it was like, because even today, you could see like these shops around the town that had like this art so it was just, you know, we're just making fun and your charity just popped up somewhere, because i knew it would work well in english although it is a bit of a tongue twister i still liked how it sounded and how it looked and i like this double meaning because it worked in, in our language as well and so he and i came up with this name and then over time, he just kind of started helping me more and more and at some point, i said, okay, now, i think you could probably handle a lot of this stuff better than me, because you actually do have an education process and so my brother has been helping me ever since he's basically the whole marketing and customer support and all of that is his work so i'm purely doing the creative stuff tony morelan 18 39 that's great that's great yeah, it gives you an opportunity to really focus on your expertise and, and allow him to focus on his expertise so is your urarity, pretty much your full-time job drazen stojcic 18 51 yeah, it has become over time for a long period i also did a lot of side jobs, but the pandemic changed a lot of that because this is a job that you can do from the comfort and safety of your home yes, and my side jobs that were mostly photography related basically, there weren't there anymore when all of this started and so for me, it was like the perfect the perfect job to do during these times where you had to stay at home a lot either i've actually used the opportunity to do a lot of the stuff that i would previously maybe put off so i did a lot of housekeeping you know in the store, cleaned up the descriptions and all that stuff that usually just you know, you don't have enough time to do all of that and i kind of fine tune to everything that we did so for us it's been a positive effect in that sense tony morelan 20 00 yeah, no, that's, that's, that's great i mean, there has been a lot of challenges during this past year for many people on all different areas, i will say you are not the first person who has said that, you know, this opportunity that samsung has provided to developers, you know, really the, you know, indie designers like yourself, you can still continue to work from your job where it is safe so that's, that's great absolutely and i mean, even before this, having the opportunity to work from home has been quite a refreshing change for me, because a lot of the work i did before, involved, a lot of traveling a lot of staying out of home, which is, you know, it's great fun for a drazen stojcic 20 42 while but then as you get older and you need, you get a wife and a house and all of a dog and all of that, of course, you prefer staying at home, it's not as a lot of people are thinking i don't want to stay at home no, i'm fine i'm not complaining tony morelan 21 05 so yeah, back when we were allowed to travel, that's actually when i first met you, because you came out to san jose and attended our conference sdc 19 so it was great to actually meet you in person, i was very aware of your work prior to that so when i actually got to put a face to the to the brand, you were already that was a great moment for me, i was honored to meet you so tell me about that what was that experience like for you to come out to san jose and get to actually see the samsung people in person and also be at the conference? drazen stojcic 21 35 i think it was probably the biggest milestone for me, it changed so much in terms of perspective of what this whole thing is about because up until that point, i would have contacts with people from samsung and from other developers as well and i still do, but you know, actually deciding to get on a plane and fly on to another side of the world, and then be a part of this great event and the whole buzz and all of these people from all over the world, it was just eye opening for me because as many developers or better to say designers in in galaxy store i don't have a lot of experience with these tech conferences and so, you know, coming to san jose meeting people from samsung meeting, meeting other developers having a talk with them, and just exchanging, you know, opinions and ideas and i loved it that that's it you know, i wanted to do this for real now yeah, i think that was the point where it shifted in my head that, okay, this is serious stuff and there's a great support from samsung, which it always was there but just putting a face to the name of all these various contexts they had, it just made all the difference tony morelan 23 02 and i have to say one of the highlights for me was sitting in a room with who i thought were the rock stars of the designers i mean, here i was, you know, chatting with you and next year was matteo dini and then bergen, tomas from vienna studios and i'm like, oh, my gosh, man these are the designers that are just making incredible watch faces on the store and we're all in this one room together, just you know, having great conversations so it was wonderful to be able to meet face to face with many of these top designers drazen stojcic 23 36 absolutely and i especially enjoyed talking with you i think it was one of the best conversations i had there just i think we clicked really early on and definitely you have two perspectives on the on the whole thing, you're started as a designer, and now you're in samsung, so you can kind of relate better to the stuff that we're talking about tony morelan 24 00 exactly yeah, that was one of the main reasons why i took the position and i think one of the main reasons i got the job was that samsung really wanted to have someone with that voice internally so that i could be the liaison between taking the suggestions and the challenges that the designers have and trying to give a route to solving some of those issues and making the platform even better exactly unfortunately this year, we couldn't have the conference because of the pandemic as many people know we did an online award show and i was absolutely honored to be a part of the team that awarded you the best watch face collection and you know without a doubt, your collection just is amazing you know i still i look at the animated watch faces you do i see the videos that you put behind your watch faces as far as the project goes, and you are clearly deserving of this top honor so tell me, how did you first learn that you were winning this award from samsung? drazen stojcic 25 10 okay, so first of all, it was really an awesome thing you know, i was just blown away by the fact that i got the award i never, i never really expected it, when i started making watch faces that will end up in me getting some sort of an award for this or making all of this success that that has happened in the past years, actually, that how i found out was because i got this strange email that said, you know, just to notice that there will be an online event at this time and date and let's stay in touch i mentioned this to matteo dini, you know, did you see there's going to be an online event? and, you know, he said, i didn't get any email about this she was the winner last year, she said to me, oh, wait, i know what this is you probably won an award so i basically found out about this from a matteo tony morelan 26 18 that's funny that's funny i want to kind of go back a little bit and let's talk about your actual workflow when it comes to designing watch faces what is the first thing you do? are you grabbing a pencil and a piece of paper and starting to sketch? do you just dive right into the computer? drazen stojcic 26 34 i think it really depends sometimes i will just get an idea from a totally random spot like one of my most successful watch faces, the inspiration for it came from the blue glow around an elevator button that i just liked tony morelan 26 55 and which watch face says that drazen stojcic 26 57 it was the pulse series yes, yeah and so i was in this elevator and he was like some hotel and then there was this button that was beautifully glowing, like pulsating blue and i was just looking at it and i loved it and so i wanted to use that glow and have the similar effect on a watch that i came home and i started i started up after effects and i made this blue ring that was glowing, but it just wasn't working, you know and so i started playing with motion and then i figured out that it'd be cool if it looked like it was coming out of the screen like it was slowly moving out to the edges and so i had this thing, and there were no watch hands, no numbers, and nothing else, just this pulsing thing and i loved it tony morelan 27 52 so you've created this glowing, really cool animation what's the next step? i mean, you've got to be able to turn this into a watch face so are you just playing around with different shapes to create the you know the form? drazen stojcic 28 05 because most of our watch faces are animated, i would do the animations and then i would just grab one on screen from the animation series and then i would start like playing in in just pure to the trying to figure out what can i do? where could i put some of this simple code stuff going to work one with another? where are the watch hands going to be? is this going to be a digital watch face? or an analog watch face? is it going to have like a lot of info or not a lot of info and so it's going back and forth so i would sometimes start with an animation and then edit it 15 times over until everything fits one within another and it's just it's really a tedious process once you start complicating things with animations and animations do complicate things is immensely you know, i sometimes envy designers that can make really awesome watch faces they're not animated, because i don't know how to do that so anyway, that's funny yeah, yeah and it's also funny when they tell me oh, you can make all these awesome animations and i'm thinking yeah, but you don't have to make them and you still make us and watch faces tony morelan 29 26 at that point, are you using illustrator or photoshop? drazen stojcic 29 29 yeah, i use a lot of software so i will use basically the whole adobe package so everything from, you know, premiere photoshop, illustrator, and i also use 3d software like cinema 4d or even sketchup for some of this stuff you know, if i just want to make a quick idea to see how it works it's just a whole bunch of stuff you know? various software's that i'm used to, from before, you know, there used to from my previous work so it's not like one thing, you know, i'm sure people could do just fine using probably one serious graphics software but because of the animations, it's just not enough you need to have like all this other stuff, too tony morelan 30 20 of course, just to mention, we both are very familiar with tomas just checked from vienna studios, still astounds me and if you haven't listened to this podcast, go back and listen to it i'll let you in on a little secret tomas uses powerpoint to create his design so when i hear you talk about, you know, all the complexity of creating these animations, and you know, truthfully, you know, you have to become somewhat of a pro with photoshop and illustrator really to leverage all the tools in there yeah, to hear that tomas uses powerpoint, i know that you were surprised as i was drazen stojcic 30 51 i was blown away i met tim us for the first time at sdc and, and we had a really nice time talking and so naturally, we came to the, to this talk about software, and you know, and he said, you're never going to guess what i'm using to make my watch faces i was thinking, maybe he's using like, i don't know, some game or something like that some of that free graphics software or something more simple and so when he said, powerpoint, it blew me away because and this is what i was talking about so there are developers, they can make really awesome successful watch faces with software that wasn't even intended for this year and, and they can have great success yeah, so it's, it's just so awesome and i have huge respect for what he does and, and i totally recommend also listening to that podcast it was so cool tony morelan 31 53 i will say one thing that you guys have in common would be the photography after you've created the watch face so just like yourself, tomas is doing real video recording of his watch faces you can see his gloved hands come on to screen and do all the tapping interaction on his face so again, it's extremely important to find your unique way to showcase your work and both you and in tomas have done that drazen stojcic 32 23 yeah, yeah tomas especially with in because he, he is a he makes premium, like high end premium watch faces that are basically like for, for general public and so him using the gloves and having all these nice backdrops and everything it just sort of fits within the brand and with the whole identity and everything that he does and so i when i start making videos, and i started right from the get go, because i realized that people needed to see this thing in action because it was animated i also wanted to set up like some of the basic standards, how i'm going to do this, what's going to be the approach and so most of my videos are like have colorful lighting, and a lot of motion they're always in motion i don't make static videos because that's also something i wanted to emphasize the animations give a lot of motion to the watch faces and so the videos are kind of like even more emphasizing that there's this you just need to figure out what is the main point what are you trying to do with your designs and then have that same idea taken from the watch face to the screenshots to your app description, to your videos to your online social media it just all needs to tie into one nice bow and then it works tony morelan 34 02 definitely i would say another thing that really stands out for me when i think of the brand urarity is color you do not shy away from color i can tell that you must spend a great amount of time thinking about color i know we're on a podcast and you can only hear us at this moment but i can actually see you and right now your background in your room is changing in color you must have some sort of led lighting the chest tell me about color and how important it is to you because i can tell it is a big factor drazen stojcic 34 34 yeah, it is it is and actually you know funny things you notice about the background because i would frequently set up my room lights to go with the with the colors on the of the watch face that i'm working on that's great or sometimes i will i will just like use these i have these cool led lights that you can customize and all that remotely and sometimes i will just like mix these colors in real life and just see what's, what fits you know what works? and a lot of it helps me having experience within photography, you learn what colors work one with another? how brightness functions, how do we perceive brightness on a screen, it's kind of like, when you're framing the shot for that photograph it's not that different from setting up various elements on the screen, because you're still trying to get that golden ratio or intuitively program to like certain shapes and certain forms and certain ratios, and certain colors as well yes and so depending on the mood, i guess i'm trying to make or the effect that i'm trying to get, i will use a lot of color, or i will use muted colors and some sometimes i don't think a lot of people notice it, but not all of my watch phases have like black backgrounds, although they look like they do, they have a slight tint, and it can be just the tiniest amount of maybe blue or green it and, and for me, it makes all the difference i spend huge amounts of time with color i don't stop until i'm perfectly satisfied and now having my brother in all of this a lot of the times i you know, i will be happy and he will say i'm not so sure i think you need to make like, i think you need to change this and then i was like spend another week changing colors so it's a long process it's not yeah, you know, you don't do it in one night tony morelan 36 42 i loved hearing what you said just about black that that truthfully, black is not just black, you can have warm black, you can have cold black and so i often do that where i'll use the color picker in photoshop and you know, if i've done my design, i'll try and find the sort of the feel of the of the face the you know, what's the tone of it and i'll sample that and then within color picker, i'll go down to the to the almost to black, but it has just a little bit of hint of that yeah, whether it's like an orange or a blue or something because that then like you said, it ties in that background, that the foundation of the watch face still picks up what feels like that ambient lighting from the other elements exactly drazen stojcic 37 25 that's exactly what i'm talking about i take a lot of time perfecting my watch faces and that's why i guess that's why i don't make a lot of them you know, i'm not like this super producer i didn't make like 100 watch faces a year? yeah, it's always maybe 10 or 12, or 15 tony morelan 37 48 so how many total? would you say you have available on the store? drazen stojcic 37 51 yeah, so at the moment, i think we have around 100 or 110 okay, i've made a lot more actually, in these four years, especially in the beginning, i would make a lot, a lot of i think a lot of developers go through this, they will just churn out just bump, bump, bump but after a while you see that? it's just it doesn't make sense it's very few hold backs, you know, let it sit for a while get everything polished to the very last detail and then once you're totally satisfied, then you publish yeah and so as time goes on, i'm more focused on making the watch faces as perfect as they can be, rather than getting them out as quickly as possible tony morelan 38 41 yeah and i think that also what comes into play is the support that comes around that watch face so what you have to do from a marketing standpoint, all of the different, you know, elements that are key to successfully marketing your watch face if you have hundreds and hundreds, it's hard to maintain that this way it sounds like you can focus on you know, a smaller collection, but still be able to then put a lot of time into the marketing drazen stojcic 39 05 side of things exactly the more watch faces you have the bigger problem you have down the road when it comes time to update and eventually does so i really think that this is a like a situation where you need to think about not the quantity but rather the quality because in the end, the customers also recognize this, you know, if they see you made 300 watch phases in a year and the year has 365 days, you know you're not sending the right message and i will frequently go and be very critical of my own work and so after a while i see a bunch of mistakes i did or i'm not totally satisfied with some of my older work and i will just remove it i will just take it, take it down, clean up the portfolio, polish it so when a customer comes, you know, they only see the very best, or at least the very best for this moment that i added i mean, you know, of course, yeah tony morelan 40 08 so would you mind sharing? how many downloads total? does he already have? drazen stojcic 40 15 so we're close to 700,000 downloads now, wow, stretched over a period of four years and a large part of this was paid watch faces, or, you know, i don't know, the exact percent, which was, some of them were free and will frequently use free watch faces to, to promote, or other things that will, for example, in terms of marketing strategies will frequently do like, buy one, get one? yes and stuff like that, you know, where a customer still gets a free watch face but, you know, we also turn them into a painting into a paying customer as well tony morelan 41 05 so let me ask you, how do you approach that? does the customer have to show proof of purchase? what's your, what's your approach to that? drazen stojcic 41 13 so we asked them to show us a screenshot of from their, from this store, or sometimes will like, be fine if they can just show a photo of their watch, with our watch face on it, or things like that, you know, any proof is fine we're not really playing detectives here or anything yeah so on one hand, we want to give something for free on another hand and a lot of these customers are our returning customers, because they, they are familiar with our watch faces and with our system, and we know a lot of them over the years, there's really been customers that have supported us right from the very start tony morelan 41 58 what's your approach with marketing on social? are you doing much in the way of that? drazen stojcic 42 03 when i started with watch faces, my main kind of venue was youtube, because of the animations and all of that, i just needed a video service that could, you know, show the watch faces in action so i was building up this youtube channel for a long time and then after a while, i also started doing facebook and instagram but it takes time, it really does and i didn't really realize how much it can be useful until my brother took over and start doing it like for real sure you know, he had only this one thing to focus on for example, our youtube channel is close to 2 million views now and we only have our watch face videos so that does kind of tell you a lot, there's a lot of things that you can do to promote your watch faces and so over time, we are also we've also teamed up with some of the more popular tech channels or people who are doing watch face reviews, or who have an interest in this and so we would team up with them, have them promote some of our work, give some of coupons for free sure, something like that some discount stuff like that and facebook has also been very good for us instagram, and, you know, i my brother does so much stuff that some of it even i don't know, you know, he's like, doing stuff on reddit, on the forums tick tock, really are the place yeah, i really don't mess into this so i gave him like free rein to do as he thinks because obviously, this is something that he does and knows better than, than me tony morelan 44 06 yeah okay excellent and i'm sure across all of this, you're leveraging galaxy store badges is that correct? drazen stojcic 44 12 yeah, absolutely you know, we, we were actually a part of the galaxy badge pilot program and so quickly, we, we kind of got this additional step into our workflow so we will use both individual badges for like certain watch faces, but we are also frequently using our, like, our main badge that leads to our whole portfolio because and as you mentioned, you know, we i think we have a strong portfolio so sometimes the first thing they see is the whole layout, everything we've done so and it's been very useful in terms of, you know, following the clicks and all of that the statistics and there's a lot of science in this, i guess it's very interesting when you start analyzing the data that you can get from these badges and clicks and all and see what works what doesn't yeah, yeah because obviously you're trying to maximize the effect, you're not going to spend time or, or money or effort into something that doesn't work tony morelan 45 19 yeah, definitely so tell me what is in the future for your entity? is there anything that we can anticipate? drazen stojcic 45 29 well, so as i mentioned before, we had a lot of success with our mechanical watch faces that have these highly customizable appearances and so for the last couple of months, i've been toying with this idea of trying to do the same thing, but with digital watch faces and getting that same wow effect for customers that, you know, oh, sorry yeah right, great so just today, i got my new the 21 ultra tony morelan 46 20 oh, did you okay, drazen stojcic 46 21 yeah, yeah, i just arrived this morning and so i, like 10 minutes before we started this, i had to transfer all of the data and settings from my old phone, of course, and one of the things that it transferred was also the alarms so i switched off the alarm at the old phone, but i forgot about the new one so that's why i went off tony morelan 46 47 that's too funny right so you were talking about in the future, doing some animations with digital? yeah, drazen stojcic 46 53 yeah so i mentioned before that we had huge success with our mechanical watch faces that that had really customizable appearances and so for the last couple of months, i've been playing with this idea of repeating that same thing, but with digital watch faces and it's, it may seem like it's a simple transition, but actually, it's not and it has its own unique challenges, because making digital watch faces is completely different idea behind it and different visuals, and it just needs a different approach and so i'm kind of messing with that i'm trying to find the best thing that that i think it will be like good first watch face to try and repeat that same success sure tony morelan 47 44 that's exciting to hear because i would love to see that your urarity face in a in a digital form so super excited to know that we can anticipate that so before we close off this interview, you know, i have to say your english is amazing you're from croatia, but you speak perfect english i know, there's a little story behind how you learn to speak english can you share that? drazen stojcic 48 07 yeah, sure so i mentioned before, you know, we had this war thing here when i was a kid and so during the war, it's not that different from the pandemic, you know, yeah, you spend a lot of time indoors, you know, you can go out, you can play your little kid and so it just coincided with this period where we got like, first cable tv and so before that, there was like, three channels all in one language and that was it and then, you know, we got like these cool things like cnn and cartoon network and all of that stuff and i didn't know a word of english other than, you know, seeing some of the movies and stuff like that and so i was just like, i would watch hours and hours of this and a cool thing was that it was subtitled so yeah and so just, you know, listening to the words and seeing the translation below, it just helps so much, you know, with the meaning and with the phrases and with the correct pronunciation and all of that stuff and then later on came to computers and with the computers, eventually there came a period where i did a little bit of online gaming, and then you would talk to people from all over the world and then you just hit too, you know, you got to start speaking and i would frequently talk to people from the us or from england, or even people from other parts of the world and you know, english was always something i enjoyed, and i just fit so perfectly and because i travel a lot, it's also proven to be really useful for me yeah, of course tony morelan 49 56 so what you're saying is that you learned english by watching ren and stimpy? drazen stojcic 50 01 yeah, pretty much that's pretty much tony morelan 50 04 that's great hey drazen, it’s been excellent to have you on the podcast thank you so much for joining me and much luck in the new year drazen stojcic 50 13 thank you for having me and just you know, i'm very, very happy and honored to be on the podcast i always enjoy talking to you and i hope that this year sdc will be possible and that we will meet in person and see the other developers as well, you know, i really missed seeing them last year tony morelan 50 37 yeah, no, it'll be great to get everybody back together exactly excellent all right well, thanks, drazen drazen stojcic 50 43 thank you, tony outro 50 44 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 51 00 the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s02e01-drazen-stojcic.html

Learn Developers Podcast

Episode 7, Foldables

season 3, episode 7 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 guy merin, senior director of engineering, surface duo developer experience, microsoft ade oshineye, senior staff developer advocate, google søren lambæk, developer relations engineer, samsung foldables, games not only do we chat about the emerging trends in the foldable industry but how companies are working together to help developers create for this new and innovative technology listen download to this episode topics covered foldable industry trends growth of foldables target audience making foldables mainstream benefits of the foldable form factor extending a traditional app to a foldable device process for supporting foldables foldable device example apps consumer adoption challenges developer opportunities resources for developers companies working together on foldables helpful links large screen/foldable guidance large screen app quality jetpack windowmanager jetpack slidingpanelayout jetpack windowmanager foldable/dual-screens surface duo layout libraries surface duo android emulator figma - surface duo design kit surface duo blog surface duo twitch surface duo twitter adopting native language discover quality apps on large screens foldables design/development perspectives learn about foldables case studies 5 steps to large screen designing understanding layout code lab testing window size classes jetnews different screen sizes migrate to responsive layouts compose/activity embedding unfolding gaming potential samsung remote test lab samsung developer program website samsung developer program newsletter samsung developer program blog samsung developer program news samsung developer program facebook samsung developer program instagram samsung developer program twitter samsung developer program youtube samsung developer program linkedin tony morelan linkedin guy merin, microsoft, linkedin ade oshineye, google, linkedin søren lambæk, samsung, linkedin 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 seven recently i hosted a roundtable discussion on developing for foldable devices not only do we chat about the emerging trends in the foldable industry, but how companies are working together to help developers create for this new and innovative technology enjoy today's show, we're doing something pretty special i've got three guests on the podcast all from leading companies in the foldable space i've got guy merin, senior director of engineering on the surface duo developer experience team at microsoft guy merin 00 53 hi tony, good morning great to be here tony morelan 00 55 excellent i've also got ade oshineye, senior staff developer advocate at google ade oshineye 01 00 hi nice to be here tony morelan 01 03 and i've also got søren lambæk, developer relations engineer at samsung søren lambæk 01 09 hello good to be here tony morelan 01 11 this is amazing i've got all of you on the podcast at the same time we actually haven't tried this format before so let's take him for a ride and see how much fun we can have let me start with guy over at microsoft tell me who is guy merin? guy merin 01 25 hey, yeah, hey, folks so i'm guy the journey in microsoft a few years back started that windows went through the windows mobile, because mobile gadgets and devices are really my passion and then the last five or so years, i've been working full time on android, building a couple of software products, and recently the surface duo so this mobile and android is really my passion and i'm really at my dream job now working with developers, you know, reaching out really great on the personal level, i got recently into mountain climbing so just last weekend, we had a big expedition to summit, one of the washington mountains i live in seattle in washington, okay and that was a very, very fun experience that i found a lot of similarities to, you know, projects we have at work, climbing a mountain and summit thing is really a project on its own with preparation and planning and found a lot of interesting similarities tony morelan 02 29 it gives you a lot of time to think also, i'm sure that when you're climbing so are you like with ropes and rappelling or yeah, rope really guy merin 02 38 is, is more snow so it's ropes and ice axes and stuff but oh, gosh tony morelan 02 45 that is great how many feet would you say? was the summit? guy merin 02 50 close to 11,000 tony morelan 02 52 wow, that is absolutely impressive what was your journey to get to the state of washington? were you born there? or is this? the accent i'm picking up? i'm not quite sure is from the northwest? guy merin 03 07 no, no so no, i was born and raised in israel okay and i moved over to washington eight years ago, i've been working at microsoft in israel, actually doing some fun stuff with windows phone in israel and then pretty much my wife wanted to move over to seattle and that that made us take the trip and we love it here tony morelan 03 32 so now let's move over to google tell me who is ade oshineye? ade oshineye 03 38 so i work in android developer relations i've worked all over the different aspects of google over the last 15 years before that was in consultancy, when i'm not at a desk in front of cameras and things i'm out with a camera, taking photos in zurich, where we have really nice mountains that i like to climb them by sitting in a train that just gently takes you to the top and then i also play badminton and play go so between that i'm pretty busy i tony morelan 04 05 wonder if i understand you actually were born and raised in england is that correct? yes ade oshineye 04 09 so i'm an east londoner but now i live in switzerland, which is strange and very different to east london but i also live in the middle of a whole collection of british shops, so that i can get british food very easily really? okay yes tony morelan 04 27 tell me how did you get involved with foldables at google? ade oshineye 04 30 well, let's see well, me specifically, i mean, i started out with the samsung flip and then we've got this planet of surface duo for us as a company, it's more around the whole beat together not the same idea that the point of the entity ecosystem is that all of these oem can try different things users can try different kinds of experiences developer can try to serve all of them and we power all of that with the platform tony morelan 04 57 and from samsung tell me who is søren lambæk? søren lambæk 05 02 hello, i work at samsung as a developer relations engineer and basically, i building relationships between the games industry and samsung there are so many mobile games out there so we were reaching out to them at a technical level and try to help their games to run smooth on certain devices on a more personal level, i am one of those artists that just got obsessed with programming sure so my background is actually a lot of with art, drawing and music and that kind of thing but i just could see, the programming hat was so powerful so i just, i got this obsession is programming tony morelan 05 48 excellent and i know that you guys can't see on the podcast but soren has some beautiful guitars behind him and before we hit the record button, we were all having a nice conversation about music now, i understand you were born in chile, but raised in england that correct søren lambæk 06 04 and so i was born i was born in chile that's correct and i was raised up in denmark, hence my name and my name is danish and okay because then i guess such a small country and at the time, i wanted to do get a career we didn't have any games industry in denmark so i decided i wanted to go to england and when university studying games design, because there was art, but then i realized programming that's where the future is, for me and then so i was one of the only students that went from art to programming is usually the other way around yeah, tony morelan 06 47 so yeah, i would definitely think so so let's talk foldables back in 2019, samsung released the galaxy fold, which was the first foldable device to really hit the mainstream market since then, other companies like microsoft, motorola, huawei, have released foldable devices and in such a short amount of time, we've seen some really great improvements with this technology guy, you've been from microsoft, what are some of the trends that you've noticed in the foldable industry? guy merin 07 17 some of the trends one we're seeing, as you said, more, more oems picking those up? are you seeing more and more companies bringing for the world? and it's really starting to become a commodity but the cool thing about it that each one has their own different angle to it so you know, for the microsoft one, it's, you know, mainly around productivity and two screens, for others is mainly around more real estate or something that is a small form that can then go to, to a bigger form and it's all really about the form factors and the posters that you can really do with it so how does the phone react when it's folded when it's open when it's tilted 90 degrees? and i think we'll see more of those in the future tony morelan 08 07 are they are you seeing different trends for the way developers are designing and building apps? ade oshineye 08 12 so i think we're seeing three main trends one is the oems exploring the space of possible designs, does the device folding fold out full vertically filled horizontally full three times, there's so many different things oems are doing second stylus is becoming more and more mainstream, that's changing the set of available postures and then the final thing is the way keyboards and trackpads are blurring the distinctions between phones, phablets tablets so the whole notion of what is an android app is becoming this flexible, multi-dimensional space and there's always people exploring that space and trying new things yeah, tony morelan 08 55 yeah soren, what about the growth in this industry? is this been something that you think, you know, over the past several years, it's really been, you know, going much higher? søren lambæk 09 04 yeah so last year, we had 150% growth, and we are expecting that in the future, more and more people seem to get foldable phones and when it comes to games, it does have like quite a lot of benefits because you can use the second screen if you're put it in like a folder but sure you can you can change this from full screen to a two completely different mode where the bottom screen, you can use it for items or mini map and that kind of thing tony morelan 09 35 yeah, yeah you know, this technology is so new that it's at this time, i think we're still trying to figure out what is this this target audience a day? what are your thoughts on who is the target audience for foldables? ade oshineye 09 49 well, i think a good way of thinking about it would be to look at the flips and the surface drill as capturing the two sets of ordinances we see there are very often younger people woohoo, looking for cool new experiences, i tend to see a lot of those people walking around with a samsung flip but then you also see a set of people at the high end with a lot more money tend to be more business people, they tend to have the larger the fold or a duel or something like that, that has a stylus that runs multiple apps at the same time, that sort of almost a replacement laptop and those are the two sets of people i tend to see using foldables tony morelan 10 25 guy, do you have any thoughts on them? on the demographic of who is attracted to foldables? guy merin 10 31 i don't see it as a demographic thing i think i think it will become a commodity that more and more users across the world will? we'll see i think right now we're still seeing trends, because he's on the higher end, of course, yeah so we're seeing trend around there but when this becomes more of a commodity, and i think it will, and more of a mainstream device, i don't think it's going to be a demographic thing, just like we've seen with other form, form factors that are spread across the world tony morelan 11 00 yeah, yeah in certain you'd mentioned about gamers and tell me your thoughts on you know why something like foldable device would be attracted to the gaming community? søren lambæk 11 09 well, obviously, a big screen will have a big effect, not only can you see like a lot of graphics do you like and can change and you can have like, a different benefits doing tony morelan 11 20 that so what would it take for foldables to become more mainstream? søren lambæk 11 24 the price is it's a major one for reforms are quite pricey sure, reducing the price wouldn't make it more accessible for a lot of people tony morelan 11 34 yeah and i also think that really trying to teach developers how to build apps, you know, more education on app adoption is also important søren lambæk 11 43 yeah, definitely, we see a lot of games developer don't even consider foldable phones yet so i hope that is something that is going to change, where they could like start maybe changing the ui before they actually building the game guy merin 11 58 i think it would only if i may add one thing i think it's is a triangle of three things there is, you know, the users and the users’ need to see the benefit of why they should, you know, try a foldable phone or a large screen and then what drives that is apps so the more apps that we see that utilize it, that gives them benefits over using just a single screen, smaller device, the more apps that will use things like side by side or split screen or drag and drop between and just productivity and thinks that users can get more out of these apps when running on these new form factors i think that's another key factor and i think the third piece of this triangle is, in order to make the app better on those, you need to support it, that sdk level and the platform yeah, that's a lot of work that has been done by everybody here so mainly by google, because they of course, own the platform so the more we will see those things as standard like jetpack compose so how do you support foldables? there? how do you support all the other sdks, the more they will come native, the better the apps will get, the better the users will benefit from them? and i think that triangle, doing it correctly, will make it much more mainstream in the future ade oshineye 13 20 i agree with that i think one other thing that we've been pushing is getting developers across the chasm of thinking about this so we have a code lab, we put together with microsoft shows developers how to build for a world where the devices can be radically different sizes i mean, on my desk here, i have a samsung flip and a samsung ultra and they are radically different sizes, one of them can fold to be even smaller so if you want to build for both of these devices, and all the things in between, you have to think about am i going to be a responsive design app or when adaptive app, i had to think about which layouts i'm going to support which postures are going to support which aspect ratios, which resolutions, and developers for a long time, we've been able to sort of not really think very hard about that because most phones for a long time were fairly similar sizes now, the same kindle app that has to fold nicely on a surface duo has to also work on a giant tablet, for example, we have duo and meet and the same apk more or less that runs on your phone also runs on your television when we think of this as large screens, the screens can be very tony morelan 14 35 large what about google's quality guidelines? so the challenge for ade oshineye 14 39 us with quality guidelines is we don't want to stifle innovation but we do want to make sure that when a user downloads an app from our store, that it works well on the device, and that there are there's a well-lit path for developers in how do i give users the best possible experience so we have fatal guidelines and implemented shouldn't advice on what is a high-quality experience and then we have tiers of quality, so that you don't have to take a big jump, you don't have to eat the elephant in one bite you can, i think it's eat the rhinoceros in one bite, you can do it in, in lots of little bites so there are steps you can take to improve your quality and we have an easy-to-understand website that shows you, here's all the things you haven't done yet and you can decide which ones to invest in and when tony morelan 15 29 yeah, and i'll mention here that i know throughout this podcast that you guys will be referencing lots of resources for developers to really learn more about how to create for foldables, i'll be sure to include links in the show notes so that you guys can easily find this content so guy, tell me who do you think would benefit by developing for the foldable form factor and why guy merin 15 52 i think everybody will benefit from it the bottom of the funnel is the apps and the user so the users would benefit the most but i think you're asking more about the developers, i think every developer should look at is how they said here before my app is not going to run now only on a single screen, small device, it will span across others, every developer should think about their app what else can i do now that i have more real estate? and again, if it's a game, okay, what do i do with the second screen? how will my game maybe if i run the game, in a split screen with discord on the other side, because i'm using that for gaming as well, to start thinking about all these new scenarios that your app can now do? how can i provide content to the app that sits just beside me with drag and drop functionalities with these kinds of things? and i think every app, every developer, can benefit from those and you should start thinking about that, because this is preparing for, for the future and for more and more of these devices showing in market yeah, tony morelan 17 02 and i know the other day, a day and i were actually having a conversation about multi app user journeys ade oshineye 17 08 so we've tried to move away from thinking of use cases or scenarios to what we call cjs critical user journeys and part of that is because if i'm at home during the pandemic, i tend to have google docs open with meeting notes and then google meat open that if you move that to a foldable, well, that's one screen each but then i need to drag and drop things across them which means both developers need to think, am i a good citizen? does my app play well with others? historically, developers have tended to think about the user journey only within their own app but if you're a video chat app, you need to think okay, how do i work well, with a game with video content, somebody's watching, if i'm a video app, do i have picture in picture, if i have picture and picture, it unlocks all sorts of interesting new user journeys for the user if i'm a game, and i support multi window scenarios, it becomes possible somebody to play a game and live, stream it or play a game and have a chat conversation going on at the same time so trying to think about the user journey that's not just inside your one app, but it's across your app and other apps or even across multiple instances of your app tony morelan 18 17 store and tell me, what should the developer with an existing app do to extend it to foldables? søren lambæk 18 23 so there's quite a lot of sdk is that can be used already jetpack? windows manager is an android library that can help you with detecting if your app is expanding over multiple screens or not tony morelan 18 39 what about specifically game developers? maybe someone who's developing, you know, for unity or for unreal? are there resources out there to help them? søren lambæk 18 47 yeah, so samsung got like, some tutorials that will help you to set up phone apps for unity and unreal, boston guy merin 18 56 tony, if i may i can add one thing on the first question, what can developers do with an existing app, we put up a three-step guide and it's not specifically for the microsoft surface device for large screen on older foldables and the really the three steps are crawl, walk, run so you should start with taking your app and just trying it out on these new form factors if you have access to one of these devices, just try it there if you don't, there is emulators for everything for foldables for a duo for a large screen so just try your app on the emulator that's step one just see that it behaves well on these new form factors using an email lender step two is what we call the low hanging fruit so don't super invest but start small, as they say, maybe think about how can my app behave when it's running within other apps? so maybe support drag and drop either is a source of or is or is a destination cause doing picture and picture, things like that these are things that are super easy that you know, there's samples, there's code snippets, and you can just go in and copy paste into your app and just support that these are really small additions you can do and then it will really shine on those new devices and step three, is where really all the magic can happen you know, you have more real estate now so there's many new design patterns, you can think about lease details, you can think about a companion plane and a few others so what now will you do in your app that, you know, you have more real estate, you can do things differently? this is step three, which is i think, you know, where all the big value will come but it's a journey towards getting there ade oshineye 20 43 definitely, i think one other thing you may want to include is, at the most basic level, you check things like if i rotate my phone, does your device crash? does the app crash? or does it handle it? and then use thing? okay, so you handle rotation, you don't lose state if i'm halfway through typing a message, and i accidentally rotate my tablet, do you lose my message? that's bad yeah so that continuity is an important thing, all the way up to things like handling hinge occlusion so if you've got a surface duo, there's a hinge down the middle, you've got to remember that there we have an api for that, handling different postures of the device, and even trying to see if you can use those postures to offer new functionality but for a lot of developers, it's stepping back thinking about all the different contexts in which people are going to try to use your app and then making sure that you've handled them tony morelan 21 31 yeah, and guy you had mentioned about them testing, i wanted to also bring up that samsung has their remote tests lab, where you can online access a real device for testing your app so another great resource for developers to, to work with guy merin 21 49 definitely, it's also that in the emulator, the emulator is also an amazing resource, because you can run it locally, you can run it on the cloud, we have some workflows that connect to a cloud emulator so every time you know we have a few samples, so every time we do a check in for the sample, it spins off an emulator and test it looks great so we have all these test steps and none of that is specific to us to the to the demo, you can run it with any other devices well, tony morelan 22 15 tell me what is the figma design kit guy merin 22 18 figma design kit is a tool for designers to start thinking about foldables and large screens and dual screens so when we started the journey with developers, we first were thinking about the developers, how do we support you with sdks and with samples and with documentation, that's step two, actually, step one is thinking about your designs and then we started looking at what are the tools that designers use so figma is one of them and there are others so we just created figma design kit for foldables so it lists out all the layouts that are possible again, the list detail, the companion pane and a few others, gives you all the frames and really helps you think about the scenarios you want to cover in your in your app for these new form factors and then you start working with the developers and the sdk, there's actually a step three that we're trying to do in the future, which is, how do we make it easy? taking a figma design kit or another slope and making that into code? that's going to be the next step in the future? tony morelan 23 30 are they tell me about the jetpack window manager and the jet news demo app? ade oshineye 23 36 so like many people, we have quite some quite old demos that were written in a world where you had a phone and you had a tablet and so we like everybody else had to think about, okay, how do we change this to handle different postures, different aspect ratios so we have an article where we walked through the process we went through to use jetpack window manager to handle a lot of these configuration changes to handle continuity, rotation, a lot of those things so we got actually pretty good article about this i think one of the things we don't touch on in that article that i think is really important, is if i have an existing app that people like, and it's too expensive for me to do a complete rewrite, how do i start adding some of the new things into it so we have a new thing called activity embedding, which lets you get a foot in the door of compose, or we're starting to add these new, more complex layouts so maybe your app was just, oh, i have a bunch of cards that go vertically up and down the screen but it's actually no longer a phone it's a device that folds out is not twice the size so now i need to think, okay, i need to go to a list detail view gmail is a good example of this you do that unfold or you rotate and now you have so much more screen estate the challenge is, how do i embed the new more complex layout index? system set of layouts i already have without having to do a rewrite so there's a lot of that functionality that we're trying to show people because we don't want to fall in the trap of the only way you can get to the new world is to burn everything down and start again we want to give people an incremental path from where they are to where they need to get tony morelan 25 18 i was at gdc, this past year in samsung had a great presentation this morning did you get a chance to see that that presentation at gdc? where they talked about developing for foldables? søren lambæk 25 30 yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, it was one of our team members, mike there was doing a presentation tony morelan 25 37 yeah, i'll make sure to include a link to that to that presentation it was great because they covered foldable optimizations for game engines like unity and unreal, talked about android jetpack apis, and window manager showed examples of things like flex mode and ui scaling, and even had an engineer from unity talk about adaptive performance 4 0 ade tell me what should a developer consider when writing a new app for foldables? ade oshineye 25 46 my immediate reaction to this is, first of all, should i use views? or should i use compose, but i'm talking to more and more of my colleagues, they all go? well, obviously, they should compose because composers the future so the official google recommendation, if you're starting from scratch, start with compose, it will mature as your app matures the other things to think about is what makes foldable special, it's the fact they have all these postures, they have all of these different kinds of usage scenarios that they offer and then you want to avoid littering your code with designs that are attached to a specific screen size, or a specific aspect ratio, or a specific resolution and instead, you've got to decide am i adaptive or responsive? will i try to scale the same design? or will i move the components around when the posture or the orientation or the size changes? it's a difference between an app with a list of cards and the cards just get bigger? and an app that says, well, when you rotate me, i go to a list detail view? tony morelan 26 52 guy, what are your thoughts on what a developer should consider when they're writing a new app for foldables guy merin 26 59 so i think a developer should consider a couple of things one, there's folding features specifically for duo, we have, we have a hinge in the middle so if you have like controls, do you want to put them in the middle, or maybe you want to lay them out a little? a little differently for game developers, we did a lot of work for example, with xbox so when you play a game, you can have the controls on one screen and the game on the other screen so the controls, you know, are now have their own dedicated space so maybe you can do some stuff with it so for example, the one thing we did is depending on where you are in the game itself, the controller themes and the way they look change so if you're now a pirate on a ship, and you're in a sword fight or something, the controller is changed to be a sword, for example, or things like that and then other considerations are the posters so what happens when the device is folded? what happens when it's open? what happens when you rotate it? and all these will change the layout of the app and show different controls and options for the use of yeah, tony morelan 28 12 yeah soren, what would you say are some of the common issues that could come up when designing around foldables? søren lambæk 28 22 i think it's important for developers to consider the ui because on the samsung fold, when the phone is folded, we got like a single display so the aspect ratio on that one is very different to when you're when you got it unfolded so the ui, you will have much less space for ui so that is something that's very important that the transition from going from single display to what's the display, that the ui will change so it fits, there's no point on like, you can see all the ui on when it's when it's unfolded and then when you go to the single screen, half of the ui is not a clickable or you can see it so that's very, very important that you test that on your on your phone tony morelan 29 11 yeah, and i know it's a gdc presentation that's one of the things that mike covered was how to have your game go from the single screen and then when you open up the device, how it transitions to the to the door screen søren lambæk 29 25 yeah, exactly ade oshineye 29 26 oh, actually, that reminds me one thing i, i keep mentioning continuity and mostly people think, oh, i have my device, let's say to tablet like this ultra i have in my hand and in in the vertical orientation that's easy and if i rotate, i don't want to lose my state that's typically what we've always meant by continuity but once you have a device that falls, especially if you've got something that has three screens and how to screen them into screens, i may launch something on the outer screen then i open it up and then the app has to move on or the activity as we found that out the screen to now maybe spread out across both screens and then if i fold it the other way, so i'm now on one of the inner screens, the app has to not lose state now we have a bunch of guidance on how you define normal apps, where it gets especially tricky is when it's things like camera, where you may not just be moving an activity across screens, but it may actually move it across cameras okay, so this is one of those places where, if you have a real device in your hand, you can see it and you can see how for a user, this would be a very comfortable, obvious thing, they would expect holding the device in their hands but for you sitting behind your keyboard, it might not leap out as you as an obvious thing for a user to do yeah, so if you sit with erica, with us a samsung flip, you can take a selfie on it, but you might just very easily rotating your hand and because you want to take a selfie with the other camera for your app that's a very complicated thing for the user it's the most natural thing in the world sure so it's important to think about continuity across the different surfaces of the foldable yeah, guy merin 31 07 yeah and let me give, let me give another example with an email app can be gmail, it can be outlook, it can be whatever it whatever you're using and i think foldable or dual screen is really a great way to read emails so if, if until now, i was used to, you know, in the morning to get to my emails on a single screen device so i just have a list of emails, and then i go into each one of them, read it, go back, go to each one of them, read it, go back reply, what have you, if you don't have a larger screen, you can have the least detail so i see all the emails in one place, i click them and then the other side, i see the actual email that i need to address and now if i have to, is a lengthy email, if i have to read it, i can rotate the device and then i get into this a form, that i across the whole screen, i just see the whole email as detail and then when i hit the reply button, it can go into this laptop mode that you know, the keyboard goes from the bottom and then i could start replying to it and when i'm done, i get back to the least detail up to my next email so it really can serve as a laptop replacement yeah, because you have a larger screen, you can do pretty much in a productive manner, which you can do with your regular pc or mac tony morelan 32 27 yeah, for sure so guy, do you think it's a misconception that developers need to do a lot of custom work, that's only going to be that's only going to add value to a foldable device guy merin 32 38 i think it's a misconception, definitely, there's actually not a lot of work you need to do as i said before, you could start small with just adding drag and drop functionality or picture in picture and that will work across every place, every form factor around large screen small screen, and you're using native api's and sdk to support a foldable, you don't need to pick up another sdk for it it's all supported natively and whatever you do will work across all these devices and again, in the future, it can work on the tv or other on a watch so whatever your app will do, consider all these layouts provide layout screens, for each one of those new form factors, a single app will work on all of it ade oshineye 33 28 yeah, i think something i did this weekend is i went and dug up all my old android devices, i have android devices, going back to the g one and even the ones before the g one that i'm not sure i'm allowed to talk about in public, all the way to the latest ones from today and as developer, handling all of these different scenarios, is actually increasing the maintainability of your app because if i think about the screen on the g one and the resolution of that, and i think about that, compared to the resolution, the pixel six, it's a huge jump, and the screens are so much bigger so think about the kinds of devices we'll have five years from now, how much bigger how much higher resolution will those screens be? how often do you want to rewrite your app between now and then? versus oh, it's just a bigger screen at all it's a different posture and being able to make it a relatively simple migration or maintenance that versus a yet another rewrite tony morelan 34 31 so tell me, soren, what are some good examples of existing apps that are taking advantage of the foldable form factor? søren lambæk 34 39 so we have seen a lot of retro games actually, you are utilizing the phone a lot so because retro games don't really have that much heavy graphics so they've got like, plenty of space that they can use so we have seen where people are using a virtual gamepad on one screen and using live small mini maps and that kind of thing so that's okay seems but i also think that like when you're watching it like a video and you start like folding it, and you just see the video slide up on just one screen, because it assumes that you want to put it on tape or something i think that is really clever and i would like to see more of that thinking tony morelan 35 19 in a day, what are some great examples of existing apps that are taking advantage of the foldable form factor? ade oshineye 35 24 so we see a lot, but actually, my two favorites were shown to me by guy, one was a battleships game where you basically have the device in a tabletop posture, and you basically rotate it the other way for the other person to play oh, i thought that was beautiful yes love that and the second thing he showed me was just the kindle yes so basically be able to have the kindle open like a book, but also be able to fold it the other way so like a like a cheap paperback, where you fold it and you hold him in one hand exactly i would never do that for any of my books, but been able to do that and like surface to that field like that is so nicely that i think was really compelling tony morelan 36 02 and that was the first thing when i when i pulled out the surface duo showed my wife, the first thing she did was grab it in, folded it around like it was a traditional paperback book that was so easy to hold she absolutely loved that that aspect of it guy tell me, what are some other examples of some great apps that are already taking advantage of a foldable, guy merin 36 25 i think two kinds of app one is apps for consuming and i think the kindle is a good example of flipping a page, which is supernatural i really liked that experience as well, but also apps around creation so for example, if you need to edit a video, or edit your photos, or edit the blog post, it's very easy with dual screen or with the foldable or our screen to have the actual video or photo on one side, and on the other side, all the controls, and then you hit a control and you see it real time, what happens, how does it change the other, it's really, really helpful to create and edit your memories that way so it's really a great creation tool, as well, not just for consuming tony morelan 37 12 yeah, i could definitely see that also be a great value with a program like adobe acrobat you know, i'm often editing pdfs and so i could see that would be a great use case for, you know, not only being able to read documents, but then you know, making edits ade oshineye 37 28 i can also imagine with that sort of notebook, passport, sort of novel types, device, where if it's light enough and thin enough, you can sort of fold it in half with a stylus, and just scribble it like you would have a normal notebook, basically, like a moleskin but it's a moleskin with an infinite number of pages there's, guy merin 37 49 there's also psychological sense here, about the folding, and that you can close it so for example, if i'm writing or scribbling or journaling with a stylus on the device, when it's open, when i'm done, consider if you're doing it on a regular notebook, what are you doing, you're closing it, and it gives you a sense that you're done you accomplished something and i think this is where foldables really shine because you're doing something you're reading an email, you're journaling, you're even playing a game, once you're done, you close it, even you hear that little click yes and it gives you a sense, you know, it's like checking a box in your to do and i think this is something that you don't see in other form factors and you see it only on this folding devices that really helps users stay in their flow and then move away to, you know, do something else that is not related to the phone so leave it off and you know, digital wellbeing and stuff tony morelan 38 46 yeah, it's funny that you say that, because that was the one of the first things i noticed when i closed my duo hearing that little click sound it's sitting on my desk i was like, ah, okay, put that away ade oshineye 38 56 yeah, yeah, that's actually not the interesting effectiveness is that with the foldables, initially, because of weight, and then eventually, because of new user journeys, they switch from being in your trouser pocket, at least for me to being in a jacket pocket and that's something changes all the places i use them tony morelan 39 14 interesting yeah and i know when i first got my hands on the z flip, folding it to that such small form factor and putting it in my pocket just felt so much better than some of the bulky devices that i seem to carry around with me søren lambæk 39 30 i actually heard that people who using the ac flip, use the phone less because they have to open it manually so for them, it actually helps them a lot to not like spend too much time on the phone so there, i guess there's some psychological effect ade oshineye 39 47 i mean, i've had the opposite with my flip in that because it's so small, and because it sorts of made me take more selfies i don't usually take selfies because well, i usually have a real camera with me, but i have this thing, it's small enough that it's in the back pocket of my jeans and it's just arms were nice and i would normally just take a photo of the place but as thing i can pull it out, then basically without having to unfold it, or unlock it just pointed on my face, click selfie, put it in my pocket again so for that one particular user journey, i use it more tony morelan 40 20 interesting yeah, i could, i could totally see that but tell me a day, what are some of the challenges that foldable technology needs to overcome to increase consumer adoption? ade oshineye 40 31 i mean, if i look at the variety of devices, i have the flip back pocket of jeans every time when it comes to the fold, i have to sort of look at the jacket i'm wearing and think about, okay, will the material the lining handles the weight, or should it go into my bag, if i'm carrying this surface duo, it's light enough that i can just casually put it in my jacket pocket, it'll be fine but it's too bulky for me to put in the front pocket of any of my jeans and it feels dangerous to put in the back pocket so weight is an issue cost is also an issue because the more expensive it is, the more careful you have to be when you put it away to think, will it be safe in this pocket but as these things get thinner, lighter, cheaper, and we discover more and more user journeys, i think that's going to be really interesting if i give an example, i have the surface level one, and it's great but every now and again, i see somebody surface two or two and i go, oh, they have a pen oh, that's interesting and i find myself thinking, well, that might be an interesting upgrade if it were thin enough and light enough, but then i'm thinking, but will it fit in my jacket? pocket? tony morelan 41 37 sure that's interesting guy tell me what do you think are some of the challenges that the foldable technology needs to overcome? i guy merin 41 45 think the first obvious one is the price point, they're still more expensive than other form factors so i think we're going to see the prices, the prices go down? for sure i think that would be probably my biggest one i think we did not hit the point of, you know, apps, enough apps are there, we'll see more and more apps, and then everybody will want to join the party i don't think we are in that stage yet and i think that will come soon tony morelan 42 13 and so on, what are your thoughts on what sort of challenges that the foldable technology needs to overcome? søren lambæk 42 19 the foldable phone at the moment is very bulky, and it's very heavy, it will be great that it was if it's lighter, i'd know that people that it actually puts people off some people that it is so bulky and heavy, where they will rather i get the flip phone for that reason i also think speaking of the flip, i think battery life is an it's very important i don't know how much bigger battery they can put in them without even giving more bulky and heavier but when you have like on the samsung one, there are three displays and if you use it for game watching films, it's really draining battery so that is i will say that is the big ones for me tony morelan 43 03 so guy, what resources would you recommend for developers interested in creating foldable apps, guy merin 43 09 i think you know; our modal is really meeting the developers where they're at so continue using whatever you're using if you're using a mac or pc, we have emulators for each one of those things so i would start with just following the recommendations you know, we have documentation samsung has google, start there, download an emulator, try it out and then just write a sample app, there was a code lab that we built with google, you could try there to test some of these new capabilities on the emulator on a specific device and then start your journey from there to commutations samples emulator we post a weekly blog, a weekly developer blog every thursday, that brings new information, for example, how to write again, how to use drag and drop, how to run side by side with another app, how to address the post changes, well, layout changes so we have a blog every week that covers code it's a developer blog with specific code and tips and tricks, try those resources and just reach out if you have a question and if you're blocked on anything, we are really here to help you out with your journey because we're creating the future and we want you to be successful with your app on all these new form factors tony morelan 44 34 yeah are there any conferences or events the that you know that you'll be attending? guy merin 44 40 definitely so google io was just completed a few weeks back, a lot of talks around large screens, you can still follow that and see some of the talks droidcon is coming up we just had droidcon san francisco a couple of days ago, and the next one is in berlin, and it's a worldwide conference google's probably going to have a few to prevent samsung has a few events microsoft build was just a couple of weeks ago and we also had to talk about tony morelan 45 08 foldables excellent and i know a day you shared with me a large list of links tells me, you know, what are some of these resources the developers can utilize ade oshineye 45 19 so for us, it's really three buckets there are introductory materials, such as our quality guidelines that i think are really important to sort of absorb into your bones so you can feel what a good experience will be like, and it will nudge you as you go on then we have a large collection of design resources, often at the material design website, but also woven through developers@android com and then the final piece is a set of resources for the developers things like how do i do testing the code library with microsoft but those three buckets of resources are the right ones for you to start with i'd also recommend come to door con berlin, were given a talk a teammate of mine, romano, france will be their co presenting with somebody from microsoft and again, you can go grill those people get lots of questions and of course, there will be future android events, where we'll have more stuff to share tony morelan 46 14 wonderful insight on what does samsung have to offer to help developers søren lambæk 46 20 so sometimes we got our own a game dev space where we posted blocks and tutorials, articles and we will have some when this podcast is out, we should have some tutorials available we also got the gdc presentation that mike did tony morelan 46 37 excellent so any more thoughts as we close the podcasts on this new technology in foldables ade oshineye 46 45 from my perspective, looking at my desk, i've got a flip duo, a samsung tab and that really captures just the variety of form factors that are happening on the android platform and i look forward to seeing more i think that's one of the things i learned here is that there's so much going on and there's so much more to come søren lambæk 47 06 i'm really looking forward to the future to see what new technology and what new devices coming out how the foldable phones will hopefully be more like lighter and more affordable and yeah, i'm really looking forward to see how developers is going to utilize them for all kinds of different apps guy merin 47 28 i think i think this is super exciting times, we are really in a pivotal point of, you know, something new, something a new generation of four factors evolving, and it's happening right now we started seeing the version one of the foldables and tools, we're now seeing a second version and a third version and i think we're going to see more of that and this is just amazing we are creating the future right now and i think developers are the most important part of it, because it will succeed based on the apps, and what developers will do with it and this is a great time now to join this ride and really create the future because i think 10 years from now, we will see things that really start happening right now with apps that take you to the next steps with foldables yeah, tony morelan 48 21 my key takeaway with the foldable industry is how many of these big companies in this industry are working together to further the technology it was great to have you know, someone from google from microsoft, and of course, from samsung, all on the podcast today before we close this out, i want to ask a question of each of you soren, what is it that you do for fun and when you're not at your desk working for samsung? søren lambæk 48 46 as i already said that i do like art to play music and draw and i have an eight-month-old son that's taking up a lot of my time at the moment tony morelan 49 00 wonderful wonderful yeah, congratulations on that thank you in a day, what is it the you do for fun when you can step away from your role at ade oshineye 49 09 google? so i do a lot of things but i think the main thing that occupies my time nowadays has been playing badminton it's an it's a huge part of the swiss culture and there's just a lot of people who play badminton, so it's a great game you can actually get seriously injured in it but you can also get very good at it so i'd recommend it tony morelan 49 32 in guy what is it that you do for fun up in the great northwest? when you get to put aside your responsibilities at microsoft i can see in your background now i noticed on your wall, you've got your own indoor rock-climbing gym guy merin 49 45 yeah, exactly so trivia in the last six months i've been training really, really hard to climb and summit some of the mountains around north washington goal is to get even bigger mountains but we did a couple of summits last weekend and really into climbing and something mountains now wow takes a lot of mental prep, nutrition, fitness level and i've seen a lot of similarities between the experiences i have with preparing for a climb, to even things i do at work it's really managing a project, a lot of insights i got from climbing that i apply in other places tony morelan 50 25 that's great that's great hey, i wanted to thank all of you for being on the podcast today it was wonderful to hear the different voices and get a chance to chat with you all ade oshineye 50 34 thank you very much for having us you closing 50 35 just 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 samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s03e07-foldables.html

Learn Developers Podcast

Episode 6, Samsung Internet

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

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s02e06-samsung-internet.html

Learn Developers Podcast

Episode 4, Chris Benjaminsen

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 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

https://developer.samsung.com/developers-podcast/s03e04-chris-benjaminsen.html

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