TIMOTHY JORDAN: Hello, world.
I'm Timothy Jordan, reporting for "The Developer Show"
here at the Firebase Dev Summit in Amsterdam.
And I'm standing with Francis Ma, the lead product
manager for Firebase.
Hi, Francis.
FRANCIS MA: Hey, Timothy.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: How are you doing today?
FRANCIS MA: Excellent.
Super excited to be in Amsterdam today.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Yeah.
This summit is way cool.
And my favorite part is the keynote,
where we get to learn all the cool new stuff
happening with Firebase.
And you talked about two things I
was hoping that we could get a few more details on.
Is that OK?
FRANCIS MA: Yeah, absolutely.
Would love to talk about it.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: The first is Firestore.
Now, we know a little bit about Firestore.
You talked about it a little bit more in the keynote.
Just lay it out for us.
What is Firestore, and why is it great for developers?
FRANCIS MA: Yeah.
Firestore is our next generation's Firebase database.
And the really cool part about it
is that it's a NoSQL document-based database that
scales automatically.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And what is it that it solves now
that we couldn't do before with other solutions?
FRANCIS MA: So there were two things.
First off, we built Firestore based
on the learnings from the Realtime Database,
and have done so building on Google's powerful cloud
infrastructure.
And so with that, the first key part is the scalability of it.
And as I mentioned earlier that Firestore
is an auto-managed database-- what that means is
as a developer, you don't have to worry
about the infrastructure.
It just scales effortlessly, whether you're
building a prototype, running a startup,
or even scaling up to, say, a billion users.
It will just automatically work for you.
And the second part that's really cool about Firestore
is that its data structure is now
based on a collections document model, which
is a change from the Firebase Realtime Database.
And with this new model, it allows
you to structure your data a little bit more intuitively
and also be able to run efficient queries on it as
well.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: All right.
Let's talk about one other thing,
and that's Firebase Predictions, which you announced
for the first time today.
Tell us-- what is it?
FRANCIS MA: Yeah.
We're super excited about Predictions.
It's our first step of bringing Google's machine learning
into Firebase.
And we have created this to help developers
apply machine learning on their own analytics data
and predict what their users are likely to do.
And so the power in there is that now they
can take more proactive actions to create a more
engaging experience for their users.
So, for example, if you're building a game,
we can help you predict how likely users are going
to leave your game because they may find it too difficult.
And so now, as a game developer, you
will be able to use it to say whether you give them
some promotion up front or lower the difficulty of the level
to continue to drive that engagement.
And the cool part about Predictions
is that you can also set up your own custom predictions.
So it not only works well for game developers,
but, say, if you're building an e-commerce app or a fitness
app, you can set up your own predictions
that are important for you.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's really cool.
I think my favorite thing about Firebase Predictions
is that all of that machine learning is under the hood.
We did all the hard work, and developers can just
use the value of it.
FRANCIS MA: Absolutely.
And that's really the spirit of Firebase,
where our focus is to help developers focus
on creating value for their users
and us doing the heavy lifting for them.
And in this instance, for machine learning,
a lot of developers that we've heard from
are finding some of the tools on the market
difficult for the fact that it requires advanced machine
learning knowledge.
And so here, following the Firebase spirit,
we have packaged a lot of it under the hood,
as you had said, such that there is
no need for them to have any machine learning knowledge
whatsoever.
All they need to do is enable this feature.
As long as they have analytics enabled,
the machine will just work and automatically set up
Predictions for you.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Francis, thanks so much for joining us today.
FRANCIS MA: Always my pleasure.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Thanks for joining me here
at the Firebase Dev Summit 2017 in Amsterdam.
For links to all the session videos, look in the description
below.
I'm Timothy Jordan for "The Developer Show."
See you next time.