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docmanage subscription price change after your app and subscription item are for sale in galaxy store, if you have a manager account with the "applications manager" authority or are the owner of the seller portal account where the app is registered, you can increase or decrease the regular subscription price the subscription price can be updated by country, for one or more countries for example, if the exchange rate for a currency changes, you can update the price of a subscription for each country that uses that currency the subscription price can be set in usd and each country’s currency topics covered in this page include how to change a subscription price subsequent price changes how to view subscription price changes how to adjust an existing subscription price change how to cancel a subscription price change how to change a subscription price for information on how to change a price for a non-subscription item, refer to modifying an item log in to seller portal, go to the apps page, and select the app which has the subscription item for which you want to update the price from the app details page, click the in app purchase tab select the subscription item whose price you want to update from the item details page, click the price click set new price or change one of the standard prices to set the price for all countries, select the all countries checkbox, enter a new price to change the price for all countries, and click apply or, to set a new price for individual countries, select the countries and enter a new price click next and confirm that you want to update the prices verify the countries for which you are updating the price if you are increasing the subscription price, select the checkbox if you want to apply the price increase to new subscribers only or unselect the checkbox if you want to apply the price increase to new subscribers and existing subscribers then, click save click save at the bottom of the item details page after you save your updates, there is a seven 7 day waiting period before the new price is applied during this 7-day waiting period, you can adjust or cancel these updates subsequent price changes after the 7-day waiting period, when the price update is applied in galaxy store, you cannot change the price of the item in the same country again until a specific amount of time after the pre-notification period has ended for all existing subscribers that is, the updated price must have been applied to all existing subscribers in all countries the amount of time to wait after the pre-notification period has ended for all existing subscribers is based on the length of the subscription period the end of the pre-notification period for an existing subscriber is defined in one of two ways the pre-notification period ends when the existing subscriber has acknowledged the price increase notification the existing subscriber must have consented to or rejected the price change from the consent page or, if the existing subscriber ignores the notifications they neither consent to nor reject the price increase from the consent page , the pre-notification period ends when the existing subscriber's subscription ends the following table describes the amount of time you must wait before you can update the price of a subscription item again the minimum pre-notification period is listed for your convenience, but the actual wait time is likely to be longer see pre-notification period for more information subscription period minimumpre-notification period before renewal date wait time to update price again weekly 2 weeks end of 7-day waiting period + minimum pre-notification period + 7 days monthly 1 month end of 7-day waiting period + minimum pre-notification period + 1 month 3 months 2 months end of 7-day waiting period + minimum pre-notification period + 3 months 6 months 2 months end of 7-day waiting period + minimum pre-notification period + 3 months annual 2 months end of 7-day waiting period + minimum pre-notification period + 3 months if a country is not selectable, it means that the pre-notification period has not ended for all existing subscribers in that country when the pre-notification period has ended for all existing subscribers, the country can be selected for another price increase how to view subscription price changes if you need to review previous prices changes or determine the next step after making an accidental price change, you can view when a price was updated, when the price change was applied to the subscription, and the region in which the price change was made to view price change information for a subscription item log in to seller portal, go to the apps page, and select the app which has the subscription item for which you want to view price changes from the app details page, click the in app purchase tab select the subscription item for which you want to view all price updates from the item details page, click here the price change history page displays all price updates by date you can specify a date range to filter the dates that are displayed when a specific date is expanded, the countries that were updated are displayed, along with the old and new subscription price, and if consent is required you can filter this list by region and consent requirement click back to exit this page how to adjust an existing subscription price change if it has been less than seven days after you have initially updated the price of a subscription in seller portal if you have updated the price more than once, this is the first time you updated the price in seller portal , you can edit the price changes after seven days after you have initially updated a subscription in seller portal , you cannot make any additional changes to adjust an existing subscription price change log in to seller portal, go to the apps page, and select the app which has the subscription item for which you want to update the price from the app details page, click the in app purchase tab select the subscription item for which you want to view all price updates from the item details page, click here from the price change history page, if not already expanded, click on the date to view the list of countries whose price has been updated and for which you want to change the price updates click edit update the list and click next verify the countries for which you are updating the price if you are increasing the subscription price, select the checkbox if you want to apply the price increase to new subscribers only or unselect the checkbox if you want to apply the price increase to new subscribers and existing subscribers then, click save click save at the bottom of the item details page notethe window of time for adjusting the subscription price change is not changed if you make edits to an existing set of price changes, the window of time to be able to make adjustments is not reset for example, if there are three days left in the 7-day waiting period, after you make your adjustments, the waiting period remains at three days it does not reset to seven days how to cancel a subscription price change if it has been less than seven days after you have initially updated the subscription prices in seller portal if you have updated the price more than once, this is the first time you updated the price in seller portal , you can cancel the update after seven days after you have initially updated a subscription in seller portal , you cannot cancel the update log in to seller portal, go to the apps page, and select the app which has the subscription item for which you want to cancel the updated the price from the app details page, click the in app purchase tab select the subscription item for which you want to view all price updates from the item details page, click here from the price change history page, if not already expanded, click on the date to view the list of countries whose price has been updated and for which you want to cancel the price updates click cancel settings click yes to cancel this set of subscription price updates if you cancel a subscription price increase but a subscription was purchased by a new subscriber at the increased price, the new subscriber continues to pay the increased price until they cancel the subscription
Learn Developers Podcast
docpay as you go yeah, format dan appelquist 29 38 yeah yeah you know, i don't work for coyle, right but one of the things i think is interesting about it is that those transactions are anonymous so it's very privacy preserving, and it fits together with our philosophy of trying to enhance and protect user privacy tony morelan 29 53 yeah, no, i know privacy is a big thing for you guys over samsung internet yeah, definitely so are there any other sessions at sdc21, that developers should be sure to check out dan appelquist 30 03 well, i would suggest checking out the session called what's new and foldables first of all, which is a kind of highlight session, give it gives a high-level overview and gives a lot of really good context about flex mode, what flex mode is, or what we're referring to as flex mode, which is, again, adapting the user experience of any application to the conditions of the folding device and how that's so important from a user experience standpoint and my colleague dongbu actually gives a brief intro in that session to the device postures api, which leads into laura's longer, more detailed talk got it, and he gives a demo a little demo of how that works as well, which is, which is very cool tony morelan 30 49 yeah, i love learning about all the multitasking capabilities with foldables that was that was great to hear yeah so if developers want to learn more about samsung internet, what is the best way? dan appelquist 31 00 well, you can visit our page on developer samsung com/internet that's got links to our blog, and we blog on medium as well but really, if you go to developer samsung com/internet you can find links there to all the places on the web where, we're present you can also follow us at samsung internet on twitter excellent, where you can always find out what we're doing and you know, we try to keep that up to date with news about samsung internet, but also just the developer activities that we're participating in the standards activities that we're participating in our team manages that twitter handle directly so it's a direct line to our team and our dms are open so if you do have questions about samsung internet, you can feel free to dm us they're tony morelan 31 50 awesome awesome hey, dan, thanks very much for being on the podcast and giving us an insight into the highlights with samsung internet and sdc21 dan appelquist 31 59 thank you, tony it's always a pleasure awesome thanks, tony morelan 32 01 dan there were some great tech talks at sdc related to smart things and lots of great new innovations for shared i'm excited to have aaron swift on the podcast director of customer and partner strategy at smart thanks hey, aaron aaron swift 32 16 hey, tony, how are you doing? tony morelan 32 18 doing just fine, lots of tech talks and even a highlight session for smart things so let's start with the session smart things find from lost to found what were some of the key points with this session aaron swift 32 28 smartthings find launched last year as a service to enable customers to locate galaxy devices such as phones, watches earbuds, your s pen pro, like whatever you might leave on the bus or the train accidentally it comprises more than 100 million find nodes and over 230,000 devices are located every day tony morelan 32 49 so a find no just to clarify, find note is that like another device that's this part of this network, aaron swift 32 55 yeah, like a phone or a tablet, a galaxy phone or a galaxy tablet, running the smartthings app with smartthings fine and as you saw, philip and moon did a great presentation talking about other hardware oems can now integrate their products with smart things fine so we have today our first smart tag device which you could attach to your keys that's available on the market now for everyone but anyone who wants to can start building their own tag devices or integrating their hardware products into the final tony morelan 33 29 yeah, i think that opening up the smartthings five network to the outside hardware oems is going to be huge and will absolutely expand the network tremendously aaron swift 33 39 yeah and they made a set of tools there's this fine device sdk and the test suites they make it really easy for any device manufacturer, whether it's ble, or ultra-wideband, to start integrating their devices if you're using the nordic dialogue or nxp chipset yeah, it's really easy to add the fine sdk into your device for certification tony morelan 34 01 that's going to be that's going to be great there was a session called smart things build and tell me what were some of the highlights for you in that session aaron swift 34 09 that session was led by jenny brand meyer and andy sayer are director of product management and director of engineering okay, and they talked about extending our platform, which historically has been very end user focus, you are buying samsung tvs and appliances for your home and now we're extending the platform for multifamily builders and apartment managers to put in the new apartment buildings okay, there's a new toolset with that, that will allow an installer to go set up hundreds of apartments and hundreds of refrigerators and dishwashers and washing machines and apartments really tony morelan 34 46 quickly so this is giving them the ability to sort of monitor the like what's happening with the with these devices if there's you know, you've got some sort of fault that happens within the system, they can detect that aaron swift 34 58 yeah, so property managers we'll be able to integrate your monitor their fleet of samsung appliances from their property management tool are there any tony morelan 35 08 apis or sdks? related to this? aaron swift 35 12 yeah, so one of the cool things about this new offering is there's a dedicated set of tools and api and sdk set to make it easy for property management software companies, like in trata, to come integrate and provide fleet management for all of the appliances tony morelan 35 28 the one thing that comes to mind, though, when you mentioned something about, you know, giving property managers, the ability to sort of monitor all these devices that are in these homes, comes down to privacy, what's in place related to privacy, when you're talking about something like this aaron swift 35 43 user privacy is front of mind to us, whether you are a home owner or a renter and so what we've done is we put together a new set of permissions on the platform, so that property managers only have the minimum access to data coming off of the appliance is needed to troubleshoot for failures got it if there happens to be something wrong, the property managers will be able to pull some information off of the appliances to troubleshoot the air, but they cannot tell that you're getting your 11pm glass of milk before you go to bed tony morelan 36 18 yeah, the last thing i need is my property manager knowing that i was in my freezer last night going for little ice cream bins aaron swift 36 24 right, right and so we've made sure that users are front of mind in this, that's, that's great, and that their privacy is protected tony morelan 36 31 yeah, that's super important there was also a session called smartthings edge and i thought this was really interesting this is where the execution is done locally without reliance on the cloud tell me more about that session aaron swift 36 44 in summer 2020, we announced major changes coming to our platform, this session ended up being such a long session with so many great speakers, because we are really excited to be talking about those changes sure a couple of my favorite ones are from zack and vlad talking about smart things edge before, when you use smart things to turn on a light with a motion sensor, your motion sensor would detect motion in your home, it would send that motion event to your hub up to the cloud, the cloud would tell you to run that automation, send the event back down to the hub to tell the light ball to turn on sure and that happened quickly but it's not quite as natural as still being able to go turn on the light or the local motion sensor in your home yeah so what smartthings edge does is it took the device events and the automation event and was able to start processing them locally yeah so now when you use that motion sensor to turn on a light motion is detected that goes to the hub, the automation is processed on the hub, and sent back over to the light to turn off without ever having to reach out to the cloud to confirm that event tony morelan 37 56 like what would be a device where you needed like instant, instant, you know, reaction time between the hub and the and the device aaron swift 38 05 so all zigbee and z wave and wi fi devices have the ability to run locally on the hub now with automations okay, so one of the most natural feeling ones is that example i gave with the light you want light to turn on right away? yeah similarly, if you want to be walking into a room and having the temperatures change, or having the vents open and close, the thermostat adjusts those are great use cases for local automations as well okay, what we're doing now is we're investing more features into the rules api to make more automations run locally got it so over time, you'll see more and more complex automations be able to run locally on your hub tony morelan 38 43 for edge devices is it a closed ecosystem? or is it can anyone build for edge? aaron swift 38 49 great question so we've released a collection of edge devices on our smartthings developers github repository that anyone can reference and then any hardware oem can add their fingerprint or their devices to that repository anyone can build their own edge devices if they want to tony morelan 39 10 wow, that's, that's, that's great so i saw there was a highlight session building the future smart home today that talked about the new matter standard can you tell me what was shared in that in that session? aaron swift 39 21 matter is the foundation for smart homes of the future? over 200 companies have come together to develop a standard that is going to be the basis for smart home devices to integrate in the future tony morelan 39 34 would you say that like today the is the ecosystem? is it pretty fragmented? aaron swift 39 39 correct there are all sorts of different smart home standards from all sorts of different companies out there, and each one operates just a little bit different from each other, which makes it hard for device manufacturers to integrate with each platform mater is going to take that fragmentation and create a common application language and data model that will apply across all the data from smartphone platforms, regardless of tony morelan 40 02 yeah, i think that's going to be great, especially for consumers so that they don't have to like decide between which technologies they want to, to purchase that it's all going to kind of seamlessly work together aaron swift 40 12 correct and if you buy a light bulb with the with the matter logo on it, you will know that it'll work with smart things, or any other matters supported ecosystem tony morelan 40 21 that's awesome that is super, super great to hear so you've talked a lot about all these different technologies related to smart things what's the best way for developers to learn even more about smart things? aaron swift 40 34 the best place to go for more information is developer samsung com/smartthings from there you can learn more about building edge devices or cloud devices or stay tuned for future updates on our investment in matter you know all of the sdc sessions on smartthings were great are there any other sessions that you would recommend developers checkout i'm personally a bit of a tv nerd so i'm really excited for redefining the experience of watching tv and what's new in samsung smart tv services tony morelan 41 04 yeah, no, i know, a bunch of the people over the tv plus and it's a great group and doing a lot of amazing things over there a lot of great content coming out that's exciting excellent hey, aaron, i really appreciate you coming on the podcast it was great chatting with you and learning a bit more about smart things and looking forward to chatting with you again in the in the near future aaron swift 41 22 great thanks, tony tony morelan 41 26 so next, i'd like to welcome roger kibbe to the podcast senior developer evangelist for bixby samsung's intelligent assistant technology welcome, roger roger kibbe 41 35 well, thanks you and i talked gosh, was probably over a year ago yeah, actually on the podcast so i'm excited to be back and talk to you about what's new and what we just saw at sdc yeah tony morelan 41 47 so it was i think about a year and a half ago safe to say that a lots happened since then so tell me what is the latest with bixby developers? roger kibbe 41 55 yeah, so we just announced several things that sdc are highlighted some things that changed first thing i want to talk about is some of the ways we've made it easier to develop for bixby and these weren't new announcements, but kind of highlighting some of the changes we've made over the past year or so and so a lot of these are focusing on improving the developer experience, one of the things we did is we created a new training ui so use the training ui to create natural language training and one of the great challenges and voice experiences is to get your natural language training, working well after all, it's the way users interact with all the business logic that you've written so that's a great challenge and so we built a new ui to make that more intuitive and hopefully easier and simpler to build great experiences we also built something we call the component gallery because bixby is on multimodal devices, there is a ui for bixby experience and the component gallery is a wysiwyg component editor so i'm writing some code for what we call bixby views, i can pop up the component gallery, configure something graphically, and it just dumps the code right in so it just makes it easier and then finally, we made it super simple to load a capsule directly from github so we have a bunch of sample code on github and now directly in the studio you can load that sample code from github without having to go and clone it or download it and go through all the previous hassles he had to do so just an example of some of the improvements we made to make it frankly, just easier if your day to day life as a developer developing something for bixby tony morelan 43 32 awesome so let me ask on the end, that component gallery actually was watching one of the sdc sessions on that is pretty cool so just to clarify, this is where like on the device when you give a voice prompt, and the device bixby reacts to that you can then have graphic images appearing on the device is that correct? roger kibbe 43 50 yeah, yeah so you can either when you're basically whenever bixby is communicating with the user, you can actually have a graphical ui on there that's complimentary and it also could have things like buttons on it, or sliders or controls, because one of the things is all these samsung devices so you know, the phone, the watch the television, the tv, all have a ui on there so bixby is not just a voice experience, but it's really a multimodal experience so you need to build graphical ui, we built a tool to make it pretty darn easy to do so tony morelan 44 26 so i heard a bit about bixby on windows tell me tell me about this new announcement roger kibbe 44 30 yeah, so brand new so bixby is available on the galaxy book notebooks so there's the samsung's newest notebooks so bixby is right there is a command key to launch bixby can turn on hi bixby so you can talk to your windows notebook you can ask questions and you can have it control smartthings home automation, you can ask it to find files you can ask them to change windows settings so right now, you know it's focused on a fairly narrow set of things but i'm super excited about we have this brand-new device, a windows laptop, what can you do with a voice front end in front of that? and what are ways where we can make it simpler and easier for a user to use their laptop? by talking to it? to my mind? there's a lot to be discovered there yeah, what we created is kind of step one in a journey toward, you know, making voice a modality that makes it easier for us to interact with our technology, which is what it's all about yeah, exactly tony morelan 45 31 and you had mentioned smart things there was a session at sdc titled enabling intelligent voice control on your iot devices and i know in that they talked about smart things and a lot about bixby tell me, what were some of the key takeaways for you from that session? roger kibbe 45 45 yeah so we introduced something called the bixby home platform, and it's a way of interfacing what you've done a big sweet voice with some of the smart things capabilities and the best way to explain it is for me to give some examples of what you can do and so first example is i might say hi, bixby turn on the dining room lights now if i'd set up dining room lights in smart things, boom, work great today but if i hadn't set up something called dining room lights, today, bixby re prompt you? or say, i can't find dining room lights, that's not a really good user experience sure so what you can set up with the bixby home platform is a lot more smarter logics so hi, bixby turn on the dining room lights, because we can say sorry, i can't find dining room lights, but you have kitchen lights, your bedroom lights, you have den lights? which one would you like to turn on? and so then you kind of the user asked for something that it didn't understand but at a set of airing out? it's like, well, i know you wanted to turn a light on yeah, here's the lights i can turn on and so i kind of prompted the user to, you know, what's the right can you want, much like we would do, frankly, a natural conversation tony morelan 47 00 exactly if roger kibbe 47 01 you ask me something that i didn't understand, i'd probably go can you clarify that? right yeah and so and this is a little bit of adding that kind of logic there so i think that's one great example of just a quote unquote, air becoming a success sure the other thing i want to highlight, and i think this is where it gets really interesting, and frankly, pretty sexy, to me, is where you're actually taking the voice input and you're taking what the iot device, its state and what it's sensing and combining them for some intelligent response okay, so let me let me give you an example so i could say hi bixby, turn on my air purifier, yeah, buy an air purifier, boom, today would turn it on all good but now with the bixby home platform, i can set it up so when i say hi bixby turn on the air purifier, instead of instantly turning on, i can go query the air purifier and say, hey, you know, what's, what's the air quality? okay, and if air quality was moderate, or acceptable, boom, i just turn it on and the default fan speed, maybe medium is on but let's say the air quality is poor well, then when i query it back and says, oh, air quality is poor now i can say, well, you want to turn it on and the air quality is poor i'll turn it on but i'm actually going to turn on and turn the fan to high so you're getting this this feedback loop? it's really, you're getting the user what they asked for, you're getting the state of an iot device you're combining those together? yeah and then the action is just smarter to my mind, this is pretty, i say, sexy and exciting because if you think about this, this is getting into much more intelligence sure the devices know, i know what you asked for, i know the state, i'm going to take the most intelligent action based upon those two inputs and that's what bixby home platform is all about it's really a development tool that lets you build experiences, like what i was just talking about tony morelan 48 59 yeah, i absolutely love that and i loved when he said in the session, that there's they're planning to open this up to partners and also to third party devices yeah, reach is going to be huge roger kibbe 49 10 absolutely well, i mean, i think that's one of the big things with a smartthings ecosystem, right is it's not just for samsung devices, but it's for, you know, devices from dozens or hundreds of manufacturers so if i can read some information on the device, i can get that information and i can do something very logical and just make things work more intelligently isn't that what we all want from our technology? tony morelan 49 32 exactly, yeah so on that note, you know, something i saw also very interesting in that session was the bixby home studio i absolutely love the whole idea of, you know, with your mouse, you can just drag and drop it and build out, you know, these experiences, all without coding yeah, that's on bixby home studio so like that is roger kibbe 49 50 the tooling behind what the experiences that i just talked about, so that you could intuitively built out, i use that air purifier example because actually, if you look at the session, they built out that exact experience and i think except i encourage people to go take a look at that because that is a really good way to kind of understand what i'm talking about, and hopefully get you excited about, huh, wow, there's something cool that i could build as an end user experience tony morelan 50 22 yeah and the demo they gave was pretty in depth i mean, this is not just a you know, they didn't just skim over the, you know, the concept of bixby home studio, they actually went through and built it out yes, it was pretty nice so that was an awesome session but i know there were a bunch of other sessions all kind of related to, you know, smart things in bixby what were some of the other sessions that you would suggest developers to check out? roger kibbe 50 44 yeah, so i would definitely check out the two bixby sessions that we that we mentioned and as you can see, a lot of the focus is on bixby and smart things yeah so if you're a bixby developer, i would suggest you check out some of the spark thing sessions and understand that, because i think a lot of the focus of what we're looking at is, hey, how do we get home controller devices to work super, super well with voice so that and that really is a dance between what bixby is doing and what smartthings is doing, and building that together and that's what the bixby home studio is all about so understand the two sides of the equation and then you'll understand and hopefully can build some really cool tony morelan 51 27 stuff yeah, i love the collaboration that's happening between smartthings and bixby so if developers want to learn more about bixby what's the what's the best way? roger kibbe 51 37 i yeah, so first thing would be go to bixbydevelopers com and that's a homepage for everything bixby that's download the studio, where we have our documentation, and just a bunch of information the other thing is we have a pretty active youtube channel so just look for bixby developers on youtube, youtube slash bixby developers, loads and then pretty much everything we do that's new, or we introduce a new youtube video, we would definitely post that to twitter okay, so that's twitter and that's bixby developers and then i do a weekly like tech tip of the week, like a two-minute video tutorial, and that's posted to twitter as well or also facebook so you can find that on facebook and then finally, i am the host of a podcast yeah, i guess focuses on all things voice not just bixby it is called bixby developers chat you can find it in your favorite podcast player or you should be able to ask your voice assistant hi bixby play bixby developers chat, podcast or another voice assistant and all of them should be able to play it so that is another resource tony morelan 52 45 that's awesome and it's a great podcast i have listened to your to your work you do you do an excellent job from one podcaster to another roger kibbe 52 52 well, thank you that's the kind of compliment you'd like to hear because we all understand the challenges and what you need to do to make a great podcast tony morelan 53 01 guests and let me remind everyone go check out that episode we did it was in the first season with roger, you can learn a bunch more about bixby and how to get started creating voice assisted capsules roger kibbe 53 11 well, thanks, tony really appreciate it and go check out those sdc videos to get a really more in depth understanding of the things we've talked about today tony morelan 53 19 thanks, roger banks one of the biggest announcements we made this past year is our latest watches now run on a new operating system called wear os powered by samsung and joining me on the podcast today is su yong kim, one of the software engineers here at samsung that has worked closely on our new watch ecosystem hey, sam thanks for joining me on the podcast today sooyeon kim 53 38 hi, tony thanks for having me today my name is yan qin and i'm a software engineer at samsung i'm very excited today to briefly recap our sdc sessions on samsung galaxy watch and where it was powered by samsung, which we jointly built with google tony morelan 53 55 yeah so there were several sessions related to the new watch ecosystem in the unified platform what would you say are the benefits of the new wear os powered by samsung? rooyen kim 54 04 so there are many, many benefits but first, we have created a seamless and deeply connected experience across not only samsung galaxy devices, but also for wear smartwatches and android smartphones with this new unified platform, we want to expand our ecosystem bring greater scale to our developer community, and at the same time, delight consumers with a variety of choices from watches to watch faces and apps tony morelan 54 33 yeah, it's true not only this, the developer community going to expand it but also the consumer reach is going to grow even wider can you talk about the growth of the smartwatch market over the past several years? sooyeon kim 54 44 well, the smartwatch market is continuously growing and in fact, according to counterpoint research shipments grew by 35% for the first quarter of 2021 compared to last year and after samsung galaxy watch for launch before august, we once again recognize this explosive growth and will continue to work hard to meet the demands of this growing market tony morelan 55 08 yeah, i agree as smartwatches get smarter than market demand is only going to increase can you tell me what are some of the new and exciting apps available for the new wear os powered by samsung? sooyeon kim 55 19 so users can enjoy familiar samsung apps like samsung pay smartthings and bixby but now google apps are also available like google maps, and youtube music we are also partnering with a wide variety of partners and developers on apps that are available for download from the play store on your watch on your phone there is also a dedicated category for watch apps, so you can easily browse and download them directly to your watch tony morelan 55 46 yeah, i love that youtube music is now available on galaxy watch for many people are buying the watch because they like to track workouts and have an active lifestyle and listening to music has always been a key component to working out can you tell me how is the new samsung galaxy watch for taking advantage of the health and wellness market? sooyeon kim 56 03 so we want to help users keep track of their health status and fitness activities so we brought groundbreaking health features and sophisticated sensors to our new samsung galaxy watch four in selected markets users can check body composition, blood pressure, electrocardiogram skeletal muscle mass based on the tablet grade water, fat percentage, and so on tony morelan 56 26 yeah, it's absolutely amazing that with this little device on your wrist, you can now check things like skeletal muscle mass and fat percentage and can conduct an ekg test can current android developers build watch apps for the new wireless powered by samsung and publish just as they've done before sooyeon kim 56 41 so we aim to make every step of watch app development from ease of bill to market launch as simple as possible with this new unified platform so yes, android developers, you can continue to build your apps within this familiar environment using android studio with watch emulators and existing and new wear os specific api's developers can also deploy and increase exposure for their apps with the watch apps category on the google play store tony morelan 57 11 yeah, so my background is in graphic design and for me, my biggest question was, were we going to build a new tool that would allow designers to create watch faces for the new unified platform? and when they learned the answer was yes, i was really excited so what are some of the new exciting features with the new west powered by samsung watch base design tool, watch face studio, sooyeon kim 57 31 anyone can download, design and publish watch faces for whereas on the play store, you don't have to learn how to code and just need to explore the new design tool watch face studio for more details there is a separate tech talk session on this tony morelan 57 45 yeah, so that session was called introducing the new watch face studio, it was a great overview of the new tool that showed just how easy it is for someone to create a watch face without any coding what are some of the other sessions from sdc21 that watch face developers should check out? sooyeon kim 57 59 oh, first there is the highlight session watch ecosystem or new era where we cover the new samsung galaxy watch ecosystem at a high level then there are tick tock sessions, build your app and the new watch ecosystem is where we specifically talk about watch app development and run through a range of api's by inviting a special guest from google and there is also a session on a new health platform that runs on where was powered by samsung tony morelan 58 27 yeah, there were a lot of great sessions all related to wearables, and lots of new opportunities for developers what is the best way for developers to learn more about the new watch ecosystem? sooyeon kim 58 36 for developers, i encourage visiting the samsung developers and the android developer sites, you can go to developer samsung com/galaxy-watch and also developer android com/where i really appreciate you coming on to the podcast today and giving your insight in to the new watch ecosystem super exciting times thanks tony thanks for inviting me so tony morelan 58 51 i'd like to welcome back to the podcast, eric clung injure, who leads developer relations at samsung eric and i did a pre sdc podcast where we gave a little preview on what to expect it sdc21, and highlights from some of our past developer conferences if you haven't checked out that episode yet, be sure to go back in and give it a listen eric, welcome back to the podcast eric cloninger 59 22 hey, tony, that was a lot of fun you know, we've been doing conferences for years and even though sdc21 was a virtual conference, it was a lot of work and a lot of work by a lot of people at samsung, yourself included and you know, i'd like to really give a shout out to everybody who put in a lot of effort a lot of late nights and all on it so i hope that the people who listened to the keynote and the spotlight session and all the technical sessions got something out of it yeah and hopefully next year, we can do this live yeah, tony morelan 59 54 no, i'm looking forward to that but yes, it was it was a great virtual conference so i've asked eric to join me on this episode to chat about the sdc session that i gave called grow your podcast audience with samsung eric cloninger 1 00 06 earlier this year, samsung made it really easy for device users to listen to podcasts can you share? what is the new podcast platform? tony morelan 1 00 14 yeah, so the new podcast platform, it's super easy to access from your device on the home screen, all you do is swipe left, which is our minus one screen that is samsung free, which is basically free entertainment from samsung all in one place there's four tabs there so there's the watch tab, which is if you wanted to stream tv, there's the read tab, if you want it to read news, there's the play tab, which is playing games and then of course, there is the listen tab, which is all about listening to podcasts eric cloninger 1 00 47 so who can access all of that content with samsung free? yeah, so tony morelan 1 00 50 samsung free is available on all of our latest devices so this is basically the note devices and s series going all the way back to s nine plus all the versions of z fold in z flip right now samsung free is only available in the us but we are expanding to europe soon i've been told that by the end of the year, we will be hitting some european countries eric cloninger 1 01 12 that's great so why did we launch a new podcast service? tony morelan 1 01 15 samsung's podcast strategy is to make it easy for the millions of samsung device users to listen to their favorite podcast shows and discover new episodes quickly and easily and also it gives publishers an impactful way to reach new listeners and really expand their audience eric cloninger 1 01 31 so how do those publishers bring their shows to samsung so grab tony morelan 1 01 34 your url from your podcast rss feed, and you can find that from your podcast hosting provider, take that rss feed in go to samsung podcast com sign up for a free samsung account and all you do is fill out a short form that allows you to import your rss feed url typically, it takes less than five minutes for you to fill out that form and that quickly, your show is now available on all of the samsung free devices eric cloninger 1 02 00 so what samsung free and the podcast platform doing to help publishers get their shows discovered tony morelan 1 02 05 so our editorial team is always looking for new and exciting shows to promote every week, we feature about seven new shows on our homepage and these promotional features have been extremely valuable for publishers in fact, there was one publisher in mind recently, marty ray project chats he saw a 2,000% increase in downloads just after being featured on our homepage so that was really great to see the value in that promotion for him eric cloninger 1 02 29 yeah, that's incredible numbers there so you're the host of our podcast, the samsung developer podcast is that how you got involved with the podcast platform team? tony morelan 1 02 39 exactly they reached out to me when they were first building the service and eventually asked if i would help promote it i said, absolutely that's when they asked me to present an sdc so you can check out my session and learn much more about the new podcast platform eric cloninger 1 02 53 right so the sdc content that is on the website is available for anyone to see at any time so are there any other sessions on the sdc21 website that potential podcasters and developers should check out? tony morelan 1 03 10 yeah, well, i would say what really got me excited was seeing all of the game focus sessions that we had up there so there's one session called galaxy store games focused developer friendly that was a great session on all the new game focused improvements for both gamers and developers and there was another session called games for everyone that samsung instant plays it's another great session for game developers to learn how to bring their html5 games directly to galaxy store, making it easy for users to play games without having to download and install anything eric cloninger 1 03 42 that is an exciting new way for people who are interested in playing casual games to get into something new without having to download hundreds of megabytes of content so i think that's going to be a game changer for all of us yeah, definitely so tony, thank you for giving us some insight on the new podcast platform and also for sitting down with different people associated with sdc21 it was a fantastic virtual conference and it was great to hear about the sessions on one ui, the incubation program smart things in bixby tony morelan 1 04 11 yeah and i also like the interviews that we did on our new watch ecosystem, you know, chatting with dan again on samsung internet that was great and, of course, our new podcast platform i'd like to thank all of my guests today and to you, eric for taking a moment to chat about sdc21 eric cloninger 1 04 27 thank you very much, tony closing 1 04 30 looking to start creating for samsung download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung tony morelan 1 04 46 the pow! podcast is brought to you by samsung developers and produced us by tony morelan
success story game, mobile, marketplace
blogtoday, we're talking with ed mills, co-founder of hitcents, and alfred nguyen, creative director and producer of forgotton anne for throughline games. hitcents is a full-service video game publisher and developer, focused on bringing to market high-quality, indie-developed titles. founded in 1999 as a software company, hitcents’ passion for games slowly took over and pivoted the company. by 2012, the company was full steam ahead in the gaming industry as a developer and publisher. to date, it has worked with notable and well-recognized brands and celebrities, such as the godfather, nba, tom hanks, adam levine, one direction, and floyd mayweather. one of its most celebrated franchises is draw a stickman, which has been played more than one hundred million times and has global success on the nintendo switch, xbox one, steam, and mobile. tell us about hitcents. ed: hitcents is a full-service video game publisher and developer, but that is not where we started. our journey is part of what makes us such a unique company. hitcents was basically started as a software company on the carpet floors of our home in kentucky when my twins clinton and chris mills were 16-years-old. over the last 20 years our focus has changed, but the core of everything we do is still software. bootstrapped, with no outside investments for 20+ years, gaming has been a key driver of our success for more than a decade. we’ve had success across the gaming spectrum, from pc to console games to mobile apps. our most successful titles are: draw a stickman - the franchise has been played more than 100m+ times. draw a stickman: epic 2 - has seen 18 million purchases and installs across multiple platforms. the godfather: family dynasty - we were the first company to bring don corleone to mobile. currently, we work with a wide range of indie games and developers, and are always open to good gaming content. we publish games created by one-person developer shops, like get to the orange door, a retro futuristic rogue-lite fps releasing in 2020, to games created in other countries that have more of an edge and statement, like the cinematic platformer ministry of broadcast, which also launched in early 2020 and deals with concepts such as big brother, fake tv and a satirical look at politics, plus many more. can you share how you started as a game developer and ultimately became a game publisher? ed: it’s kind of crazy how we got started in games. hitcents was more of a complex ecommerce web agency and our creative director had an idea to draw a stickman and bring it to life on a browser. the weekend we launched draw a stickman we had millions of visitors, which ended up crashing our servers for all our clients. needless to say, it seemed tragic at the time, but the brand draw a stickman emerged as a successful, long-standing ip for hitcents. the brand has won 5 webby awards and made both hollywood and the game industry take note of us. as a result, a-list clients started to come on board with new content and connections, bringing us early success in games. this led to our partnering with caa for ip-related games. hitcents has many popular titles. we want to focus on forgotton anne. can you tell us about this game, available now on galaxy store? ed: forgotton anne is a seamless cinematic adventure with meaningful storytelling and a light puzzle platform. you play anne, the enforcer, who keeps order in the forgotten lands as she sets out to squash a rebellion that might prevent her master, bonku, and herself from returning to the human world. in the game, you step into a hand-animated realm of wonder in which everyday objects take on a life of their own. imagine a place where all that is lost and forgotten goes -- old toys, letters, socks. forgotten lands is this magical world inhabited by forgotlings; living mislaid objects longing to be remembered. in my opinion, and i’m sure the readers will think i’m biased, but the opening sequence in forgotton anne is so much fun to watch. i now know where all my lost socks go. forgotton anne has a stunning visual style and interactive game experience. what systems do you use to create game concepts and story characters? alfred: to create anne and forgotten lands, our artists use adobe products, as well as clip studio paint and tv paint to design, paint, and animate most of the sprites you see in the game, as well as the detailed environmental assets. with the protagonist anne alone more than 5000 frames were drawn! for story overview and testing, we used a lot of documents, spreadsheets, and a free software called twine that is great to test branching dialogues. how important is user experience when designing your games? alfred: the user experience is very important when designing a game. it is always a delicate balance between taking the player into consideration and staying true to a specific intention. knowing that sometimes a player might not immediately like a specific design, even though it adds a dimension that contributes positively to the game experience as a whole. this was the case when it came to prioritizing fluid animation over some degree of the controls’ responsiveness, or when we decided not to include game over, as it would negatively affect the pacing of the game. forgotton anne features light puzzles and platforming sections. however, it is very much a story about anne and letting the player make choices in her stead, to see how the consequences play out. how will the player use anne’s authority and deal with conflicts? alfred: when designing we let storytelling and emotions come first. then we discuss how we can make things the most intuitive for the largest target audience. however, as developers we have to accept that different players like different things. in the end, we are just happy that as many people as possible love the game! what are some of the challenges you face while developing your games? alfred: one challenge was to create a seamless cinematic experience where the player doesn’t feel a traditional cut between storytelling cutscenes and gameplay. the way we managed this was to ensure that there were no loading screens while playing and that all cutscenes were rendered in-game so the player was not presented with a different aesthetic when a longer story scene played out. the whole game is voice-acted and we created a ‘talk animation system’ to make it feel like the words were acted out. this really adds to the immersion. artwise we aimed for an incredibly rich and detailed painted environment. this presented its own challenge, as we had to make sure the player could discern how to navigate the 2.5d world, allowing for some travel in the z-depth axis at certain intersections. which objects would the player be able to interact with or bump into and which were decorative elements? something that sounds very trivial, like walking up and down stairs, was actually also a challenge as we wanted anne to feel real with her animations, unlike many other 2d games. if you pay attention, you will notice her feet place themselves correctly on the steps, as do her hands when she is climbing ladders. the tone of the game was also a challenge we wanted to get right. the premise of the game is very outlandish and quirky, with echoes of fairy tales like beauty and the beast, but at the same time we wanted to create a very realistic world. we were trying to strike a tone that could easily go from emotional and serious when dealing with themes of consumerism and authoritarianism to funny and endearing using the diverse cast of forgotling characters. are there common errors made by developers while programming games? alfred: scoping a game is always really hard. in early development you tend to be overambitious, and rightly so, as you need to explore the best version possible of the game you are making. however, it is important to constantly update plans and make the necessary cuts when necessary, as most developers don’t have the luxury of working without deadlines. these cuts tend to be a good thing, as it sharpens the concept and forces the developer to prioritize what is really important to the game and player’s experience, instead of falling into the typical pitfall of feature-creeping, i.e. adding features to the game due to the worry that it is not fun enough for players. forgotton anne boasts a number of awards. what is the basic structure for developing a successful game? ed: we don’t think there is a secret formula to creating hit games, or the market would be flooded with them. but, there are some universal truths one can rely on for added probability. one of them is knowing your intentions and having a capable team that has the necessary competences to execute. communication is key, as it does not matter how skilled each individual is on the team if there is a lack of understanding between the people. i also strongly believe in an organic approach to development, where you need to accept changing circumstances and adapt quickly to them. we rarely set out knowing exactly every little detail of the finished game. if we did, it would prove to be detrimental to the creative process, as half the fun is coming up with solutions and discovering great ideas over the course of realizing the initial vision. while iterating on gameplay mechanics, we might discover a great opportunity to emphasize a storytelling aspect, or perhaps a piece of composed music could inspire how a sequence could play out. there is still so much to explore with the medium of games and its storytelling potential. that is really our aim and we hope that it translates to some originality that resonates with players. how do you stay up to date with the latest game and software trends? ed: there are a couple of ways. every major platform on mobile and console has a developer conference and these shows offer the best avenue to listen and learn. another popular option is to go with an established publisher that often has early access to beta programs and has boots on the ground looking for the latest changes and opportunities to use tools that make a better product and potentially make work quicker. as a publisher, we are always playing and researching as many games as we can; reading up on trends in the industry -- who’s hot, what’s not; and researching new technologies and marketing techniques. what advice do you have for indie developers attempting to develop a successful game business? ed: start with a team, even if it's just 2 people. to make a game it requires many skill sets. i like to see experts, or someone that desires to be an expert, at each position or task. for example, you can have one team member specializing in art design plus knowledge of ui (user interface) and ux (user experience), who can complement a programmer. the more well-rounded each team member is the more fun the project and the less time wasted searching for answers to complex development problems. create a gdd (game design document) that maps out the major aspects of the game. this will save countless hours of unneeded art and programming. it's ok to iterate upon your gdd, but do start with a solid foundation. choose the best language/engine to make your game. though unity is great for 3d games and can port over to android with relative ease, sometimes it can lose the true feel of doing the code in its native environment if you are producing a 2d game or an app. the best advice i can give is to find a team member with the skill set that complements your game or app idea. if you are a programmer, stay with what you know and get better at it. decide what your time commitment is to making your game, i.e. months? years? paid games are easier to go to market than free-to-try, but free-to-try will get you more downloads over time. this question can be a blog all on its own, so again having a good publisher can help more than almost anything. with all of your current success, what is next for hitcents? ed: the godfather:family dynasty game has become over the past 3 years one of, if not the most, successful mobile paramount game. hitcents is planning the next big game with a known brand on par to the success and magnitude of the godfather. the biggest thing for our future is knowing the words cross platform means playing across your mobile device, pc, and console, not just across mobile platforms. our future is about consumer choice, bringing all the options to our players and letting them choose what they want to play, where they want to play it, and what device they want to play it on. ideally, your samsung galaxy phone can play and progress while you are on the go, and then you can pick up on your console at home where you left off. it's an exciting time for gamers! what motivated hitcents to bring your games to galaxy store? ed: galaxy store provides hitcents with the opportunity to diversify our sales, by opening a new revenue stream. it allows us to widen our customer base and gain access to samsung device owners globally. what samsung developer program services did you take advantage of when publishing forgotton anne to galaxy store? ed: we integrated samsung in-app purchase payment service, which is used to make a one-off payment for goods or to pay for a regular subscription. it allows hitcents to sell premium content and virtual goods, including in-game items available for purchase during game play. did you use any marketing services to support driving both awareness and downloads for your game on galaxy store? ed: marketing and monetization is another key component of every developer’s journey. we found the galaxy store badge can be used as a resource on our website and media to support marketing our game on galaxy store. adding galaxy store badge has put users one click away from downloading our game on galaxy store. the guides and downloadable content provided easy-to-follow instructions. thanks to ed mills and alfred nguyen for sharing how they create and distribute successful game titles. follow us on twitter @samsung_dev for more developer interviews and tips for building games, apps, and more for the galaxy store.
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 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
tutorials mobile, advertisement
blogwhat is a marketing newsletter? in business school, i learned that a business's primary objective is to generate revenue to sustain its existence. i also learned that a business can only generate revenue if it provides a service or product that consumers are willing to pay for. additionally, i gained the understanding that consumers are more willing to pay for a service or product from a company they have empathy for. a marketing newsletter is a direct engagement with consumers. newsletters provide a means to send information to a targeted group of users and potential buyers that improve brand awareness, inform them of product changes and include items of interest. a marketing newsletter has four goals. 🏎️ to increase customer loyalty which can be measured by subscribers of the newsletter 🏎️ to increase interest in a product which can be measured by open rate of the newsletter 🏎️ to generate traffic which can be measured by click-through rate to your web site from the newsletter 🏎️ to increase income which can be measured by attributed revenue of direct purchases via the newsletter a previous winner of the “best of galaxy store award,” persona, uses a marketing newsletter because they believe that “the more communication channels you have with users, the easier it is to achieve brand loyalty.” note : a newsletter is not a sales brochure; it is not meant to list your products and prices. when newsletters are of no interest or sent unrequested to recipients, the newsletter will only tarnish your customer relationship. the same due diligence used to ensure there is no intellectual property (ip) infringement in your product or store description should be used in your newsletters. samsung has created an ip infringement guide for app submission that, along with the references used for the guide, may also be a useful for your newsletter composition. start communicating to your consumers i used to go to a lot of trade shows; it is a great way to learn about your competition as well as ways to improve your product. i’ve noticed that it isn’t always the big corporate booths that have waiting lines, but the smaller companies with free swag will also draw interest. before you can publish a newsletter you need customers to send it to. smaller companies who can’t afford a marketing team still need to get information out to current users and potential customers. without big budgets to interest customers, a company can still create initial interest for a newsletter from a product web site, galaxy store product description, social media groups, as well as word of mouth from satisfied customers. a way to entice customers to sign up or continue receiving the newsletter is with coupons, giveaway contests and special discounts. sharing those in the newsletter first is an excellent way to retain your users and build brand loyalty. persona’s marketing team is using all the social media tools. their goal is to be found on every social media platform: facebook, instagram, twitter, pinterest, youtube, reddit, telegram channels, and others. however, one of the most important digital marketing tools is their well-designed website, persona-wf.com. use the right tools for the job there is an old saying that when you only have a hammer, every screw looks like a nail. while this is true, having a screwdriver available makes for a much better end product. the same should be said for a marketing newsletter. while having a word processing program and a mail account allows you to initially create and publish a newsletter, it is not as effective as using a proper emailing tool, especially as your business grows. a good customer relationship management (crm) tool will have both operational and analytical systems. this makes it easier to not only organize and send newsletters, but also analyze and create reports as well as provide information that is used to target your audience. they usually include a dedicated email service provider. a couple of methods to measure the effectiveness of your newsletter are open rate as well as clicks from the newsletter. for their mailing program, persona uses mailchimp so they have access to various reports that helps them tailor their audience. however, there are many mailing companies, such as mailer lite, sendinblue or others, who can fulfill your business needs. of course you can create your own mailing lists using basic office tools. even if the mailing list is small, keep in mind that domain accounts that include email services, both free and paid services, have limits to how many emails or recipients can be sent in a set time period. i believe an advantage of using a crm mailing program is the ability for unsubscribing. it is much better to have an unhappy reader hit the unsubscribe button than flame you on social media. trying to handle removal of readers manually can be a very time consuming operation. select the right style of newsletter annually i get a two-page recap from my aunt about her family’s prior year. i am often amazed to learn how productive my cousins are and that the new dog is such a scamp. however, i read it and toss it away. her letter is just words and there is no engagement with me. it is telling and telling, but isn’t selling. a good newsletter needs more than just words and it needs a format that engages readers. the format of the newsletter will make a difference, so tailor your newsletter to your target audience. some newsletters are a recap or summary with a links to content with more details. that format is easy to scan through and find topics of interest. it is a great format if your target is a manager or representative who is busy. the reader can skim or skip parts of no interest and deep read what they find important. other newsletters may have a story about one topic with links throughout the story to more detailed information. if your target is detail oriented, these how-to newsletters will engage the reader. if your app is a game, giving users tips and tricks while taking them on a journey through the game draws them in. another style of newsletter is mostly visual. telling a story in images is especially useful if you have an international audience as it removes translations and has visual interpretations. also if your target audience is more creative, you may want to go with a newsletter with more visuals. adobe indesign is a useful tool for creating a heavily imaged newsletter. there are many low- priced or free alternatives, such as affinity-publisher, if you are on a budget. dominus mathias, a case study watch face designers like persona or game developers with in-app purchases depend on repeat customers. i interviewed dominus mathias watch face design studio and their success story shows what you can achieve. you may find it interesting how a small designer company, dominus mathias, uses email marketing newsletters to increase their sales. dominus mathias cooperates closely with the company vienna studios for marketing and started collecting email addresses in 2019 for the purpose of sending a newsletter to subscribers. the reason was a way to alert customers to ongoing discounts with the end goal to increase repeat sales. initially they used the google groups service for their newsletter. with the increasing number of subscribers, they were forced to look for alternatives that could automate the whole process. ultimately they chose to use fluent forms, as well as the fluentcrm plugin for wordpress, in connection with their website, viennastudios.com. using fluent forms gives them the ability to send newsletters, on average, about one per week depending on planned activities. vienna studios newsletters may include coupons, giveaway contests or special discounts in their newsletter, to entice readers to purchase products or visit the web site. the use of newsletters by dominus mathias and vienna studio has increased the number of recipients who read the newsletters and fulfill the desired action of purchasing a watch face design. almost every newsletter has some success; the rate depends on various parameters such as the intensity/frequency of sending, the time of sending, the topicality and attractiveness of the promoted watch faces, etc. dominus mathias and vienna studio have continued to innovate to increase sales and downloads. in february 2023, in order to make the business more attractive for their customers, they introduced a new app called watch face arena. this app not only provides current information about products that are on sale or for free, but also enables customers to actively participate in a playful way. for example, consumers can vote for their favorite watch faces that are in competition with another one and follow the ranking of the most attractive ones. the app is available on the google play store. the time to start is now the time to start your marketing newsletter is now, because you can. you don’t need to spend a lot of money for tools to start, you can use your business email address and a word processor. starting small can be a big advantage. even if you have ten names on the mailing list, they can be your alpha group. don’t wait for a new product or updated version release. start gathering names and contact information. if you don’t do it now, when will you do it? resources persona watch faces ip infringement guide mailchimp mailer lite sendinblue fluent forms fluentcrm vienna studios
Ron Liechty
tutorials web
blogpush notifications have a terrible reputation but if done well can give your users a positive experience. you know that thing where you go to a web site then, before you can do anything, you have to acknowledge the push notification request. do you hate that? yeah, me too. jo franchetti even wrote an entire article about the crisis of websites bombarding people with permission requests and dialogs when they first arrive on the page. a crisis of permissions that’s just one of the many ways it’s easy to upset your users with push notifications, this article will try to detail some ways to do them better. a bad example of requesting for push notifications on first load failing before you even begin push notifications on the web are one of the most maligned apis on the web and this is one of the reasons why. it’s possible to give a bad impression before you even send a single notification. just like you wouldn’t ask to move in with someone on the first date, do not ask to send notifications on the very first user engagement. assume your users do not want push notifications. prove the worth of your web app with it’s high quality information and delightful user experience. make the users want push notification before you prompt them, the best way to do this is to have a checkbox to enable push notifications in context. this makes it clear not only what the push notification request is for but how they can turn them off when they do not want them. in this example app users can turn on notifications for particular information channels with the “notify me on updates” checkbox: if they check the checkbox then we will call pushmanager.subscribe() which will prompt the user to enable notifications. the users are more likely to enable push notifications because they chose to be prompted through their own intuition. on a related note app install banners: in some browsers, app install banners, pop up in a similar way to poorly done notification requests. it is not in response to a user action and are unrelated to your app’s content and not part of your apps user interface. it is possible to integrate this into your app interface, letting you hide this banner and letting you provide your own install button. do this in the beforeinstallprompt event: window.addeventlistener('beforeinstallprompt', handleinstallprompt); you can use this event to integrate an app install button into your app. if you get this event then you can show the button which allows the content to be installed. in the below image i put a subtle bubble at the bottom of the homepage for installing it. it’s easy to find and access but won’t intrude on the user’s app experience. the user pays the cost of notification, don’t be expensive. the user doesn’t pay a cost in money but they do in attention. each notification is a weight upon the user’s mind. a notification to a user when their attention is at their limit could be the motivation the user needs to block all notifications from the entire web browser. each notification should bring joy to the user. how do you bring joy? be timely if you could’ve given this information earlier or could show it later why bother interrupting the user right now. bad notification: ‘did you know you can send money with our app’ good notification: ‘alice has sent you $20’ be efficient opening an app or web page is comparatively slow, it can take a few seconds which is a long time to someone who is busy cooking dinner or watching netflix or at work. if you can put all the information in the notification without them opening the app then do that. if all the response you need is a simple option-a/option-b question such as yes/no then add those buttons. when the user presses the button update the notification to acknowledge the button press but don’t open the app. eve has requested $15 [send now] [decline] be clear there are many options to change the appearance of the notification use as many as possible to make it clear where the app is from, what it’s about and what action is expected from the user. use the badge and icon for your app icon. use the title to give a summary of what action the user needs to take, use the body and image to give relevant information and context. the next section describes how to customise your notificaition. do not waste the user’s time don’t push ads, don’t use them to beg users to return, don’t push boring notifications to remind the user your web app exists. i know it’s tempting and you have quotas to meet but it will only have an adverse effect on how the user views your app and notifications as a whole. the user probably does not love your app as much as you do and will be a lot less forgiving. fully customising push notifications here is an example notification where as much as possible has been configured: { body: "awkward zombie - disagree to agree", icon: "/icons/appicon.png", image: "https://example.com/previewimage.jpg", badge: "data:image/png;base64,ivborw0kggoaaa...", vibrate: [100, 50, 100], data: data, tag: data.url, actions: [ { action: "read now", title: "open" }, { action: "close", title: "close" }, ], }; self.registration.shownotification(title, options); if assets take too long to load they get ignored. the most important icon is the badge icon since it’s the one which gets put into the status. it’s also very small so is ideal to be url encoded and is kept in a constant in the service worker file, to ensure it is loaded reliably. for the icon we use the app icon so it’s extra clear where the notification is from. this is a locally loaded png to be sure it loads quickly. the image is loaded from the third party site the being loaded from the rss feed we don’t need to have it store local it’s okay for these to be from somewhere else. it adds good context but it isn’t essential so if it does not load in time then it’s not an absolute problem. these examples of action buttons i’ve done here are probably not totally necessary since notifications can be closed by some other means and we can just listen for notification clicks. better examples would be something like “open” and “remind me later”, defaulting to “open” if neither button is clicked. detailing the different parts of the notification combining notifications you can’t guarantee a user will check their device in between notifications. new notifications by default do not replace the the old ones so this can result in an overwhelming flood of notifications if they arrive in short succession. if you set the tag property then notifications which share the same tag can overwrite each other. in this example the tag is set to the rss feed’s url, so that notifications from the same rss feed overwrite each other. this is better since we don’t get flooded but now if a second notification comes through we lose the first one. it’s probably a good idea to check to see if you are replacing a notification and if you are concatenate them together. const existingnotifications = await self.registration.getnotifications({ tag: data.url, }); if (existingnotifications.length) { const oldnotification = existingnotifications[0]; options.body = oldnotification.body + '\n' + options.body; } there is a limited amount of text that can be fit into a notification body. an alternative solution would be to replace the notification with one that just says ‘you have n notificaitons’ then when the user taps on it open your web app’s notification interface. updating notifications this can also be a good way to update the user in notification only interfaces. once they have click on the notification to perform an action make, the request to the server to perform that action. once the request completes then show a new notification acknowledging it’s completion. self.addeventlistener("notificationclick", async function (e) { const notification = e.notification; const action = e.action; if (action === "close") { notification.close(); } if (action === "respond") { // close the old notification notification.close(); const response = await fetch('/api/respond.json') .then(r => r.json()); // let the user know if it succeeded or not if (response.ok) { self.registration.shownotification("success", options); } else { self.registration.shownotification(response.error, options); } } }); by having the user interact only through push notifications the user can complete their task and have a positive interaction with your app without needing to dedicate much mental energy to it giving a positive experience. together we can use push notifications to enrich people’s lives and make users have a positive association to push notifications.
Ada Rose Cannon
Develop Samsung Wallet
docpay as you go card type payasyougo sub type evcharges type value description payload object cardtemplate object required wallet card template object cardtemplate prtnrid string 32 required partner id cardtemplate templaterefid string 19 required partner template id cardtemplate title string 32 required wallet card name cardtemplate countrycode string 2 conditional the main headquarters location * required when creating a template cardtemplate cardtype string 100 conditional this value is set to “payasyougo” * required when creating a template cardtemplate subtype string 100 conditional this value is set to “evcharges” * required when creating a template cardtemplate prtnrapppckgname string 128 optional app package name cardtemplate applogoimg string 200 optional the banner logo image url cardtemplate nonetworksupportyn string 1 optional this must be set to either 'y' or 'n' * default 'n' cardtemplate sharebuttonexposureyn string 1 optional this must be set to either 'y' or 'n' * default 'y' cardtemplate privacymodeyn string 1 optional this must be set to either 'y' or 'n' * default 'n' cardtemplate preventcaptureyn string 1 optional this value is a screen capture prevention flag that defines whether the content view prevents screen capture cardtemplate state string 15 optional wallet card's state* default 'draft' cardtemplate testingmodeoff string 1 optional testmode offeither 'y' or 'n'* default ‘n’available only when updating templates cardtemplate desc string 500 optional description { "cardtemplate" { "prtnrid" "4082825513190138240", "templaterefid" "2138240408282551318", "title" "wallet card title", "prtnrapppckgname" "prtnrapppckgname", "countrycode" "us", "desc" "desc", "cardtype" "payasyougo", "subtype" "evcharges", "applogoimg" "http //www yourdomain com/banner_logo_image png", "nonetworksupportyn" "n", "sharebuttonexposureyn" "y", "privacymodeyn" "n", "preventcaptureyn" "n" } } -generic card card type generic sub type others type value description payload object cardtemplate object required wallet card template object cardtemplate prtnrid string 32 required partner id cardtemplate templaterefid string 19 required partner template id cardtemplate title string 32 required wallet card name cardtemplate countrycode string 2 conditional the main headquarters location * required when creating a template cardtemplate cardtype string 100 conditional this value is set to “generic” * required when creating a template cardtemplate subtype string 100 conditional this value is set to “others” * required when creating a template cardtemplate designtype string 100 optional select from these values “generic 01”, “generic 02”, “generic 03”* default “generic 01” cardtemplate prtnrapppckgname string 128 optional app package name cardtemplate applogoimg string 200 optional banner logo image url cardtemplate nonetworksupportyn string 1 optional either 'y' or 'n'* default 'n' cardtemplate privacymodeyn string 1 optional either 'y' or 'n'* default 'n' cardtemplate preventcaptureyn string 1 optional screen capture prevention flag cardtemplate category string 20 optional select from the following values “parking_pass”, “membership”, “reservations”, “insurance”, “health”, “receipt”, “coupon_stamp”, “note”, “photo”, and “others” cardtemplate state string 15 optional wallet card's state* default 'draft' cardtemplate testingmodeoff string 1 optional testmode offeither 'y' or 'n'* default ‘n’available only when updating templates cardtemplate desc string 500 optional description { "cardtemplate" { "prtnrid" "4082825513190138240", "templaterefid" "2138240408282551319", "title" "wallet card title", "prtnrapppckgname" "prtnrapppckgname", "countrycode" "us", "desc" "desc", "cardtype" "generic", "subtype" "others", "applogoimg" "http //www yourdomain com/banner_logo_image png", "designtype" "generic 02", "nonetworksupportyn" "n", "category" "membership", "privacymodeyn" "n", "preventcaptureyn" "n" } }
Develop Smart TV
docsamsung checkout q&a this topic solves various issues you may face while creating applications that use samsung checkout service select the applicable section to see the most common questions about a specific subject, and click the section heading to access all the available questions for that subject faq search form search application development issues q1 my application is getting the following error “[payresult] cancel” how can i send a question to samsung checkout team? below you can find a sample email that you can send to us through the samsung apps tv seller office 1 1 q&a section tv q2 i got the following error in response to the api "/billing/service/v2/paymethods/md" as { "status" "0410424", "result" "оформление покупки не поддерживается [da-0219-a7af33]", "resultlongmesg" "unavailable service support country ", "resulttitle" "недоступно" } what's wrong? the "md" at the end is the country code for "md moldova, republic of", which is not a supported country for the samsung checkout service to see all the list of country where samsung checkout is supported, go to the "country and currency codes" section in implementing the purchase process tv q3 if a user purchases a product which has only been made available in a single country, can that purchase be returned using the "invoice/list" endpoint even if it is using a different country code than the one the user purchased the product in? yes the response for "invoice/list" does not consider the country code of the api request parameter, it returns all of the purchases what the buyer has purchased regardless of country tv q4 is there a checklist that i can follow in order to check if my application is integrating with samsung checkout api properly? yes, below is the minimum checklist for integration with samsung checkout, you can test each item in the checklist to make sure your application works properly when purchasing the product when the samsung checkout client is launched, it shows the loading by itself, no graphical overlapping should exist in user experiences during the transition for example, a 3rd party application should not show loading when launching the samsung checkout client check the purchase process based on the type of product consumable/dynamic item type the user should be able to use the appropriate payment method to buy the item, and the title and price on the purchase page should be same as intended subscription/free trial item type in addition to the above, the user should be able to see the next payment date or relevant information of the subscription item check the post-purchase process in the 3rd party application does the 3rd party application reflect the result of a purchase in the application properly after completing the purchase process? both the success case for a purchase and other cases should be handled is there any overlap when screen is switched from the samsung checkout client to the 3rd party application? check the purchase history based on the type of product go to the "tv menu > samsung account > payment info" to see the subscription or purchase history the user needs to be able to check the purchase history or subscriptions of the item the user needs to be able to check subscription details check the user purchase history from the user buyer portal to make sure the history is properly updated after making a purchase, go to the samsung checkout website and check whether your status is updated properly test for exceptions turn off the tv while the purchase is in progress and checks if any inappropriate status is observed for example, go to the "tv menu > samsung account > payment info" to see the subscriptions or purchase history after completing the purchase of the item, turn the tv off and on again and run the 3rd party application to see if the previous purchase is still in active status tv dpi portal usage guide from the dpi portal, partners can register and manage products for sale and access the transaction history logs and sales reports for the applications they own q5 how do price changes work? if you want to change the price of an existing item, go to the dpi site and select "app > product list on the left side > product id" from there, you can change the product price for countries where it is necessary to select a tax category, you need permission from the samsung administrator to change the price prices you set can be changed after three months and you must notify the consumers of the new price tv q6 can we have a unique product for each country? when a buyer purchases a specific product which is sold in multiple countries, they have the right to access any of those versions therefore, if you want to give a right for the purchase only within a single country, you need to register products separately for each country the product id needs to be different tv q7 are security keys tied to the appid value? for example, if we have 2 applications each with their own id, will each one have its own securitykey? this is correct, security keys are bound to the appid tv q8 when we login on the dpi site, our application is not listed on it how can we add it? when you enroll your application on the seller site, you need to check the appropriate options for using samsung checkout refer to the picture below tv operation of your service this section explains the issues related to the operation of your service q9 can i use samsung checkout service for hotel tv applications? no, samsung checkout service is available on only samsung smart tvs htv q10 can i use my tv to test samsung checkout? i bought samsung smart tv around 2016 yes, samsung checkout service is available since the 2016 samsung smart tv range however, the latest features are guaranteed to function only for the last three years, and there may be a difference in the functionality of each year tv q11 does samsung send push notifications, e-mail, or any sort of messaging to users throughout the service lifecycle free trial, subscribe, cancel ? samsung sends an e-mail to users who buy items, subscribe, cancel, and refund in addition, samsung sends a notice e-mail to users whose subscription item payment has failed tv q13 what happens to current users who are in the middle of their subscription, when cp changes the price? will the user get some notification when they renew next time? no the service provider must relay this information to the buyers before the changes are made, because samsung checkout does not send price change notifications to buyers who subscribe to subscription products tv q14 does the samsung checkout charge users based on local currency, or based on the credit card that is used? for example, can you pay with us credit card in columbia? will the card be charged in local currency, or in usd? you will be charged in local currency tv q15 what are "customid" and "ordercustomid"? "customid" and "ordercustomid" have the same value "customid" also uses the same value as "ordercustomid" when calling buyitem if you have a unique id, use it if not, use the samsung account uid tv q16 how is the provider's user account data matched with samsung checkout's transaction list? this is done using "ordercustomid" if the provider has a user account, they can put the value in the "ordercustomid" parameter when calling the buyitem api this value is mapped to the transaction list's "order custom id" column tv product type this section includes information related to product types that can be purchased using the samsung checkout service limited period q17 in the response data of the "invoice/list" api, are `period`, `appliedtime`, `limitendtime`, and `remaintime` always present for `invoicedetails` objects that have an `itemtype` of limited period? yes tv q18 in the api spec document for the response data of "invoice/list" api, `limitendtime` is listed as "limited period product end time, in 14-digit utc time" does this mean that the field is not mandatory, that it should either exist and be a 14-digit string, or that it should not exist? no, limitendtime must exist when a limited period product is applied tv q19 from the response data of "invoice/list" api, what is the expected value of the `limitendtime` field when a purchase hasn’t been applied yet? it appears that for limited period item purchases that have not been applied `itemtype` is "3" , the `limitendtime` field is set to "" correct limitendtime is calculated based on the date and time when the purchase is applied tv subscription q20 in the response data of the "invoice/list" api, is `subscriptioninfo` ever present for `invoicedetails` objects that do not have an `itemtype` of subscription? subscriptioninfo is shown only when itemtype is subscription tv q21 does an invoiceid ever change, or is it static? if a new purchase is made, does it always generate a new invoiceid? the invoiceid is generated when the buyer subscribes to a product for regular payment however, subscriptionid is generated only when the buyer subscribes a product for the first time samsung checkout uses the first invoiceid as the subscriptionid and it is never updated tv q22 does subscription end date `subsendtime` get updated as soon as a user has been successfully billed for the upcoming period of the subscription? no, the subscription end date subsendtime describes the expiry time of this subscription not nextpaymenttime tv q23 how is a month defined in subscriptions? calendar month or 30/31 days? calendar month the next month's payment is made on the same day of the month as the day the consumer first applied for the subscription for example, if the consumer applied for a subscription on november 14th, the next payment is made on december 14th for months that don't have a day corresponding to the settlement date such as the 31st , payment is made at the end of the month tv q24 would the canceling of a subscription/closing of the account automatically trigger a refund at samsung checkout? no even if the consumer withdraws their samsung account or cancels a subscription to the regular payment, this does not refund any payments already charged on the next settlement date, the subscription status is changed from 'active' to 'expired', and regular payment is stopped tv
events mobile, ai
blog#sdc2017 wrapped up today and it was our best conference yet. the day started off with keynote speeches from arianna huffington, stan lee and rain paris. the action continued on the floor with lots of activity at the samsung pay, galaxy apps and samsung health booths, just to name a few. however, the talk of the conference was the announcement of bixby 2.0, which introduces deep linking capabilities and enhanced natural language abilities to better recognize individual users and create a predictive, personalized experience that better anticipates needs. the bixby sdk will be available to select developers and through a private beta program, with general availability coming in 2018. this afternoon, we sat down with the samsung bixby home team to learn more about bixby home and what developers can expect from its newly launched sdk. tell us about bixby home. bixby home helps you navigate your smartphone and make your day easier. it learns and adapts to show you the content you care about. it allows for easier access to apps, important information and personalized daily content. essentially, you get what you need when you need it. when you interact with bixby home, you’ll engage with cards that contain the information you want. social media cards contain all your important social feeds news cards carry the information that you want to read media cards show you the videos you want to interact with international cards allow you to book travel it’s available on the s8, s8+ and the note 8. it will be available on all galaxy flagships devices coming out in the new year. tell us about the sdk you just launched for bixby home here at sdc. the new sdk gives developers two different ways to develop content cards for bixby home: the first way is app-based integration, which pulls content from partner mobile apps. this creates app-based cards. for this type of development, devs will need to add an api library into their mobile apps. the second way is server-based integration, which pulls content from partner servers. here, developers are required to map endpoints from their server to the bixby home server through a server api. the creation process is simple enough: first devs need to register as a developer and then they need to submit their card plan. next, they create, configure, submit the card for approval, conduct an integration test and deploy. currently, there are six different types of cards they can create: utility, multimedia, news cards, location cards, communications cards and commerce cards – more to come in the near future. what’s the value proposition for devs? why develop bixby home cards? well, there are a few reasons why devs would want to develop for not only for bixby home, but also for samsung mobile: they get access to all samsung customers, they see increased engagement with apps and services and they extend consumer reach across multiple devices. what kind of support will devs receive when developing with the new sdk? with the sdk, partners control their content. however, there are api libraries for both app-based cards and server-based cards. they receive a developer guide, a ux guide, and sample cards and apps to review. through the partner portal, devs can manage their cards. here they can propose, design and create their cards, as well as track card analytics. they’re supported every step of the way. we’re very excited about this new sdk and want to set our developer partners up for success. thanks to all the developers, designers, creators, partners, sponsors and everyone else who joined us at #sdc2017. it truly was a great event and we can wait to start working with you all this year to bring our announcements to life. follow us on @samsung_dev to keep the conversation going and keep an eye on our blog for technical content that will bring your dev game to the next level. and see you next year!
Samsung Developer Program
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 2, 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 olga gabay zeru studio listen download this episode topics covered galaxy themes studio galaxy store consumers galaxy store developers galaxy store badges social media promotions licensing ip marketing best of galaxy store awards helpful links olga gabay linkedin zeru studio facebook behance 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 four on today's show, i interview olga gabay olga is a 2020 best of galaxy store award winner for her phone ui theme design, dark warrior in just a few years, her design style for capturing emotion in her themes, has helped her become one of the top developers on galaxy store not only do we talk about her approach to design, the impact of covid, but also the challenges related to using licensed imagery enjoy i am super excited to have on the podcast with me today olga gabay welcome to the podcast, olga olga gabay 00 50 thank you tony morelan 00 52 i absolutely love your work your designs always evoke such emotion you know, when i see your themes, i often think of them as like movie posters, or even like video game covers they all seem to like tell a story that being said, though, when they look at your full library of work, it's quite a variety of styles who is olga gabay? olga gabay 01 15 well, basically, i'm a graphic designer, i started to do this middle of 90s by now it's like, almost 26 years of experience so throughout all these years, what i collected, i mean, like, ideas, experiences i just brought up now in my themes, and i still keep experimenting so actually, sometimes people they don't believe all my works are by the same designer, because there is a variety of styles actually, i'm not really happy with that, because i'm more jealous to people who can produce all their works in just one style something when you can say this designer has some unique face some unique style, and i don't have it, i want to try these and that and that, you know, like everything, a little bit of everything tony morelan 02 03 yeah, when i think of olga gabay, i definitely do think of those that that certain style that i had mentioned, where it really does capture emotion but as i'm scanning through your collection, i see this wide variety and i think i can relate to that a lot because even in my watch face designing that i was doing i remember before i worked at samsung, i had someone at samsung, give me a little advice and say, you know, you should pick a style, you should pick a direction and then build on that brand and i couldn't do it i was just i would do something that was very artistic, or i do something that's very mechanical and i guess that's just that's how i work but that's what i can relate to that for sure interesting that you said that you started designing back in the 90s that's about the time that i did, too we get the joy of working when adobe was doing all those early releases of photoshop and illustrator, we got to be a part of that so is that true? were you working in photoshop back in the in the early days? olga gabay 03 02 oh, yes, absolutely so i believe my first photoshop ah, that was a version of 2 5 i think okay and yes, that's so it was a lot of fun back then because, you know, like when they introduced this layer system? oh, yes i was like, wow, now you can put things on different layers that was so exciting tony morelan 03 21 yeah, i remember that i remember even like multiple undo’s when i first started, i think it was photoshop, you know, 1 2, we didn't even have multiple undo it was one undo and that was there was no history you couldn't go back that was everything was on one layer but you know what that made us pay attention that much more closely to the work that we were doing? did you study design in school? is this, you know, a career path that you started out olga gabay 03 51 early on? yeah, i will start in just the college but back then in the college, we didn't study any computers so we were doing everything that old fashioned ways like with paper paints, pencils, glues that sort nothing much yes tony morelan 04 05 and you know what's great about that, and you can tell me if you have the same sort of theory on that i often tell when i'm when i'm teaching classes in schools, you need to grab a pencil and paper to do your initial copying, that if you dive right into a computer program, you're limiting your freedom to design so i always say those first comp designs, you should really grab pencil and paper did you have the same approach to design? olga gabay 04 30 yes, i agree with that but i used to do it for many years but you know, in all my themes now, i never did even a single time because i was always like under the pressure of to make my collection and then i just lost this habit so nowadays, i just go straight but of course i do draft it's not like i create the image of the wallpaper as it's supposed to be first, i'm just composing everything with low resolution images and just doing some marks with an image electronic pen sure so with my tablet, you know, so it's still drafting, but electronically gotcha i tony morelan 05 06 see i see yeah, i'm not surprised when i see your work i do see a lot of, i'll call it collaging so it looks like you're compiling different imagery and bringing it together to make a new scene so i could definitely see where you do rounds of, of comping and revisions to finally get to that final design olga gabay 05 25 yeah, exactly tony morelan 05 26 let me back up just a little bit and tell me where are you originally from? olga gabay 05 31 so, i came from russia from moscow i moved to canada 20 years ago, in the greater toronto area, as life is more quiet here nice i'm tony morelan 05 39 sure it's a little a little cold, where you are at least this time of year up in canada your name is olga gabay but tell me do you have a company name? is there a brand name behind olga? olga gabay 05 50 yes, my company name is zero studio but because it's a small studio, and i'm the only designer there two other people they do some routine things not related to the designing so i often go under my own name i know it's sometimes it creates a little mess but my name in the theme store is more a result of registration so i could not put the company name that's the problem now i can change it tony morelan 06 15 yeah, once you start building your collection, it can be a little difficult to halfway through to want to change course and switch the brand name because you lose the history and the download recording of it yeah, i understand your situation on that tell me about how you first learned about samsung and designing themes olga gabay 06 34 oh, actually, that's a little bit funny story, because i was just exploring things on my phone, some new features, some settings, you know what i can do? and i came across the theme store and the very first thing i realized there that it's not all these themes, they're not created by samsung electronics itself, i mean by the local people so there are all different designers from all over the world and when i found that out at home, i can do the same, i need to give it a try so then i just googled how to create themes for samsung galaxy phones and that brought me to the page where everyone can register for the program sure tony morelan 07 14 so how many years ago was that? olga gabay 07 16 sorry, something years ago? first, it took me about two months to create my portfolio actually, then the review? you know, it's a long process tony morelan 07 23 yes, the review team gets a lot of applications yes, i know super excited that you were selected and that you've become one of the top designers for samsung is theme designing? is this your full-time job? or do you do other design projects olga gabay 07 39 currently, it's my full-time job, i was so excited to be accepted, i just started creating one thing after another at first it was mostly wallpapers, then themes, you know, you also need to do a lot of other things like searching for the images that you are going to use sometimes it takes a lot of time to find the appropriate images that you want to use in the in the other thing is social media promotion, takes tons of time, yes, registering the application, all these keywords, translating them in other languages and verifying the language because you cannot simply put like translate from english to chinese yeah, you need to check if your translation is correct so the context is still the same and yes, it takes a lot of time tony morelan 08 22 so that's interesting what you said as far as translating for different languages, because i know that you have that opportunity when you're publishing your app to go in, in what's called add a language, if you don't add a language than english is just the default language for your theme meaning that regardless of what country a user is, in, when they actually look at your theme for sale, they're having to read it in english so you are taking that extra step and correct where you are selecting to add a language and then putting in translation so that users from around the world will actually see your text in their native language, correct? olga gabay 08 56 yeah, because i found out that many users, they do their search with their local language on the other hand, there are one major issue first of all, you cannot translate in all the languages, you can select the few most common ones yes and the second issue, as i just mentioned, it's you need to be sure that the context is correct because you know, like google translator or university context, sometimes they still can be misleading you cannot always trust them so then how do you gain confidence that what you're translating is correct well, i only have issues with chinese korean language and you know, chinese language is mandatory there because if you don't have chinese translation, your product won't be on the chinese market yes, korean language again, due to the huge amount of buyers in korea so all i can do is just put the translation of the google and check if the image is matching the word so if the result will be similar to what i expect to see so in chinese i recently translated the word pink color, okay, but the chinese it to be translated as a cream oh, and that's something you don't want to do because when you put this translation in that image search, you receive exactly the cream like cakes and oh, interesting yeah, or for instance, the word spring, it will give you spring like a piece of metal tony morelan 10 14 yes, like a bouncing spring okay so i see what you're doing so you're taking the translated words, and then sort of cross referencing them in google to just make sure that they are pulling up imagery that matches it so you know that yeah, that it has translated it correctly? yeah so let me go back and ask you, you had said that the name of your company is zero studios, that that's spelled ze are you? is that correct? olga gabay 10 39 yes correct tony morelan 10 39 yeah how did you come up with that name? is there a meaning behind that? olga gabay 10 42 already internet years, i use the name zero as my nickname and it means a sky in basque language i just wanted to have a nickname something related to sky i don't know why it was just kind of mode and then i just borrowed my own nickname to name the studio, because, you know, it's actually was quite quick decision i just needed to use something funny tony morelan 11 05 so you had mentioned that there are a few other people that work with you, but they don't do design? where are they assisting you? olga gabay 11 10 yep the social media marketing, because you know, it's a routine job when you need to repeatedly for instance, copy paste tags, yes, like scheduled posts, when you need to follow people, but it takes a lot of time so that's why i need to save and the second person is making this some registrations and updates, updating applications for instance, recently, i needed to change prices and because different countries, different abilities to pay, right, so we cannot put the same price for united states, for india and for i don't know, like africa, for instance right? we need to adjust them accordingly so like, depending on how much people can afford, every product should be changed manually tony morelan 11 56 yeah so you're coming up with a custom pricing approach, depending on different countries? olga gabay 12 02 yeah, that's an incredibly difficult job what i could do is just to hire someone to change his prices tony morelan 12 09 i see i see so we've talked a lot about themes, but are you designing also, wallpapers, aod? icons? yes, olga gabay 12 17 i designed everything so all four section like themes, wallpapers, say, always on display images and icons and because i have a huge amount of wallpapers, and lds, that creates actually a big number of products in my store so exactly, it would be 1650, something like this tony morelan 12 40 wow so i can see where you would need help with this managing olga gabay 12 46 so yeah, exactly because if it was just a few hundreds of them, it was fine but you know, well, okay, there are also a lot of free products but still, there are still hundreds of products to be changed manually tony morelan 13 00 so let's talk about that for a moment because that always is a good topic of discussion and that is this whole free approach so give me your insight, you know, how are you utilizing the ability to offer free wallpapers free themes? olga gabay 13 14 well, i will say my approach is just to take into account the people who cannot pay for the products, of course, it's mostly wallpapers again, simply because you know, it takes just a little job to do them because some wallpapers i create from scratch, but still majority are modified stock images so you just recall or in them like recomposing them, but just a little, you know, it's not like really a long, difficult work but i have approximately 10% of my themes are free and some of them, it took many, many hours to create and still i was willing to release them for free because like i said, the people who cannot buy mostly this, it's a conscious that don't have access to the paid content in the store because we have a huge section of this country's especially in africa, asia, like small island countries, they don't have an atoll, right? tony morelan 14 06 yes, that's a great approach i mean, i often tell designers that you know, you can utilize the free aspect of the galaxy store, but you do need to limit it so that you don't want to just be giving away all of your content, where you know, your fanbase is just expecting to get free i mean, you can use it as a way to broaden your brand but so you said at about 10% of your apps are free, meaning that the remaining 90% are paid, correct? olga gabay 14 34 yes, but it's only related to themes for wallpapers and lds, the percentage of free content is higher, okay it can be up to 30% because you know, it's kind of compromise if the person cannot or don't want a want to buy the theme, at least maybe this person can be satisfied with just the wallpaper tony morelan 14 55 so let's talk about your imagery, because i think that is one thing that stands out the most i mean, you do this this collaging you've talked a bit about how sometimes you're utilizing your own photography, but you also are licensing stock photography yes tell me a little bit about that approach olga gabay 15 13 again, in the very beginning, i was only using my own images and it was actually helpful because when i was creating my portfolio, i didn't want any conflict in situations, but the review team, so they wouldn't say, okay, like, we're not sure if this image is ever belong to you so i made sure i use only my own images just to show my capabilities, so that i can use my own photography or my own artworks but of course, later on, i started to utilize stock images simply because it's impossible for one person again, to create everything on their own right? because you cannot be illustrators 3d designer, videographer and everything so i started introducing stock images and the most difficult part, as we all know, you know, it's is licensing because first of all, there is no clear border between modified image and non-modified image because of course, if you're doing a complex collage, that's obvious, but if you change just a little, you cannot always say for sure whether it's good to be using the theme or not, that's actually the open question and i know that many designers, they keep asking it so my approach is to use different stocks for that the photobank that has soft agreement likes kind of, oh, you can, you can use it, but just make sure you modify the just a little and the amount of your downloads is not too high, it just doesn't exceed certain number but there are also some stocks with harder restrictions, then you want to make sure you don't go with this image aziz, tony morelan 16 41 you had mentioned that when you first apply to become a themes designer that you made certain that all of the artwork shown in your comp designs, was truly your own artwork and i just want to mention that yes, that is a requirement that for those that are applying to become a themes designer, you must use 100% all original artwork, you cannot use stock imagery and just to repeat, when you are publishing themes if you are using stock photography, you must you must make sure that you have the proper license in place for distributing certain imagery like that great to see that you are making that an important asset to your theme thank you so let's talk a bit about your workflow and the software you use to create your themes and wallpapers what's your what's your first step? olga gabay 17 28 okay, first step, i need to get some inspiration normally, i don't need to do anything special for it because in your normal life, when you observe some scenes or 3d or you're watching nice landscapes on instagram, or some other people art works on pinterest, you already like i use you see it and you think oh, here is some inspiration for a new theme and most often i get an influence from the music that i listen to that actually a majority of my themes, they based on the picture that that i create in my head by listening to something to some music, that's very interesting tony morelan 18 05 i love hearing that it's funny, because when i see a lot of your theme designs, they inspire an emotion and that emotion can definitely be conveyed, you know, through music so interesting that it's kind of reverse in the same state what music you're inspired by at that moment is what helps you in your mind, think of what would that theme be? olga gabay 18 26 yes, exactly so you can actually see this picture in your head while you see hear the sound and even i have a few themes that started with a ringtone so i don't know if you noticed, i have many of my themes, actually majority of my themes they have customized sounds, yes and here's the thing, some of the themes it's when i hear that beautiful piece on there in the sound bank, and i like wow, that's a perfect ringtone now, i need to make a picture for this ringtone that's funny, but you know, it's like that the old way reverse way to do things but yes, it's also a source of inspiration tony morelan 19 06 so that's really interesting that you say that because this past year, you actually won the best of galaxy store award for best innovative theme and when i saw your theme nominated, that's what stood out when i heard the ring tones i thought wow, this is really capturing the essence of the theme titled dark warrior so let's talk a little bit about that how did you first learn that you were winning? the best innovative theme for best of galaxy store awards? 2020 olga gabay 19 35 yes, i will justify it and i didn't expect that to be honest tony morelan 19 40 so have you leveraged? you know, the fact that you won this award? olga gabay 19 44 well, it just inspired me to create more themes of that would contain something different or for that i reserved the store market regularly just to check what other designers do and trying to figure out what they didn't try to apply in their themes so something that can be sort of unique element, we all want to be unique and something right because we want to be distinct, not just fluid, the store with the same kind of themes tony morelan 20 15 yes so what was unique with this year's award show was that because of the pandemic, we were not able to have an in-person event so then everything was online for those of you that haven't seen it, go check out on youtube, we have our best of galaxy store awards for 2020 olga wins the best innovative theme award for her theme, dark warrior i actually had the honor of helping olga create the trailer video, when we announce who won the award and what it was for we play a quick little 32nd clips to help the viewers see what this theme was, that was a blast for me to take your theme and the essence that you've created and tried to bring that to film, i was able to, you know, have some fun doing some voiceover work, i had a colleague of mine help with myself, where we both did the voice that is heard overlaid on top of the video and doing the motion behind it so i actually had a blast working on that trailer for your dark warrior theme olga gabay 21 14 and it was a fantastic job of you actually, because i was i was like so much surprised and it was really amazing, you know? tony morelan 21 22 yeah, so that was definitely go check out the video on youtube, you can jump ahead to when olga wins the award and take a look at that it really it was definitely a highlight for me working on that on the theme boards project so let's go back even a little bit further you actually came out to sdc19 to san jose, correct? olga gabay 21 44 yes, correct tony morelan 21 45 yeah, that's when i first met you so tell me about that experience? what was that like to fly down to san jose and get to meet not only the people at samsung, but i'm sure you had the opportunity to meet a lot of the other developers that were there at the event olga gabay 21 58 actually, i can tell straight it was my best experience of this year, as the best event i ever attended the last few years probably or even more, it was actually very exciting because not only i could meet people in the real life, make new connections but i learned a lot i attended your seminar on designing watch face tony morelan 22 19 so the seminar that you're referring to was that the one that i had the comedian up on stage with me, and we were working with the audience yeah yeah, that was a lot of fun yeah, we actually brought in a professional comedian and together, we were able to get the audience to help us inspire to create a watch this and that was a quite a fun event olga gabay 22 41 yeah, absolutely tony morelan 22 44 unfortunately, this year, we were not able to have a live event because of the pandemic can you tell me how the pandemic has affected you in your work? olga gabay 22 53 honestly, it wasn't affected at all, because i just keep doing my things and even my sales were not affected surprisingly, you know, i actually was i was prepared for the worst, but it didn't happen and i would say it, it was rather beneficial, because i spent more time staying home and that gave me opportunity to learn more, you know, now i can see i improve my skills because if not, i would probably spend this time more thinking outside with people like this that's true tony morelan 23 27 and you know what, you're not the first developer who has told me that, you know, due to the pandemic, more people were on their devices, they were at home, we saw a definite uptick in the use of devices, which meant that more people were downloading themes and wallpapers, but likewise, more developers were stuck at home and so they had more time to really work on their marketing their designs just really building their brand so we did see some success stories come out of this you know, unfortunate pandemic that we've all been in so what is in the future for olga gabay and zero studios olga gabay 24 11 so i'm planning to introduce in more of my own artwork like the same as i did in the very beginning, and to be unique tony morelan 24 18 so let's talk about some of the other designers so who out there in the samsung galaxy store inspires you olga gabay 24 24 i will say the theme designers are a sebastian ward cabbage and air design tony morelan 24 29 yes, both are great designers if you want to find them on the galaxy store sebastian wolodkiewicz is sw designs that's the letter s and the letter w and aire designs is spelled a i r e designs yeah, i love all of their themes olga gabay 24 45 in my opinion that's how that perfect theme should look like in terms of interface and usability so something that looks comfortable for the eyes with good looking icons and what i love about these two designers, they always have good choice of colors other icons are clear, readable they don't use color combination that tony morelan 25 04 hurt your eyes when i teach classes, i remind the students if it takes somebody, you know, a few seconds to actually figure out what that icon is, then you failed so yeah, so color, simplicity, when it comes to icons, those are all extremely important so when you're not designing themes, what do you like to do for fun? olga gabay 25 24 first of all, i prefer to spend time outside, especially, and the nature and i stick to the active lifestyle so i love all kinds of alternative workouts that can be performed outside of the gyms, and also, it's traveling and mostly traveling so i have visited many different countries and cities, and i love to do travel photography and then i also sell some disk images on photo banks and that's kind of, i will say, hobby or side hustle, what i enjoyed that's great that's great so not only are you utilizing stock imagery by purchasing the license to use them in your work, but you also are taking your photos and putting them out there for other people to you so tony morelan 26 07 that that's great yes, exactly well, olga, thank you very much for being on the podcast i really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me it's been, it's been a lot of fun olga gabay 26 17 thank you very much to me for this opportunity i really enjoyed this chat closing 26 21 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
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