>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. (electronic music) >> Welcome back everyone. Here live in San Francisco, Mascone West. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage live video here at Samsung Developer Conference, #SDC2017. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and co-host of theCUBE. My next guest is Dean Takahashi, who is the lead writer for GamesBeat for VentureBeat big blog covering business and innovation technology. Obviously, been a journalist and writer covering mobile and mobile gaming for a long time. Legend in the Silicon Valley community. Dean, great to see you. >> Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the kind intro. >> People who follow you know, you've been out there in the front line looking at the evolution of gaming obviously, from gaming and then obviously mobile gaming hit a thing. Then gen 2, gen 3. I don't know what generation we're on, but certainly Samsung is converging. That's their message here. Trying to keep these smart things, the cloud message a little bit of an IOT. Feels like an enterprise show a little bit. But, at the end of the day, it's the consumer connection. >> It's all coming together now >> It's all coming together. What's your rapport? What are you seeing? What are you reporting on? >> Well, I cover everything from the smallest startups, including the small game companies. I try to pay attention to Silicon Valley in general. And then the big companies as well. So, the relationships pertain to developers, who are on the small side to the platform owners on the big side. And, I see a really big war going on among all the platform owners. They're trying to get the hearts and minds of those developers. They're trying to bring in, trying to do what Samsung is doing. Which is integrate a lot of different things onto their platform. And, we'll see how much sort of openness is sort of left at the end of this. Or how much of a commons there is across the whole tech landscape, or the whole game industry. And I don't know who's going to win, who's going to own it all. But, everybody's trying. >> It's a war. Platform wars immediately. The device here, my new Samsung 8 is nice. It's got a big screen. It's gameable. Mobile gaming obviously hot. But again, the platform wars are interesting. Now they have the living room, they've got the kitchen, the smart family hub. All this stuff they're talking about. They had the smart TV for a while. The question that I have is, developers don't want hassles. They want the distribution and all the goodness of the big vendor, but one of the things Samsung seems to be trying to create is this unified fabric of breaking down the stovepipes within their company. Problem is, developers won't tolerate different API documentation. This is an issue we've heard from developers here in theCUBE is how does Samsung do that? Because that'll really be, that's the kryptonite for developers. That'll keep the super developers away. >> Yeah. Like the announcement they had here about the Internet of Things and trying to sort of integrate three different standards down into one is the kind of move that you have to make or you have to seek. Some of these come in through acquisitions but, yeah. The developers don't want to mess around with the multiple APIs. >> It's interesting. We cover, as you know, we cover a lot of the enterprise and the emerging tech with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, and we see the enterprise is clear, right? DevOps, the cloud native, the Linux foundation. Those worlds are exploding. Open source is exploding. And then you got companies like Intel, which cares about field programmable gate arrays and 5G. Enabling that end to end. And then you've got the consumer companies whether it's Ali Baba or Samsung or a Google or an Apple, really caring about the device side. So, everything is kind of coming into the middle where cloud is the engine, right. So, the interesting thing I'd love to get your perspective on, Are developers sensitive to the fact that they can have more compu because augmented reality, even virtual reality. We've had one VIP influencer here on theCUBE say VR is done. 1.0 is done. But we learn from it. It didn't really hunt. It didn't really go off the shelves. But augmented reality is hotter, because it's more realistic. Drones are using augmented industrial IOT. >> Augmented reality has a nice launch pad, right. It's got a long runway off of smartphones. You create your app for smartphones and eventually it's going to run on all these other new things that come out, like the glasses. Once those are established, that's great. But in the meantime, the apps and developers can sort of make this living on the smartphone. >> So it's not a big bad like a Google Glass where it just kind of crashes and burns >> Yeah. >> Kind of thing. So they can get some beach head with mobile. >> Yeah. >> So the question for you is how vet the signal from noise on companies. Obviously you look for the ones that have more of a pragmatic business model. Get in on mobile gaming. Obviously Google is on stage with Android. So you're starting to see more openness with APIs. Differentiating from Apple, ecosystem, which it is what it is. How do you see companies differentiating and being real? >> Signal from noise, you do look at everything from who their alliances are with, to how many people, do they have enough people to get the job done? Do they have the funding? It's sort of figuring out whether the team has experience at what they're doing. So, a lot of the basics of journalism. Just finding out facts about a company. >> So, Magic Leap. Have you dug into those guys? I saw the funding news yesterday. Another $500 Million. >> Yeah. >> I haven't seen the product. I haven't seen the demo. I'm not covering gaming like you are. But you have seen their demo. Have you? >> I haven't seen their demo. >> I think a half, a half a million dollars more. That's a war chest. >> Yeah. They're out in Florida. So they're a bit far from me. They are very lucky to have convinced someone to give them some additional money. When they've burned through a billion dollars plus already so, $1.4 billion >> Insane. And nothing to show for it. >> $500 million more, yeah. And they're very ambitious and that's good but, >> It better be good. >> They almost seem like they were trying to say we're going to accelerate and beat Moore's Law. We're going to do something impossible, put these things into little glasses and it's going to be amazing. It's going to be like, so you can't distinguish augmented reality from reality, right? And surprise, surprise, you can't really rush Moore's Law. >> And by the way that's, I'm surprised they're not in Silicon Valley because it seems like that's a go big or go home strategy. Certainly, a billion dollars they've burned through, another half a billion. No one can do that. It's hard to do. So, back down to the more pragmatic ecosystem, you're seeing Samsung here. I like their approach. I think that it's a good strategy. They didn't overplay their hand at the show on talking about where the data resides. That was one thing I'm still not seeing but maybe they're going to bring that out later. Maybe it's not ready yet. The cloud, I didn't really see the cloud story there as much. I don't know what that means. So, those are open discussion points for me. But, certainly leveraging the device, leveraging the distribution is what they're offering. But then they made a comment here on theCUBE, "We're open." What does that mean? I mean Android's obviously got a benefit of being open. But what does open mean to you and how do you see that? >> I think that, you could argue that for smart things where it's connecting to something like an Invidia Shield. And you can use the remote control on an Invidia Shield to change your lighting, or something like that. So, it's sort of overlapping circles of certain, you know, I don't know if that's open. But it works. If you deliver something that works, your consumers, you know, it's relatively open. >> Yeah. And the glam is obviously electronics. Consumer electronics base. You've got a little bit of the IOT. I find this fascinating story of the IOT because people are things too. I mean, you're walking around with the phones. We have the fashion tech happening. And obviously gaming. Alright, what's the big surprise for you here at the show. Give me some positive review. What you liked about it, and what critical analysis, where they need to improve. What are some of your thoughts? >> I think there is always sort of that challenge for a big company like this that has a worldwide consumer base. How much do they want to cater to or appeal to the hardcore crowd? So, say like gaming and non-gamers is a good example of that. And they're not really trying to get everybody in gaming onto their platform or onto their side. They're saying that they're welcome. They can come. We've built this as an all-purpose sort of platform. And, they're not going out to invest in a lot of the game companies. They didn't put money into Magic Leap. They're not sort of trying to pull people in and >> They're not giving the hard sell. >> Yeah. The challenge then is that other companies are. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo of course are doing it. But Amazon, Google, even Apple to some degree is embracing a lot of gamers on the game platforms. Making their platforms fairly friendly. So, I think Samsung needs to decide whether it's going to step up in that space. Other territories, yeah. It's on a very good march, I think. To continuously come out with new tech that gets widely adopted. They're doing well in VR. But I think, it almost seems like they've embraced 360 video a lot more than they have on the game side. >> We'd certainly love to get those 360 cameras here. Apple versus Samsung. Obviously, World Wide Developer Conference is legendary. Samsung 4th year now doing this event. Compare, close, getting there, leveling up? >> Well, I think Apple's event was underwhelming in a lot of ways as far as just what they announced. And say even the performance of the phones. It doesn't really, it's kind of flatish compared to the performance of Samsung phones. I think Samsung has maybe a broader following and broader base. And they have the potential to draw >> And Android's global appeal >> draw more >> is pretty interesting. >> Yeah, draw more developers over who might find it easier. >> Interesting to see the psychographic profile of developer makeup from Apple and Samsung. Dean, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Dean Takahashi here inside theCUBE. Lead writer for GamesBeat, part of VentureBeat blog in Silicon Valley. Check them out, VentureBeat.com. Of course you've got siliconangle.com and thecube.net. That's our content there. This is theCUBE live coverage from Samsung Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier, right back with more after the short break. >> And also plug our GamesBeat conference. >> GamesBeat conference. >> GamesBeat Summit in April. April 9th and 10th in Berkeley. >> Yep, get the plug in. GamesBeat Conference in April. Check it out. Dean co-chairs the committee for getting the great content. Hardcore gamers, thought leaders. Check out GamesBeat Summit in April. Of course, this is theCUBE live coverage here in San Francisco. More after this short break. (electronic music)