>> 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)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's TheCUBE. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017 brought to you by Samsung. (techno music) >> Hello there and welcome to the special exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference 2017 here at the Moscone West in San Francisco, TheCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and co-host of TheCUBE. We're here with Leah Hunter: author, thought leader, covers technology design, women in tech, a variety of things author at O'Reilly's Safari Books, Fast Company, Forbes, among a lot of other things you've done. Welcome to TheCUBE conversation here at the Samsung Developer Conference. >> Thank you. I appreciate it. >> So, Samsung obviously is tied with Google. We saw Google onstage. The story we're seeing here emerging is the edge of the network of mobile devices. That means the humans involved. That means the consumer and the technology are intersecting. This has been a big part of TheCUBE coverage, we've been looking at this for a while. We were just in China talking with Alibaba Cloud and the design ethos culture. Not just creating user experience, that's been out for a while, but it's not about speeds and feeds anymore. It's about enabling human interactions, we're seeing some bad stuff now. The fake news, all that bad behavior, but now, all the data's out there. This is a big part of the developer design now coming forward. What's your thoughts? >> Well, there are two ways that I see that playing out really powerfully and that it can play out powerfully. One, ethnography and social science is getting embedded into what people are creating now and I'm thrilled to see that, because we're at the beginning of a lot of new technologies, augmented reality is one of my specializations, and we're, you know, sure, it's been around for 60 years if you're counting that way, 15 really deeply, but we're just at the cusp of it really taking hold for consumers. And there's this opportunity for anyone developing AR specifically to build social science ethnography user research into their team to create things in a way that is, like, start as you mean to go on. We can be wise about what our future world looks like. And the second thing is around art. You know, when I came here and I sat down, you mentioned at Alibaba there had just been a conversation about art. Well, in my latest book I interviewed someone who is an artist. His name is Alex Mayhew, he did a bunch of work with Peter Gabriel, he's a digital artist who just happened to slide into technology. And because his background is in something entirely different, he approaches AR in a really different way. He just did something for an art museum in Ontario that's really fantastic and worth checking out. You can actually look up the exhibit. It's called ReBlink. I'm going to write about it, but it's there now. >> Well, you've been covering technology many ways, now you're onto AR, and also you're seeing the front range if you will of these new concepts. But before you get it there, define what ethnography is for the folks that might not know what it is. (laughs) >> Thank you. I forget, okay, so I define ethnography as kind of like seeing the world like a five year old. There's an author that I love, her name is Keri Smith. She writes children's books. I found the first copy of this at the Teat Museum. It's called How to be a Life Artist. But her books are all about close observation, collecting everything, paying attention to the world, and finding everything interesting. Being curious in the same way you do when you're a five year old. Well, that's essentially what an ethnographer does in a business context. They observe, they interview people, they go around and collect data the same way that anyone who's on the data side is doing it with numbers. They do it with quotes and observation and pictures and then aggregate that into a story. >> That brings up a great conversation we're seeing here at the Samsung conference as a trend, a mega trend if you will, and that is the blending of analog and digital. Or, they say, physical to digital. Whatever they want to call it. Internet of things is the tech buzzword, >> (Leah) Yeah >> Internet of things being the senses on devices, or wearables, or things of that nature. That is defined as the edge of the network. This is the big wave that's forcing things to be different at the tech level. So this is where this blending comes in. It's the consumerization of tech. This is a big part of these consumer companies who have to kind of get their act together on cloud computing, and a lot of tech detail. So it's coming down from the edge, the infrastructures being redefined, or replatformed as we say. How do you view that, and what does your data show for you around how companies are reacting, what are the consumer expectations? >> Well, I'm going to speak to what I'm seeing in the world because I approach the world like an ethnographer. I wander around, and I collect interesting bits of things, kind of like a magpie. >> (John) Yeah. >> One thing that I saw this week, or I saw two things that were very interesting. I was just in New York, and I walked past an area where it was branded Amazon, but it kind of looked like a carnival. And I was like, what is going on here? And basically, Amazon is doing pop-ups, I believe they said in 18 cities, they just started in New York, but it's a pop-up where you can text in, and you can buy an item on Amazon that you can't get anywhere else. In this instance it was a Nintendo. You go and you pick it up in this physical space that kind of operates like a carnival and has circusy lights and beautiful trucks and whatever. But I thought that that was the coolest blend, and they also gave me their marketing materials that kind of looked like a ticket to a carnival. But I liked that, because it was a new way a digital focused company is operating in the physical world, to your point. It's a new way of blending those. And Amazon doesn't necessarily have to do it. It's just smart marketing. But it also shows the way that companies are pushing from the internet into the physical world. Now that's also happening in reverse. There's a company I really like called Shimmy that basically uses Kinect sensors to measure your body and make custom-made swimsuits for women. They're using that digital information and they're sort of, like, pushing it, so, yeah. >> Yeah, this is a big thing, I mean, this is about reimagining the future. And I think developers, this is a developer conference, so they tried out all the shiny new toys, Bixby, which is personalization now, IOT, which is kind of a geeky message, but ultimately the developers and the ecosystem partners of Samsung have to create the future together. So the question for you is around how you see the ecosystems developing. I see developers learning more about the real world. Less being behind the wall, if you will. Being the super geeks coding away. You're seeing developers on the front lines. And I think that's super important. I do want to get it noted here that you got a book coming out. >> Yes. >> So tell us what you're working on, cause it's going to ship in December? >> Yeah, I... >> What is the book about? I mean, obviously it's chroniclizing this new wave. What is the book about? Tell us a little bit about the book you're writing. >> So I wrote a book, my last book was about industrial augmented reality specifically, and it was sponsored by PTC, so you can actually go and find it for free. They wanted something that would work around industrial AR, and I wrote it in editorial independence so it is truly my perspective, but what was interesting about that at the time I wrote it, I discovered industrial AR was the most powerful place to play, because there were real world examples of AR actually helping people. >> John: Yeah. >> Now, I've broadened that look to see okay, Goldman Sachs said that there's going to be all this growth. Are the areas that they're looking at, things like education, real estate, you know, construction, is there actually growth there? So it's a broad look at a AR. And it's on O'Reilly's Safari Books. >> John: Well, that's interesting. One of the things that's interesting, you know, I've seen many waves myself, I've been through a bunch of cycles. It used to be the consumers that would lead the trends. But you're bringing up an interesting point around AI, augmented reality, even virtual reality. The innovations coming from the enterprise side. So, industrial IOT is really hot right now cause people are connecting physical plant and equipment. You see drones and it's mostly about industrial, AR's industrial because the use cases are so obvious. >> That's right. >> Not necessarily the consumer side has it yet. So it's almost flipped the entire world around. >> But, with, you know, Pokemon Go, that did sort of give consumers the scent, a scent of, okay, this is what it is you know, with AR kit, it hasn't completely lived up to our expectations, but there has been a flurry of activity around people experimenting to see how it can be applied in a consumer way. And, frankly, you know, there are people like DHL who are starting to roll it out in a way that is somewhere between industrial use and consumer in a broad way. So it's moving there. It is nowhere near ready for it yet. >> Leah Hunter here. A thought leader, writer, author, and a new book coming out. I'll give you the final word. What are you up to? What are you going to do after this event? What's next for you? What's the next couple months look like? Obviously, you've got to jam hard on the book, get that done, what else you working on? >> (laughs) I'm an interesting person to ask that question. I produce a television show called Created Here. I'm flying to Austin after this to interview artists and musicians and shoot our next episode of the show. Then we're going to LA and then New York. >> And where are you based out of? >> Me? >> Yeah. >> San Francisco, New York, a little bit Paris, and some New Orleans. >> You're on the plane a lot. >> I am. I like my life. >> Well, you've got a great life, and obviously great work you're doing. Come by TheCUBE studio in Palo Alto, give us an update on what your findings are as you go get that new perspective of art, artistry, artisans are really going to be the craft, we believe that TheCUBE will be the future of intersecting with technology. More exclusive coverage here in Moscone West in San Francisco, this is the Cube's coverage of Samsung Developer Conference. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.