Podcasts about Moscone

Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more to this influential and fascinating man's story. He was a trailblazing progressive and powerful state legislator who was instrumental in passing legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights to funding for school lunches. Moscone's 1975 campaign for mayor was historically significant because it was the first time a major race was won by a candidate who campaigned aggressively for expanding civil rights for both African Americans and LGBT people. He won his campaign for mayor chiefly because of huge support from those two constituencies. Moscone was also a very colorful character who, in addition to being a successful politician, was a charming and charismatic bon vivant who was deeply embedded in the fabric and culture of San Francisco. He grew up the only son of a single mother in Cow Hollow when it was a working class, largely Italian American neighborhood, and he became the kind of politician who knew bartenders, playground attendants, small business owners, and neighborhood activists in every corner of the city. Moscone's life and the history of San Francisco during the middle half of the twentieth century are deeply intertwined.  Through illustrating the life of Moscone, author Lincoln A. Mitchell explores how today's San Francisco came into being. Moscone--through his work in the State Senate, victory in the very divisive 1975 mayor's race, and brief tenure as mayor--was a key figure in the city's evolution. The politics surrounding Moscone's election as mayor, governance of the city, and tragic death are still relevant issues. Moscone was a groundbreaking politician whose life was cut short, but his influence on San Francisco can still be felt today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more to this influential and fascinating man's story. He was a trailblazing progressive and powerful state legislator who was instrumental in passing legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights to funding for school lunches. Moscone's 1975 campaign for mayor was historically significant because it was the first time a major race was won by a candidate who campaigned aggressively for expanding civil rights for both African Americans and LGBT people. He won his campaign for mayor chiefly because of huge support from those two constituencies. Moscone was also a very colorful character who, in addition to being a successful politician, was a charming and charismatic bon vivant who was deeply embedded in the fabric and culture of San Francisco. He grew up the only son of a single mother in Cow Hollow when it was a working class, largely Italian American neighborhood, and he became the kind of politician who knew bartenders, playground attendants, small business owners, and neighborhood activists in every corner of the city. Moscone's life and the history of San Francisco during the middle half of the twentieth century are deeply intertwined.  Through illustrating the life of Moscone, author Lincoln A. Mitchell explores how today's San Francisco came into being. Moscone--through his work in the State Senate, victory in the very divisive 1975 mayor's race, and brief tenure as mayor--was a key figure in the city's evolution. The politics surrounding Moscone's election as mayor, governance of the city, and tragic death are still relevant issues. Moscone was a groundbreaking politician whose life was cut short, but his influence on San Francisco can still be felt today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more to this influential and fascinating man's story. He was a trailblazing progressive and powerful state legislator who was instrumental in passing legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights to funding for school lunches. Moscone's 1975 campaign for mayor was historically significant because it was the first time a major race was won by a candidate who campaigned aggressively for expanding civil rights for both African Americans and LGBT people. He won his campaign for mayor chiefly because of huge support from those two constituencies. Moscone was also a very colorful character who, in addition to being a successful politician, was a charming and charismatic bon vivant who was deeply embedded in the fabric and culture of San Francisco. He grew up the only son of a single mother in Cow Hollow when it was a working class, largely Italian American neighborhood, and he became the kind of politician who knew bartenders, playground attendants, small business owners, and neighborhood activists in every corner of the city. Moscone's life and the history of San Francisco during the middle half of the twentieth century are deeply intertwined.  Through illustrating the life of Moscone, author Lincoln A. Mitchell explores how today's San Francisco came into being. Moscone--through his work in the State Senate, victory in the very divisive 1975 mayor's race, and brief tenure as mayor--was a key figure in the city's evolution. The politics surrounding Moscone's election as mayor, governance of the city, and tragic death are still relevant issues. Moscone was a groundbreaking politician whose life was cut short, but his influence on San Francisco can still be felt today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more to this influential and fascinating man's story. He was a trailblazing progressive and powerful state legislator who was instrumental in passing legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights to funding for school lunches. Moscone's 1975 campaign for mayor was historically significant because it was the first time a major race was won by a candidate who campaigned aggressively for expanding civil rights for both African Americans and LGBT people. He won his campaign for mayor chiefly because of huge support from those two constituencies. Moscone was also a very colorful character who, in addition to being a successful politician, was a charming and charismatic bon vivant who was deeply embedded in the fabric and culture of San Francisco. He grew up the only son of a single mother in Cow Hollow when it was a working class, largely Italian American neighborhood, and he became the kind of politician who knew bartenders, playground attendants, small business owners, and neighborhood activists in every corner of the city. Moscone's life and the history of San Francisco during the middle half of the twentieth century are deeply intertwined.  Through illustrating the life of Moscone, author Lincoln A. Mitchell explores how today's San Francisco came into being. Moscone--through his work in the State Senate, victory in the very divisive 1975 mayor's race, and brief tenure as mayor--was a key figure in the city's evolution. The politics surrounding Moscone's election as mayor, governance of the city, and tragic death are still relevant issues. Moscone was a groundbreaking politician whose life was cut short, but his influence on San Francisco can still be felt today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more to this influential and fascinating man's story. He was a trailblazing progressive and powerful state legislator who was instrumental in passing legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights to funding for school lunches. Moscone's 1975 campaign for mayor was historically significant because it was the first time a major race was won by a candidate who campaigned aggressively for expanding civil rights for both African Americans and LGBT people. He won his campaign for mayor chiefly because of huge support from those two constituencies. Moscone was also a very colorful character who, in addition to being a successful politician, was a charming and charismatic bon vivant who was deeply embedded in the fabric and culture of San Francisco. He grew up the only son of a single mother in Cow Hollow when it was a working class, largely Italian American neighborhood, and he became the kind of politician who knew bartenders, playground attendants, small business owners, and neighborhood activists in every corner of the city. Moscone's life and the history of San Francisco during the middle half of the twentieth century are deeply intertwined.  Through illustrating the life of Moscone, author Lincoln A. Mitchell explores how today's San Francisco came into being. Moscone--through his work in the State Senate, victory in the very divisive 1975 mayor's race, and brief tenure as mayor--was a key figure in the city's evolution. The politics surrounding Moscone's election as mayor, governance of the city, and tragic death are still relevant issues. Moscone was a groundbreaking politician whose life was cut short, but his influence on San Francisco can still be felt today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west

Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more to this influential and fascinating man's story. He was a trailblazing progressive and powerful state legislator who was instrumental in passing legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights to funding for school lunches. Moscone's 1975 campaign for mayor was historically significant because it was the first time a major race was won by a candidate who campaigned aggressively for expanding civil rights for both African Americans and LGBT people. He won his campaign for mayor chiefly because of huge support from those two constituencies. Moscone was also a very colorful character who, in addition to being a successful politician, was a charming and charismatic bon vivant who was deeply embedded in the fabric and culture of San Francisco. He grew up the only son of a single mother in Cow Hollow when it was a working class, largely Italian American neighborhood, and he became the kind of politician who knew bartenders, playground attendants, small business owners, and neighborhood activists in every corner of the city. Moscone's life and the history of San Francisco during the middle half of the twentieth century are deeply intertwined.  Through illustrating the life of Moscone, author Lincoln A. Mitchell explores how today's San Francisco came into being. Moscone--through his work in the State Senate, victory in the very divisive 1975 mayor's race, and brief tenure as mayor--was a key figure in the city's evolution. The politics surrounding Moscone's election as mayor, governance of the city, and tragic death are still relevant issues. Moscone was a groundbreaking politician whose life was cut short, but his influence on San Francisco can still be felt today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more to this influential and fascinating man's story. He was a trailblazing progressive and powerful state legislator who was instrumental in passing legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights to funding for school lunches. Moscone's 1975 campaign for mayor was historically significant because it was the first time a major race was won by a candidate who campaigned aggressively for expanding civil rights for both African Americans and LGBT people. He won his campaign for mayor chiefly because of huge support from those two constituencies. Moscone was also a very colorful character who, in addition to being a successful politician, was a charming and charismatic bon vivant who was deeply embedded in the fabric and culture of San Francisco. He grew up the only son of a single mother in Cow Hollow when it was a working class, largely Italian American neighborhood, and he became the kind of politician who knew bartenders, playground attendants, small business owners, and neighborhood activists in every corner of the city. Moscone's life and the history of San Francisco during the middle half of the twentieth century are deeply intertwined.  Through illustrating the life of Moscone, author Lincoln A. Mitchell explores how today's San Francisco came into being. Moscone--through his work in the State Senate, victory in the very divisive 1975 mayor's race, and brief tenure as mayor--was a key figure in the city's evolution. The politics surrounding Moscone's election as mayor, governance of the city, and tragic death are still relevant issues. Moscone was a groundbreaking politician whose life was cut short, but his influence on San Francisco can still be felt today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more to this influential and fascinating man's story. He was a trailblazing progressive and powerful state legislator who was instrumental in passing legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights to funding for school lunches. Moscone's 1975 campaign for mayor was historically significant because it was the first time a major race was won by a candidate who campaigned aggressively for expanding civil rights for both African Americans and LGBT people. He won his campaign for mayor chiefly because of huge support from those two constituencies. Moscone was also a very colorful character who, in addition to being a successful politician, was a charming and charismatic bon vivant who was deeply embedded in the fabric and culture of San Francisco. He grew up the only son of a single mother in Cow Hollow when it was a working class, largely Italian American neighborhood, and he became the kind of politician who knew bartenders, playground attendants, small business owners, and neighborhood activists in every corner of the city. Moscone's life and the history of San Francisco during the middle half of the twentieth century are deeply intertwined.  Through illustrating the life of Moscone, author Lincoln A. Mitchell explores how today's San Francisco came into being. Moscone--through his work in the State Senate, victory in the very divisive 1975 mayor's race, and brief tenure as mayor--was a key figure in the city's evolution. The politics surrounding Moscone's election as mayor, governance of the city, and tragic death are still relevant issues. Moscone was a groundbreaking politician whose life was cut short, but his influence on San Francisco can still be felt today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

*Hi friends, if you'd like to join us for a pre-screening of the new Amazon original movie “Holland” on Wednesday, March 18th,  please register here. All the details, including time and location are found on our Instagram page. Seats are limited, so register now to reserve yours.* Harvey Milk was a trailblazing politician and activist with a charismatic and fearless personality. In 1977, he became California's first openly gay elected official and became a powerful voice for marginalized communities…. But on the morning of November 27, 1978, Harvey's life was cut short just one year into his term when he and Mayor George Moscone became the target of a shocking act of violence.    Thank you to this week's sponsors!   Head over to Wayfair.com and find something that's just your style today. Wayfair. Every style. Every home. Treat yourself to the most comfortable shapewear on earth and save 20% Off sitewide at honeylove.com/MOMS20. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. PLEASE support our show and tell them we sent you. Treat yourself to Honeylove, because you deserve it. Celebrate the women in your life with Thrive Causemetics. Luxury beauty that gives back. Right now, you can get an exclusive 20% off your first order at thrivecausemetics.com/MOMS.  We've worked out a special deal with Hiya for their best selling children's vitamin. Receive 50% off your first order. To claim this deal you must go to hiyahealth.com/MOMS. This deal is not available on their regular website.  Check-out bonus episodes up on Spotify and Apple podcast now! To advertise on the show, contact sales@advertisecast.com or visit https://www.advertisecast.com/MomsandMysteriesATrueCrimePodcast.  Listen and subscribe to Melissa's other podcast, Criminality!! It's the podcast for those who love reality TV, true crime, and want to hear all the juicy stories where the two genres intersect. Subscribe and listen here: www.pod.link/criminality    Check-out Moms and Mysteries to find links to our tiktok, youtube, twitter, instagram and more.    Sources: https://milkfoundation.org/ https://milkfoundation.org/about/harvey-milk-biography https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ca-court-of-appeal/1834395.html https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/mayor-moscone/11  https://uchastings.academicworks.com/opportunities/1637 https://www.kqed.org/news/11708263/remembering-george-moscone-the-peoples-mayor-of-san-francisco https://www.famous-trials.com/danwhite/598-whiteconfession ​​https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/mayor-moscone/32/  https://www.famous-trials.com/danwhite/595-openingstatements https://www.famous-trials.com/danwhite/588-defense https://www.famous-trials.com/danwhite/607-rolandtestimony https://web.archive.org/web/20211116135122/https://www.nytimes.com/1978/11/29/archives/2-deaths-mourned-by-san-franciscans-25000-pay-tribute-at-city-hall.html https://web.archive.org/web/20211116135122/https://www.nytimes.com/1978/11/28/archives/suspect-sought-job-moscone-had-been-asked-to-reappoint-him-as-a.html https://web.archive.org/web/20211116140625/https://www.nytimes.com/1978/11/29/archives/exaide-held-in-moscone-killing-ran-as-a-crusader-against-crime.html https://web.archive.org/web/20211116141539/https://www.nytimes.com/1979/05/22/archives/exofficial-guilty-of-manslaughter-in-slayings-on-coast-3000-protest.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220121001637/https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/22/us/dan-white-killer-of-san-francisco-mayor-a-suicide.html https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Dan-White-Had-Other-Targets-Cop-Says-Plot-2990060.php The San Francisco Examiner https://www.newspapers.com/image/460828822/?terms=dan%20white%20supervisor&match=1 The San Francisco Examiner https://www.newspapers.com/image/460894957/?terms=dan%20white%20supervisor&match=1 The San Francisco Examiner https://www.newspapers.com/image/460800558/?terms=dan%20white%20supervisor&match=1  The San Francisco Examiner https://www.newspapers.com/image/460810075/?terms=dan%20white%20supervisor&match=1  The San Francisco Examiner https://www.newspapers.com/image/460896167/?terms=dan%20white%20supervisor&match=1 The San Francisco Examiner https://www.newspapers.com/image/460916394/?terms=dan%20white%20supervisor  https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/04/archives/dan-white-gets-7-years-8-months-in-double-slaying-in-san-francisco.html         

Bundle tickets for AIE Summit NYC have now sold out. You can now sign up for the livestream — where we will be making a big announcement soon. NYC-based readers and Summit attendees should check out the meetups happening around the Summit.2024 was a very challenging year for AI Hardware. After the buzz of CES last January, 2024 was marked by the meteoric rise and even harder fall of AI Wearables companies like Rabbit and Humane, with an assist from a pre-wallpaper-app MKBHD. Even Friend.com, the first to launch in the AI pendant category, and which spurred Rewind AI to rebrand to Limitless and follow in their footsteps, ended up delaying their wearable ship date and launching an experimental website chatbot version. We have been cautiously excited about this category, keeping tabs on most of the top entrants, including Omi and Compass. However, to date the biggest winner still standing from the AI Wearable wars is Bee AI, founded by today's guests Maria and Ethan. Bee is an always on hardware device with beamforming microphones, 7 day battery life and a mute button, that can be worn as a wristwatch or a clip-on pin, backed by an incredible transcription, diarization and very long context memory processing pipeline that helps you to remember your day, your todos, and even perform actions by operating a virtual cloud phone. This is one of the most advanced, production ready, personal AI agents we've ever seen, so we were excited to be their first podcast appearance. We met Bee when we ran the world's first Personal AI meetup in April last year.As a user of Bee (and not an investor! just a friend!) it's genuinely been a joy to use, and we were glad to take advantage of the opportunity to ask hard questions about the privacy and legal/ethical side of things as much as the AI and Hardware engineering side of Bee. We hope you enjoy the episode and tune in next Friday for Bee's first conference talk: Building Perfect Memory.Show Notes* Bee Website* Ethan Sutin, Maria de Lourdes Zollo* Bee @ Personal AI Meetup* Buy Bee with Listener Discount Code!Timestamps* 00:00:00 Introductions and overview of Bee Computer* 00:01:58 Personal context and use cases for Bee* 00:03:02 Origin story of Bee and the founders' background* 00:06:56 Evolution from app to hardware device* 00:09:54 Short-term value proposition for users* 00:12:17 Demo of Bee's functionality* 00:17:54 Hardware form factor considerations* 00:22:22 Privacy concerns and legal considerations* 00:30:57 User adoption and reactions to wearing Bee* 00:35:56 CES experience and hardware manufacturing challenges* 00:41:40 Software pipeline and inference costs* 00:53:38 Technical challenges in real-time processing* 00:57:46 Memory and personal context modeling* 01:02:45 Social aspects and agent-to-agent interactions* 01:04:34 Location sharing and personal data exchange* 01:05:11 Personality analysis capabilities* 01:06:29 Hiring and future of always-on AITranscriptAlessio [00:00:04]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of SmallAI.swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we are very honored to have in the studio Maria and Ethan from Bee.Maria [00:00:16]: Hi, thank you for having us.swyx [00:00:20]: And you are, I think, the first hardware founders we've had on the podcast. I've been looking to have had a hardware founder, like a wearable hardware, like a wearable hardware founder for a while. I think we're going to have two or three of them this year. And you're the ones that I wear every day. So thank you for making Bee. Thank you for all the feedback and the usage. Yeah, you know, I've been a big fan. You are the speaker gift for the Engineering World's Fair. And let's start from the beginning. What is Bee Computer?Ethan [00:00:52]: Bee Computer is a personal AI system. So you can think of it as AI living alongside you in first person. So it can kind of capture your in real life. So with that understanding can help you in significant ways. You know, the obvious one is memory, but that's that's really just the base kind of use case. So recalling and reflective. I know, Swyx, that you you like the idea of journaling, but you don't but still have some some kind of reflective summary of what you experienced in real life. But it's also about just having like the whole context of a human being and understanding, you know, giving the machine the ability to understand, like, what's going on in your life. Your attitudes, your desires, specifics about your preferences, so that not only can it help you with recall, but then anything that you need it to do, it already knows, like, if you think about like somebody who you've worked with or lived with for a long time, they just know kind of without having to ask you what you would want, it's clear that like, that is the future that personal AI, like, it's just going to be very, you know, the AI is just so much more valuable with personal context.Maria [00:01:58]: I will say that one of the things that we are really passionate is really understanding this. Personal context, because we'll make the AI more useful. Think about like a best friend that know you so well. That's one of the things that we are seeing from the user. They're using from a companion standpoint or professional use cases. There are many ways to use B, but companionship and professional are the ones that we are seeing now more.swyx [00:02:22]: Yeah. It feels so dry to talk about use cases. Yeah. Yeah.Maria [00:02:26]: It's like really like investor question. Like, what kind of use case?Ethan [00:02:28]: We're just like, we've been so broken and trained. But I mean, on the base case, it's just like, don't you want your AI to know everything you've said and like everywhere you've been, like, wouldn't you want that?Maria [00:02:40]: Yeah. And don't stay there and repeat every time, like, oh, this is what I like. You already know that. And you do things for me based on that. That's I think is really cool.swyx [00:02:50]: Great. Do you want to jump into a demo? Do you have any other questions?Alessio [00:02:54]: I want to maybe just cover the origin story. Just how did you two meet? What was the was this the first idea you started working on? Was there something else before?Maria [00:03:02]: I can start. So Ethan and I, we know each other from six years now. He had a company called Squad. And before that was called Olabot and was a personal AI. Yeah, I should. So maybe you should start this one. But yeah, that's how I know Ethan. Like he was pivoting from personal AI to Squad. And there was a co-watching with friends product. I had experience working with TikTok and video content. So I had the pivoting and we launched Squad and was really successful. And at the end. The founders decided to sell that to Twitter, now X. So both of us, we joined X. We launched Twitter Spaces. We launched many other products. And yeah, till then, we basically continue to work together to the start of B.Ethan [00:03:46]: The interesting thing is like this isn't the first attempt at personal AI. In 2016, when I started my first company, it started out as a personal AI company. This is before Transformers, no BERT even like just RNNs. You couldn't really do any convincing dialogue at all. I met Esther, who was my previous co-founder. We both really interested in the idea of like having a machine kind of model or understand a dynamic human. We wanted to make personal AI. This was like more geared towards because we had obviously much limited tools, more geared towards like younger people. So I don't know if you remember in 2016, there was like a brief chatbot boom. It was way premature, but it was when Zuckerberg went up on F8 and yeah, M and like. Yeah. The messenger platform, people like, oh, bots are going to replace apps. It was like for about six months. And then everybody realized, man, these things are terrible and like they're not replacing apps. But it was at that time that we got excited and we're like, we tried to make this like, oh, teach the AI about you. So it was just an app that you kind of chatted with and it would ask you questions and then like give you some feedback.Maria [00:04:53]: But Hugging Face first version was launched at the same time. Yeah, we started it.Ethan [00:04:56]: We started out the same office as Hugging Face because Betaworks was our investor. So they had to think. They had a thing called Bot Camp. Betaworks is like a really cool VC because they invest in out there things. They're like way ahead of everybody else. And like back then it was they had something called Bot Camp. They took six companies and it was us and Hugging Face. And then I think the other four, I'm pretty sure, are dead. But and Hugging Face was the one that really got, you know, I mean, 30% success rate is pretty good. Yeah. But yeah, when we it was, it was like it was just the two founders. Yeah, they were kind of like an AI company in the beginning. It was a chat app for teenagers. A lot of people don't know that Hugging Face was like, hey, friend, how was school? Let's trade selfies. But then, you know, they built the Transformers library, I believe, to help them make their chat app better. And then they open sourced and it was like it blew up. And like they're like, oh, maybe this is the opportunity. And now they're Hugging Face. But anyway, like we were obsessed with it at that time. But then it was clear that there's some people who really love chatting and like answering questions. But it's like a lot of work, like just to kind of manually.Maria [00:06:00]: Yeah.Ethan [00:06:01]: Teach like all these things about you to an AI.Maria [00:06:04]: Yeah, there were some people that were super passionate, for example, teenagers. They really like, for example, to speak about themselves a lot. So they will reply to a lot of questions and speak about them. But most of the people, they don't really want to spend time.Ethan [00:06:18]: And, you know, it's hard to like really bring the value with it. We had like sentence similarity and stuff and could try and do, but it was like it was premature with the technology at the time. And so we pivoted. We went to YC and the long story, but like we pivoted to consumer video and that kind of went really viral and got a lot of usage quickly. And then we ended up selling it to Twitter, worked there and left before Elon, not related to Elon, but left Twitter.swyx [00:06:46]: And then I should mention this is the famous time when well, when when Elon was just came in, this was like Esther was the famous product manager who slept there.Ethan [00:06:56]: My co-founder, my former co-founder, she sleeping bag. She was the sleep where you were. Yeah, yeah, she stayed. We had left by that point.swyx [00:07:03]: She very stayed, she's famous for staying.Ethan [00:07:06]: Yeah, but later, later left or got, I think, laid off, laid off. Yeah, I think the whole product team got laid off. She was a product manager, director. But yeah, like we left before that. And then we're like, oh, my God, things are different now. You know, I think this is we really started working on again right before ChatGPT came out. But we had an app version and we kind of were trying different things around it. And then, you know, ultimately, it was clear that, like, there were some limitations we can go on, like a good question to ask any wearable company is like, why isn't this an app? Yes. Yeah. Because like.Maria [00:07:40]: Because we tried the app at the beginning.Ethan [00:07:43]: Yeah. Like the idea that it could be more of a and B comes from ambient. So like if it was more kind of just around you all the time and less about you having to go open the app and do the effort to, like, enter in data that led us down the path of hardware. Yeah. Because the sensors on this are microphones. So it's capturing and understanding audio. We started actually our first hardware with a vision component, too. And we can talk about why we're not doing that right now. But if you wanted to, like, have a continuous understanding of audio with your phone, it would monopolize your microphone. It would get interrupted by calls and you'd have to remember to turn it on. And like that little bit of friction is actually like a substantial barrier to, like, get your phone. It's like the experience of it just being with you all the time and like living alongside you. And so I think that that's like the key reason it's not an app. And in fact, we do have Apple Watch support. So anybody who has a watch, Apple Watch can use it right away without buying any hardware. Because we worked really hard to make a version for the watch that can run in the background, not super drain your battery. But even with the watch, there's still friction because you have to remember to turn it on and it still gets interrupted if somebody calls you. And you have to remember to. We send a notification, but you still have to go back and turn it on because it's just the way watchOS works.Maria [00:09:04]: One of the things that we are seeing from our Apple Watch users, like I love the Apple Watch integration. One of the things that we are seeing is that people, they start using it from Apple Watch and after a couple of days they buy the B because they just like to wear it.Ethan [00:09:17]: Yeah, we're seeing.Maria [00:09:18]: That's something that like they're learning and it's really cool. Yeah.Ethan [00:09:21]: I mean, I think like fundamentally we like to think that like a personal AI is like the mission. And it's more about like the understanding. Connecting the dots, making use of the data to provide some value. And the hardware is like the ears of the AI. It's not like integrating like the incoming sensor data. And that's really what we focus on. And like the hardware is, you know, if we can do it well and have a great experience on the Apple Watch like that, that's just great. I mean, but there's just some platform restrictions that like existing hardware makes it hard to provide that experience. Yeah.Alessio [00:09:54]: What do people do in like two or three days that then convinces them to buy it? They buy the product. This feels like a product where like after you use it for a while, you have enough data to start to get a lot of insights. But it sounds like maybe there's also like a short term.Maria [00:10:07]: From the Apple Watch users, I believe that because every time that you receive a call after, they need to go back to B and open it again. Or for example, every day they need to charge Apple Watch and reminds them to open the app every day. They feel like, okay, maybe this is too much work. I just want to wear the B and just keep it open and that's it. And I don't need to think about it.Ethan [00:10:27]: I think they see the kind of potential of it just from the watch. Because even if you wear it a day, like we send a summary notification at the end of the day about like just key things that happened to you in your day. And like I didn't even think like I'm not like a journaling type person or like because like, oh, I just live the day. Why do I need to like think about it? But like it's actually pretty sometimes I'm surprised how interesting it is to me just to kind of be like, oh, yeah, that and how it kind of fits together. And I think that's like just something people get immediately with the watch. But they're like, oh, I'd like an easier watch. I'd like a better way to do this.swyx [00:10:58]: It's surprising because I only know about the hardware. But I use the watch as like a backup for when I don't have the hardware. I feel like because now you're beamforming and all that, this is significantly better. Yeah, that's the other thing.Ethan [00:11:11]: We have way more control over like the Apple Watch. You're limited in like you can't set the gain. You can't change the sample rate. There's just very limited framework support for doing anything with audio. Whereas if you control it. Then you can kind of optimize it for your use case. The Apple Watch isn't meant to be kind of recording this. And we can talk when we get to the part about audio, why it's so hard. This is like audio on the hardest level because you don't know it has to work in all environments or you try and make it work as best as it can. Like this environment is very great. We're in a studio. But, you know, afterwards at dinner in a restaurant, it's totally different audio environment. And there's a lot of challenges with that. And having really good source audio helps. But then there's a lot more. But with the machine learning that still is, you know, has to be done to try and account because like you can tune something for one environment or another. But it'll make one good and one bad. And like making something that's flexible enough is really challenging.Alessio [00:12:10]: Do we want to do a demo just to set the stage? And then we kind of talk about.Maria [00:12:14]: Yeah, I think we can go like a walkthrough and the prod.Alessio [00:12:17]: Yeah, sure.swyx [00:12:17]: So I think we said I should. So for listeners, we'll be switching to video. That was superimposed on. And to this video, if you want to see it, go to our YouTube, like and subscribe as always. Yeah.Maria [00:12:31]: And by the bee. Yes.swyx [00:12:33]: And by the bee. While you wait. While you wait. Exactly. It doesn't take long.Maria [00:12:39]: Maybe you should have a discount code just for the listeners. Sure.swyx [00:12:43]: If you want to offer it, I'll take it. All right. Yeah. Well, discount code Swyx. Oh s**t. Okay. Yeah. There you go.Ethan [00:12:49]: An important thing to mention also is that the hardware is meant to work with the phone. And like, I think, you know, if you, if you look at rabbit or, or humane, they're trying to create like a new hardware platform. We think that the phone's just so dominant and it will be until we have the next generation, which is not going to be for five, you know, maybe some Orion type glasses that are cheap enough and like light enough. Like that's going to take a long time before with the phone rather than trying to just like replace it. So in the app, we have a summary of your days, but at the top, it's kind of what's going on now. And that's updating your phone. It's updating continuously. So right now it's saying, I'm discussing, you know, the development of, you know, personal AI, and that's just kind of the ongoing conversation. And then we give you a readable form. That's like little kind of segments of what's the important parts of the conversations. We do speaker identification, which is really important because you don't want your personal AI thinking you said something and attributing it to you when it was just somebody else in the conversation. So you can also teach it other people's voices. So like if some, you know, somebody close to you, so it can start to understand your relationships a little better. And then we do conversation end pointing, which is kind of like a task that didn't even exist before, like, cause nobody needed to do this. But like if you had somebody's whole day, how do you like break it into logical pieces? And so we use like not just voice activity, but other signals to try and split up because conversations are a little fuzzy. They can like lead into one, can start to the next. So also like the semantic content of it. When a conversation ends, we run it through larger models to try and get a better, you know, sense of the actual, what was said and then summarize it, provide key points. What was the general atmosphere and tone of the conversation and potential action items that might've come of that. But then at the end of the day, we give you like a summary of all your day and where you were and just kind of like a step-by-step walkthrough of what happened and what were the key points. That's kind of just like the base capture layer. So like if you just want to get a kind of glimpse or recall or reflect that's there. But really the key is like all of this is now like being influenced on to generate personal context about you. So we generate key items known to be true about you and that you can, you know, there's a human in the loop aspect is like you can, you have visibility. Right. Into that. And you can, you know, I have a lot of facts about technology because that's basically what I talk about all the time. Right. But I do have some hobbies that show up and then like, how do you put use to this context? So I kind of like measure my day now and just like, what is my token output of the day? You know, like, like as a human, how much information do I produce? And it's kind of measured in tokens and it turns out it's like around 200,000 or so a day. But so in the recall case, we have, um. A chat interface, but the key here is on the recall of it. Like, you know, how do you, you know, I probably have 50 million tokens of personal context and like how to make sense of that, make it useful. So I can ask simple, like, uh, recall questions, like details about the trip I was on to Taiwan, where recently we're with our manufacturer and, um, in real time, like it will, you know, it has various capabilities such as searching through your, your memories, but then also being able to search the web or look at my calendar, we have integrations with Gmail and calendars. So like connecting the dots between the in real life and the digital life. And, you know, I just asked it about my Taiwan trip and it kind of gives me the, the breakdown of the details, what happened, the issues we had around, you know, certain manufacturing problems and it, and it goes back and references the conversation so I can, I can go back to the source. Yeah.Maria [00:16:46]: Not just the conversation as well, the integrations. So we have as well Gmail and Google calendar. So if there is something there that was useful to have more context, we can see that.Ethan [00:16:56]: So like, and it can, I never use the word agentic cause it's, it's cringe, but like it can search through, you know, if I, if I'm brainstorming about something that spans across, like search through my conversation, search the email, look at the calendar and then depending on what's needed. Then synthesize, you know, something with all that context.Maria [00:17:18]: I love that you did the Spotify wrapped. That was pretty cool. Yeah.Ethan [00:17:22]: Like one thing I did was just like make a Spotify wrap for my 2024, like of my life. You can do that. Yeah, you can.Maria [00:17:28]: Wait. Yeah. I like those crazy.Ethan [00:17:31]: Make a Spotify wrapped for my life in 2024. Yeah. So it's like surprisingly good. Um, it like kind of like game metrics. So it was like you visited three countries, you shipped, you know, XMini, beta. Devices.Maria [00:17:46]: And that's kind of more personal insights and reflection points. Yeah.swyx [00:17:51]: That's fascinating. So that's the demo.Ethan [00:17:54]: Well, we have, we can show something that's in beta. I don't know if we want to do it. I don't know.Maria [00:17:58]: We want to show something. Do it.Ethan [00:18:00]: And then we can kind of fit. Yeah.Maria [00:18:01]: Yeah.Ethan [00:18:02]: So like the, the, the, the vision is also like, not just about like AI being with you in like just passively understanding you through living your experience, but also then like it proactively suggesting things to you. Yeah. Like at the appropriate time. So like not just pool, but, but kind of, it can step in and suggest things to you. So, you know, one integration we have that, uh, is in beta is with WhatsApp. Maria is asking for a recommendation for an Italian restaurant. Would you like me to look up some highly rated Italian restaurants nearby and send her a suggestion?Maria [00:18:34]: So what I did, I just sent to Ethan a message through WhatsApp in his own personal phone. Yeah.Ethan [00:18:41]: So, so basically. B is like watching all my incoming notifications. And if it meets two criteria, like, is it important enough for me to raise a suggestion to the user? And then is there something I could potentially help with? So this is where the actions come into place. So because Maria is my co-founder and because it was like a restaurant recommendation, something that it could probably help with, it proposed that to me. And then I can, through either the chat and we have another kind of push to talk walkie talkie style button. It's actually a multi-purpose button to like toggle it on or off, but also if you push to hold, you can talk. So I can say, yes, uh, find one and send it to her on WhatsApp is, uh, an Android cloud phone. So it's, uh, going to be able to, you know, that has access to all my accounts. So we're going to abstract this away and the execution environment is not really important, but like we can go into technically why Android is actually a pretty good one right now. But, you know, it's searching for Italian restaurants, you know, and we don't have to watch this. I could be, you know, have my ear AirPods in and in my pocket, you know, it's going to go to WhatsApp, going to find Maria's thread, send her the response and then, and then let us know. Oh my God.Alessio [00:19:56]: But what's the, I mean, an Italian restaurant. Yeah. What did it choose? What did it choose? It's easy to say. Real Italian is hard to play. Exactly.Ethan [00:20:04]: It's easy to say. So I doubt it. I don't know.swyx [00:20:06]: For the record, since you have the Italians, uh, best Italian restaurant in SF.Maria [00:20:09]: Oh my God. I still don't have one. What? No.Ethan [00:20:14]: I don't know. Successfully found and shared.Alessio [00:20:16]: Let's see. Let's see what the AI says. Bottega. Bottega? I think it's Bottega.Maria [00:20:21]: Have you been to Bottega? How is it?Alessio [00:20:24]: It's fine.Maria [00:20:25]: I've been to one called like Norcina, I think it was good.Alessio [00:20:29]: Bottega is on Valencia Street. It's fine. The pizza is not good.Maria [00:20:32]: It's not good.Alessio [00:20:33]: Some of the pastas are good.Maria [00:20:34]: You know, the people I'm sorry to interrupt. Sorry. But there is like this Delfina. Yeah. That here everybody's like, oh, Pizzeria Delfina is amazing. I'm overrated. This is not. I don't know. That's great. That's great.swyx [00:20:46]: The North Beach Cafe. That place you took us with Michele last time. Vega. Oh.Alessio [00:20:52]: The guy at Vega, Giuseppe, he's Italian. Which one is that? It's in Bernal Heights. Ugh. He's nice. He's not nice. I don't know that one. What's the name of the place? Vega. Vega. Vega. Cool. We got the name. Vega. But it's not Vega.Maria [00:21:02]: It's Italian. Whatswyx [00:21:10]: Vega. Vega.swyx [00:21:16]: Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega.Ethan [00:21:29]: Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega. Vega.Ethan [00:21:40]: We're going to see a lot of innovation around hardware and stuff, but I think the real core is being able to do something useful with the personal context. You always had the ability to capture everything, right? We've always had recorders, camcorders, body cameras, stuff like that. But what's different now is we can actually make sense and find the important parts in all of that context.swyx [00:22:04]: Yeah. So, and then one last thing, I'm just doing this for you, is you also have an API, which I think I'm the first developer against. Because I had to build my own. We need to hire a developer advocate. Or just hire AI engineers. The point is that you should be able to program your own assistant. And I tried OMI, the former friend, the knockoff friend, and then real friend doesn't have an API. And then Limitless also doesn't have an API. So I think it's very important to own your data. To be able to reprocess your audio, maybe. Although, by default, you do not store audio. And then also just to do any corrections. There's no way that my needs can be fully met by you. So I think the API is very important.Ethan [00:22:47]: Yeah. And I mean, I've always been a consumer of APIs in all my products.swyx [00:22:53]: We are API enjoyers in this house.Ethan [00:22:55]: Yeah. It's very frustrating when you have to go build a scraper. But yeah, it's for sure. Yeah.swyx [00:23:03]: So this whole combination of you have my location, my calendar, my inbox. It really is, for me, the sort of personal API.Alessio [00:23:10]: And is the API just to write into it or to have it take action on external systems?Ethan [00:23:16]: Yeah, we're expanding it. It's right now read-only. In the future, very soon, when the actions are more generally available, it'll be fully supported in the API.Alessio [00:23:27]: Nice. I'll buy one after the episode.Ethan [00:23:30]: The API thing, to me, is the most interesting. Yeah. We do have real-time APIs, so you can even connect a socket and connect it to whatever you want it to take actions with. Yeah. It's too smart for me.Alessio [00:23:43]: Yeah. I think when I look at these apps, and I mean, there's so many of these products, we launch, it's great that I can go on this app and do things. But most of my work and personal life is managed somewhere else. Yeah. So being able to plug into it. Integrate that. It's nice. I have a bunch of more, maybe, human questions. Sure. I think maybe people might have. One, is it good to have instant replay for any argument that you have? I can imagine arguing with my wife about something. And, you know, there's these commercials now where it's basically like two people arguing, and they're like, they can throw a flag, like in football, and have an instant replay of the conversation. I feel like this is similar, where it's almost like people cannot really argue anymore or, like, lie to each other. Because in a world in which everybody adopts this, I don't know if you thought about it. And also, like, how the lies. You know, all of us tell lies, right? How do you distinguish between when I'm, there's going to be sometimes things that contradict each other, because I might say something publicly, and I might think something, really, that I tell someone else. How do you handle that when you think about building a product like this?Maria [00:24:48]: I would say that I like the fact that B is an objective point of view. So I don't care too much about the lies, but I care more about the fact that can help me to understand what happened. Mm-hmm. And the emotions in a really objective way, like, really, like, critical and objective way. And if you think about humans, they have so many emotions. And sometimes something that happened to me, like, I don't know, I would feel, like, really upset about it or really angry or really emotional. But the AI doesn't have those emotions. It can read the conversation, understand what happened, and be objective. And I think the level of support is the one that I really like more. Instead of, like, oh, did this guy tell me a lie? I feel like that's not exactly, like, what I feel. I find it curious for me in terms of opportunity.Alessio [00:25:35]: Is the B going to interject in real time? Say I'm arguing with somebody. The B is like, hey, look, no, you're wrong. What? That person actually said.Ethan [00:25:43]: The proactivity is something we're very interested in. Maybe not for, like, specifically for, like, selling arguments, but more for, like, and I think that a lot of the challenge here is, you know, you need really good reasoning to kind of pull that off. Because you don't want it just constantly interjecting, because that would be super annoying. And you don't want it to miss things that it should be interjecting. So, like, it would be kind of a hard task even for a human to be, like, just come in at the right times when it's appropriate. Like, it would take the, you know, with the personal context, it's going to be a lot better. Because, like, if somebody knows about you, but even still, it requires really good reasoning to, like, not be too much or too little and just right.Maria [00:26:20]: And the second part about, well, like, some things, you know, you say something to somebody else, but after I change my mind, I send something. Like, it's every time I have, like, different type of conversation. And I'm like, oh, I want to know more about you. And I'm like, oh, I want to know more about you. I think that's something that I found really fascinating. One of the things that we are learning is that, indeed, humans, they evolve over time. So, for us, one of the challenges is actually understand, like, is this a real fact? Right. And so far, what we do is we give, you know, to the, we have the human in the loop that can say, like, yes, this is true, this is not. Or they can edit their own fact. For sure, in the future, we want to have all of that automatized inside of the product.Ethan [00:26:57]: But, I mean, I think your question kind of hits on, and I know that we'll talk about privacy, but also just, like, if you have some memory and you want to confirm it with somebody else, that's one thing. But it's for sure going to be true that in the future, like, not even that far into the future, that it's just going to be kind of normalized. And we're kind of in a transitional period now. And I think it's, like, one of the key things that is for us to kind of navigate that and make sure we're, like, thinking of all the consequences. And how to, you know, make the right choices in the way that everything's designed. And so, like, it's more beneficial than it could be harmful. But it's just too valuable for your AI to understand you. And so if it's, like, MetaRay bands or the Google Astra, I think it's just people are going to be more used to it. So people's behaviors and expectations will change. Whether that's, like, you know, something that is going to happen now or in five years, it's probably in that range. And so, like, I think we... We kind of adapt to new technologies all the time. Like, when the Ring cameras came out, that was kind of quite controversial. It's like... But now it's kind of... People just understand that a lot of people have cameras on their doors. And so I think that...Maria [00:28:09]: Yeah, we're in a transitional period for sure.swyx [00:28:12]: I will press on the privacy thing because that is the number one thing that everyone talks about. Obviously, I think in Silicon Valley, people are a little bit more tech-forward, experimental, whatever. But you want to go mainstream. You want to sell to consumers. And we have to worry about this stuff. Baseline question. The hardest version of this is law. There are one-party consent states where this is perfectly legal. Then there are two-party consent states where they're not. What have you come around to this on?Ethan [00:28:38]: Yeah, so the EU is a totally different regulatory environment. But in the U.S., it's basically on a state-by-state level. Like, in Nevada, it's single-party. In California, it's two-party. But it's kind of untested. You know, it's different laws, whether it's a phone call, whether it's in person. In a state like California, it's two-party. Like, anytime you're in public, there's no consent comes into play because the expectation of privacy is that you're in public. But we process the audio and nothing is persisted. And then it's summarized with the speaker identification focusing on the user. Now, it's kind of untested on a legal, and I'm not a lawyer, but does that constitute the same as, like, a recording? So, you know, it's kind of a gray area and untested in law right now. I think that the bigger question is, you know, because, like, if you had your Ray-Ban on and were recording, then you have a video of something that happened. And that's different than kind of having, like, an AI give you a summary that's focused on you that's not really capturing anybody's voice. You know, I think the bigger question is, regardless of the legal status, like, what is the ethical kind of situation with that? Because even in Nevada that we're—or many other U.S. states where you can record. Everything. And you don't have to have consent. Is it still, like, the right thing to do? The way we think about it is, is that, you know, we take a lot of precautions to kind of not capture personal information of people around. Both through the speaker identification, through the pipeline, and then the prompts, and the way we store the information to be kind of really focused on the user. Now, we know that's not going to, like, satisfy a lot of people. But I think if you do try it and wear it again. It's very hard for me to see anything, like, if somebody was wearing a bee around me that I would ever object that it captured about me as, like, a third party to it. And like I said, like, we're in this transitional period where the expectation will just be more normalized. That it's, like, an AI. It's not capturing, you know, a full audio recording of what you said. And it's—everything is fully geared towards helping the person kind of understand their state and providing valuable information to them. Not about, like, logging details about people they encounter.Alessio [00:30:57]: You know, I've had the same question also with the Zoom meeting transcribers thing. I think there's kind of, like, the personal impact that there's a Firefly's AI recorder. Yeah. I just know that it's being recorded. It's not like a—I don't know if I'm going to say anything different. But, like, intrinsically, you kind of feel—because it's not pervasive. And I'm curious, especially, like, in your investor meetings. Do people feel differently? Like, have you had people ask you to, like, turn it off? Like, in a business meeting, to not record? I'm curious if you've run into any of these behaviors.Maria [00:31:29]: You know what's funny? On my end, I wear it all the time. I take my coffee, a blue bottle with it. Or I work with it. Like, obviously, I work on it. So, I wear it all the time. And so far, I don't think anybody asked me to turn it off. I'm not sure if because they were really friendly with me that they know that I'm working on it. But nobody really cared.swyx [00:31:48]: It's because you live in SF.Maria [00:31:49]: Actually, I've been in Italy as well. Uh-huh. And in Italy, it's a super privacy concern. Like, Europe is a super privacy concern. And again, they're nothing. Like, it's—I don't know. Yeah. That, for me, was interesting.Ethan [00:32:01]: I think—yeah, nobody's ever asked me to turn it off, even after giving them full demos and disclosing. I think that some people have said, well, my—you know, in a personal relationship, my partner initially was, like, kind of uncomfortable about it. We heard that from a few users. And that was, like, more in just, like— It's not like a personal relationship situation. And the other big one is people are like, I do like it, but I cannot wear this at work. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Because, like, I think I will get in trouble based on policies or, like, you know, if you're wearing it inside a research lab or something where you're working on things that are kind of sensitive that, like—you know, so we're adding certain features like geofencing, just, like, at this location. It's just never active.swyx [00:32:50]: I mean, I've often actually explained to it the other way, where maybe you only want it at work, so you never take it from work. And it's just a work device, just like your Zoom meeting recorder is a work device.Ethan [00:33:09]: Yeah, professionals have been a big early adopter segment. And you say in San Francisco, but we have out there our daily shipment of over 100. If you go look at the addresses, Texas, I think, is our biggest state, and Florida, just the biggest states. A lot of professionals who talk for, and we didn't go out to build it for that use case, but I think there is a lot of demand for white-collar people who talk for a living. And I think we're just starting to talk with them. I think they just want to be able to improve their performance around, understand what they were doing.Alessio [00:33:47]: How do you think about Gong.io? Some of these, for example, sales training thing, where you put on a sales call and then it coaches you. They're more verticalized versus having more horizontal platform.Ethan [00:33:58]: I am not super familiar with those things, because like I said, it was kind of a surprise to us. But I think that those are interesting. I've seen there's a bunch of them now, right? Yeah. It kind of makes sense. I'm terrible at sales, so I could probably use one. But it's not my job, fundamentally. But yeah, I think maybe it's, you know, we heard also people with restaurants, if they're able to understand, if they're doing well.Maria [00:34:26]: Yeah, but in general, I think a lot of people, they like to have the double check of, did I do this well? Or can you suggest me how I can do better? We had a user that was saying to us that he used for interviews. Yeah, he used job interviews. So he used B and after asked to the B, oh, actually, how do you think my interview went? What I should do better? And I like that. And like, oh, that's actually like a personal coach in a way.Alessio [00:34:50]: Yeah. But I guess the question is like, do you want to build all of those use cases? Or do you see B as more like a platform where somebody is going to build like, you know, the sales coach that connects to B so that you're kind of the data feed into it?Ethan [00:35:02]: I don't think this is like a data feed, more like an understanding kind of engine and like definitely. In the future, having third parties to the API and building out for all the different use cases is something that we want to do. But the like initial case we're trying to do is like build that layer for all that to work. And, you know, we're not trying to build all those verticals because no startup could do that well. But I think that it's really been quite fascinating to see, like, you know, I've done consumer for a long time. Consumer is very hard to predict, like, what's going to be. It's going to be like the thing that's the killer feature. And so, I mean, we really believe that it's the future, but we don't know like what exactly like process it will take to really gain mass adoption.swyx [00:35:50]: The killer consumer feature is whatever Nikita Beer does. Yeah. Social app for teens.Ethan [00:35:56]: Yeah, well, I like Nikita, but, you know, he's good at building bootstrap companies and getting them very viral. And then selling them and then they shut down.swyx [00:36:05]: Okay, so you just came back from CES.Maria [00:36:07]: Yeah, crazy. Yeah, tell us. It was my first time in Vegas and first time CES, both of them were overwhelming.swyx [00:36:15]: First of all, did you feel like you had to do it because you're in consumer hardware?Maria [00:36:19]: Then we decided to be there and to have a lot of partners and media meetings, but we didn't have our own booth. So we decided to just keep that. But we decided to be there and have a presence there, even just us and speak with people. It's very hard to stand out. Yeah, I think, you know, it depends what type of booth you have. I think if you can prepare like a really cool booth.Ethan [00:36:41]: Have you been to CES?Maria [00:36:42]: I think it can be pretty cool.Ethan [00:36:43]: It's massive. It's huge. It's like 80,000, 90,000 people across the Venetian and the convention center. And it's, to me, I always wanted to go just like...Maria [00:36:53]: Yeah, you were the one who was like...swyx [00:36:55]: I thought it was your idea.Ethan [00:36:57]: I always wanted to go just as a, like, just as a fan of...Maria [00:37:01]: Yeah, you wanted to go anyways.Ethan [00:37:02]: Because like, growing up, I think CES like kind of peaked for a while and it was like, oh, I want to go. That's where all the cool, like... gadgets, everything. Yeah, now it's like SmartBitch and like, you know, vacuuming the picks up socks. Exactly.Maria [00:37:13]: There are a lot of cool vacuums. Oh, they love it.swyx [00:37:15]: They love the Roombas, the pick up socks.Maria [00:37:16]: And pet tech. Yeah, yeah. And dog stuff.swyx [00:37:20]: Yeah, there's a lot of like robot stuff. New TVs, new cars that never ship. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking like last year, this time last year was when Rabbit and Humane launched at CES and Rabbit kind of won CES. And now this year, no wearables except for you guys.Ethan [00:37:32]: It's funny because it's obviously it's AI everything. Yeah. Like every single product. Yeah.Maria [00:37:37]: Toothbrush with AI, vacuums with AI. Yeah. Yeah.Ethan [00:37:41]: We like hair blow, literally a hairdryer with AI. We saw.Maria [00:37:45]: Yeah, that was cool.Ethan [00:37:46]: But I think that like, yeah, we didn't, another kind of difference like around our, like we didn't want to do like a big overhypey promised kind of Rabbit launch. Because I mean, they did, hats off to them, like on the presentation and everything, obviously. But like, you know, we want to let the product kind of speak for itself and like get it out there. And I think we were really happy. We got some very good interest from media and some of the partners there. So like it was, I think it was definitely worth going. I would say like if you're in hardware, it's just kind of how you make use of it. Like I think to do it like a big Rabbit style or to have a huge show on there, like you need to plan that six months in advance. And it's very expensive. But like if you, you know, go there, there's everybody's there. All the media is there. There's a lot of some pre-show events that it's just great to talk to people. And the industry also, all the manufacturers, suppliers are there. So we learned about some really cool stuff that we might like. We met with somebody. They have like thermal energy capture. And it's like, oh, could you maybe not need to charge it? Because they have like a thermal that can capture your body heat. And what? Yeah, they're here. They're actually here. And in Palo Alto, they have like a Fitbit thing that you don't have to charge.swyx [00:39:01]: Like on paper, that's the power you can get from that. What's the power draw for this thing?Ethan [00:39:05]: It's more than you could get from the body heat, it turns out. But it's quite small. I don't want to disclose technically. But I think that solar is still, they also have one where it's like this thing could be like the face of it. It's just a solar cell. And like that is more realistic. Or kinetic. Kinetic, apparently, I'm not an expert in this, but they seem to think it wouldn't be enough. Kinetic is quite small, I guess, on the capture.swyx [00:39:33]: Well, I mean, watch. Watchmakers have been powering with kinetic for a long time. Yeah. We don't have to talk about that. I just want to get a sense of CES. Would you do it again? I definitely would not. Okay. You're just a fan of CES. Business point of view doesn't make sense. I happen to be in the conference business, right? So I'm kind of just curious. Yeah.Maria [00:39:49]: So I would say as we did, so without the booth and really like straightforward conversations that were already planned. Three days. That's okay. I think it was okay. Okay. But if you need to invest for a booth that is not. Okay. A good one. Which is how much? I think.Ethan [00:40:06]: 10 by 10 is 5,000. But on top of that, you need to. And then they go like 10 by 10 is like super small. Yeah. And like some companies have, I think would probably be more in like the six figure range to get. And I mean, I think that, yeah, it's very noisy. We heard this, that it's very, very noisy. Like obviously if you're, everything is being launched there and like everything from cars to cell phones are being launched. Yeah. So it's hard to stand out. But like, I think going in with a plan of who you want to talk to, I feel like.Maria [00:40:36]: That was worth it.Ethan [00:40:37]: Worth it. We had a lot of really positive media coverage from it and we got the word out and like, so I think we accomplished what we wanted to do.swyx [00:40:46]: I mean, there's some world in which my conference is kind of the CES of whatever AI becomes. Yeah. I think that.Maria [00:40:52]: Don't do it in Vegas. Don't do it in Vegas. Yeah. Don't do it in Vegas. That's the only thing. I didn't really like Vegas. That's great. Amazing. Those are my favorite ones.Alessio [00:41:02]: You can not fit 90,000 people in SF. That's really duh.Ethan [00:41:05]: You need to do like multiple locations so you can do Moscone and then have one in.swyx [00:41:09]: I mean, that's what Salesforce conferences. Well, GDC is how many? That might be 50,000, right? Okay. Form factor, right? Like my way to introduce this idea was that I was at the launch in Solaris. What was the old name of it? Newton. Newton. Of Tab when Avi first launched it. He was like, I thought through everything. Every form factor, pendant is the thing. And then we got the pendants for this original. The first one was just pendants and I took it off and I forgot to put it back on. So you went through pendants, pin, bracelet now, and maybe there's sort of earphones in the future, but what was your iterations?Maria [00:41:49]: So we had, I believe now three or four iterations. And one of the things that we learned is indeed that people don't like the pendant. In particular, woman, you don't want to have like anything here on the chest because it's maybe you have like other necklace or any other stuff.Ethan [00:42:03]: You just ship a premium one that's gold. Yeah. We're talking some fashion reached out to us.Maria [00:42:11]: Some big fashion. There is something there.swyx [00:42:13]: This is where it helps to have an Italian on the team.Maria [00:42:15]: There is like some big Italian luxury. I can't say anything. So yeah, bracelet actually came from the community because they were like, oh, I don't want to wear anything like as necklace or as a pendant. Like it's. And also like the one that we had, I don't know if you remember, like it was like circle, like it was like this and was like really bulky. Like people didn't like it. And also, I mean, I actually, I don't dislike, like we were running fast when we did that. Like our, our thing was like, we wanted to ship them as soon as possible. So we're not overthinking the form factor or the material. We were just want to be out. But after the community organically, basically all of them were like, well, why you don't just don't do the bracelet? Like he's way better. I will just wear it. And that's it. So that's how we ended up with the bracelet, but it's still modular. So I still want to play around the father is modular and you can, you know, take it off and wear it as a clip or in the future, maybe we will bring back the pendant. But I like the fact that there is some personalization and right now we have two colors, yellow and black. Soon we will have other ones. So yeah, we can play a lot around that.Ethan [00:43:25]: I think the form factor. Like the goal is for it to be not super invasive. Right. And something that's easy. So I think in the future, smaller, thinner, not like apple type obsession with thinness, but it does matter like the, the size and weight. And we would love to have more context because that will help, but to make it work, I think it really needs to have good power consumption, good battery life. And, you know, like with the humane swapping the batteries, I have one, I mean, I'm, I'm, I think we've made, and there's like pretty incredible, some of the engineering they did, but like, it wasn't kind of geared towards solving the problem. It was just, it's too heavy. The swappable batteries is too much to man, like the heat, the thermals is like too much to light interface thing. Yeah. Like that. That's cool. It's cool. It's cool. But it's like, if, if you have your handout here, you want to use your phone, like it's not really solving a problem. Cause you know how to use your phone. It's got a brilliant display. You have to kind of learn how to gesture this low range. Yeah. It's like a resolution laser, but the laser is cool that the fact they got it working in that thing, even though if it did overheat, but like too heavy, too cumbersome, too complicated with the multiple batteries. So something that's power efficient, kind of thin, both in the physical sense and also in the edge compute kind of way so that it can be as unobtrusive as possible. Yeah.Maria [00:44:47]: Users really like, like, I like when they say yes, I like to wear it and forget about it because I don't need to charge it every single day. On the other version, I believe we had like 35 hours or something, which was okay. But people, they just prefer the seven days battery life and-swyx [00:45:03]: Oh, this is seven days? Yeah. Oh, I've been charging every three days.Maria [00:45:07]: Oh, no, you can like keep it like, yeah, it's like almost seven days.swyx [00:45:11]: The other thing that occurs to me, maybe there's an Apple watch strap so that I don't have to double watch. Yeah.Maria [00:45:17]: That's the other one that, yeah, I thought about it. I saw as well the ones that like, you can like put it like back on the phone. Like, you know- Plog. There is a lot.swyx [00:45:27]: So yeah, there's a competitor called Plog. Yeah. It's not really a competitor. They only transcribe, right? Yeah, they only transcribe. But they're very good at it. Yeah.Ethan [00:45:33]: No, they're great. Their hardware is really good too.swyx [00:45:36]: And they just launched the pin too. Yeah.Ethan [00:45:38]: I think that the MagSafe kind of form factor has a lot of advantages, but some disadvantages. You can definitely put a very huge battery on that, you know? And so like the battery life's not, the power consumption's not so much of a concern, but you know, downside the phone's like in your pocket. And so I think that, you know, form factors will continue to evolve, but, and you know, more sensors, less obtrusive and-Maria [00:46:02]: Yeah. We have a new version.Ethan [00:46:04]: Easier to use.Maria [00:46:05]: Okay.swyx [00:46:05]: Looking forward to that. Yeah. I mean, we'll, whenever we launch this, we'll try to show whatever, but I'm sure you're going to keep iterating. Last thing on hardware, and then we'll go on to the software side, because I think that's where you guys are also really, really strong. Vision. You wanted to talk about why no vision? Yeah.Ethan [00:46:20]: I think it comes down to like when you're, when you're a startup, especially in hardware, you're just, you work within the constraints, right? And so like vision is super useful and super interesting. And what we actually started with, there's two issues with vision that make it like not the place we decided to start. One is power consumption. So you know, you kind of have to trade off your power budget, like capturing even at a low frame rate and transmitting the radio is actually the thing that takes up the majority of the power. So. Yeah. So you would really have to have quite a, like unacceptably, like large and heavy battery to do it continuously all day. We have, I think, novel kind of alternative ways that might allow us to do that. And we have some prototypes. The other issue is form factor. So like even with like a wide field of view, if you're wearing something on your chest, it's going, you know, obviously the wrist is not really that much of an option. And if you're wearing it on your chest, it's, it's often gone. You're going to probably be not capturing like the field of view of what's interesting to you. So that leaves you kind of with your head and face. And then anything that goes on, on the face has to look cool. Like I don't know if you remember the spectacles, it was kind of like the first, yeah, but they kind of, they didn't, they were not very successful. And I think one of the reasons is they were, they're so weird looking. Yeah. The camera was so big on the side. And if you look at them at array bands where they're way more successful, they, they look almost indistinguishable from array bands. And they invested a lot into that and they, they have a partnership with Qualcomm to develop custom Silicon. They have a stake in Luxottica now. So like they coming from all the angles, like to make glasses, I think like, you know, I don't know if you know, Brilliant Labs, they're cool company, they make frames, which is kind of like a cool hackable glasses and, and, and like, they're really good, like on hardware, they're really good. But even if you look at the frames, which I would say is like the most advanced kind of startup. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was one that launched at CES, but it's not shipping yet. Like one that you can buy now, it's still not something you'd wear every day and the battery life is super short. So I think just the challenge of doing vision right, like off the bat, like would require quite a bit more resources. And so like audio is such a good entry point and it's also the privacy around audio. If you, if you had images, that's like another huge challenge to overcome. So I think that. Ideally the personal AI would have, you know, all the senses and you know, we'll, we'll get there. Yeah. Okay.swyx [00:48:57]: One last hardware thing. I have to ask this because then we'll move to the software. Were either of you electrical engineering?Ethan [00:49:04]: No, I'm CES. And so I have a, I've taken some EE courses, but I, I had done prior to working on, on the hardware here, like I had done a little bit of like embedded systems, like very little firmware, but we have luckily on the team, somebody with deep experience. Yeah.swyx [00:49:21]: I'm just like, you know, like you have to become hardware people. Yeah.Ethan [00:49:25]: Yeah. I mean, I learned to worry about supply chain power. I think this is like radio.Maria [00:49:30]: There's so many things to learn.Ethan [00:49:32]: I would tell this about hardware, like, and I know it's been said before, but building a prototype and like learning how the electronics work and learning about firmware and developing, this is like, I think fun for a lot of engineers and it's, it's all totally like achievable, especially now, like with, with the tools we have, like stuff you might've been intimidated about. Like, how do I like write this firmware now? With Sonnet, like you can, you can get going and actually see results quickly. But I think going from prototype to actually making something manufactured is a enormous jump. And it's not all about technology, the supply chain, the procurement, the regulations, the cost, the tooling. The thing about software that I'm used to is it's funny that you can make changes all along the way and ship it. But like when you have to buy tooling for an enclosure that's expensive.swyx [00:50:24]: Do you buy your own tooling? You have to.Ethan [00:50:25]: Don't you just subcontract out to someone in China? Oh, no. Do we make the tooling? No, no. You have to have CNC and like a bunch of machines.Maria [00:50:31]: Like nobody makes their own tooling, but like you have to design this design and you submitEthan [00:50:36]: it and then they go four to six weeks later. Yeah. And then if there's a problem with it, well, then you're not, you're not making any, any of your enclosures. And so you have to really plan ahead. And like.swyx [00:50:48]: I just want to leave tips for other hardware founders. Like what resources or websites are most helpful in your sort of manufacturing journey?Ethan [00:50:55]: You know, I think it's different depending on like it's hardware so specialized in different ways.Maria [00:51:00]: I will say that, for example, I should choose a manufacturer company. I speak with other founders and like we can give you like some, you know, some tips of who is good and who is not, or like who's specialized in something versus somebody else. Yeah.Ethan [00:51:15]: Like some people are good in plastics. Some people are good.Maria [00:51:18]: I think like for us, it really helped at the beginning to speak with others and understand. Okay. Like who is around. I work in Shenzhen. I lived almost two years in China. I have an idea about like different hardware manufacturer and all of that. Soon I will go back to Shenzhen to check out. So I think it's good also to go in place and check.Ethan [00:51:40]: Yeah, you have to like once you, if you, so we did some stuff domestically and like if you have that ability. The reason I say ability is very expensive, but like to build out some proof of concepts and do field testing before you take it to a manufacturer, despite what people say, there's really good domestic manufacturing for small quantities at extremely high prices. So we got our first PCB and the assembly done in LA. So there's a lot of good because of the defense industry that can do quick churn. So it's like, we need this board. We need to find out if it's working. We have this deadline we want to start, but you need to go through this. And like if you want to have it done and fabricated in a week, they can do it for a price. But I think, you know, everybody's kind of trending even for prototyping now moving that offshore because in China you can do prototyping and get it within almost the same timeline. But the thing is with manufacturing, like it really helps to go there and kind of establish the relationship. Yeah.Alessio [00:52:38]: My first company was a hardware company and we did our PCBs in China and took a long time. Now things are better. But this was, yeah, I don't know, 10 years ago, something like that. Yeah.Ethan [00:52:47]: I think that like the, and I've heard this too, we didn't run into this problem, but like, you know, if it's something where you don't have the relationship, they don't see you, they don't know you, you know, you might get subcontracted out or like they're not paying attention. But like if you're, you know, you have the relationship and a priority, like, yeah, it's really good. We ended up doing the fabrication assembly in Taiwan for various reasons.Maria [00:53:11]: And I think it really helped the fact that you went there at some point. Yeah.Ethan [00:53:15]: We're really happy with the process and, but I mean the whole process of just Choosing the right people. Choosing the right people, but also just sourcing the bill materials and all of that stuff. Like, I guess like if you have time, it's not that bad, but if you're trying to like really push the speed at that, it's incredibly stressful. Okay. We got to move to the software. Yeah.Alessio [00:53:38]: Yeah. So the hardware, maybe it's hard for people to understand, but what software people can understand is that running. Transcription and summarization, all of these things in real time every day for 24 hours a day. It's not easy. So you mentioned 200,000 tokens for a day. Yeah. How do you make it basically free to run all of this for the consumer?Ethan [00:53:59]: Well, I think that the pipeline and the inference, like people think about all of these tokens, but as you know, the price of tokens is like dramatically dropping. You guys probably have some charts somewhere that you've posted. We do. And like, if you see that trend in like 250,000 input tokens, it's not really that much, right? Like the output.swyx [00:54:21]: You do several layers. You do live. Yeah.Ethan [00:54:23]: Yeah. So the speech to text is like the most challenging part actually, because you know, it requires like real time processing and then like later processing with a larger model. And one thing that is fairly obvious is that like, you don't need to transcribe things that don't have any voice in it. Right? So good voice activity is key, right? Because like the majority of most people's day is not spent with voice activity. Right? So that is the first step to cutting down the amount of compute you have to do. And voice activity is a fairly cheap thing to do. Very, very cheap thing to do. The models that need to summarize, you don't need a Sonnet level kind of model to summarize. You do need a Sonnet level model to like execute things like the agent. And we will be having a subscription for like features like that because it's, you know, although now with the R1, like we'll see, we haven't evaluated it. A deep seek? Yeah. I mean, not that one in particular, but like, you know, they're already there that can kind of perform at that level. I was like, it's going to stay in six months, but like, yeah. So self-hosted models help in the things where you can. So you are self-hosting models. Yes. You are fine tuning your own ASR. Yes. I will say that I see in the future that everything's trending down. Although like, I think there might be an intermediary step with things to become expensive, which is like, we're really interested because like the pipeline is very tedious and like a lot of tuning. Right. Which is brutal because it's just a lot of trial and error. Whereas like, well, wouldn't it be nice if an end to end model could just do all of this and learn it? If we could do transcription with like an LLM, there's so many advantages to that, but it's going to be a larger model and hence like more compute, you know, we're optim

On November 27th, 1978, former San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Dan White walked into City Hall and murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. White was angry about Moscone's decision not to reappoint him to the Board after he resigned earlier that month. Harvey Milk had urged the mayor not to reappoint White. Join Mike and Gibby as they discuss Dan White. George Moscone was thought by many to be a good mayor, and Harvey Milk was one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States. Their murders were a blow to the City and its residents. Harvey Milk was revered by most in the gay community and was often referred to as the mayor of Castro Street. Harvey Milk worked hard to pass anti-discrimination ordinances and fought against all propositions that would harm the LGBTQ community.You can help support the show at patreon.com/truecrimeallthetimeVisit the show's website at truecrimeallthetime.com for contact, merchandise, and donation informationAn Emash Digital productionSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to episode 255 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are here to tackle the aftermath of Google Next. Whether you were there or not, sit back, relax, and let the guys dissect each day's keynote and the major announcements.  Titles we almost went with this week: How About Some AI? “The New Way to Cloud” is a Terrible TagLine (and is what happens when you let AI do your copy) Welcome Google Cloud Next Where There is No Cloud, Just AI  Ok Google, did your phone go off? For 100 dollars, guess how many AI stories Google Has This Week  From Search to Skynet: Google Cloud Next's Descent into AI Madness ‘Next' Up from Google – AI!   Have Some Conference with Your AI  A big thanks to this week's sponsor: We've got a new sponsor! Sonrai Security   Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at sonrai.co/cloudpod GCP – Google Next 2024 We're jumping right into GCP this week, so we can talk about all things Google Next.  01:44 FIrst impressions: Vegas > Moscone, so take that Vegas.  Both Ryan and Justin agree that Vegas is much better than the Mosconoe center in San Francisco for Google Next The Sessions were well organized, but Ryan is a little tired from walking back and forth between them. Exercise is tiring! Vegas infrastructure was well utilized, something Amazon didn't do as well.  Folks staying at area hotels that *weren’t* Mandalay Bay had some issues with trying to get onto / off  property at the beginning and end of the day.  Free coffee is still available. *If you can find it.  Expo hall felt cramped 08:22 Thoughts on the Keynote Address  Note: Not enough space in the arena for keynotes; the arena holds approx. 12k; numbers released by Google say there were 30k in attendance.  Thomas Kurian kicked off the keynote, introduced their new tagline “The New Way to Cloud” Sundar: Months can feel like decades in the cloud… WORD. 36B revenue run rate Kurian did a rapid fire announcement of all the things coming – which required Justin to rewatch just to get them all.  A3 Mega Nvidia H100 GPUs Nvidia GB200 NVL72 (in early 2025 TPU v5p GA Hyperdisk ML for Inference Cloud Storage Fuse Caching GA Parallel Store Caching AI Hypercomputer Dynamic Workload Scheduler Nvidia GPU Support for GDC Google Distributed Cloud GKE Enterprise for GDC AI Models on GDC Vector Search on GDC Vertex AI Solutions with GDC Secret and Top Secret

November 27, 1978. San Francisco politicians George and Harvey Milk are assassinated by a former colleague.Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more.History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.Go to HistoryDaily.com for more history, daily.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"A clean city is not what San Francisco is. San Francisco is a messy city. It's politically messy, it's diverse. It fights amongst itself. It is San Francisco and it's never not gonna be. So, let's lean into the right kind of messy of San Francisco and artists can get messy. So, let's get messy." — Jonathan Moscone, Executive Director,California Arts CouncilThis interview with Jonathan Moscone is part of our co-production with Arts for a Better Bay Area of the re-launch of the State of the Arts Summit on June 28th, 2023. You can watch the wonderful interview conducted by our roaming reporter team of Isa Nakazawa  and Eric Estrada. You can listen to the full episode features the opening and keynote speakers made up of community leaders, poets, artists, administrators, government officials, and representatives from arts and culture organizations; who share their wonderful insights and recommendations on the rebuilding of our communities through the arts. With Arts for a Better Bay Area's State of the Arts Summit theme, "Rebuilding Our Communities," our opening and keynote speakers below explore collective ways the arts community can develop and bridge supportive connections as we emerge from the pandemic. To find out more information about our guests and their respective organization's programs, and services, how to volunteer and make a donation please visit our episode landing page with links to resources for the arts and culture sector. We hope that you enjoyed episode two of our new six-part series highlighting the issues and solutions of our arts and culture organizations and their workforce as they innovate to come back from the pandemic along with addressing the systemic racism in our performing arts ecosystem.We welcome your participation in our next virtual and live in-person community dialogue event. Our next community dialogue will be streamed as well as you can tune into our usual radio show, podcast, and television show with our friends atBAVC Media. Sign Up for our Newsletter to participate in our next live showPlease consider donating to Voices of the Community - Voices of the Community is fiscally sponsored by Intersection for the Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, which allows us to offer you tax deductions for your contributions. Please consider making a donation to help us provide future shows just like this one.

Richard Seroter, Director of Outbound Product Management at Google, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what's new at Google. Corey and Richard discuss how AI can move from a novelty to truly providing value, as well as the importance of people maintaining their skills and abilities rather than using AI as a black box solution. Richard also discusses how he views the DevRel function, and why he feels it's so critical to communicate expectations for product launches with customers. About RichardRichard Seroter is Director of Outbound Product Management at Google Cloud. He's also an instructor at Pluralsight, a frequent public speaker, and the author of multiple books on software design and development. Richard maintains a regularly updated blog (seroter.com) on topics of architecture and solution design and can be found on Twitter as @rseroter. Links Referenced: Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com Personal website: https://seroter.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/rseroter LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seroter/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Human-scale teams use Tailscale to build trusted networks. Tailscale Funnel is a great way to share a local service with your team for collaboration, testing, and experimentation.  Funnel securely exposes your dev environment at a stable URL, complete with auto-provisioned TLS certificates. Use it from the command line or the new VS Code extensions. In a few keystrokes, you can securely expose a local port to the internet, right from the IDE.I did this in a talk I gave at Tailscale Up, their first inaugural developer conference. I used it to present my slides and only revealed that that's what I was doing at the end of it. It's awesome, it works! Check it out!Their free plan now includes 3 users & 100 devices. Try it at snark.cloud/tailscalescream Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. We have returning guest Richard Seroter here who has apparently been collecting words to add to his job title over the years that we've been talking to him. Richard, you are now the Director of Product Management and Developer Relations at Google Cloud. Do I have all those words in the correct order and I haven't forgotten any along the way?Richard: I think that's all right. I think my first job was at Anderson Consulting as an analyst, so my goal is to really just add more words to whatever these titles—Corey: It's an adjective collection, really. That's what a career turns into. It's really the length of a career and success is measured not by accomplishments but by word count on your resume.Richard: If your business card requires a comma, success.Corey: So, it's been about a year or so since we last chatted here. What have you been up to?Richard: Yeah, plenty of things here, still, at Google Cloud as we took on developer relations. And, but you know, Google Cloud proper, I think AI has—I don't know if you've noticed, AI has kind of taken off with some folks who's spending a lot the last year… juicing up services and getting things ready there. And you know, myself and the team kind of remaking DevRel for a 2023 sort of worldview. So, yeah we spent the last year just scaling and growing and in covering some new areas like AI, which has been fun.Corey: You became profitable, which is awesome. I imagined at some point, someone wound up, like, basically realizing that you need to, like, patch the hole in the pipe and suddenly the water bill is no longer $8 billion a quarter. And hey, that works super well. Like, wow, that explains our utility bill and a few other things as well. I imagine the actual cause is slightly more complex than that, but I am a simple creature.Richard: Yeah. I think we made more than YouTube last quarter, which was a good milestone when you think of—I don't think anybody who says Google Cloud is a fun side project of Google is talking seriously anymore.Corey: I misunderstood you at first. I thought you said that you're pretty sure you made more than I did last year. It's like, well, yes, if a multi-billion dollar company's hyperscale cloud doesn't make more than I personally do, then I have many questions. And if I make more than that, I have a bunch of different questions, all of which could be terrifying to someone.Richard: You're killing it. Yeah.Corey: I'm working on it. So, over the last year, another trend that's emerged has been a pivot away—thankfully—from all of the Web3 nonsense and instead embracing the sprinkle some AI on it. And I'm not—people are about to listen to this and think, wait a minute, is he subtweeting my company? No, I'm subtweeting everyone's company because it seems to be a universal phenomenon. What's your take on it?Richard: I mean, it's countercultural now to not start every conversation with let me tell you about our AI story. And hopefully, we're going to get past this cycle. I think the AI stuff is here to stay. This does not feel like a hype trend to me overall. Like, this is legit tech with real user interest. I think that's awesome.I don't think a year from now, we're going to be competing over who has the biggest model anymore. Nobody cares. I don't know if we're going to hopefully lead with AI the same way as much as, what is it doing for me? What is my experience? Is it better? Can I do this job better? Did you eliminate this complex piece of toil from my day two stuff? That's what we should be talking about. But right now it's new and it's interesting. So, we all have to rub some AI on it.Corey: I think that there is also a bit of a passing of the buck going on when it comes to AI where I've talked to companies that are super excited about how they have this new AI story that's going to be great. And, “Well, what does it do?” “It lets you query our interface to get an answer.” Okay, is this just cover for being bad UX?Richard: [laugh]. That can be true in some cases. In other cases, this will fix UXes that will always be hard. Like, do we need to keep changing… I don't know, I'm sure if you and I go to our favorite cloud providers and go through their documentation, it's hard to have docs for 200 services and millions of pages. Maybe AI will fix some of that and make it easier to discover stuff.So in some cases, UIs are just hard at scale. But yes, I think in some cases, this papers over other things not happening by just rubbing some AI on it. Hopefully, for most everybody else, it's actually interesting, new value. But yeah, that's a… every week it's a new press release from somebody saying they're about to launch some AI stuff. I don't know how any normal human is keeping up with it.Corey: I certainly don't know. I'm curious to see what happens but it's kind of wild, too, because there you're right. There is something real there where you ask it to draw you a picture of a pony or something and it does, or give me a bunch of random analysis of this. I asked one recently to go ahead and rank the US presidents by absorbency and with a straight face, it did it, which is kind of amazing. I feel like there's a lack of imagination in the way that people talk about these things and a certain lack of awareness that you can make this a lot of fun, and in some ways, make that a better showcase of the business value than trying to do the straight-laced thing of having it explain Microsoft Excel to you.Richard: I think that's fair. I don't know how much sometimes whimsy and enterprise mix. Sometimes that can be a tricky part of the value prop. But I'm with you this some of this is hopefully returns to some more creativity of things. I mean, I personally use things like Bard or what have you that, “Hey, I'm trying to think of this idea. Can you give me some suggestions?” Or—I just did a couple weeks ago—“I need sample data for my app.”I could spend the next ten minutes coming up with Seinfeld and Bob's Burgers characters, or just give me the list in two seconds in JSON. Like that's great. So, I'm hoping we get to use this for more fun stuff. I'll be fascinated to see if when I write the keynote for—I'm working on the keynote for Next, if I can really inject something completely off the wall. I guess you're challenging me and I respect that.Corey: Oh, I absolutely am. And one of the things that I believe firmly is that we lose sight of the fact that people are inherently multifaceted. Just because you are a C-level executive at an enterprise does not mean that you're not also a human being with a sense of creativity and a bit of whimsy as well. Everyone is going to compete to wind up boring you to death with PowerPoint. Find something that sparks the imagination and sparks joy.Because yes, you're going to find the boring business case on your own without too much in the way of prodding for that, but isn't it great to imagine what if? What if we could have fun with some of these things? At least to me, that's always been the goal is to get people's attention. Humor has been my path, but there are others.Richard: I'm with you. I think there's a lot to that. And the question will be… yeah, I mean, again, to me, you and I talked about this before we started recording, this is the first trend for me in a while that feels purely organic where our customers, now—and I'll tell our internal folks—our customers have much better ideas than we do. And it's because they're doing all kinds of wild things. They're trying new scenarios, they're building apps purely based on prompts, and they're trying to, you know, do this.And it's better than what we just come up with, which is awesome. That's how it should be, versus just some vendor-led hype initiative where it is just boring corporate stuff. So, I like the fact that this isn't just us talking; it's the whole industry talking. It's people talking to my non-technical family members, giving me ideas for what they're using this stuff for. I think that's awesome. So yeah, but I'm with you, I think companies can also look for more creative angles than just what's another way to left-align something in a cell.Corey: I mean, some of the expressions on this are wild to me. The Photoshop beta with its generative AI play has just been phenomenal. Because it's weird stuff, like, things that, yeah, I'm never going to be a great artist, let's be clear, but being able to say remove this person from the background, and it does it, as best I can tell, seamlessly is stuff where yeah, that would have taken me ages to find someone who knows what the hell they're doing on the internet somewhere and then pay them to do it. Or basically stumble my way through it for two hours and it somehow looks worse afterwards than before I started. It's the baseline stuff of, I'm never going to be able to have it—to my understanding—go ahead just build me a whole banner ad that does this and hit these tones and the rest, but it is going to help me refine something in that direction, until I can then, you know, hand it to a professional who can take it from my chicken scratching into something real.Richard: If it will. I think that's my only concern personally with some of this is I don't want this to erase expertise or us to think we can just get lazy. I think that I get nervous, like, can I just tell it to do stuff and I don't even check the output, or I don't do whatever. So, I think that's when you go back to, again, enterprise use cases. If this is generating code or instructions or documentation or what have you, I need to trust that output in some way.Or more importantly, I still need to retain the skills necessary to check it. So, I'm hoping people like you and me and all our —every—all the users out there of this stuff, don't just offload responsibility to the machine. Like, just always treat it like a kind of slightly drunk friend sitting next to you with good advice and always check it out.Corey: It's critical. I think that there's a lot of concern—and I'm not saying that people are wrong on this—but that people are now going to let it take over their jobs, it's going to wind up destroying industries. No, I think it's going to continue to automate things that previously required human intervention. But this has been true since the Industrial Revolution, where opportunities arise and old jobs that used to be critical are no longer centered in quite the same way. The one aspect that does concern me is not that kids are going to be used to cheat on essays like, okay, great, whatever. That seems to be floated mostly by academics who are concerned about the appropriate structure of academia.For me, the problem is, is there's a reason that we have people go through 12 years of English class in the United States and that is, it's not to dissect of the work of long-dead authors. It's to understand how to write and how to tell us a story and how to frame ideas cohesively. And, “The computer will do that for me,” I feel like that potentially might not serve people particularly well. But as a counterpoint, I was told when I was going to school my entire life that you're never going to have a calculator in your pocket all the time that you need one. No, but I can also speak now to the open air, ask it any math problem I can imagine, and get a correct answer spoken back to me. That also wasn't really in the bingo card that I had back then either, so I am a hesitant to try and predict the future.Richard: Yeah, that's fair. I think it's still important for a kid that I know how to make change or do certain things. I don't want to just offload to calculators or—I want to be able to understand, as you say, literature or things, not just ever print me out a book report. But that happens with us professionals, too, right? Like, I don't want to just atrophy all of my programming skills because all I'm doing is accepting suggestions from the machine, or that it's writing my emails for me. Like, that still weirds me out a little bit. I like to write an email or send a tweet or do a summary. To me, I enjoy those things still. I don't want to—that's not toil to me. So, I'm hoping that we just use this to make ourselves better and we don't just use it to make ourselves lazier.Corey: You mentioned a few minutes ago that you are currently working on writing your keynote for Next, so I'm going to pretend, through a vicious character attack here, that this is—you know, it's 11 o'clock at night, the day before the Next keynote and you found new and exciting ways to procrastinate, like recording a podcast episode with me. My question for you is, how is this Next going to be different than previous Nexts?Richard: Hmm. Yeah, I mean, for the first time in a while it's in person, which is wonderful. So, we'll have a bunch of folks at Moscone in San Francisco, which is tremendous. And I [unintelligible 00:11:56] it, too, I definitely have online events fatigue. So—because absolutely no one has ever just watched the screen entirely for a 15 or 30 or 60-minute keynote. We're all tabbing over to something else and multitasking. And at least when I'm in the room, I can at least pretend I'll be paying attention the whole time. The medium is different. So, first off, I'm just excited—Corey: Right. It feels a lot ruder to get up and walk out of the front row in the middle of someone's talk. Now, don't get me wrong, I'll still do it because I'm a jerk, but I'll feel bad about it as I do. I kid, I kid. But yeah, a tab away is always a thing. And we seem to have taken the same structure that works in those events and tried to force it into more or less a non-interactive Zoom call, and I feel like that is just very hard to distinguish.I will say that Google did a phenomenal job of online events, given the constraints it was operating under. Production value is great, the fact that you took advantage of being in different facilities was awesome. But yeah, it'll be good to be back in person again. I will be there with bells on in Moscone myself, mostly yelling at people, but you know, that's what I do.Richard: It's what you do. But we missed that hallway track. You missed this sort of bump into people. Do hands-on labs, purposely have nothing to do where you just walk around the show floor. Like we have been missing, I think, society-wise, a little bit of just that intentional boredom. And so, sometimes you need at conference events, too, where you're like, “I'm going to skip that next talk and just see what's going on around here.” That's awesome. You should do that more often.So, we're going to have a lot of spaces for just, like, go—like, 6000 square feet of even just going and looking at demos or doing hands-on stuff or talking with other people. Like that's just the fun, awesome part. And yeah, you're going to hear a lot about AI, but plenty about other stuff, too. Tons of announcements. But the key is that to me, community stuff, learn from each other stuff, that energy in person, you can't replicate that online.Corey: So, an area that you have expanded into has been DevRel, where you've always been involved with it, let's be clear, but it's becoming a bit more pronounced. And as an outsider, I look at Google Cloud's DevRel presence and I don't see as much of it as your staffing levels would indicate, to the naive approach. And let's be clear, that means from my perspective, all public-facing humorous, probably performative content in different ways, where you have zany music videos that, you know, maybe, I don't know, parody popular songs do celebrate some exec's birthday they didn't know was coming—[fake coughing]. Or creative nonsense on social media. And the the lack of seeing a lot of that could in part be explained by the fact that social media is wildly fracturing into a bunch of different islands which, on balance, is probably a good thing for the internet, but I also suspect it comes down to a common misunderstanding of what DevRel actually is.It turns out that, contrary to what many people wanted to believe in the before times, it is not getting paid as much as an engineer, spending three times that amount of money on travel expenses every year to travel to exotic places, get on stage, party with your friends, and then give a 45-minute talk that spends two minutes mentioning where you work and 45 minutes talking about, I don't know, how to pick the right standing desk. That has, in many cases, been the perception of DevRel and I don't think that's particularly defensible in our current macroeconomic climate. So, what are all those DevRel people doing?Richard: [laugh]. That's such a good loaded question.Corey: It's always good to be given a question where the answers are very clear there are right answers and wrong answers, and oh, wow. It's a fun minefield. Have fun. Go catch.Richard: Yeah. No, that's terrific. Yeah, and your first part, we do have a pretty well-distributed team globally, who does a lot of things. Our YouTube channel has, you know, we just crossed a million subscribers who are getting this stuff regularly. It's more than Amazon and Azure combined on YouTube. So, in terms of like that, audience—Corey: Counterpoint, you definitionally are YouTube. But that's neither here nor there, either. I don't believe you're juicing the stats, but it's also somehow… not as awesome if, say, I were to do it, which I'm working on it, but I have a face for radio and it shows.Richard: [laugh]. Yeah, but a lot of this has been… the quality and quantity. Like, you look at the quantity of video, it overwhelms everyone else because we spend a lot of time, we have a specific media team within my DevRel team that does the studio work, that does the production, that does all that stuff. And it's a concerted effort. That team's amazing. They do really awesome work.But, you know, a lot of DevRel as you say, [sigh] I don't know about you, I don't think I've ever truly believed in the sort of halo effect of if super smart person works at X company, even if they don't even talk about that company, that somehow presents good vibes and business benefits to that company. I don't think we've ever proven that's really true. Maybe you've seen counterpoints, where [crosstalk 00:16:34]—Corey: I can think of anecdata examples of it. Often though, on some level, for me at least, it's been okay someone I tremendously respect to the industry has gone to work at a company that I've never heard of. I will be paying attention to what that company does as a direct result. Conversely, when someone who is super well known, and has been working at a company for a while leaves and then either trashes the company on the way out or doesn't talk about it, it's a question of, what's going on? Did something horrible happen there? Should we no longer like that company? Are we not friends anymore? It's—and I don't know if that's necessarily constructive, either, but it also, on some level, feels like it can shorthand to oh, to be working DevRel, you have to be an influencer, which frankly, I find terrifying.Richard: Yeah. Yeah. I just—the modern DevRel, hopefully, is doing a little more of product-led growth style work. They're focusing specifically on how are we helping developers discover, engage, scale, become advocates themselves in the platform, increasing that flywheel through usage, but that has very discreet metrics, it has very specific ownership. Again, personally, I don't even think DevRel should do as much with sales teams because sales teams have hundreds and sometimes thousands of sales engineers and sales reps. It's amazing. They have exactly what they need.I don't think DevRel is a drop in the bucket to that team. I'd rather talk directly to developers, focus on people who are self-service signups, people who are developers in those big accounts. So, I think the modern DevRel team is doing more in that respect. But when I look at—I just look, Corey, this morning at what my team did last week—so the average DevRel team, I look at what advocacy does, teams writing code labs, they're building tutorials. Yes, they're doing some in person events. They wrote some blog posts, published some videos, shipped a couple open-source projects that they contribute to in, like gaming sector, we ship—we have a couple projects there.They're actually usually customer zero in the product. They use the product before it ships, provides bugs and feedback to the team, we run DORA workshops—because again, we're the DevOps Research and Assessment gang—we actually run the tutorial and Docs platform for Google Cloud. We have people who write code samples and reference apps. So, sometimes you see things publicly, but you don't see the 20,000 code samples in the docs, many written by our team. So, a lot of the times, DevRel is doing work to just enable on some of these different properties, whether that's blogs or docs, whether that's guest articles or event series, but all of this should be in service of having that credible relationship to help devs use the platform easier. And I love watching this team do that.But I think there's more to it now than years ago, where maybe it was just, let's do some amazing work and try to have some second, third-order effect. I think DevRel teams that can have very discrete metrics around leading indicators of long-term cloud consumption. And if you can't measure that successfully, you've probably got to rethink the team.[midroll 00:19:20]Corey: That's probably fair. I think that there's a tremendous series of… I want to call it thankless work. Like having done some of those ridiculous parody videos myself, people look at it and they chuckle and they wind up, that was clever and funny, and they move on to the next one. And they don't see the fact that, you know, behind the scenes for that three-minute video, there was a five-figure budget to pull all that together with a lot of people doing a bunch of disparate work. Done right, a lot of this stuff looks like it was easy or that there was no work at all.I mean, at some level, I'm as guilty of that as anyone. We're recording a podcast now that is going to be handed over to the folks at HumblePod. They are going to produce this into something that sounds coherent, they're going to fix audio issues, all kinds of other stuff across the board, a full transcript, and the rest. And all of that is invisible to me. It's like AI; it's the magic box I drop a file into and get podcast out the other side.And that does a disservice to those people who are actively working in that space to make things better. Because the good stuff that they do never gets attention, but then the company makes an interesting blunder in some way or another and suddenly, everyone's out there screaming and wondering why these people aren't responding on Twitter in 20 seconds when they're finding out about this stuff for the first time.Richard: Mm-hm. Yeah, that's fair. You know, different internal, external expectations of even DevRel. We've recently launched—I don't know if you caught it—something called Jump Start Solutions, which were executable reference architectures. You can come into the Google Cloud Console or hit one of our pages and go, “Hey, I want to do a multi-tier web app.” “Hey, I want to do a data processing pipeline.” Like, use cases.One click, we blow out the entire thing in the platform, use it, mess around with it, turn it off with one click. Most of those are built by DevRel. Like, my engineers have gone and built that. Tons of work behind the scenes. Really, like, production-grade quality type architectures, really, really great work. There's going to be—there's a dozen of these. We'll GA them at Next—but really, really cool work. That's DevRel. Now, that's behind-the-scenes work, but as engineering work.That can be some of the thankless work of setting up projects, deployment architectures, Terraform, all of them also dropped into GitHub, ton of work documenting those. But yeah, that looks like behind-the-scenes work. But that's what—I mean, most of DevRel is engineers. These are folks often just building the things that then devs can use to learn the platforms. Is it the flashy work? No. Is it the most important work? Probably.Corey: I do have a question I'd be remiss not to ask. Since the last time we spoke, relatively recently from this recording, Google—well, I'd say ‘Google announced,' but they kind of didn't—Squarespace announced that they'd be taking over Google domains. And there was a lot of silence, which I interpret, to be clear, as people at Google being caught by surprise, by large companies, communication is challenging. And that's fine, but I don't think it was anything necessarily nefarious.And then it came out further in time with an FAQ that Google published on their site, that Google Cloud domains was a part of this as well. And that took a lot of people aback, in the sense—not that it's hard to migrate a domain from one provider to another, but it brought up the old question of, if you're building something in cloud, how do you pick what to trust? And I want to be clear before you answer that, I know you work there. I know that there are constraints on what you can or cannot say.And for people who are wondering why I'm not hitting you harder on this, I want to be very explicit, I can ask you a whole bunch of questions that I already know the answer to, and that answer is that you can't comment. That's not constructive or creative. So, I don't want people to think that I'm not intentionally asking the hard questions, but I also know that I'm not going to get an answer and all I'll do is make you uncomfortable. But I think it's fair to ask, how do you evaluate what services or providers or other resources you're using when you're building in cloud that are going to be around, that you can trust building on top of?Richard: It's a fair question. Not everyone's on… let's update our software on a weekly basis and I can just swap things in left. You know, there's a reason that even Red Hat is so popular with Linux because as a government employee, I can use that Linux and know it's backwards compatible for 15 years. And they sell that. Like, that's the value, that this thing works forever.And Microsoft does the same with a lot of their server products. Like, you know, for better or for worse, [laugh] they will always kind of work with a component you wrote 15 years ago in SharePoint and somehow it runs today. I don't even know how that's possible. Love it. That's impressive.Now, there's a cost to that. There's a giant tax in the vendor space to make that work. But yeah, there's certain times where even with us, look, we are trying to get better and better at things like comms. And last year we announced—I checked them recently—you know, we have 185 Cloud products in our enterprise APIs. Meaning they have a very, very tight way we would deprecate with very, very long notice, they've got certain expectations on guarantees of how long you can use them, quality of service, all the SLAs.And so, for me, like, I would bank on, first off, for every cloud provider, whether they're anchor services. Build on those right? You know, S3 is not going anywhere from Amazon. Rock solid service. BigQuery Goodness gracious, it's the center of Google Cloud.And you look at a lot of services: what can you bet on that are the anchors? And then you can take bets on things that sit around it. There's times to be edgy and say, “Hey, I'll use Service Weaver,” which we open-sourced earlier this year. It's kind of a cool framework for building apps and we'll deconstruct it into microservices at deploy time. That's cool.Would I literally build my whole business on it? No, I don't think so. It's early stuff. Now, would I maybe use it also with some really boring VMs and boring API Gateway and boring storage? Totally. Those are going to be around forever.I think for me, personally, I try to think of how do I isolate things that have some variability to them. Now, to your point, sometimes you don't know there's variability. You would have just thought that service might be around forever. So, how are you supposed to know that that thing could go away at some point? And that's totally fair. I get that.Which is why we have to keep being better at comms, making sure more things are in our enterprise APIs, which is almost everything. So, you have some assurances, when I build this thing, I've got a multi-year runway if anything ever changes. Nothing's going to stay the same forever, but nothing should change tomorrow on a dime. We need more trust than that.Corey: Absolutely. And I agree. And the problem, too, is hidden dependencies. Let's say what is something very simple. I want to log in to [unintelligible 00:25:34] brand new AWS account and spin of a single EC2 instance. The end. Well, I can trust that EC2 is going to be there. Great. That's not one service you need to go through that critical path. It is a bare minimum six, possibly as many as twelve, depending upon what it is exactly you're doing.And it's the, you find out after the fact that oh, there was that hidden dependency in there that I wasn't fully aware of. That is a tricky and delicate balance to strike. And, again, no one is going to ever congratulate you—at all—on the decision to maintain a service that is internally painful and engineering-ly expensive to keep going, but as soon as you kill something, even it's for this thing doesn't have any customers, the narrative becomes, “They're screwing over their customers.” It's—they just said that it didn't have any. What's the concern here?It's a messaging problem; it is a reputation problem. Conversely, everyone knows that Amazon does not kill AWS services. Full stop. Yeah, that turns out everyone's wrong. By my count, they've killed ten, full-on AWS services and counting at the moment. But that is not the reputation that they have.Conversely, I think that the reputation that Google is going to kill everything that it touches is probably not accurate, though I don't know that I'd want to have them over to babysit either. So, I don't know. But it is something that it feels like you're swimming uphill on in many respects, just due to not even deprecation decisions, historically, so much as poor communication around them.Richard: Mm-hm. I mean, communication can always get better, you know. And that's, it's not our customers' problem to make sure that they can track every weird thing we feel like doing. It's not their challenge. If our business model changes or our strategy changes, that's not technically the customer's problem. So, it's always our job to make this as easy as possible. Anytime we don't, we have made a mistake.So, you know, even DevRel, hey, look, it puts teams in a tough spot. We want our customers to trust us. We have to earn that; you will never just give it to us. At the same time, as you say, “Hey, we're profitable. It's great. We're growing like weeds,” it's amazing to see how many people are using this platform. I mean, even services, you don't talk about having—I mean, doing really, really well. But I got to earn that. And you got to earn, more importantly, the scale. I don't want you to just kick the tires on Google Cloud; I want you to bet on it. But we're only going to earn that with really good support, really good price, stability, really good feeling like these services are rock solid. Have we totally earned that? We're getting there, but not as mature as we'd like to get yet, but I like where we're going.Corey: I agree. And reputations are tricky. I mean, recently InfluxDB deprecated two regions and wound up turning them off and deleting data. And they wound up getting massive blowback for this, which, to their credit, their co-founder and CTO, Paul Dix—who has been on the show before—wound up talking about and saying, “Yeah, that was us. We're taking ownership of this.”But the public announcement said that they had—that data in AWS was not recoverable and they're reaching out to see if the data in GCP was still available. At which point, I took the wrong impression from this. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hang on. Hold the phone here. Does that mean that data that I delete from a Google Cloud account isn't really deleted?Because I have a whole bunch of regulators that would like a word if so. And Paul jumped onto that with, “No, no, no, no, no. I want to be clear, we have a backup system internally that we were using that has that set up. And we deleted the backups on the AWS side; we don't believe we did on the Google Cloud side. It's purely us, not a cloud provider problem.” It's like, “Okay, first, sorry for causing a fire drill.” Secondly, “Okay, that's great.” But the reason I jumped in that direction was just because it becomes so easy when a narrative gets out there to believe the worst about companies that you don't even realize you're doing it.Richard: No, I understand. It's reflexive. And I get it. And look, B2B is not B2C, you know? In B2B, it's not, “Build it and they will come.” I think we have the best cloud infrastructure, the best security posture, and the most sophisticated managed services. I believe that I use all the clouds. I think that's true. But it doesn't matter unless you also do the things around it, around support, security, you know, usability, trust, you have to go sell these things and bring them to people. You can't just sit back and say, “It's amazing. Everyone's going to use it.” You've got to earn that. And so, that's something that we're still on the journey of, but our foundation is terrific. We just got to do a better job on some of these intangibles around it.Corey: I agree with you, when you s—I think there's a spirited debate you could have on any of those things you said that you believe that Google Cloud is the best at, with the exception of security, where I think that is unquestionably. I think that is a lot less variable than the others. The others are more or less, “Who has the best cloud infrastructure?” Well, depends on who had what for breakfast today. But the simplicity and the approach you take to security is head and shoulders above the competition.And I want to make sure I give credit where due: it is because of that simplicity and default posturing that customers wind up better for it as a result. Otherwise, you wind up in this hell of, “You must have at least this much security training to responsibly secure your environment.” And that is never going to happen. People read far less than we wish they would. I want to make very clear that Google deserves the credit for that security posture.Richard: Yeah, and the other thing, look, I'll say that, from my observation, where we do something that feels a little special and different is we do think in platforms, we think in both how we build and how we operate and how the console is built by a platform team, you—singularly. How—[is 00:30:51] we're doing Duet AI that we've pre-announced at I/O and are shipping. That is a full platform experience covering a dozen services. That is really hard to do if you have a lot of isolation. So, we've done a really cool job thinking in platforms and giving that simplicity at that platform level. Hard to do, but again, we have to bring people to it. You're not going to discover it by accident.Corey: Richard, I will let you get back to your tear-filled late-night writing of tomorrow's Next keynote, but if people want to learn more—once the dust settles—where's the best place for them to find you?Richard: Yeah, hopefully, they continue to hang out at cloud.google.com and using all the free stuff, which is great. You can always find me at seroter.com. I read a bunch every day and then I've read a blog post every day about what I read, so if you ever want to tune in on that, just see what wacky things I'm checking out in tech, that is good. And I still hang out on different social networks, Twitter at @rseroter and LinkedIn and things like that. But yeah, join in and yell at me about anything I said.Corey: I did not realize you had a daily reading list of what you put up there. That is news to me and I will definitely track in, and then of course, yell at you from the cheap seats when I disagree with anything that you've chosen to include. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me and suffer the uncomfortable questions.Richard: Hey, I love it. If people aren't talking about us, then we don't matter, so I would much rather we'd be yelling about us than the opposite there.Corey: [laugh]. As always, it's been a pleasure. Richard Seroter, Director of Product Management and Developer Relations at Google Cloud. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment that you had an AI system write for you because you never learned how to structure a sentence.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Join us in a little Pride history lesson as we cover the lives and deaths of two great men that played an integral part in the LGBTQ+ community! As Mayor of San Francisco and ally to the community, George Moscone used his position and privilege to open doors for many who had always been oppressed and under represented. As San Francisco city supervisor, Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to hold an elected position in the U.S. When George had an opportunity to turn the board of city supervisors in their parties favor, former fellow city supervisor, Dan White, claimed to see it as a personal betrayal. Was Dan really just the depressed and desperate man his defense team claimed him to be? Or was Dan quick to react with violence out of a lack of regard to the lives of those different than him? Tune in and decide for yourself as Elysia and Savannah give it their all! The facts, the eww's, the awe's, at least one dad joke, and some tears!    Join the conversation! Find us on Instagram and Facebook!   Sources: Murder at City Hall: The killing of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk   https://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Myth-of-the-Twinkie-defense-The-verdict-in-2511152.php   https://advance.lexis.com/documentpage?pdmfid=1000516&pddocfullpath=%2Fshared%2Fdocument%2Fcases%2Furn%3AcontentItem%3A3S11-SJR0-003C-R37H-00008-00&pdcontentcomponentid=506037&config=00JAA0NDgwMGE5Mi01ODYxLTRkZDEtODQ0OS1mYmEyN2M3ZmZmZWQKAFBvZENhdGFsb2fyUIbYd2jFgdWUbISiHcjK&ecomp=8sm_k&earg=sr1&prid=00cf44dc-548e-49f8-8e4a-e90060e66e41&crid=2b99cafc-c901-458f-8d3b-711848efdef7   https://milkfoundation.org/about/harvey-milk-biography   https://cultureofoneworld.org/breaking-news/human-rights/legacy-of-the-late-sf-mayor-george-moscone-haunts-ghost-light/1337/   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Moscone   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_White   https://www.history.com/news/what-were-the-white-night-riots       Music By: https://www.fesliyanstudios.com/royalty-free-music/download/shady-business/2181 

Francesca and Marina Moscone are the co-founders of their namesake brand, Marina Moscone. As sisters and partners, they have worked together for six years to create a burgeoning family business. This episode shines a light on their commitment to only producing what they believe in, Marina's unique aesthetic, and a collection that is destined for success due to the sisters' unique partnership full of trust, love, and mutual respect.

In the grand, six-month-long tradition of Oncology for the Inquisitive Mind, Josh and Michael provide an update from an international meeting to keep you right up to date with the latest and greatest developments in their field. This week's special is the ASCO GI Symposium, held in Moscone, California, and brought to your ears from Melbourne. From two guys in their pyjamas. Who would much rather be in Moscone, California.At any rate, updates abound in this OftiM special. Listen on so you too can crest the wave of Gastrointestinal Oncology!Studies Discussed: NAPOLI 3, CHECKMATE 648 and 649 updates, SPOTLIGHT, Pemigatinib in FGFR mutant mCRCFor more episodes, resources and blog posts, visit www.inquisitiveonc.comFind us on Twitter @InquisitiveOnc!If you want us to look at a specific trial or subject, email us at inquisitiveonc@gmail.comArt courtesy of Taryn SilverMusic courtesy of AlexiAction: https://pixabay.com/users/alexiaction-26977400/Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. If you are unwell, seek medical advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Francesca and Marina Moscone are the co-founders of their namesake brand, Marina Moscone. As sisters and partners, they have worked together for six years to create a burgeoning family business. This episode shines a light on their commitment to only producing what they believe in, Marina's unique aesthetic, and a collection that is destined for success due to the sisters' unique partnership full of trust, love, and mutual respect.

The 34Questions podcast challenges it's guests to answer introspective questions. We intend to leave a memento for the future, revealing our personalities to our descendants.Reaching out, to show them from whom they are coming from. The podcast also serves as a journal entry, a glimpse of the person you are. The past, to the person you will become. Guests participate in a series of games which lead to facing the Wheel of Fate. Whichever number the wheel lands on, is the question that will be asked. No two interviews are exactly alike, as no two people are. Reach out, reach forward. As always, much love. Looking forward to catching you on 34Questions. -------------- Background Music by: Homage Beats -------------- 34Questions.comThe 34Questions podcast challenges it's guests to answer introspective questions. We intend to leave a memento for the future, revealing our personalities to our descendants.Reaching out, to show them from whom they are coming from. The podcast also serves as a journal entry, a glimpse of the person you are. The past, to the person you will become. Guests participate in a series of games which lead to facing the Wheel of Fate. Whichever number the wheel lands on, is the question that will be asked. No two interviews are exactly alike, as no two people are. Reach out, reach forward. As always, much love. Looking forward to catching you on 34Questions. 

This month, Megan covers a story that she mentioned in passing a few months ago, and Danielle demanded to know more about. This one's for you, babe! Megan talks about the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, and the resulting “White Night” Riots. Harvey Milk was the first non-incumbent, openly gay elected official in the United States, and was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Mayor, George Moscone, was his political ally. However, on November 27, 1978, they were gunned down by a coworker, fellow Supervisor, Dan White. The jury's verdict left not only Danielle absolutely shocked, but also shocked the entire city of San Francisco. CONTENT WARNING: police brutality, brief mention of suicide --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/crimeandroses/support

Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here with a quick update on VMware's annual show.Before we get started, I just wanted to ask you to click on that subscribe button. That really helps the show grow, and lets us continue to bring you all this content and interviews with great guests.Last week I went to VMworld, or as it is now called VMware Explore. I have to say it was a bit of a disaster, but I will get into that in a bit.To start with, VMware Explore was held in San Francisco at the Moscone center. Not sure this was a great decision. They may have felt if they stay local, more companies will be interested in sponsoring, and exhibiting. For everyone not from the bay area, it was very expensive. Hotels were at a premium for sure. San Francisco is also dealing with a bit of a crime crisis at the moment, which has been getting a lot of news coverage. All of this, plus a lingering pandemic, a bunch of Monkey Pox, and an uncertain economy meant that this event wasn't as well attended as previous ones. Additionally, a lot of uncertainty about the Broadcom acquisition was expressed, and this may have played into the lower attendance as well.It was a dramatically smaller show. It reminded me of some of the regional events that they do. Vendors I talked with said that they had many good interactions, so maybe with less volume, you get a more interested crowd. I do know that this event used to sell out long before the show, but this year you could buy tickets at the door.The exhibit floor seemed to be less than half of what it was previously. The main focus was around storage, Horizon products and visibility solutions. The usual cohort of smaller vendors just wasn't there this year. I'm not sure if this speaks to market conditions, or an erosion of the VMware ecosystem.While the exhibit floor was lackluster, the sessions seemed to be buzzing with activity. I think the attendees were really focused on the education aspect of this show, and there were a lot of sessions for people to attend. The sessions I attended were good if not packed. I generally heard good feedback from people about their sessions.VMware had a handful of announcements. They doubled down on cloud, citing an IDC analysis that showed 400 percent growth in cloud native apps over the past 3 years from a total of 72 Million in 2019 to an estimated 310 Million cloud native apps today.Some of the big announcements were VMWare Image Builder which is a SaaS service that allows customers to package verify and publish across multiple Kubernetes providers, talking a lot of the manual work out of building for multiple platforms.They also expanded and improved the VMware Application Catalog with more integration with OpenShift, greater OS support, and a bunch of additions to the catalog.They also discussed how they are growing the VMware Marketplace as well, but not a ton of big flashy new stuff this year.My plan for this year's show was to meet with some of the vendors and get some interviews. I was able to interview O.J. Walanyk from Kenetik, but shortly after a quick interview with him, I put my microphones down and somebody walked off with them while I wasn't looking. They were brand new and that was the first time I used them. So, unfortunately, the recording was also lost when the mics were taken, but I did have some audio off the camera, so please excuse the crowd noise.Unfortunately, without the mics, it was a bit difficult to do any more interviews, but in all honesty, there weren't many new vendors to talk with.Thanks for watching, and If you want to support the channel, please subscribe, that is the best way to show your love.I will see you in the next one. 

STEPHANIE introduces our second listener favorite scandal she has done on this season of Beyond Reproach—Episode 50: How Dan White got away with the murder of Harvey Milk and George Moscone. In this episode STEPHANIE does a deep dive into the assassination of Harvey Milk and subsequent the “Twinkie Defense.” We raise our glasses to one of the many examples of straight white men getting away with literal murders using defenses that would have been laughed out of court if used by anyone else. ALSO MENTIONED: Our future best friend David Wondritch, sexy cocktails, Jimmy Buffet, baddies vs trashies, Haight-Ashbury, Anita Bryant, diet culture, Scene Pene, Log Cabin republican, NIMBY vs YIMBY, rage quitting, calling the manager, the 5Gs, Hashtag History Podcast, Jonestown, bad apples, Three's Company defense, Danny Boy, and northern California sadness. For source information on each scandal and to peruse our online shop: SITE

In this episode we are drinking our first tequila cocktail–the Frozen Margarita! This frozen  summertime crowd-pleaser is a spin on a vintage recipe called the daisy. For our non-Spanish speakers “margarita” is Spanish for “daisy.”

I used to see Jon Fortt at all the big tech events, sitting under lights, earpiece in and connected, waiting for the throw from CNBC New York for the latest in technology from The Sands, Moscone, or Javits Convention Centers. Jon has interviewed most of today's technology leaders, including Andy Jassy, Shantanu Narayen, Sandy Speicher, Satya Nadella, and many more. In this far-ranging discussion, Jon shares his take on a number of topics, from leadership, culture, authenticity, and other observations time with some of today's top leaders. We covered the evolution of media, and Jon's personal experimentation in varying content formats, structure, and delivery, stretching the limits inside, and outside the formal confines of CNBC. After recounting a career journey of from newspapers to magazines, national to local to national again, print to television, and adding successfully adding LinkedIn, YouTube & WordPress to the mix. I'm sure fans will enjoy getting to know another side of Jon, being on the other side of the questions. And for those who don't follow Jon, let me introduce you to a positive force in journalism, innovating in delivery, and leveraging his platforms to help others through education. Thanks again Jon, really enjoyed our conversation Transcript and Show Notes  YouTube  LinkedIn Article 

Join us as we untie the tangled web of connections between George Moscone, mayor of San Francisco during the mid-seventies, Willie Brown, Dianne Feinstein, Harvey Milk, Dan White and Jim Jones, which of course takes to Guyana and Jonestown.  It's a tale of voter fraud, corruption, mind control, extortion, bribes, and ties to intelligence agencies.

 Brent: Welcome to this new year today, I have ghetto Yansen and he is with Spriker and I'm very excited to talk to him ghetto. You are the global business and technology. Evangelists for Spriker and which in the blue room or the green room, we talked about that you're the Ben marks of Spriker or the Ben marks of shop where, or the benchmarks of Magento or whatever.  Brent: However you want to say that. Why don't you do a better introduction than I just did. And maybe tell us what you're doing day to day and, one of your passions in life.   Guido: Oh, I have many passions brands. One of wishes now a Spriker indeed. Yeah, my background's in the. I guess to try to compromise a bit that I have a background in psychology and what a usability part of of psychology optimizing a web shop off the debts.  Guido: The study itself at university I'm done. I don't feel that old, but at university that didn't have a lot of online things going on. In terms of examples. So that was mainly about the usability. I could think of thing machine or a way, finding an airports how that works. But I always applied this to align to e-commerce and in, started out with things like mumbo and.  Guido: Wait maybe I am old mama Joomla and a, and I switched gears to to e-commerce and Magento in 2008. That time when we were all playing around with cameras and virtual mark, and those kinds of things that Magento came around, which was this magical thing that was way ahead of its time. And we all add a great fun, I think playing around with that and did that for, 13 years.  Guido: And I think that's also like 20 10, 20 11 that I met you. I think we met at a. It was the Moscone center in San   Brent: Francisco. Could be, yeah. Yeah. The fabric comm X dot commerce.   Guido: This will all be beeped   Brent: out with the knee, right? Yeah. In fact, I was just going through all my supplies. I was going through my old video just getting stuff, getting my mat cleaned up and I found of a video of the, in the intro or the, welcome from the.  Brent: PayPal slash Magento slash whatever eBay people. Yeah. And it was us coming out of the conference center and they all, there's huge. Just all the employees lined up welcoming, everybody to the event. So it was definitely a well thought out event and it was fun how could you go wrong?  Brent: I don't know if if the outcome was what they had expected, but it was fun. And then. A fun event, 2011, definitely.   Guido: Yeah. Events were a fun ride. Remember those events were fun. Now we had a lot of fun with that with Magento organized, a lot of stuff. For Magento we had the Mimi, Japan and Netherlands kickstart this whole global movement of Magento events.  Guido: And I've been lucky enough to to attend many of those those firsts, which are the best I think, to go through like those first events in a country where. People have heard each other's names online on slack or on the forums, but never met in person. So all those awkward first meetings, or those are great to to, attend to.  Guido: And yeah, I and it's also a, the Magento ecosystem is also where I met Boris the founder of Spriker and currently co CEO of Spriker. I think we met sills. 20 11 20 12 had a Magento agency. And some six, seven years ago when you started with we kept in contact and yeah, I would have lost a year.  Guido: I was working at a Magento merchants actually. And he approached me and said, Hey, we're growing like crazy at Spriker and we need someone like you doing community stuff. Spriker we need something like that. So to support that. I don't think you actually build this, build a community.  Guido: I The community is there and does its own thing. That's what we see, which has the rights. But we need someone from Spriker to facilitate what's happening out. There are very similar indeed to what's. What bandage. And before that, around though, we're doing a Magento. So yeah, that's the,   Brent: yeah.  Brent: And I, I did I've interviewed my Miquel Turk for both Spriker and it's an interesting and fun platform and one of the. I had made early on was about the who 15 and how we're working on getting sub one second times. And he laughed at me and he said, yes, Spriker, we're working on sub 400 millisecond times or something like that.  Brent: It is an interesting platform and I'd love to dive into it a little more, but first let's I know that you have been involved with. In conversion rate optimization, I think from an e-commerce standpoint, that is one thing that is often overlooked, especially. A lot of clients will come to a technology partner and they'll say, Hey, I want to build a fantastic website.  Brent: Then they leave those either the technology partner doesn't focus on that or the client doesn't see value in that. So can we maybe just have a brief conversation around, what does it mean for conversion rate and why is that? And so why is that even more important than the platform you're on or the store build that you're doing or any of those.  Guido: I think the conversion rate optimization traditionally it's in the name. It's, a bit limiting. It's the oldest Christian in the Ciroc community. Let's first define what it is. So Euro it's about a practice of semi or semi-truck. Practice or figuring out what works for your online store which usually involves doing user research talking to users, doing surveys, translating those into a hypothesis on what could work and what's, where you expect to be a better for, your store.  Guido: And then validating that through experiments. Usually that's, an AB test. That's, very short description of of, Shiro these days. And I think one of the things that was holding back Shiro, it depends a bit on the depends a lot on the area you're in the business you're in, but for many companies it's, relatively easy to say what the ROI is for buying more ads, buying Edwards.  Guido: This is what I put in. This is what I put out. That's, very straightforward and that's something that then people try to apply to Shiro and that doesn't really work zeroes more. Often long-term strategy, trying to figure out what worked for your customer. And it's really hard to say at the end of the day, at the end of the year what came out of that?  Guido: Exactly. Which is also a bit counter-intuitive because we're doing an AB test. So we can exactly say, this is what version a is doing. This is what version B is doing, but. The course of the year, like if you do three aunts or a thousand experiments what's your contribution? I don't know. And that's that's, sometimes hard for managers to get into and also it can also mean that you're not even growing, but it can also mean that you're not going down.  Guido: So your conversion rate stays the same. Your number stays the same if you're in a declining business like a couple of last years with, if you're in a, in a. Selling holiday houses, like booking.com. It's going to be really hard to increase refresher rates or to, or avenue. But you really need a team like this to understand.  Guido: Okay, what are people still buying? What are the, changing consumer behavior to last year's? And companies that do CRO well those are the ones that can survive this. And if you just keep buying more assets, that's going to be a very difficult thing to,   Brent: to maintain that. Yeah. I think with the Google mistake or the Google ad mistake or the paid ad mistake has always been, Hey, let's just throw money at it.  Brent: And money will also always get it there. And sure. It's true. You can plow enough money into anything to make anything work, but there was a diminish diminishing return on that investment. And I think one thing we learned, I was part of the PayPal mobile optimization program for a year. And we did learn that number one, measuring and doing those tests matters.  Brent: Getting the merchant to get involved and see what's happening. And then I think what you said is you are either not propping up, but finding what works best for you. And then even doubling down on that to make sure that you're putting that investment where it's really paying off, but learning things that are counter-intuitive.  Brent: And I think one of the things that we learned in the mobile optimization. Some of the things that you would think would perform better, perform worse when you think they should perform better. And I think from a from a psychological standpoint or any, type of human behavior standpoint, for me, that's always very interesting to learn.  Brent: Why and why would something you would think performed better perform worse? And I think for the mobile one, I think was all about we're going from this desktop. People have a perception of desktop and then people have a perception of mobile. And I'll just say in the Western world, I'll generalize.  Brent: Most of the time, we're still on our desktop computer buying something it's going more mobile it's compared to the emerging markets where it's, maybe they don't even have a desktop and they're buying everything online. Yeah.   Guido: Yeah and that's counter-intuitive parts saying, okay.  Guido: We think this is going to work with. But it didn't, that's also a big part of why CRO can sometimes be a difficult conversation. Because w with management often, Ciro's also an initially used just to prove whatever management wants it to prove. And that doesn't always work. For example with, booking that I just mentioned that it's booking.com.  Guido: It's you can book hotel rooms there. It's a big company worldwide. It's based in the Netherlands originally. So that's why I use it as an example. There are the example of running experiment. But they, publicly said it. Okay. One in 10 experiments is success. So that even for that company, that's the pinnacle of AB testing and running experiments.  Guido: They're really good at this. And even they well fail nine out of 10 times fill as in doesn't go up doesn't increase your conversion rates or revenue or whatever you're optimizing. So you can imagine if, you don't have your processes in place or you're not as good as booking yet, that number is not as good as one in 10, but might be wanting 21 in 50 or whatever.  Guido: And that's, also I think Bartel for whites white can be really hard to start For companies doing this because you really need to be dedicated. It's not just running a three tests a year and then the hope for the best. That's probably not going to work for you. So that's makes it a bit harder than just buy more Google ads.  Guido: But yeah, you need to realize that. The traffic to your website, that's part one, part two is getting the people on those websites to convert to whatever you want them to buy. And it's still a very important blocking factor if that's not, good. And if you're double the amount of people converting on your websites, that's probably going to stay there.  Guido: Even if you stop optimizing today, if you double that and you're stopped today, it's not going to be we worse tomorrow. Less like things with ads. If you still buy ads today, you're not going to have any traffic any more tomorrow. So that's going to be I think Sierra is going to be in the end.  Guido: There's going to be a better investment, but yeah,   Brent: I think that looking at at what people are doing there, the op the, alternative is not doing. And then you don't even know, then you're really just sailing into a black hole without any knowledge or, thought about what you're doing. So measuring it.  Brent: And I think I've heard is that it's hypothesized, so you can come up with some experiments, you observe those, you measure them and then adjust after. So even, like you said, one in 10 or, one in 20. Those numbers mean that at least you've, found success in that little piece. And normally not normally, but let's just say in the business world if you get a one and 10 on a stock pick and that stock picked does a thousand.  Brent: The increase in your business or your, return? That one in 10 usually pays for the nine. And I think if, as we dig in to CRO and we work in on those specific things with, clients and learn what is doing better, those that one in 10 is going to give a payback. And I'm guessing booking.com does it because it gives them a payback.  Brent: And of course they know their customer.   Guido: Yeah. Yeah. And I think if you're interested, you're all, if you're, like I said you're in an agency you want to sell these things to clients. I think it helps to frame it in a totally different way. Don't, sell it as optimization senators, risk managers.  Guido: And a way to prioritize your backlog. If you run the experiments and you say indeed nine out of 10 would not have works. That may, that means that you save money on implementing those nine things that wouldn't would not have worked anyway. So you don't have to implement them. Just implement the one that does work.  Guido: And, you can also say to the strands that's maybe you think you're not experimenting, but you're changing a little things on your websites today and tomorrow under the author, you still, basically, you're still experimenting. You just don't have any idea what the outcome mess of the experiments.  Guido: The overall sum, you know what happens at the end of the month when you're looking through your books okay, this is what we solve, but you have no ID which. Which of those experiments that you're, I don't know that your content team and what your design team, whatever they or development team, whatever they deployed, you have no idea what those individual experiments contributed to the whole.  Guido: So you're not learning anything. Exactly. It's something   Brent: you can build upon. All right, so let's tie this into Spriker. We, Came on to talk more about Spriker than CRO, but how how we   Guido: can do multiple episodes of breath is found. Good.   Brent: Good good So how well let's, frame it around Spriker and, your role.  Brent: So some of your role is, going to be helping clients and some of your roles building a community.   Guido: It's a bit of a it might, feel like a bit of a career switch, so I'm not, I won't be. So for the last 10 years I've been running those experiments, running hero programs and actually building teams that do this.  Guido: So I won't be doing that. That Spriker at least not, initially. It's, more about the community part. The thing I've also been doing with. With Magento on the side for, 13 years. That's what I'm going to focus on doing doing for Spriker, but it still feels a bit it still feels a bit similar, so I'm not running AB tests anymore, but I'm still trying to.  Guido: To get the best possible feedback out of that community and use that to make Spriker better. And it can be Spriker the product can be Spriker the services that we offer. So in that sense, it's not that far from what I've been doing is Bombi. It won't result in an AB test, only commercial websites.  Guido: But I still plan on running some experiments with the community to see what's working and what isn't, and then collecting that feedback we are building or expanding, facilitating the community that we have. That's a, that's the main goal. Some of the things. That we have. So we have a couple of subgroups within that community.  Guido: We already have a partner advisory board for both the solution partners in the technology part. That's already running. I'm not involved with that. I'm currently working on seating, a customer advisory boards. So that's existing customers getting them to get our coupler, like 15 customers, getting them to get R and R on a regular basis.  Guido: And I get feedback from them on how they use system and help them communicate with Spriker in a better. So that's one thing I'm doing. The second one is regular user groups. So we already had to use a group sets Spriker before the pandemic, those are now being continued on our remote basis.  Guido: So we had our first one last month, which was really fun. Doing that and that's, more aimed necessarily at at the strategy level. There's more day-to-day users that are doing that. The, like most user groups are and a third one is that's working on I'm not sure about the name yet, but like a developer attraction and adoption group.  Guido: So there will be people from, clients, from solution partners and from Spriker itself to she. Okay. What can we do to get, to attract more developers basically to Spriker. We've seen that with, Magento that has, can be quite the bottleneck if you don't have enough developers out in the world.  Guido: So we have a great academy team. That's a surprise. We've got some great courses to onboard people, both for people working in the back ends for developers itself or for people selling selling Spriker those courses that it's something we have. So also I think learning from I'm not the only one from magenta and the spikers and the LA people with Magento background.  Guido: So Carol making sure that Spriker has really good documentation. So that's a, this has been thinking. But the academy, of course only works if people know about Spriker itself, you need to get those developers on board first. And so that's going to be part of that's that third group that I'm working on to figure out, okay, what can we do to onboard more people more developers and get them enthusiastic about the platform.  Brent: It reminds me of the tech stack on spreads. The, what is that? The platform's on, tech beach BHP. Perfect. Yes. So a Magento developer could, he could transition a Spriker or fairly, easy. Yup. Yup. And   Guido: multiple have   Brent: gone sour yeah. It seems to be. I think we've always said this with Magento.  Brent: It seemed like Magento had run the course with eBay and then mark Lavelle and the team came in and, really reinvigorated the community. It seems like red, another tipping point now did an amazing job at that. Absolutely. We're at an another tipping point. So it sounds like some of your role is to listen to what the community is saying and maybe.  Brent: Not adjust commercial aspects of it, put at least adjust communication aspects. Would that be a good realization of, part of your role of how the community is reacting, not reacting, but forming strategy and forward-looking planning in to involve the community.   Guido: Yeah. And of course that's something I experienced in the last 15 years with Magento myself being an active community member, but multiple working on the I'd never worked on the Magento site itself.  Guido: So I've seen something that Magento did really well. I've seen some things I think Magento could have done better. And that's, definitely the part. And one of the first things I said two boars, whatever I'm going to do I won't have sales targets. That's an important one. For this job to work people need to trust you, right?  Guido: That, they need to be able to come with you with open feedback, open open criticism about whatever they think is important for them to continue their journey with with the products and that shouldn't result in a call from the sales department next day, saying. Yeah.   talk-commerce-guido-2022-1-10__22-55-15: Why   Brent: did you do that?  Brent: Why did you say that? I've definitely I've unfortunately, or fortunately had those calls. It does get you. And unfortunately those calls do change a little bit of your direction as a, maybe even as an agency head or as a, or a community organizer in order to get money from. The not from the community, but from that entity and Magento was very good at saying, we're never going to give you money for anything.  Brent: So that was easier. But in in order to get people, let's just say, get people involved. There was a aspect of, we, you need to tow the line. And I agree there has to be some kind of line that has to be towed in terms of don't don't bash us on stage and at a meet Magento event, which actually happened.  Brent: And it should happen when it's something that's egregious. But there are I think there always has to be a commercial aspect to things. And again, so just help educate me. Is there a community version of spark or is it completely commercial?   Guido: It's completely commercial. It's the sources.  Guido: But it's not an open source license. So it the full code is on the, is available and get up for everyone to see and to try and as a and if you're like me too lazy to install it. So there's there are demos available for the different markets that we serve. So we have B to B, to C we have we have marketplace solutions so that's all there for people to see.  Guido: But if you want to use the product, then it becomes a commercial license and that's fully based on either the items sold order. So it depends a bit on the business model and I guess on what's our sales team agrees with   Brent: the clients. Okay. So it's negotiable somewhat.   Guido: Now yeah so, they have it's not necessarily negotiable, but there are levels that you can get to.  Guido: And then of course the better the price becomes lower. Yep.   Brent: Got it. Yeah. Marketplaces is certainly a, big topic right now. Everybody's trying to do a marketplace. I think Magento has made the way Magento is, engineered. Isn't great for marketplace applications. So tell us a little bit about how the marketplace would help a merchant.  Guido: Yeah, and I think w what makes breaker great is that it's, it really focuses on the non standards business models, protocols, the sophisticated business model. And usually with specifically, I think with, marketplace with B to C it's, usually straightforward and there are a lot of platforms supporting that.  Guido: And then you go to B2B or to marketplace usually. And like you said, with Magento You often get into the area of a lot of customizations. And then you need a platform that supports that the business models get more and more diverse, more and more when you go to B2B and marketplace and you need a platform to support that.  Guido: So I think that's one of the, strength of   Brent: biker a Spriker started in Germany. And it's branching out to the rest of the world. So what are. What are your plans now for the U S market? I'm assuming that's the next big market to tackle.   Guido: Yup. So we got our first clients in in the U S and this is definitely, yeah.  Guido: Western Europe and the U S or for many platforms to go to markets, especially if that's one of those countries, your, if you use your own country, U S is a big focus. We have already started there this year. Or 2021 last year and this year 2022 will be a big focus here and we will have we already had an exciting events.  Guido: There are last year, I think we'll have one or two excite events. There are next year for context excites is the spike of fruition of of Magento. Imagine if if that's, if that helps you with with context So that's another, we are definitely focusing on that, but for me personally like I said, the one aspect that I find important is to grow.  Guido: That's a developer base. And specifically for that, I think it's even more important to be a presence. What is feasible in countries that are not Western Europe and the U S because there are a lot of development communities in south America and Africa in Asia, Indonesia, India. And that those are typical markets where marketing or sales is not active or not active yet, or not as active in, in as in Western Europe and in the U S so that's going to be a fun challenge for, me and my team to, see outcome are we are, we can visit get visibility specifically in those markets, but in terms of sales we're growing really fast in in the U S right now, I think this Fastest growth rates.  Guido: Yeah. So it's going to be definitely a big one for 2020   Brent: type of merchant. That would be a good fit for Spriker.   Guido: Yeah. That, that will be the, customer like I said, that has a sophisticated business model and that is a tricky term, I think, because I've met a lot of, I've also worked agency side and every customer thinks they have a sufficient.  Guido: Business model. So that's, always a up for discussion but a typical I think the best suit it's like we just said with B2B and market. Those are definitely the customers that would be a better fit force. Private, I think B2C, although we do have some beets see clients that have more sophisticated mall.  Guido: Sorry if there's, if it requires more customization then then your standard shop, that's definitely a good one. Maybe, a good dimension for context that's Spriker is a password. Oh man. It was on-prem before that we had on-prem we still have some on-prem customers but we only sell the past solution right now.  Guido: So platform as a service and which means we also everything, but there's still a lot of customization that you can still do that you can either have an agency for, we have a lightness partner now. Our orders. You can do in-house if you have a development team in that.   Brent: Oh as I think that past solution and just to educate our audience, the past means that it is a single installation, but it is all, it was hosted by the vendor.  Brent: So you're hosting the platform, you're supporting the base code. But it's the single issue, but it's not shared, it's not an instance that shared like a SAS solution. It's not shared with thousands of people. How do you, then   Guido: you anchor customize it. You can build on top of that compared to with a SAS solution where you can customize some things through settings, but if it's not in the setting, Then you're done.  Guido: Yeah.   Brent: And it's a big difference there. It's the only way to customize that is to build an application that's sitting outside of the application that would con connect via an API. You can't build it directly into the software.   Guido: And a nice addition to that is that's we're going to release. I think there's going to be a Q2.  Guido: I think that was announced. I hope I think Q2, we will release our SDK and AOP. That's the. The application that the platform basically that we will have so then we're going to have our own marketplace, our own app store for things to connect with. Spriker. So then we can have a shared database of whatever you want to connect.  Guido: If you want to connect your your email, your CRM, your ERP to Spriker. You can do that. And I think that's especially interesting because a lot of things in Spriker are interchangeable. So w what the gardener calls package business capability. BBC's which basically means that everything in Spriker it's a collection of those package business capabilities.  Guido: And that's, talk to each other through an API. So if you want to, for example remove that or use your own. You can remove practice checkouts and use a third-party checkout or your own checkouts. And that's different elements in Spriker have. We have I don't know the accounts, but we have several PVCs that consists of several undoes of modules.  Guido: You can just swap them out and especially with the AOP, that will be really interesting because then you can Israel can be relatively well, even more easy to do.   Brent: So coming back to the past model one of the complaints with the Magento version of pass is that it, doesn't necessarily save the client any money on, maintenance because you basically, you're hosting it on Magento, but they'll help support your core, but they won't do anything else then.  Brent: Answer support tickets. So is Spriker taking any different approach to that? Do they, are they doing some of the core updates on the code itself?   Guido: That's a good question. And I don't really, I haven't worked with a Magental spouse version, so I don't really know how to compare it to to that. But yeah, the this Riker core is maintained and it's a it's the same for everyone.  Guido: And you can then choose to update it for you. Yes or no. For all the different models. There are hundreds, I think we're currently over a thousand modules of Spriker itself. They're all versions. You can choose to update. Those were never Whatever works for you. You can you can, of course, ideally update them all when they come out.  Guido: And then that's all on a rolling basis. I think on average, I heard someone say that on average, we have 10 releases a day. That's something I'm definitely that's, being maintained and that you can benefit   Brent: from. So the I, know that speaking to Mike McKell earlier in the year, he talked a lot about the BDB version and then the scalability and the robustness of the platform.  Brent: Maybe tell it, talk to us a little bit about the type of client that would look at B2B and skew counts and things like that.   Guido: Oh, yeah. In terms of we have those extreme examples, and last year at at the, excite conference we had one they have over 550 million sq use in their Spriker store, which I find mind boggling.  Guido: That's that's, very impressive. And yes, people order dare on a regular basis. It's not just sitting there but they they sell electronic parts it's and the case study is actually on my website. If you're interested, it's a sociability and this is the name of the. That's the platform.  Guido: And yeah, I think In terms of, and that's, why I think Spriker is very interesting to me personally. I was funded and that there's already, there's something I found with, Magento. I funded the B2B sites, that those those clients always way more interesting PTC sites because of those those tricky business models and the tricky Details that you need to get right in, B2B.  Guido: B2C can be hard with a lot of customers. Just the sheer volume of, customers. If you have a lot of shopping that those customers of customer behavior change can change fast, but with B2B also have this and the detail that you need to get, right? All those specific things for your business.  Guido: I was Working with a company that did prince and they printed basically on that. And that means that if you print on everything, it's really hard to get templates for, printing. I know, yeah. Umbrella umbrellas, that's a different cars. You can mugs pens, everything, all the merchant you can think of that they would print it.  Guido: And which, meant that it was basically almost all manual. For, the depends that some, automation but basically everything else was done manually, which is mind blowing, but then you need to keep in mind when, someone orders it they had their, our local supply was in the.  Guido: But if, you didn't need a speed delivery, so if you needed a speed delivery, they would do that in a, in the Netherlands. And then you'd have an extra fee for that. But if If you would want to deliver, like in one and a half, two weeks, they would actually ship all the stock that was in the Netherlands.  Guido: Put it on a on a truck, drove it to Poland, and then there are people would unpack everything print it, put it back in a truck, drive it back to the Netherlands and. Because it was so labor intensive, that was actually cheaper to do that than just to print it in the Netherlands, which again is mind blowing, but then you need a system, a backend that supports crazy shit like that.  Guido: And, that's what I find interesting. Those, clients of debt, those are the things that are holding. Or, things your system is holding you back on? I think that's those are great cases for Spriker.   Brent: Yeah, same example that we worked with the eyeglass company that had the same idea where they, want part of the eyeglasses would get done in a factory, in one part of the city.  Brent: And then it would get shipped across town to put the lenses in the frames or whatever. Then they get shipped to the retail store, get shipped back, and then. Then get shipped to the client directly. If that's that's the if that's the model that they had. And that was I know that for Magento, that turned out to be very complicated.  Brent: But, yeah. So I can see how that would from a standpoint of complexity and from a platform where you that's, where you, the necessity of having a platform that you can modify and make your own. Essentially,   Guido: if you want to do a. What we call unified commerce. So your terminals in your stores, your physical stores, where people can can order stuff or clients can order stuff locally.  Guido: And that's connected into your system complexity rises quickly. And also things like in the beginning with, Magento Magento was fixed right now, but in Magento in the beginning it was all already really hard to have multiple warehouses. There's also, it was also another thing.  Guido: And luckily Spriker fixed that from beginning. That's, something. We have a lot of clients that's a doer multiple millions of revenue. That's the things they want to fix and expect from from a platform to. Yeah, it's F as a default.   Brent: There's a whole bunch of buzzwords floating around in the community on monoliths and microservices and micro blah-blah-blah PWA.  Brent: Where is Spriker sitting in on that. And I guess from a technology standpoint, is it easier for a customer to get into it and not worry so much about the technology? Or are they going to have to. Not worry there's going to be a certain amount of development needed to get things running.  Guido: It's a past platform so, there will always be some some development needed to get at the Oregon. Although we do have a. We do have for there's a front end that you can use if that's what you want, but you can also add your own phone tents. It will need to be connected to, the data that you have or data that you have needs to be important.  Guido: So those are always things that, that needs. And yeah, there are a lot of buzzwords and it can be complex can get complex really fast. I'm still struggling with it myself. And honestly, the first time I heard the term monolith was with the open letter the Magento Ruthie last summer, they started complaining about how things were going and partially rightfully and that's where I I formed encountered the term monolith before, but just disregarded it and then, but that, wasn't the first point. I thought I need to look into this and then, oh, this is what they mean, but yeah for, a Spriker I think Spriker is more something that's often listed in the.  Guido: Corner of things, a mock standing for a microservices, API, firsts cloud something and a cloud native and and, the headless. So those are also for. Yeah.   Brent: Excellent.   Guido: But that's, like a, term that people use often. We, were not fully onboard with the microservices part of that that equation Spriker believes more.  Guido: And that's what I just mentioned with, the package business capabilities. Microservices first will mean that everything is a microservice. That that leads to a lot of overheads very quickly. And that's, not needed for most companies. And there are always exceptions. But it's not something that you'd benefit from.  Guido: And then on the other end of the spectrum is the, monolith like a magenta was at the. Mainly and then Spriker sits, in the middle, which we find very comfortable and most lines seem to be for most lines. It seemed to be a nice balance between the flexibility that you would get with a, with API first and microservices.  Guido: But to have those package in things that make sense for the business package business capabilities. It's not a developer term. It's, business. It's a business term. Alexa, you're you to have a package business capability for you can have a CRM or an ERP or your checkouts or your phone tense.  Guido: Those can be different, capabilities of your system. And for, clients that just makes more sense. That language makes more sense and the way at least Spriker has built a, it also prevents the overhead that, you would get with only using microservice.   Brent: Yeah. I like that term, a package business capabilities.  Brent: Yeah, it gives the I think it, the idea of behind that is. You don't there. There's going to be a lot of solutions that would apply, but you don't necessarily have to do the customization, but if you need to, you still can. So clients or merchants can feel better about. Making their solution work at a lower cost or at least a lower initial investment to get them up and running.  Brent: Yeah.   Guido: And the Spriker is also not. It's targeting the local bakery rights. That'd be fair. It's we're, targeting a larger enterprise businesses mainly and those usually. Either an agency or their own development team that, can handle this. And that's also where I think Spriker shines.  Guido: A lot of developers love working with Spriker because it's so maintainable for them, they only need to focus on those extra things that are the, exceptions basically for their business and not necessarily maintaining the system behind us. That's also not something I'm not a developer, but a.  Guido: Recurring daily tasks, not something necessarily that you're looking forward to for doing for most people, at least I'm generalizing here, but most people the new things, that those are the challenging things. That's what you want to do with most developers want to do. And that's, what we enable.  Guido: And, along those package, business capabilities, one thing I I think you need to mention that's not something that's probably grant funded or something it's a term developed by by Gardner Spriker was also they recognized Spriker as a, as efficient, airy in their magic quadrants last year.  Guido: And it's only the second year that we, that the sparkle was even listed. And the magic quadrants. And we're already we were spoken was the platform. We moved the most distance in a positive direction within that. Within the quite uncertain, there was really nice, but also if you look at this quadrant the market changed so much compared to when we started with Magento.  Guido: Like I said, with Magento, we had commerce where we had virtual mark and there was Magento And we had a couple of like Intershop or those kinds of more commercial packages. But right now the magic quadrants, the market is so different than Demetric wardens already contains like 16, 16, 17 systems.  Guido: And that's like the creme de LA creme from, what gardeners selectors are the F right now are the hundreds of solutions that you as a company can pick. That's a huge challenge, I think for both developers, both an agencies and clients to say, what on earth do I need to a, big year? A lot of we saw all of you included agencies that's select a platform, right?  Guido: And you need to stick to dads and that's what you invest in. And that's what you then hope sticks when for, long enough. But also in, in debt, I think. And of course I am definitely biased in this in-depth. Spriker is positioned really well because it's so open with the API, with those package B business capabilities there's relatively easy to adopt for you as an agency or develop our work lines that fits really well with with whatever you have, right.  Guido: With the adjacent tools for e-commerce that you need to connect with debts because it's focuses only on the, on you bringing development through the table for, everything that's specific to your business and enabling that. I think that positions us   Brent: really well.  Brent: Five 10 minutes left here. What are you excited now for 2022? What do you see coming on the e-commerce horizon on the technology horizon? Do you think? I think one thing you mentioned is that there's so many more technology players in that magic quadrant and it's, you would think that we'd be seeing some more consolidation, but it's almost as though we're splitting it between SAS pass and on-prem, and then everybody.  Brent: There's more of them. So what, do you see happening in 2022? What's exciting. More and more. Yeah,   Guido: this is very exciting. I, do think and, actually I had the same thing with magenta. I never looked at other platforms and look the oldest competition that we need to fight. Those other platforms.  Guido: Apparently. The e-commerce market is huge and we all get to play a part in that. And there's this place for almost all of us or these, a lot of us there is place for, Magento and there's place for, a shop where there are a lot of business cases, that's fifth with those, and we don't necessarily need.  Guido: Bethel each other. And in a ring and the bolt flying everywhere that this was really needed. I think we can all focus on that's the thing that we really good at. And looking at how fast Spriker is going in terms of clients and employees I'm not worried about that.  Guido: That's a very exciting thing to be at. I'm actually for the past forever, every ever since I've. The works basically. I had this dream once working for like a SAS company, like Dropbox or Evernote that those were the companies I thought 15 years ago, that will be really cool to work at. So I have a, single piece of software and you can optimize debts and both from a usability perspective, but also you have this endless nearly endless world markets and form of your, that you got, that you can conquer that there will be really exciting.  Guido: And that's, this is what I am excited about. This is my first time working on the platform sites and, doing this and Applying my, my experience with, community building for the first time in actually a professional way. I They actually paying me for this now, especially my dream job that had been doing on the side for, 13 years now.  Guido: So I'm very, excited about that. And it's a great spot to be in with, Spriker it's it's very they're, remote first. I've been working remote first for, but at least pre Corona, but four or five years. But it's, so natural to the company. It's everyone is remote first have with limited holidays.  Guido: That's always nice to have I'm working work from Netherlands. I don't have to complain and we already. Twenty-five holidays by default. So nothing to complain there, but it's still nice to have, especially we have to, to kids like I do sometimes you need, you just need some extra because they're the home again.  Guido: And And, building that community. And like I said, w what I really enjoyed with the Magento community, bringing people together, especially for the first time, I does have a lot of community first next year. And the awkward moments, the recognition. That's exciting starting point at five that you see where people first meet the immediate charter and then build businesses based on that.  Guido: I clearly remember the first meeting magenta are organized in the Netherlands. To developers came to get our metadata for the first time. And now they have this huge Magento business that they sold a couple of years ago. And, that's happened multiple times and that's really exciting to me to see that's happening and then to be at the start of that.  Brent: Yeah, I agree. So I like the idea of having an MMA. MMA cage match, but you'd call it Magento, meet Magento association, cage match, and we'd get Spriker and shop wire in there. And we'd just get some we just have a Throwdown and see who wins. That's that's one way to look at it.   Guido: That's one way to look at it.  Guido: Like I said, I don't necessarily need a cage measure. I think we're, I think we can all we're all in e-commerce. So that's, a really good choice to begin with. And I think if we play at rise, we will all win big. What would be   Brent: a buydown instead of a Throwdown? I think. So we as, we close out, I always give people an opportunity to do a shameless plug.  Brent: What w shameless plug is just, you can promote anything you'd even a local school or charity or whatever it is that you're, thinking about the.   Guido: I feel like I've been shamelessly plugging Spriker for us lost at least 20 minutes already. Yeah, but if you want me to continue with that, we have we have for looking for a lot of people.  Guido: As, everyone in the in the e-commerce sphere is, so if you're interested in in dance and now working for a great European employer have a look at the Sprocket. Hiring people work white likes. That's where we are remote first and work from anywhere. So a take your pick if you're interested, definitely take a look there.  Guido: And on a personal note, we started out with a CRO. I have my podcast on the, on CRO still. It's a weekly podcast interviewing experts in the field and that's the last hero. So I have looked there and you probably already into podcasts anyway, since you're listening to this, so might as well subscribe.  Brent: Absolutely. Yeah. We all need to share our subscribers and get people to listen more and learn more. I think that the, at first first this should be education. This should be learning about other platforms is not about Magento or whatever. The place where we can learn about what other platforms are doing.  Brent: And from my personal for 2022, I'm super interested in CRO and I have seen sodas seen the light and, why that's so important for clients. So I applaud you for what you've done over the years. And just as a plug. You did organize the first meat Magento, right way back in 2009,   Guido: January 27th, 2009.   Brent: Wow.  Brent: Yeah, that's amazing. And it's, been such a fantastic journey for both the community building, which has been the most important part for me. Because that's when I got introduced to right about that same time, that's when I got introduced to Magento. And I think that community is what has driven the Magento to where it is.  Brent: And you have to give a lot of a lot of kudos, so to speak to the community for helping move that along. And right now there's a lot of A lot of communication that isn't and is happening in the Magento community.   Guido: Yeah. Yeah, I do think community a, is a huge asset for, you as a company, whatever you're doing as a as a company community is one of those things that is the hardest to copy.  Guido: It's all of us can copy your product. They can copy your servers, your pricing model, your business model. But it's really hard to copy a, community. And I think that's also the, one of the big reasons magenta was still so big, even with all those comp the competition that's out there in, in that 14, 15 year that Magento was existing.  Guido: Something better probably has come along. And, maybe it has For that specific business model. But transitioning all those agencies away from, you or the developers to learn something new or clients to switch platforms. Clients don't switch platforms every year. There's, a time delay in that and, it gives them that gives you the opportunity to, improve your product again, because you have that community commitment from people through you in the company.  Guido: And that's Yeah, I think I mean with Adobe taking over Magento right now, they're well, they're not investing in the name Magento anymore. That's I think that's abundantly clear with removing the name from the website. The logo was and magento.com now redirecting to to the Adobe website.  Guido: But, even for, the product It's. Yeah, it's hard to see a little of investment from, Adobe. What we hoped would happen when they took over. But still everyone's using Magento. And it's really hard. You, as a business owner, you or the Magento agency, it's really hard to have everyone trained on a different, platform.  Guido: That's not necessarily something you're looking   Brent: forward to. Yeah. That's so true.   Guido: Yeah. And so communities is a huge assets for four years of community. And then for user, as a business and that's community, then in a broad sense, a sense of the word can be individuals, developers, the companies that, are attached to you and committed to   Brent: I think I get your name right there, ghetto Yonson.  Brent: Thank you so much for being here today. Ghetto is the global business and technology evangelist for Spriker. I look forward to seeing you in 2022 in person, somewhere in the world. Hopefully in the U S or in Europe maybe even at a race, we can do a race together. We did, we got through this whole episode without talking about running.  Brent: Next time we'll do more of that. I appreciate you being here today. Thank you.   Guido: Thanks for having me.   Brent: Thank you.

Jonathan Moscone is a champion of arts and activism. A long-time theater director and current Chief Producer at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), he has devoted his career to interweaving arts organizations with civic life and community in an impactful way. With his Civic Engagement practice at YBCA, Moscone has created youth fellowships, artist residencies in the City's public schools, programs to help artists lead financially sustainable lives, and ballot measures to restore city funding to arts and homeless family services. He also serves on numerous community boards, such as the Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard Project, the Homeless Prenatal Program, and leads the San Francisco Grants for the Arts advisory panel. Moscone's gratifying career would not be complete without his extensive experience in theater production. Before his time at YBCA, Jonathan was the Artistic Director of the California Shakespeare Theater in Berkeley and Orinda for 16 years. He works throughout the Bay Area as a freelance director, putting on shows like "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby" for CalShakes in 2005, Bruce Norris' "Clybourne Park" for the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in 2011, and "Candida" (2011), for which he won the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award as Best Director of the year. In 2009, Moscone received the inaugural Zelda Fichandler Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation for his transformative work in theater. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the ACT's Masters of Fine Arts Program. All successes aside, Jonathan Moscone is one of the kindest people one has the privilege of meeting. He is smart, funny, and genuinely himself in any setting. His down to earth temperament has not only made him an affable director, but a beloved leader in his community. Artists contribute so much to a community's vitality, and through YBCA, Moscone is utilizing his talents and passions to lead the way in Bay Area arts activism. For more information about Jonathan Moscone, please visit: https://ybca.org/person/jonathan-moscone/ Meet Jonathan Moscone!

Dry Clean Only: Conversations on Fashion + Style In this episode, co-hosts Kristen Cole (in NYC) and Cristina Ehrlich (in LA) sit down with NY-based womenswear designer, Marina Moscone. The women catch up and discuss shirting, the creative process, recent travels, agility through crisis, pink cords, looming, exploded silhouettes, Italian craftsmanship, bijoux beads and their favorite Italian spots to eat in the West Village, NYC.

We welcome sportscaster/columnist/humorist Barry Tompkins to talk mixology vs bartending, old San Francisco, new San Francisco, and the bar scenes of both.

Come gather around the campfire and let me tell you about the assassination of LGBT+ Icon Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. Milk and Moscone were both San Francisco politicians and civil rights leaders whose lives were cut short by their former colleague. Milk was a veteran, Wall Street statistician, and hippie who became one of the first openly gay elected official in America. Both men were dealing with a city and country that was bursting with political tension, clashes between the gay rights movement and the fundamentalist anti-gay movement, and violence against the LGBT+ community, sometimes from the very people sworn to protect them. Both new that the more they fought for inclusion and progress, the more their lives were in danger. They fought anyway. How did Milk grow into one of the most well-known activists in America? What happened to make Supervisor Dan White turn on his former friend Milk and “the people's mayor” Moscone? How was he protected after he committed an assassination? What legacy did these men leave behind? Let's talk about it. **This episode includes sensitive content (CW: death, suicide, LGBT hate crimes, police brutality, sexual content). Listener discretion is advised.**Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode! Check out our links here to support the show, follow our social media, and see photos from the case: https://linktr.ee/CampfireStoriesPodcast Also check out our YouTube channel Campfire Stories: Astonishing History.If you are a member of the LGBT+ community and are looking for resources: https://www.hrc.org/resources/direct-online-and-phone-support-services-for-lgbtq-youthhttps://www.glaad.org/resourcelist You can contact me at campfirestoriesbusiness@gmail.com Sources for every episode are available in the episode transcript on Buzzsprout. Music by: Zoliborz Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/CampfireStories)

On The Cloud Pod this week, Matthew Kohn joins the team as a substitute for Jonathan and Peter, who have gone AWOL. Also, Google demonstrates again why its network is superior to the other cloud providers.         A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week's highlights AWS now allows crash-consistent AMIs without requiring a reboot. No more manual processes needed.  Google is building a subsea cable named Firmina. The cable, to be comprised of 12 fiber pairs, will carry traffic quickly and securely between North and South America. Oracle announces improvements to its block volumes. Its Ultra-High-Performance (UHP) block volume comes with up to 300,000 IOPS and 2,680 MB/s throughput per volume and is generally available across all OCI commercial regions and on all interfaces.  General News: Not Dead Yet Hashicorp Vagrant 3.0 will maintain its Ruby-based features while being ported to Go. We thought this was on a path to death but apparently not.    Amazon Web Services: Proceed With Caution AWS announces a new region in Tel Aviv, Israel. AWS clearly realized it was behind the other cloud providers on building new regions.  Amazon launches AWS Proton in general availability. There are some super cool improvements that have been done to this. Amazon EC2 now allows you to create crash-consistent Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). This is one of our EC2 wish list items — it's great to tick it off the list. AWS announces per second billing for EC2 Windows Server and SQL Server Instances. It's nice to only be billed for what you actually use.   AWS removes NAT Gateway's dependence on Internet Gateway for private communications. This has been a big annoyance for a while so nice to see it sorted! Google Cloud Platform: Just Figure It Out Google is announcing the general availability of Ubuntu Pro images on Google Cloud. Doesn't make a lot of sense to embrace open source by purchasing an enterprise product. PLAID guest posts on the GCP blog talking about using Anthos Clusters on AWS. This is a really interesting blog post.   Google is announcing a new model for multi-project cloud monitoring. We don't understand this one.   Google announces Firmina, an open subsea cable it's building from the East Coast to Argentina. This is why its network is superior to others.       Azure: Will Make Your Head Explode Azure is launching its newest sustainable datacenter region in Arizona. But why is it in Arizona? Oracle: Give Us Your Soul    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has a new Ultra-High-Performance (UHP) block volume. Of course it came up with this — Oracle needs it to support its own product.  Oracle announces Java Management Service (JMS) is now generally available. This just seems like a great way for Oracle to audit you and bill you more.    TCP Lightning Round In his absence, Peter takes this week's point but the team won't tell him why just to confuse him, leaving scores at Justin (10), Ryan (5), Jonathan (7), Peter (1).  Other Headlines Mentioned: Azure IoT Edge integration with Azure Monitor is now in public preview  AWS App Mesh introduces enhanced ingress traffic management capabilities Amazon EC2 adds new AMI property to flag outdated AMIs Amazon SageMaker Pipelines now supports callback capability Support for SQL Server in data flows using Azure Data Factory & Azure Synapse AWS Backup now supports crash-consistent backups of Amazon EBS volumes attached to an Amazon EC2 instance Azure Monitor Agent and Data Collection Rules now generally available Amazon Translate is Now Integrated with Amazon CloudWatch Events and Amazon EventBridge Introducing AWS Elemental Link UHD: a device to send live UHD video to AWS AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority now supports more flexibility for CAs shared across accounts AWS Resource Access Manager enables granular access control with additional managed permissions  Things Coming Up Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated] Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30) Amazon re:Inforce — August 24–25 — Houston, TX Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021 AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas Oracle Open World (no details yet) 

Is sending the former CEO of one of the biggest technology companies in the world to space a good idea? On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the potential economic catastrophe that could follow if Jeff Bezos becomes space junk.  A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. Jumpcloud, which provides cloud directory services, enables remote access, eases onboarding and offboarding of users and enables zero trust access models. This week's highlights Amazon is sending the old junk it found in the attic into space. Google is now fully qualified to direct traffic. Azure turned its out-of-office message on and hoped no one would notice. General News: Frenemies  Snowflake had its annual user conference and announced some new tools and features. Pretty good!  Jeff Bezos is joining the first human flight to space with his company Blue Origin. This is super risky, even if he's no longer CEO.  Fastly blames global internet outage on a software bug. This is the right way to address outages — nice one, Fastly!  Amazon Web Services: Watch This Space Amazon announces auditing feature for FSx for Windows File Server. This needs an acronym.  AWS has added a third availability zone to the China (Beijing) region operated by Sinnet. Nice to see.  AWS Sagemaker Data Wrangler now supports Snowflake as a data source. Smart move.        Google Cloud Platform: Sneaky Sales Tactics Google announces the release of container-native Cloud DNS for Kubernetes. Powerful building block or Achilles heel?  Google announces new capabilities for Cloud Asset Inventory. Makes so much sense to come from the provider because they know what you have.    Google releases new Microsoft and Windows demos on Google Cloud Demo center. This is absolutely not a sales tool…  Introducing Google Cloud Service, Kf for Cloud Foundry, on Kubernetes. Another good pathway to Google. Google’s Artifact repository now supports Java, Node.JS and Python. We think it's great it's included Python.   Google is releasing a fully managed zero-trust security solution using traffic director. We wish there was a demo for this.      Azure: Getting Fit Azure announces a name change and new features for Windows Virtual Desktop service. This is really just a rebranding exercise.   Azure is changing the pricing structure for Azure Sentinel and Monitor Log analytics. The cheaper it gets, the more you will store.     TCP Lightning Round After a slightly subdued round, Justin takes this week's point, leaving scores at Justin (10), Ryan (5), Jonathan (7).  Other headlines mentioned: Identify and Copy existing objects to use S3 Bucket Keys, reducing the costs of Server-Side Encryption with AWS Key Management Service (SSE-KMS) Amazon EKS pods running on AWS Fargate now support custom security groups Amazon Keyspaces now supports customer-managed customer master keys (CMKs) for encryption of data at rest to help you meet your compliance and regulatory requirements Amazon SNS now supports SMS Sandbox and displays available origination IDs in your account AWS Glue Studio now allows you to specify streaming ETL job settings Amazon SageMaker model registry now supports rollback of deployed models Google Cloud VMware Engine now HIPAA compliant Azure: Advancing in-datacenter critical environment infrastructure availability  Things Coming Up Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated] Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17 Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30) Amazon re:Inforce — August 24–25 — Houston, TX Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021 AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas Oracle Open World (no details yet)

This week on The Cloud Pod, apparently there was a machine learning conference because there is A LOT of machine learning news. For the listeners (and hosts of The Cloud Pod) who don't understand machine learning, buckle up because this will be a long episode for you.     A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning, and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights Amazon is acting like it's helping but really it's lying with numbers. Google is pretending the 1991 Ford Fiesta it's selling is a 2021 Mustang.  Azure got a little overexcited with the use of its naming bot. General News: Fake It Until You Make It Amazon data shows more diversity among senior leaders after the definition of “executive” loosened. Well, that's one way to do it.    Amazon's Andy Jassy is warming up for the CEO role. We hope competitors don't expect him to tread softly when he starts.   Pluralsight will acquire A Cloud Guru to address growing cloud skills gap. This is earth-shattering. Amazon Web Services: Busy As Usual Amazon Redshift Machine Learning is now generally available. There's a helpful table to explain the different machine learning products.  Amazon ECS Anywhere is now generally available. A bit disappointed that they haven't addressed the networking issue more. Introducing Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics Studio for analyzing streaming data. They're really into studios at the moment. Amazon SQS now supports a high throughput mode for FIFO Queues. This is nice.  Amazon Location Service is now generally available with new routing and satellite imagery capabilities. Just so you don't run your truck under a bridge that's too low.       Google Cloud Platform: Not A Robot In Disguise New Cloud TPU VMs make training machine learning models on TPUs easier. We told you this would be a long episode.  Google releases Log Field Analytics in Cloud Logging, a new way to search, filter and understand the structure of logs. This will make all those angry executives happy.   Google announces the generally availability of Datashare for Financial Services. Same product, different press release. Google introduces Analytics Hub, secure and scalable sharing for data and analytics.   Google announces Datastream, a serverless change data capture and replication service, is now in preview. Pretty nice feature!  Google is releasing logical replication and decoding for Cloud SQL for Postgres in Preview. A no-brainer.   Google releases Data Flow Prime, a new platform to simplify big data processing. No relation to Optimus Prime, just in case you were wondering. Google announces Dataplex in Preview, an intelligent data fabric for analytics at scale. Nice!    Azure: Crazy Naming Bot Azure has announced the general availability of its Azure ND A100 V4 Cloud GPU instances. Someone is excited about this.  Azure announces Synapse Link for Dataverse for application data analytics and predictive insights. The naming bot has gone crazy with this one.   Azure announces new infrastructure capabilities to simplify deployment and management. You can picture The Cloud Pod team flexing their muscles, can't you.    TCP Lightning Round Ryan wants to fight to the death but the others don't want to get blood on the carpet so he takes this week's point, leaving scores at Justin (9), Ryan (5), Jonathan (7).  Other headlines mentioned: Amazon QLDB supports IAM-based access policy for PartiQL queries and ledger tables  Announcing Amazon CloudWatch Resource Health Amazon SageMaker Autopilot adds automatic cross validation to improve model quality on smaller datasets by up to 35% AWS Launch Wizard adds support for SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instances deployed on Amazon FSx for Windows File Server Introducing AWS App Runner Integration in the AWS Toolkit for JetBrains IDEs AWS Glue DataBrew adds new nest and unnest transformations AWS Security Hub now supports bidirectional integration with Atlassian Jira Service Management   Amazon API Gateway now supports synchronous invocations of Express Workflows using REST APIs Amazon CloudWatch adds Control Plane API Usage Metrics across AWS Services  Cloud Bigtable lifts SLA to 99.999% and adds new security features for regulated industries Cloud Spanner trims entry cost by 90%, offers sharper observability and easier querying  Things Coming Up Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated] Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17 Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30) Amazon re:Inforce — August 24-25 — Houston, TX Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021 AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas Oracle Open World (no details yet) 

On November 27, 1978, Former San Fransisco Supervisor, Dan White, snuck into San Fransisco City Hall and shot and killed Mayor George Moscone. White casually walked down the hall. During his walk, he bumped into Supervisor Harvey Milk. Milk was a advocate for the LGBT community in San Fransisco and was an openly gay man himself. White asked Milk to "talk". They both entered a small room, where White shot at Milk multiple times . The first three shots were non-fatal, the last 3 were right to the head. White's motivation was that he was upset with Milk and Moscone because they would not let him back on the Board of Supervisors. White only served 4 years in prison. 

This week on The Cloud Pod, Ryan is stuck somewhere in a tent under a broken-down motorcycle but is apparently still having fun.         A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights Amazon went back to school to become a detective. Google was voted prom queen at the virtual homecoming. Oracle shocks everyone with its new look. General News: Great Partners Hashicorp has partnered with AWS to launch support for predictive scaling policy in the Terraform AWS provider. This will be hugely popular for people new to the cloud.     Amazon Web Services: Dropping Stories For No Reason AWS Lambda Extensions are now generally available with new performance improvements. This has pretty limited regional availability, though.    Amazon releases the AWS Shield threat landscape 2020 year in review. One of our favourite blogs. AWS EKS Add-Ons now supports CoreDNS and kube-proxy. This is neat! Introducing the AWS Application Cost Profiler — there have been a few complaints about this on Twitter. AWS Compute Optimizer launches updates to its EC2 instance type recommendations. This is awesome. AWS Outposts launches support for EC2 Capacity Reservations. Being able to use the same tool regardless of where you are is a good thing!   An AWS Region in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is in the works. Great!       Google Cloud Platform: Prom Queen 2021 Google VM Manager with OS configuration management is now in Preview. This is basically patch and agent management.   Forrester names Google Cloud a leader in Unstructured Data Security Platforms. Good job, Google! Google has released a better way to manage firewall rules with Firewall Insights. We just want a firewall manager that does everything for us.  Google announces new BigQuery user-friendly SQL launches. Thanks but no thanks.  Azure: Selling No-Code To Developers Azure gains 100th compliance offering — protecting data with EU Cloud Code of Conduct. Now we know why France was so happy last week. Azure announces preview capabilities of Azure Application Services to run on K8 anywhere. We're really surprised by how quickly the cloud providers have embraced hybrid infrastructure.  Azure releases several new features to empower developers to innovate with Azure Database services. We need to bring the tumbleweed sound effect back.  Accenture, GitHub, Microsoft and ThoughtWorks launch the Green Software Foundation with the Linux Foundation. So they're anti-Bitcoin mining? Microsoft uses GPT-3 to add AI features to Power Apps. For developers who don't code.  Microsoft's new research lab studies developer productivity and well-being. We'll see what happens.    Oracle: One We're Actually Excited About Introducing Arm on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The free tier is amazing! TCP Lightning Round Justin really appreciates Jonathan for handing him an easy win and takes this week's point, leaving scores at Justin (9), Ryan (4), Jonathan (7).  Other headlines mentioned: Amazon Forecast now supports generating predictions for 5X more items using 3X more historic data points Amazon Elastic File System now supports longer resource identifiers AWS X-Ray now supports VPC endpoints Announcing enhancements to Amazon Rekognition text detection — support for more words, higher accuracy and lower latency Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights now supports container monitoring Customizations for AWS Control Tower v2.1 adds more scaling optimizations and improves compatibility with AWS CodeBuild Amazon EventBridge now supports sharing events between event buses in the same account and Region Amazon SageMaker Pipelines is now integrated with Amazon SageMaker Experiments Amazon Braket introduces quantum circuit noise simulator, DM1  AWS Transfer Family now supports Microsoft Active Directory Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations The Microsoft Build of OpenJDK is now generally available Public preview: Azure Confidential Ledger  Google now allows you to Test Dataflow pipelines with the Cloud Spanner emulator  Things Coming Up Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated] Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17 Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30) Amazon re:Inforce — August 24-25 — Houston TX Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021 AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas

This week on The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the fine art of writing the podcast show notes so there are bullet points for when Peter shows up without doing the homework.       A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights Amazon is catering to the unimaginative with its version of a vanilla milkshake. Google now performs commitment ceremonies but they come at a cost. Azure did an online pastry course and can now make croissants.  General News: La France Est Méconnaître Amazon (France Is Ignoring Amazon) VMware picks longtime executive Raghuram as its new CEO. So many people were overlooked for this position.   France says Google and Microsoft Cloud Services are OK for storing sensitive data. Bit of a snub for Amazon.     Amazon Web Services: Busy Little Bees AWS SaaS Boost released as open source. Sounds more like a product than it actually is.    AWS announces general availability of AWS Application Migration Service. If play is to lift and shift, with no thought of transformation at all, this is for you.     AWS CloudFormation Guard 2.0 is now generally available. It's great that this supports more than just cloud transformation.  AWS Premium Support launches Support Automation Workflows (SAW). This will make the exchange of data so much easier.  Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces a new lower-cost storage tier. This is great news for everybody.  Amazon announces the release of EKS 1.20 — the raddest release ever.   AWS launches another way to run containers with App Runner. Just in case you don't want to use one of the other billion container services.      Google Cloud Platform: Here To Confuse You Google will bring Starlink satellite connectivity to enterprises in late 2021. Cool!   Google is offering new committed use discounts for Cloud Run. Commit yourself to Google. Google is announcing several new ways to ensure your Cloud Run environment is secure. Thumbs up! Enhance DDoS protection and get predictable pricing with Google's new Cloud Armor service. Making this a per customer thing doesn't make a huge amount of sense.   Google launches new managed machine learning platform Vertex AI. A very powerful release.    Google releases LaMDA to improve conversation technology for chat bots. Not to be confused with AWS Lambda… Google launches the next generation of its custom AI chips. But it's not ready yet.    Azure: Viva La France! Microsoft to upgrade cloud products' data controls in European Union. Lots of interesting use cases for this one.   Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain service on September 10, 2021. We'll help you — it will only cost you a suitcase full of cash and a helicopter.  Azure Static Web Apps is now generally available. Static is great until you want to have any type of interaction.     TCP Lightning Round Justin exacts his revenge on Ryan for stealing his jokes last week and takes this week's point, leaving scores at Justin (8), Ryan (4), Jonathan (7).  Other headlines mentioned: General availability: Azure Key Vault SLA raised to 99.99% Amazon EMR 6.3 now supports Apache Ranger for fine-grained data access control AWS WAF adds support for log filtering Amazon Connect adds near real-time insights into voice call, chat, and task activity Now use AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar to prevent desired-state updates during critical events AWS License Manager now provides historical license usage reporting Amazon Macie supports criteria-based bucket selection for sensitive data discovery jobs Google’s Translation API Advanced can translate business documents across 100+ languages   Amazon Transcribe improves live subtitling with partial results stabilization Google now allows you to automate your budgeting with the Billing Budgets API General availability: Announcing lower pricing for provisioned throughput on Azure Ultra Disks Ground processing with space data 5x faster with Azure  Things Coming Up Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated] Google Financial Services Summit — May 27th  Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17 Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30) Amazon re:Inforce — August 24-25 — Houston TX Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021 AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas Oracle Open World (no details yet) 

05/28/82 Moscone Center - San Francisco, CA Set 1: Alabama Getaway Greatest Story Ever Told Althea Little Red Rooster Tennessee Jed Truckin' Drums Goin' Down The Road Feeling Bad Not Fade Away Set 2: Walkin' Blues A Mind To Give Up Livin' Turn On Your Love Light Encore: Johnny B. Goode

Google I/O 2021 的惊喜与趋势：「AI First」持续发力。 空缺了一年的「程序员春晚」今年在线上回归了，在这场两个多小时的大会中，Sundar Pichai 介绍了许多正在研发的新产品——它们都与 AI 密切相关，无论是 C 端的视频聊天、语音交互，还是 B 端的开源工具，底层算力，都展现了人工智能在更多场景下的应用能力。 而除了对开发者们的意义，Google 借着这些产品也扮演了越来越重要的生态缔造者的角色，并影响着游戏、电商和出海的行业格局。 本期节目由 Richer 主持，嘉宾是 Google 平台及生态事业群开发者产品市场负责人黄继佳 和 北京谷歌开发者社区的袁滚滚。在讨论今年大会的看点之外，我们还聊到了那些年出现在 Google I/O 但昙花一现的产品， 以及 Google 的一举一动对其它行业生态的影响。 欢迎收听。 另外，声动活泼正在招聘 节目制作人、商务，点击 加入我们 (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/hXJS0StOQpBAB7grXj0ADg) 了解更多详情。欢迎向我们自荐或推荐合适人选。简历接收邮箱

This week on The Cloud Pod, Justin is away so the rest of the team has taken the opportunity to throw him under the bus.     A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights The Pentagon has had enough of the kids fighting so no one gets the toy. Amazon has given developers the happy ending they've always wanted. Google is playing with fire and hopes no one gets burnt. JEDI: Play Nice Pentagon officials are considering pulling the plug on the star-crossed JEDI cloud-computing project. Reminds us of when we were kids and our parents took toys away when we couldn't play nice together. Amazon Web Services: We've Made All the Money AWS announces a price reduction for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. That's an awful lot of samples.   Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) announces pricing change for VPC Peering. Just get rid of the ridiculous data transfer fees!    AWS Organizations launches a new console experience. We're excited to try this out! AWS announces IAM Access Control for Apache Kafka on Amazon MSK. This is great.  AWS Systems Manager now includes Incident Manager to resolve IT incidents faster. This might initially fall short of some of the other offerings on the market.  AWS Local Zones are now open in Boston, Miami and Houston. They're continuing on the Oracle model of racks in random garages.  Amazon now lets you create Microsoft SQL Server Instances of Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts. A big hooray for people using Outposts.  Google Cloud Platform: Smells A Bit Google announces Agent Assist for Chat is now in Preview. Hopefully this is better than predictive text, which is often highly inappropriate. Google releases a handy new Google Cloud, AWS and Azure product map. This press release has an Oracle smell about it.  Browse and query Google Cloud Spanner databases from Visual Studio Code. We can see this being welcomed by developers.   Azure: So Pretty Azure releases a new logo. We think it kind of looks like a Google icon.  Multiple new features for Azure VPN Gateway are now generally available. Really great features!  Enabling Azure Site Recovery while creating Azure Virtual Machines is now generally available. Something about this feels clunky. The next installment of the low code development series is now available. Spoiler alert: it's not that riveting.    TCP Lightning Round Ryan blatantly stole Justin's jokes but still takes this week's point, leaving scores at Justin (7), Ryan (4), Jonathan (7).  Other headlines mentioned: Amazon QuickSight Launches Threshold Alerts Amazon DevOps Guru now generally available with additional capabilities Amazon Pinpoint Announces Journey Pause and Resume Azure Backup: Operational backup for Azure Blobs is now generally available Append blob support in Azure Data Lake Storage is now generally available Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports up to 10x faster tuning and enables exploring up to 20X more models Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics supports cron expression for scheduling Amazon CloudFront announces price cuts in India and Asia Pacific regions Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers AWS Graviton2 (M6g, C6g, R6g, and R6gd) instances3 Amazon Athena drivers now support Azure AD and PingFederate authentication Migration Evaluator announces a faster way to project AWS cloud costs with Quick Insights Amazon EKS managed node groups adds support for Kubernetes node taints  Things Coming Up Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated] Save the date: AWS Containers events in May AWS Regional Summits — May 10–19 Microsoft Build — May 19–21 (Digital) Google Financial Services Summit — May 27th  Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17 Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30) Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021 AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas Oracle Open World (no details yet) 

This week on The Cloud Pod, Yahoo is back and cheaper than ever. Just kidding, it's Ryan who is back and the team is curious as to how he managed to extricate himself out from under that kitten.   A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights Amazon has been doing yoga and the results are paying off. Google bought a hard hat and is getting into the construction business. If you need to get your kid to sleep, let them read this from Azure. General News: Yahoo's Renaissance Verizon dumps Yahoo-AOL for rock-bottom price. But they're not dead yet! Amazon posts record profits as AWS hits $54B annual run rate. That's pretty good! Microsoft beats Q3 revenue expectations, spurred by strong cloud sales. Get on the bandwagon, Azure. Alphabet announces first quarter results for 2021. It does include GCP and G-Suite revenue.    Cloud infrastructure spending grew 35% to $41.8B in Q1 2021. These numbers boggle our minds. JEDI: Just Keeps Getting Better Court snubs Microsoft and the U.S. government's request to throw out Amazon’s complaint against JEDI cloud contract decision. We can't wait to hear what Trump says under oath.  Amazon Web Services: Bring Your Own Talent AWS is launching Amazon FinSpace, a data management and analytics solution. Step one, invent the universe.  AWS Proton introduces customer-managed environments. We had to look up what Proton actually is.  AWS Proton allows adding and removing instances from an existing service. We're looking forward to some re:Invent sessions on this.    Amazon launches CloudFront Functions for the lowest possible latency. A great solution that can reduce your costs quite a bit.   Happy 10th birthday to AWS Identity and Access Management. Ten years on and still a pain in the ass. Introducing Amazon Nimble, a new service that creative studios can use to produce visual effects, animations and interactive content entirely in the cloud. More verticalization!   Google Cloud Platform: If You Hate Money Google wants customers to move their vSphere 5.5+ to Google Cloud VMware Engine. Taking the responsibility away from engineering teams.    Databricks on Google Cloud is now generally available. A good play by Google.   Google has released its Liquibase Cloud Spanner extension. In theory, you should be able to roll back…  Google Cloud and the DORA research team are excited to launch the 2021 state of DevOps survey. We highly recommend you check this out. Google announces the Google Kubernetes Engine Gateway Controller is now in preview. Check this out if you're tired of service mesh.     Google is here to tell you six more reasons GKE is the best K8 service. Stay tuned for more announcements from Kubecon EU 2021 next week.  Google Cloud announces a new region to support growing customer base in Israel. Although this is great, it hasn't told us when or where it will be built.    Azure: The Best We Could Do Azure is announcing the preview of Azure Web PubSub service for building real-time web applications with websockets. Welcome to the club — you're a little late, Microsoft. TCP Lightning Round Jonathan is winning with waffles and takes this week's point, leaving scores at Justin (7), Ryan (3), Jonathan (7).  Other headlines mentioned: Amazon Redshift announces support for hierarchical data queries with Recursive CTE Amazon Connect Customer Profiles launches Identity Resolution in Preview to detect and merge duplicate customer profiles Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink introduces custom maintenance windows in preview Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate now allows you to configure the size of ephemeral storage for your Tasks Announcing support for linear interpolation in AWS IoT SiteWise Easily clean up unused resources in Amazon Forecast using hierarchical deletion   Amazon CloudWatch Monitoring Framework for Apache is generally available AWS Snow Family now enables you to order, track, and manage long-term pricing Snow jobs AWS Glue DataBrew announces native console integration with Amazon AppFlow to connect to data from SaaS (Software as a Service) applications and AWS services (in Preview) Introducing AWS for media and entertainment AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now makes it easier for you to manage permissions for AWS services accessing your resources General availability: Azure Site Recovery now supports cross-continental disaster recovery for 3 region pairs Google Introducing Open Saves: Open-source cloud-native storage for game  Things Coming Up Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated] Save the date: AWS Containers events in May AWS Regional Summits — May 10–19 AWS Summit Online Americas — May 12–13 Microsoft Build — May 19–21 (Digital) Google Financial Services Summit — May 27th  Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17 Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30) Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021 AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas Oracle Open World (no details yet)

Justin and Jonathan kick off this week's episode of The Cloud Pod by themselves, Peter joins the party late because he's been fighting dinosaurs and Ryan is unable to attend as he can't move from under the weight of the kitten on his lap.    A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights Amazon will find any excuse to use GIFs just like the rest of us. Google has given Cardi B a headstart on a theme song for its new product. Azure sent the wedding invites out late but still expects you to show up. Amazon Web Services: Cheaper Than Healthcare Amazon RDS on VMWare no longer requires the use of a VPN tunnel back to AWS. Still cheaper than paying for healthcare.  Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces support for Asynchronous Search. This is really cool! Amazon EC2 now allows you to replace the root volume for a running instance. There are some great use cases for this.     Red Hat Enterprise Linux with High Availability is now available on Amazon EC2. Good to see IBM isn't throwing up barriers.  AWS is releasing the new Amazon FSx File Gateway. Hopefully this is easy to implement.   AWS announces moving graphs for CloudWatch Dashboards. Also known as GIFs for CloudWatch.  Google Cloud Platform: Closet Fans of Cardi B Google announces PHP, a general purpose programming language, is now on Cloud Functions. Visit thecloudpod.net to see a live example of PHP, also known as the WordPress platform we built our website on.   GCP is launching Web App and API Protection (WAAP), which provides comprehensive threat protection for web apps and APIs. Do not confuse this with the Cardi B song.    Google has made the Doc AI solutions generally available. If you've sent a fax lately, you know how expensive it is.    Google announces new multi-instance NVIDIA GPU on the Google Kubernetes Engine. What a massive risk for the tech industry — having one company that manufactures all the chips.    Azure: Short Notice Microsoft brings Azure supercomputing to the UK Met Office. Supercomputers and the Cloud are finally colliding.      Microsoft is joining the Redhat Summit this week to announce several new RHEL capabilities for Azure. It did a terrible job of giving us the heads up about this event. TCP Lightning Round Justin takes the win and this week's point with an easy dig at information security, leaving scores at Justin (7), Ryan (3), Jonathan (6).  Other headlines mentioned: AWS Ground Station now supports data delivery to Amazon S3 AWS Cost Categories introduces a details page  AWS Secrets Manager Delivers Provider for Kubernetes Secrets Store CSI Driver AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter and Explorer now integrate with AWS Security Hub for diagnosis and remediation of security findings AWS Nitro Enclaves now supports Windows operating system  AWS Cloud9 now supports Amazon Linux 2 environments Google Cloud Spanner launches customer-managed encryption keys and Access Approval  Things Coming Up Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated] Save the date: AWS Containers events in May AWS Regional Summits — May 10–19 AWS Summit Online Americas — May 12–13 Microsoft Build — May 19–21 (Digital) Google Financial Services Summit — May 27th  Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17 Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30) Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021 AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas Oracle Open World (no details yet) 

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team admits to using the podcast as a way to figure out what day it is. Justin also relents and includes Azure news because he couldn't handle any more Oracle mobile apps announcements.  A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights Social media influencers can breathe a sigh of relief.  Amazon is dangling a carrot in front of one of its partners.  Azure is throwing a spanner in the works. General News: Not Cool News The FBI arrests a man for his plan to kill “70% of the internet” in an AWS bomb attack. 70% is quite a stretch but we're sure it would have caused a crappy day for a lot of people.   Hashicorp has released its Boundary 0.2 release with several new features. We're really excited about this.  Announcing HashiCorp Terraform 0.15 General Availability. If you believe it, this is really great news.  Amazon Web Services: Good At Compromising AWS announces AQUA is now generally available. Justin should have gotten a prediction point for this one.   Amazon Managed Service for Grafana now offers more support. We'll see if Grafana can actually make money out of its partnership with Amazon. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now integrates with AWS Lambda. This is really cool!  Decrease machine learning costs with instance price reductions and savings plans for Amazon SageMaker. Some pretty significant savings here.   Google Cloud Platform: Colossal Google takes a deep dive into its scalable storage solution, Colossus. Nothing new here.  Google announces tracking index backfill operation progress in Cloud Spanner. This is super important.   The new Google Cloud region in Warsaw is open. Nice to see Eastern Europe getting another region.  Azure: Someone Out There Cares User data through Azure Instance Metadata Service is now generally available. It would be great to use this with VMWare.  Microsoft announces encryption is now supported at the host level with AKS. Compliance people will be happy with this one. Microsoft announces plans to establish its first datacenter region in Malaysia. Just an announcement — don't get too excited because it's not opening yet.  TCP Lightning Round Jonathan takes the cake and this week's point, leaving scores at Justin (6), Ryan (3), Jonathan (6).  Other headlines mentioned: Amazon Pinpoint is now FedRAMP High Compliant You can now use macros and transforms in CloudFormation templates to create AWS CloudFormation StackSets Amazon Macie adds CloudWatch logging for job status and health monitoring of sensitive data discovery jobs  Amazon Textract achieves FedRAMP compliance Now visualize and report patch compliance using AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager     Things Coming Up Discover cloud storage solutions at Azure Storage Day — April 29 Save the date: AWS Containers events in May AWS Regional Summits — May 10–19 AWS Summit Online Americas — May 12–13 Microsoft Build — May 19–21 (Digital) Google Financial Services Summit — May 27th  Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17 Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30) Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021 AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas Oracle Open World (no details yet) 

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan has given all his money to the Amazon press team to write really confusing headlines just to annoy Peter. Also, Jonathan is missing presumed cranky buns.  A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights IBM is spinning off its infrastructure services business — the new public company will be called “Kyndryl.” Teresa Carlson has left the AWS building. The AWS VP is headed to big-data analytics company Splunk Inc. as its new chief growth officer. Google's like the cool kids who know how to party. General News: Eventual Degradation of Profits IBM to name its infrastructure services business “Kyndryl”. We hope they didn't spend a lot of money coming up with that name.  Top AWS executive Teresa Carlson joins Splunk as President and Chief Growth Officer. We thought she might have been a candidate to succeed Andy Jassy. Amazon Web Services: 5G Not Included AWS formally launches the OpenSearch project. Seems like it's listened to the open source feedback.     Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling introduces Warm Pools to accelerate scale-out while saving money. Please don't let Andy name anything. AWS and Verizon team up to provide 5G-powered edge computing infrastructure. Justin got his COVID-19 vaccination and was disappointed it didn't come with 5G.    Amazon Redshift now supports data sharing when producer clusters are paused. We wonder what underlying tech made this possible?  Google Cloud Platform: Excel at No Code Leaf Space enables next-gen satellites on Google Cloud. This fills a very obvious gap in the market and is pretty cool.  Google introduces a new blog series: Cloud CISO perspectives. Hopefully some cool stuff will be announced.  Google announces its business process automation app AppSheet is now generally available. We feel bad for the poor sap that has to maintain this on the backend.   Oracle: Answering Questions That Haven't Been Asked Oracle releases new features for its Cloud Infrastructure Mobile app. None of the providers really do an amazing job of cloud mobile apps.   TCP Lightning Round Though he won't be quitting his day job for the comedy club circuit, Justin produces some gold to take this week's point, leaving scores at Justin (6), Ryan (3), Jonathan (5).  Other headlines mentioned: eksctl now supports creating node groups using resource specifications and dry run mode Amazon Athena now presents query execution plans to aid tuning AWS Step Functions adds new data flow simulator for modelling input and output processing   Amazon Textract announces quality updates to its tables extraction feature Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) Multicast on AWS Transit Gateway is now available in major AWS regions worldwide General availability: Azure Blob storage supports objects up to 200 TB in size New digital rewards and racer profile personalization features on the AWS DeepRacer console AWS Identity and Access Management now makes it easier to relate a user’s IAM role activity to their corporate identity AWS Control Tower introduces changes to preventive S3 guardrails and updates to S3 bucket encryption protocols Amazon FSx and AWS Backup announce support for copying file system backups across AWS Regions and AWS accounts Introducing SAP Integration with Google Cloud Data Fusion  Things Coming Up Discover cloud storage solutions at Azure Storage Day — April 29 Save the date: AWS Containers events in May AWS Regional Summits — May 10–19 AWS Summit Online Americas — May 12–13 Microsoft Build — May 19–21 (Digital) Google Financial Services Summit — May 27th  Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17 Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30) Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021 AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas Oracle Open World (no details yet) 

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the future of the podcast and how they'll know they've made it when listeners use Twitter to bombard Ryan with hatred when he's wrong.  A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights Amazon gives Justin a long overdue birthday present. Google wants to educate the people. Azure has a new best friend but could they be a wolf in sheep’s clothing? General News: Goodbye, Friend The Apache foundation has decided to send Mesos to the attic. This makes us sad because we loved the concept. Amazon Web Services: Happy Birthday, Justin New AWS WAF Bot Control to reduce unwanted website traffic. This is great! AWS is releasing the Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS firewall to defend against DNS-level threats. Pricing is interesting on this one. AWS launches CloudWatch Metric Streams. After years of complaints, they're finally fixing this issue.  AWS Lambda@Edge changes duration billing granularity from 50ms down to 1ms. Nice price cut! AWS Direct Connect announces MACsec encryption for dedicated 10Gbps and 100Gbps connections at select locations. AWS has fulfilled their promise to Justin — three years later. Amazon announces new predictable pricing model up to 90% lower and Python Support moves to GA for CodeGuru Reviewer. If this goes down next week, blame Ryan.  Google Cloud Platform: So Pretty Google is releasing an open-source set of JSON dashboards. This is super important.   Google announces free AI and machine learning training for fraud detection, chatbots and more. We recommend you check these out.   Google Clouds Database Migration Service is now generally available. Everything is so beautiful on paper.    Google introduces request priorities for Cloud Spanner APIs. This just reinforces the fact that we don't know how Cloud Spanner works.   Azure: Best Friends Microsoft’s new low-code programming language, Power FX, is in public preview. Terrible name. Microsoft announces new solutions for Oracle WebLogic on Azure Virtual Machines. They're running WebLogic on Azure because of some product requirement.    The U.S. Army moves Microsoft HoloLens-based headset from prototyping to production phase. You don't get JEDI, but you get HoloLens! Microsoft launches Azure Orbital to deepen the value chain for geospatial earth imagery on cloud. Reminded us to watch Lord of War again, it's a good movie. Oracle: Win Dinner With Larry Oracle offers free cloud migration to lure new customers. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will fly you to his private island — but if you don't sign up, you have to make your own way back.  Oracle and Microsoft expand interconnection to Frankfurt, adding a third location in EMEA. Don't invite Oracle into your data center.   TCP Lightning Round Anyone who makes fun of the Canadian accent wins so Justin takes this week's point and the lead, leaving scores at Justin (5), Ryan (3), Jonathan (5).  Other headlines mentioned: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) now supports node image autoupgrade in public preview Public preview of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) run-command feature  Amazon WorkSpaces webcam support now generally available Amazon VPC Flow Logs announces out-of-the-box integration with Amazon Athena AWS WAF now supports Labels to improve rule customization and reporting Amazon EKS is now FedRAMP-High Compliant AWS Budgets announces CloudFormation support for budget actions AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store now supports easier public parameter discoverability AWS Systems Manager Run Command now displays more logs and enables log download from the console Amazon EC2 now allows you to copy Amazon Machine Images across AWS GovCloud, AWS China and other AWS Regions AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store now supports removal of parameter labels  Announcing Amazon Forecast Weather Index for Canada  Things Coming Up Public Sector Summit Online — April 15–16 Discover cloud storage solutions at Azure Storage Day — April 29 AWS Regional Summits — May 10–19 AWS Summit Online Americas — May 12–13 Microsoft Build — May 19–21 (Digital) Google Financial Services Summit — May 27th  Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17 Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30) Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021 AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas Oracle Open World (no details yet) 

Aaron and Darren dive into the design process for new features and product updates.  Whitespark and GatherUp take different approaches to this process and we look at each process to see what works best and why for each team. Helpful links from the episode: MozCon - GatherUp is a sponsor! Brighton SEO conference Invision GatherUp March webinar FULL SHOW NOTES[intro music]00:12 Aaron Weiche: Episode Five, The Design Process.00:16 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:43 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.00:46 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren.00:47 AW: And we are super excited to talk this week 'cause it's been a few weeks since we've connected, but we have a common theme. I just got back from a week in London, and you're headed over to England in a handful of days, so we like...01:05 DS: Yep.01:05 AW: We almost could have met and recorded a podcast live from London.01:09 DS: We're gonna do that eventually. For sure we're gonna be at the same place. Maybe when we're at MozCon we should definitely plan a podcast when we're there together, that'd be awesome.01:17 AW: Genius. And should we have a live crowd and a T-shirt cannon, and that kinda stuff?01:22 DS: Yes, definitely. And an applause sign, so when we say something funny, someone flashes the applause button.01:29 AW: There you go. It's you and I, and then hopefully three people and then our T-shirt cannons.01:35 DS: Exactly. [chuckle] And some guys showed up to get free scones or something.[laughter]01:41 AW: Totally. Yeah. If we give enough good free stuff, they'll show up.01:44 DS: Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, I'm going to London in a couple of weeks here. I gotta go to London to do a presentation at BrightonSEO, and I'm also doing a training session. It sounds like you've got some training stuff coming up, too. Tell me about your trip though. How was London, what was the best thing?02:00 AW: Oh, the best thing, regardless of location, it was the first trip, my wife and I, where we've had seven days together since our first child, which she turns 15 next week.02:11 DS: Wow.02:12 AW: Yeah. Plenty of three, maybe even a four-day getaway, but having a full week... At some point midway, it was just like, "Wow, we've gotten so much time together." We maybe ran out of things to even talk about, and then we're like, "Okay, cool, silence is even cool," and then we just found other things to talk about. It was so great.02:36 S2: Oh, that's nice.02:36 AW: Yeah. We divided our trip halfway between the countryside of England, so we went out to an area called the Cotswolds, about an hour, hour-and-a-half outside of the London area, and super small little villages, one lane roads to get in between, driving out there was nuts. Man, there were so many times where I thought for sure that one side of the car was gonna be sheared off by the other car.03:03 DS: Right. Do you ever have to stop and one car has to reverse until the road gets wide enough for someone to pass?03:09 AW: Yeah, we totally had some of that going on. And just so many times where the locals they're still doing 40, 50 miles an hour on a one-lane road and I'm like over to the side, and then there's stone walls next to every road. There's no shoulder. It was just crazy. I definitely, out loud, shared how I felt a few different times, and I couldn't believe we never even touched mirrors out of all of it. It was crazy.03:37 DS: It's funny, I had that same experience in Italy for sure. Driving down these tiny little roads between buildings, and I'm like, "How are we both gonna fit through there?" But then you manage to do it. And the locals are like, "What's wrong with you? Just drive your car, man."03:52 AW: The locals stuck behind me hated me, because I was nowhere... When they would post the speed limit, I'm like, "How can somebody go that fast? I can't go 40 here, that's not happening."04:05 DS: Totally. Yeah.04:05 AW: Yeah, it was great. And then just the beauty and the calmness and the serenity of out there was awesome. I really, really loved that part. Then we went into London for four days, and that just such mixture of... We went to the theater, just so much sightseeing, so much history. It's like everywhere you turn is something that you would never see in the States. And that's the cool part about it to me, is just photographic visuals of little alleys and buildings, and little cafes and pubs, and things like that, where it's just like, "Oh, my... " You're in this huge area, but every 10 feet is something to look at.04:45 DS: Yeah. I saw that on Facebook, your photos were beautiful.04:48 AW: Yeah. Not even close to all the ones captured, those are just some of them. Yeah, it was really, really great. And, yeah, I'll give you a few tips. There's just so much to explore there, I would love to go back. It was my first time, and I'd be very excited to go back.05:07 DS: Yeah. Jill and I are in a similar situation. We've never taken a long trip like that away from our daughter. She usually comes with us if we're going somewhere for a while. But just like two nights most... I think two nights is the most we've ever done actually, we've never done more than that. She's eight now, we've got another seven years, I guess, before we can have the seven-day vacation.[laughter]05:29 AW: Well, hopefully you get it in sooner than I did, 'cause... Oh, man, it was really great, it was awesome for both of us. You're headed over to London to do a conference, right?05:42 DS: Yeah. I'm speaking at Brighton and also doing a training thing, so I've been very busy trying to... I'm doing a really interesting case study, where I take a business from nowhere, like the brand new, zero online presence business, and I've been trying to see how wide I can get them to rank in the local results, so tracking their location across multiple zip codes, and doing everything I can, like all the regular local search stuff, and being able to measure the impact at every step, which has been really great. So, it's like, "Okay, they got three new reviews. Wow, look at what happened to the rankings." Just those three reviews gave them a massive ranking boost. And so, because it's so dialed in and they had nothing going on before, it's this clean, clear case study of what happens at each phase and how that impacts local search. It's been really great, I'm excited about that. But it's been taking me too long and I've been putting too much time into it and not enough time into preparing for the local search training I'm doing on one of the days, so I have to spend about seven hours giving a full day training course, so I'm gonna be really slammed all next week trying to get all that stuff done.06:47 AW: Yeah, so much work all the time to get ready for that stuff. Your study sounds awesome. I'm gonna be excited. Hopefully, you'll share that deck with me when you're done with it.07:00 DS: Yeah. Basically, I've got four months into it for Brighton, and so I'll have that much data, but I'm also going to show it at MozCon, so I'll have another two, three months of data to present and more things, as we get more links and as we do more things, how that impacts local search. Ideally we'll have them ranking round the whole country and local search by the end of it.07:25 AW: Nice. I like that. I'll be able to see it in person then at MozCon. And speaking of MozCon, I'm excited, GatherUp is gonna be one of the sponsors for MozCon.07:36 DS: That's awesome, yeah. We've done it a few years and it's been really great. You've done it before though. You were just the local?07:43 AW: Yeah, just only the local SEO event, haven't sponsored the regular one. But it's such a fit for our audience, 'cause our two biggest audiences are multi-location and brands, and then agencies. And that's the entire thousand plus people is, for the most part, either an agency person or someone in-house at a larger brand.08:05 DS: I think it's gonna be huge for you guys, it's gonna be really, really good. You're gonna have a ton of great conversations and, yeah, it's definitely your audience. I thought Moz had some kind of review product in Moz local. No?08:18 AW: They have a review monitoring for a couple of sites, and that's really about it. Comes from your GMB integration, stuff like that, but nothing for acquisition or review widgets or all of the other wonderful things we do.08:33 DS: Cool, cool. I'll try to see if I can squeeze a mention of GatherUp into my slide deck for you.08:39 AW: There you go. Every time you do it, it buys you one beer.08:42 DS: One beer? Wow. [laughter] It's great. I'm gonna get a six-pack eventually.08:47 AW: Yeah. I gotta keep my budget low after spending on conferences.[chuckle]08:53 DS: Totally. Having a booth at MozCon is about a billion times better than a booth at any other conference, because they only let eight businesses in, and they're right... It's like, everyone that's coming into the main conference center to watch the talks, they walk right through the booths every time. And then after the conference gets out and they open the doors for a snack time, the snacks are right there where you're hanging out. And so it's like everyone comes right to you. It's not like you have this expo hall, which is often separate from the conference, so you get massive exposure. It's the best place I've ever seen for a conference booth. I think it's gonna be great for you.09:35 AW: That's exactly what I shared with our team, because none of... I don't think anyone else from our team has ever been to just the regular MozCon. I told them that, the placement and the numbers. You're not one of 100 or 500 booths. You're not tucked in a corner, you're not hoping people find their way to you. You're right in the flow and there's just a handful, and you're so visible and so accessible. I'm really hoping it's gonna be a great thing for us, I'm definitely excited about it.10:06 DS: It's gonna be good. How much time do we have here? I did wanna ask you, what is your conference process? But we're into 10 minutes, let's get into the meat of this podcast.10:15 AW: There you go. Another time, we'll go into it. Maybe after MozCon, then we can talk about how I did IFA a couple of weeks ago and I've had a couple of really good leads. I'm hopefully closing a deal or two from that coming up, which totally takes care of what that investment was, and then we'll see how Moscone goes and then, yeah, let's do that for a subject down the line. We might even be... We'll be in double digits by then. It'll be...10:40 DS: What do you mean?10:41 AW: Episode 10 or 12. Right?[chuckle]10:43 DS: Oh, yeah. Totally. Exactly. We could actually talk about that at MozCon. That might be a good topic for when we're at MozCon.10:50 AW: Boom. Talk about conferences, right?10:51 DS: Yeah, totally.10:53 AW: All right. With that, just as you alluded to, and this week you brought up the main topic of looking at the design process. You have a number of things from when we started chatting before we hit record and notes put together, but, yeah, I'd love to see you break this apart and talk about some of your challenges and share some of the things that we're doing and see where we end up with all this design stuff, because it sure does matter.11:26 DS: It does matter. This has come up for us recently because we just finished our revisions on the brand new local citation finer that we're building. We tore it down, started from scratch, rebuilt the whole thing, and as a result, we have a whole new interface. The way that our process works is... The first phase of this local citation was what we called feature parity. We're building in a brand new development stack and bringing it up to modern standards, and as we're doing that, we're re-envisioning some of the UI, some of the layout, some of the design, and just improving things as we go. We got it as far as we could, so now we have a feature parity version of a local citation finder. It looks a million times better, it has a lot of new functionality, we took it quite a bit beyond feature parity. And it looks great.12:25 DS: It looks a lot better than the existing one, but I don't wanna stop there. And so what we've done now is, I've given it to our designer at this freelance company we use out of Croatia, Creativa Studios. These guys are awesome. And so they're gonna take a pass through it where they just go through each screen and Photoshop it up, so they put their spin on it. And then they'll come back to us and we put a fresh face on it, and then we launch the thing. And so that's been our process for this software, and it really got me thinking about design because I feel like that's pretty ass backwards.12:56 DS: I think a lot of businesses, SaaS businesses, go the other direction. They start with the designs, they start with the wireframes, and they conceptualize everything. And they do a lot of painstaking planning, then based off of the plans and the wireframes, the designs, they start building the software. And I can see the merit to that, but I have to tell you, every time we've tried to do it that way, what ends up happening is, by the end of it, we have a completely different product than the designs. And it works, but a lot of that initial time spent upfront is wasted because, once you start building the software and using it and trying it and tweaking it, you realize a lot of those original concepts don't work or you want it to be slightly different. And so that's why I feel like our organic approach... It works for us anyway. So, we just build first and design after. We put a better face on it after. 'Cause it's the functionality and the user interface, and my developers are decent enough at design to make it look fine. And then we can make it look really good after the fact.13:58 DS: What do you guys do over at GatherUp? How do you build a new feature, for example? Do you completely design it first, and then build it out, or do you kinda build it and then say, "How do we make it look better?"14:10 AW: There's definitely been an area of evolution for us in the last three-and-a-half, nearly four years since I came on, just 'cause I'm a much more process-driven person, plus, as the company has grown and things like that, where we start now is any new feature basically starts in a feature spec just in a Google Doc.14:39 DS: Yeah, that's how we do it, too.14:39 AW: So, you're writing down, "Here's the business case, here's why we wanna do it," and then you just start writing down the little things, the dependencies, "In this situation, it was, do this, here's what to keep in mind." And we try to get that through a first pass as far as possible. After that, what it used to be, and I don't know if I should talk about where we came from or where we've arrived at first, but where we came from is... Once upon a time, we would freelance it out. We wouldn't even really create a design spec, we'd create a wireframe. We'd be conversationally all be talking about it, and we'd either create something where we could all mark it up or create examples off of existing screens, or whatever that might look like, and then we would take it to a designer and ask them to design it. Or we would even say, "All right, let's just re-use some of the elements we have from this screen and that screen," and we'd have our devs build it without a designer. And let's just say all of those failed miserably in many different ways.15:46 DS: So, what's your process now?15:48 AW: Now, it goes to a feature spec. One big change that we did is, we said, "All right, we're gonna hire a designer." 'Cause, for us, it was hitting upon a couple of different things. One, we badly needed a V2 of our interface. Our interface felt dated, there is some not-so-great decisions. Our style sheets were starting to blow apart because there was just no consistency. We had a number of things. And so I just looked and I was just like, "All right, I'm a very visual person, and visual interface and all that really matters to me." I basically went and tapped someone who was my creative director at my previous agencies and recruited him, and just said, "Here is an opportunity for you. Everything needs to be redone, we have a re-brand coming up as well." And we basically brought him on as our chief experience officer. He's the one responsible for how people touch the product and interact with it, all of these different kinds of aspects to it.16:47 AW: So, we go from feature spec to now he's usually creating what we would call a low-fidelity wireframe, and we're using that and InVision to make it clickable, so you can click and move around and start to get, like, "All right, here's how we move through three or four things," to get rid of just static design, where it's like, "Yeah, it looks great." And then, just as you're alluding to, once you click or do something, it starts to fall apart. So, we drive home that idea in InVision first. Once he gets to that, then he's like, "All right, we've solved most of those things, we understand it," and then we bring it into design.17:22 AW: The other thing we have going for us is we've also created a library now of this is what this is and how it's used. So, getting a lot more down with what the size things are, how tables are presented, buttons, spacing, whatever that might be. It's not very Wild West at all, 99% of anything we do, that element has already been created somewhere. He takes it through design, and once we hit a point for the back and forth and that's good, then we take it to our front-end devs. Front-end devs build it and stand it up, and we're able to... They're gonna wire in as much as they can, just without data into the back end of the product. And once we approve that, then it's ready to... Basically that's when we insert it into a sprint with our engineering team. Engineering team then takes it through our feature of internal testing, beta, public beta, and then release.18:17 DS: Does it feel like there's any waste in that process? In terms of... I don't know, for me, it sounds like it takes a long time to go from that Word Document, where you describe the feature, to actually having this in production, 'cause you've got many different steps you have to follow.18:37 AW: Yeah. You can look at it that way. For me, I view it as this all serves as different points for people to touch it, feel it, interact with it, socialize it, get people used to it. It's amazing all the things that happen, and just as you alluded to, there is nothing like when you actually really use it. We probably learn the most about our product when we do our stage of what's called a private beta, when we flag it in our product, you could turn it on, and we can start using it at test production accounts we have. That's where we really learn the most. But the good thing is, by having the same person doing it, who's using the product, going through all these design processes, he sees some of those things before it happens. And even us as a team, we bring up a lot more things. Our customer success team is fabulous at... They right away look at it and they think of something that they get asked all the time, and they're like, "All right, well, what about this? 'Cause this is what's gonna be asked about there."19:39 DS: Right, yeah.19:39 AW: We do get those iterations within there, and there is stuff that you could look at, like, "Wow, that seems excessive." But for us, it's really helped tied off a lot of details 'cause for a long time, we were pretty much like build, build as fast as you can, and throw it out there. And then you'd be like, "Oh, here's all the stuff that we need to go back and fix," or, "It could be better," or, "We didn't even think about that," and things like that. So, we feel like we've arrived at a place that allows us to hit the quality that we want.20:06 DS: Yeah. Our approach is, we build it first and then we tweak it. I'll look at it and I'm like, "Okay, we wanna change this, change that." And then the dev team could turn around those changes in... Sometimes while I'm on the call with them, they're like, "Okay, they'll change it in the code," deploy, I'd be like, "Okay, refresh." So, I'm on the call, we're changing, we're updating it regularly. And then once I feel satisfied with it, I throw it over to Jessie and Nick, have them take a look, throw it over to Brianna or our customer service team, have her take a look at it. And then we get it pretty much, like, "Yeah, the functionality of this is great." Then we just put some lipstick on it. We get a designer to make it just feel and look a little bit more polished, and then I feel like it goes out the door. And to me, it feels like some pretty rapid development, it's a great way of getting to a launch-ready product pretty quickly. It works pretty well for us.21:05 AW: Yeah. And I think that's an important part. At the end of the day, lots of ways to achieve something. It does come down to whatever works best for you in getting those things out and once... I feel like we're pretty agile. We talked about, in an earlier episode, where we've gone to a feature a month that is gonna get delivered, and then we have multiple others that fall underneath it. We kick out a lot of updates, and we push a lot of really, really, in our world, what are big features, and a lot to tackle on a consistent basis. And to me, there's even more we can explore. Our chief experience officer has been with us for a year now, but I still think he's halfway there to where we really need him and want him to be, because he just needs to continue to use the product more and understand it more.21:57 AW: And really it's unlocking things. There's always a straight line way to do something, and that's the one thing I worry about with your process, is you come into it with this bias of, "Well, here's how you do it." But you didn't take any time to explore, what are the other ways to do it, or how would this work in other environments, are there steps I can cut out, or what's intuitive for the user, things like that, that what we've found in our process in doing it and creating some of these motions in just like a clickable wireframe, is you get people using it and talking about it really early that sometimes, "Oh, well, we can reduce clicks and do it this way, or if we add clicks, it takes all this other stuff off the table and makes it easier." I think there's some really interesting dialogue when you do that, so I really look at it as, as fast as we can get it to something that can be socialized. And you're, in essence, doing it that same way, too, you're just doing it in a full build, to some extent.22:55 DS: Yeah, one of the failures of our process... Well, I'm gonna even call it my process. My developers might say that the way I do it sucks. It's frustrating for them, because one of the things that happens is I get this idea, I want this feature, and so I scope it out, and then they start building it. And then we have to ditch it because we realize, "You know what, that's not gonna work the way we originally planned." And so they've already spent the time to program it, but we ditch it, and we come up with a new angle. Whereas with your approach, you avoid that, because you think about it in the design and wireframing phase before all the time has been put into actually programming. I can see the benefit there, for sure.23:39 AW: Yeah. In any process, fail early and fast, if you're gonna fail with those things, so that you can re-calibrate or restart from what you learned or where you went wrong, and then try to go from there as fast as possible.23:55 DS: Yeah. There's gotta be some good guides out there, blog posts on processes for software development, that I just don't feel like I spend enough time reading and investing in. Looking at all those different things and thinking about what do we wanna incorporate in our process and how do we wanna do our next project or feature release. Right?24:13 AW: Yep. And sometimes you play around with it. We're definitely constantly adding things or just tweaking some little things. We have our main steps and framework down, but inside of that, we're trying a lot more things. We realize in a lot of things, "Okay, we need to socialize this, or we need to have more conversations or even a presentation of it with our engineering team," because we give it to them all wrapped up, but they might not always understand the business case or the use case or some of the things like that. And for a while, we'd do a great job of creating the feature spec, but then all the changes that we would make while we were designing and building, we would never update the feature spec. So, it was like, it got it started, but we really realized, "Oh, well, this thing, it should be the narrative of the feature. And as we make these new options or choices, we need to go back and update that." So, the final thing you do, that still serves even when you're at step 28 to finish it up, that feature spec is still informing you or something you can cross-check against to make sure you did it right.25:22 DS: That makes sense, yeah.25:23 AW: Especially when you pass it off to so many hands, because ours is going through half a dozen hands in the process.25:31 DS: Yep. Our process is currently... It works, but I think one of the big ones that really stands out in my mind is the rebuild of our rank tracker. That took us two, three years, and it's because we kept going back to the drawing board on it. We'd build something and then we'd be like, "Yeah, that doesn't work." And then we would build something else and then we'd build something else, whereas I think a lot of that anguish could have been saved if we had more of a formal design process. And sometimes it works great. If we think about our new tool that we just launched, that review checker, that was mostly just one guy, Dimitri, thinking about it, putting it together, getting feedback, we tweak the system based on the feedback and eventually we've got something out the door. And it worked pretty well there. And I think a formal process for that small tool would have really slowed everything down.26:27 DS: So, we were able to get something out the door quickly with a part-time developer by just letting him roll with it. And then he would show us what he's got and we'd be like, "Okay, well let's make this look a little bit better. Let's change the icons here, let's change the colors, let's move this and put it somewhere else." But the functionality never really changed. All that changed was the placement and layout and design, and that kind of stuff.26:51 AW: Yeah. For the rank tracker, most of the things you kept coming back to, were they visual displays? Was it how you were displaying things more so than functionality?27:01 DS: I think it was a combination of both. It wasn't really the design that was the problem, it was the overall architectural planning, I think, was the problem. And it's just a really big project, and there's two main components to it. There's the crawling architecture, that's a big complicated system that runs on the back end that does all the crawling, and then we have the front end interface that pulls in all the data. I think it was actually... Most of the problem wasn't visual, it was architectural. And so we went back to the drawing board a couple of times on that, based off of... Even technologies that we were using were problematic. So, we started with our database structure being in this one thing called Couchbase, and it worked great until we reached a certain capacity, and then it all started falling apart.27:48 DS: Having to shift gears and rebuild something else, and then once you rebuild that, you've got to change something else, with the way that we're doing other things, that was part of the big problem. The system works quite beautifully now. One of our developers, Troy, has done a really good job with the crawling platform and the servers that we use for it, and the whole architecture of that is running really well now. So, glad to have that behind us, which allows us to rapidly develop all these other things right now.28:19 AW: Yeah. Just because at the time now, I know a majority of your products are siloed from each other, do you have a consistent design theme and library across all of those? Is that constantly evolving? Do you introduce... When you introduced the review tool, did you introduce a new library for that? What does that look like for you guys?28:39 DS: Yeah. No, we don't, which is bad. This is part of our problem. We do have this concept that we're building, it's called the platform. And we're building our new account system, which does all of our processing, and where customers can log in and see what subscriptions they have, their billing information. That's the base of it, and that's going to evolve into what will be an integrated platform. And so that was designed in advance. We have all the Photoshop files, all the InVision stuff for that platform concept. We wire-framed it all out. And now this software... I told you we just rebuilt the local citation finder. The design of that is being built by the same guys that designed the platform, using the same concepts. And so it will have a uniform design to our new platform. And then the rank tracker, I'm gonna ask the designers to take a pass through that as well to make it also uniform. And then the Holy Grail will happen some point in 2019, where everything is integrated into one platform.29:40 AW: Yeah. That'll be big, but I think you'll find, just as we did when we started through the redesign of our application interface, that just working from a set library, developing consistency and predictable elements, that is such... I think that's such an important pillar in good design. Your team is not guessing, but also the user isn't seeing all those inconsistencies. Right?30:07 DS: Absolutely. It's gonna be great. They know that our buttons are always on this spot and they always look like this. It's like that is what a select dropdown looks like in this application.30:17 AW: Yeah. Those visual cues, that visual way finding just makes it so much easier. And we still have things... I think we still have four to five different pop-up designs in our product where it's trying to find, "All right, when can we sweep through and get those all on one?" That kind of stuff.30:37 DS: That one little modal that's still that old design.30:40 AW: Yeah. That kind of stuff just drives me nuts right now. I just had that happen today where I hit something and got into something where it literally, I feel like it was one of the first things ever designed in our product and it's still in there somehow. It's like, "Oh, remind me to never click on that in a demo again." It's terrible. [laughter] It's easier for me to avoid it than to figure out how are we gonna get that one thing changed to base on other pieces that are there?31:11 DS: Yeah. I have a tendency to just derail my development team when that stuff comes up. As anything that bugs me, I'm just like, I'll just ping them on Slack and be like, "Would you be able to fix this this afternoon?" They're just like, "Drop what you're doing, just take a break. I'm sure you're getting tired of it, just fix this." 'Cause anything that bugs me too much, I just wanna get it done immediately.31:31 AW: See, I have that power in our feature build process, beta process, whatever else, but our product managers now have got to the point where they're like, "Yeah, we'll get that in the next sprint, but... "31:45 DS: Yeah. That's what we need at Whitespark, but right now I'm just like the ultimate dictator. It would be good to have somebody to be like, "No, not doing that. You can't derail our team 'cause we're working towards a sprint and we need to get it finished."32:01 AW: Yeah. I both love and hate it. It's like, "No, I want this done ASAP." But on the other side, I'm like, "Man, I love that we have enough process and communication and things that don't get someone upset at me just because here's Aaron banging his fist that he wants this done." It's a good thing even though in the moment sometimes I wanna throw a tantrum about it.32:23 DS: Yep, for sure.32:25 AW: So, what do you think, based on this, do you feel like there's something that you know you wanna try different, or where are you at?32:33 DS: If I think about what's on our software development roadmap, it's tough to say because... Actually, a little bit, yes, and so I think what we'll do... 'Cause we're finishing phase one of this local citation finder rebuild, which was done development first. I think phase two, we're gonna have a nice fresh design, we're gonna have all the functionality that we need for future parity, so a brand new system. Before we start development of the new features that I want, we'll actually wire frame them and then turn the wireframes into proper full designs, 'cause we'll have all of the materials to be able to do that. And so I think we're gonna get to that point that you're at now, where you can go through those phases for a feature, 'cause everything that we're building now, they're just new features on the existing well designed system. So, we're going to definitely approach it as from a design first perspective for phase two of that local citation finder. And I think that will work better, because then we can have all those discussions in advance before anyone starts writing code, and I think that's where the time savings will be.33:38 AW: Well, and it's figuring out what's most important to you. There's pillars inside this of... For me, it was quality and consistency were the two biggest pillars. You're pointing another one out in being efficiency. I think when anybody looks to design their plan around design, however you're gonna map that out, is you have to figure out... I would start with, what are our pillars, what is most important to us. Obviously another one is user experience and usability to it. So, what are the three, four or five things you're gonna answer to? And as you build a process or figure out, who do we need internally on the team as compared to externally, or the talent pool or skill set, how do you answer to those and does it meet those core pillars that you know you need it to meet when you design it? And that's where I think that can be different for everyone else, based on how they view things or what's important to them.34:37 DS: Right. Do you guys ever run your designs across your customers, you run it by the customers and say, "Hey, this is this new feature, does this look like what you have in mind?"34:48 AW: Yeah, we definitely socialize... Especially with bigger things, we'll take it to people and see how they feel about it. Even in the case with you guys, when we do stuff for agency resellers, we're gonna say, "All right, how does Whitespark feel about it? And let's socialize this, part of the pieces, or let's explain it and see if they get it." And then if they do get it, then there's a lot of questions, like, "Oh, well, can it also do this? Can it do this?" That can be helpful as well. We've even gotten into that with our monthly webinars. Our monthly webinar almost always consists of, "Hey, here's the latest thing that we just rolled out, we wanna make sure you fully understand it. Here's what's right around the corner, possibly going into beta, if you wanna join, here's how to," and get them excited about that.35:34 AW: And then the last is we almost always try to have something that is a sneak peek. So, we did that today with a... I just did our March webinar today, and we gave a sneak peek to a report that you can start to get people excited, and you give them something to look forward to, you get them something to get used to, that when you roll it out into the product, they're ready and waiting to utilize 'cause you've already talked about it and explained it, and they have the visual cue on it. And they're wanting it and looking for it, instead of it just being a surprise, which surprises can be good, too, but I find when we can seed it as we go along, it works out much better.36:11 DS: I really wanna get into that. I feel like one of the things that we fail at at Whitespark is, we'll launch a brand new feature and we don't even tell anybody. It's like, yeah, we've got this awesome new feature and we didn't promote it, we did not do a webinar on it, we did not even tweet about it. Just like, yeah, it's this nice little new feature, whereas it's an opportunity to promote the value of this new feature and we often don't do that. We're just so focused on continuously building and adding new features and improving the software that we don't do a great job of promoting it. And I think what you just described, or that process where you get people involved at the early stages, you get their feedback, you socialize them, and you even get them into the beta already, all that stuff is so valuable and it's definitely something I'd like to incorporate at Whitespark.37:03 AW: Now, it gets the hype going, it gets them excited about it. For some people, it's a feature or something they've been asking for, so it makes them feel like they're being heard and listened to. And, yeah, there's definitely a lot of wins on it that go a long way. And we're trying to find more and more ways how do we do that? Like our last feature, text back, we used a little explainer video just about the feature itself, and put that out there. So, it's like how different mediums can we use, so we're really trying to expand, even... I think we do quite a bit, but we wanna take it even further. 'Cause at the end of the day it is about marketing and storytelling and communication and getting those things across, and we wanna do as much as we can in them.37:47 DS: Do you have a specific person at GatherUp that's responsible for prepping the webinars and marketing and writing up the emails, or do you do all that yourself?37:58 AW: Yeah. I do way too much of it myself. One step we did take, we hired what we just call a product and content marketer last fall. And she's been great, she's taken a lot off my plate, from writing user guides and beta instructions and blog posts, and things like that. She still hasn't taken it all off, I still do all the emails, I still do all the webinars, and I don't know if that will ever... I wouldn't see the webinars being in there, but it's reduced 50% of my content output. Where I was, other than Mike Blumenthal helping out on our blog a lot, it was all me, and it was way too much. That has been a really big help, especially with all kinds of littler things, and I think we still have a long way to go. She's only six months in, still learning product, still learning all these things, and it's getting better and we're figuring out some of our processes and ways to excel there. But in my opinion, too much of it still relies on me to execute. I can be a great... If you wanna ask me about stuff, if you want me to spout off about it or anything else, I would love to be the motivation or the soapbox source, but to have someone else write and execute on it, that would be a dream come true for me.39:17 DS: Yeah. I feel pretty lucky to have Jessie. Jessie's been with the company for nine years, she knows everything, she's also an awesome SEO, she knows the local search space really well. She does all of our newsletter, when we launch new features, she writes them up, she promotes them, she manages our social media. We're really lucky to have her to be able to handle all that. She can talk about all of our products, all of our services, and she can talk about local search as well as anybody. She's really great to have in that role, it takes a lot off of me. I don't have to worry about any of that stuff.39:51 AW: Yeah. I like your Jessie. And if we weren't such good friends, I would steal your Jessie.39:57 DS: Yeah.[laughter]40:00 AW: Everybody needs a Jessie.40:01 DS: Yeah, she's pretty great. And when we go to conferences, too, she's the one that's there and she'll organize all the stuff and she'll talk to the customers. Yeah, she's great that way.40:10 AW: Nice.40:10 DS: Yeah.40:11 AW: All right. Well, I think that puts a wrap on this episode. And in talking design, my advice to people today, and maybe, Darren, you have a couple of things you wanna share, but mine is define what your core pillars are that you want to anchor to and build a processor on that. I'm of the ilk that design individuals are so important, do not undersell what that takes, and if that means... In our case, where we hired someone with great expertise and allowed them to own it, that was a big change for us and it allowed us to work that process even better, so I think the design process is definitely an important one and not something to just cobble together, for sure, for someone building or enhancing a product in today's SaaS market.41:00 DS: Yeah, I'd agree with all that advice. I would say that it is possible to build things with a more agile design second approach, and I think that our review tracker was a good example. If you have a developer that can design stuff well, then you don't necessarily need to put all of that effort in upfront, depending on what you're building, if it's a small little thing. If it's a big complicated thing, I do think there's a lot of value in putting more effort into the planning and design in advance, and I've learnt lessons there. And so take Aaron's advice on that one, and that's advice that we're gonna start taking a little bit more here, too, where we do the planning in advance, 'cause I think that there's generally good value in that and you avoid pitfalls in the future.41:43 AW: Yeah. Well said.41:45 DS: All right.41:45 AW: Well, Darren, when we talk next, we'll be able to get your download of some time in England, in London, and good luck at the Brighton conference. Knock 'em dead, and find some time to enjoy yourself, and have a few pints, and eat some good food as well.42:02 DS: Thank you. I'm gonna try to do all those things, it's gonna be good.42:06 AW: You will excel, I have no doubt.42:08 DS: The pint drinking anyways.[chuckle]42:09 AW: Totally. All right. Thanks, everybody, for joining us on another episode of the SaaS Venture. Happy to have you with us, and we will see you next time.42:20 DS: See you next time.[music]

On November 27, 1978, a shocking story unfolded in San Francisco: Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were shot and killed at City Hall by former Supervisor Dan White. This episode features an unedited "aircheck" of KCBS Radio coverage beginning shortly after 11 a.m., featuring field reports from Jim Hamblin and Barbara Taylor.

On this episode, we're talking about La Familia, hors-d'oeuvres, and Surveillance. So, let's go steal a podcast!We discuss introducing ourselves at the start of the episode, Nicky-a Moscone, do Boston cops eat garlic bread instead of donuts?, is this a bad episode?, Nate has privilege, Sophie is written really emotional this episode, Sprungions/Cebolletas, and Chef Elliot, Hollywood “fat”, a soft boy, Vin Diesel doesn't make a cameo, our weekly forced Pardison scene, Sophie is mischaracterised, Necro Butcher is here, we talk briefly about the bad show “the L Word”, the Butcher's bad look, Daleks temporarily take over the recording, he died with a mushroom in his eye, no offence to Kansas, Elliot's spaghetti, welcome to the Yawncast, Hi Everyone I'm Hom.RecommendationsThe Fandomentals www.thefandomentals.com/The Great Gundam Project by Abnormal Mapping www.abnormalmapping.com/Find us at:Shoutengine shoutengine.com/profile/letsstealapodcast/Email letsstealapodcast@gmail.comTwitter twitter.com/letsstealcastTumblr letsstealapodcast.tumblr.com/Frankie twitter.com/frankiExtraCassidy twitter.com/whatiscosplay

Jonathan Moscone, Chief of Civic Engagement at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and former Artistic Director, California Shakespeare Theatre, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky. On Saturday, October 28th, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco is presenting the YBCA 100 Summit, based on “an annual compilation of the creative minds that inspire YBCA. The list celebrates thought leaders, provocateurs, and innovators who are using their platform to create cultural movement.” The program starts at 12:30 pm and continues into the evening. For more information, go to ybca.org In this interview, Jon Moscone discusses the event as well as other projects by YBCA, goes into depth about his direction of Paula Vogel's play “Baltimore Waltz,” recently at the Magic Theatre, discusses the controversial “Glass Menagerie” at Cal Shakes this past season, and talks about the relationship of politics and the arts. The post Interview: Jonathan Moscone, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts appeared first on KPFA.

  Our guest today is Joe Chernov. He's now the Chief Marketing Officer at @InsightSquared. He also lends a hand to startups and wildlife causes when he can. Diving right in, he says, "It's unbelievable what you can get done if you don't care if you get fired!" Talking about his experience at Eloqua, "If we were to publish something that is valuable, we could edge our way into deeper coverage by the media."  Scorecard - even though we're not supposed to keep score:  16 articles after spending 2 years developing a product and writing up the release. An infographic got 800 articles. Very eye-opening. Joe says, "Content marketing is what happens when a marketing department shifts its thinking from knowing that the company that signs their paychecks needs to shift to the customer signs the paycheck." That shift in mindset turned collateral into an ebook, a self-serving whitepaper into a more valuable, lengthy piece of content.     Point: The opportunity to leverage the correct content through the active sales process:   Best content ideas come from your sales people. Conversations with sales will be the source of the best ideas.  Example: They publish a issue of their "blog" once a month that includes a recap of 4-5 articles on similar content. Each month has a new theme which helps to focus the articles on that topic.    He's talking about a sales team creating an editorial calendar. You heard Matt right.   Point: Personas as a driving force for effective content.   Personas help reduce the size of your universe so that as a writer or content creator, your writing universe is smaller which helps guide the writing and allow it to be less daunting.  But, he cautions against being way too specific with a persona. "Susie Seller" is just a role in an organization. We don't need to know which college she attended or coffee brand she prefers, unless you are selling coffee.   People have a hard time comparing their content metrics to their business metrics.   The very best way to shine a light on the value of your content is to look at lead quality. Your lead or transactional content success could be measured by downloads, subscribers. These are higher value than typical leads.  You want to know did they close? Did they move deeper into the funnel than other sources? Lead Quality tops the list for this comparison and measurment.   Favorite KISS song and why: Deuce. Gene Simmons wrote it on a bus. It's about absolutely nothing.    -----------------------     Even though this is a replay, it's timely as it mentions the upcoming Dreamforce. Matt will be presenting 5 minute walk from Moscone. Take a break:     You Can't Buy a Beer With a Hashtag: How to Translate #ABM Into Execution, Pipeline & Closed Deals - Matt Heinz Champion your way through Dreamforce –visit the B2B Champions Club! Need to step away from all the noise at Dreamforce? Look no further. Come to the B2B Champions Club – just a 5 minute walk from Moscone Center. Hear industry leading speakers as well as relax, recharge and network. Sign up to reserve your spot! Stop by anytime throughout the week for: 20+ sessions by top B2B Sales and Marketing Leaders Networking alongside industry leading peers during breakfast, lunch, and happy hours Live streaming of Marc Benioff keynote Register for the #B2BChampionsClub today!