TIMOTHY JORDAN: Hello and welcome
to the "Developer Show."
I'm your host Timothy Jordan.
Let's start with a quick review of what happened recently
with the Google Developer platform,
also known as the TLDR.
Perform complex back end logic on data
store in real time with automatic synchronization
across devices-- Android plus Firebase plus Google
App Engine makes it happen.
David East is here today to explain it all a bit further.
DAVID EAST: That's me.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Logs just got a lot better
with Metrics Advanced Filters and Charts brought
to you by Google Cloud Logging and Google Cloud Monitoring,
available today in beta.
Improved navigation, search, customization, and visibility
are available today in a beta new design of the cloud
console.
Try it today and let us know what you think.
Universal app campaigns and user acquisition performance
reporting is now available in Google Play Developer Console
to make ads and user growth as simple as writing
an async task.
A recent Google Shopper survey revealed that over 40%
of people are likely to use their phones to pay digitally
for products this holiday season.
Google's Head of commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy
recently sat down with "Fortune" to discuss this and more
commerce trends to come.
Joanna Smith is on the show today
to discuss what this means for us developers.
JOANNA SMITH: Money.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: As the crow flies is not
the best measure of proximity.
But thanks to the Distance Matrix Service
as part of the Google Maps API, you
can calculate what point of interest
is actually the closest to travel for your users.
Get a Project Tango developer kit for 50% off with a special
limited time offer on the Google Store available soon,
and keep an eye out on the Google+ community for an update
on the sale.
And in the meantime, check out the recent app
contest winners for some inspiration.
Links in the description below with all the other links.
Record your game play and share it on YouTube
from your phone with an update to Google Play Games.
It includes support for your front-facing camera and mic,
so we know how you really feel about that hidden bomb.
Also, we're working on an SDK for this,
so you can build it right into your own app or game.
VR is cool.
Seriously, it's cool.
And Google Cardboard now makes it
possible around the world in 39 languages
and in more than 100 countries on both Android and iOS-- oh,
and the SDK got updated too.
Fred Sauer is also cool and on the show today
to tell us a little more about Cardboard.
FRED SAUER: I'm super excited to be here today.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Turkish mobile games developer
Peak Games has a growing user base in the US
with their game Spades Plus.
The game generates over 70% of its mobile revenue
from Android.
We recently had a chat with them about how
they improved user engagement, increased installs
with Google Play Store listing experiments and app promotion,
as well as other Android and Google Play features
that help them be successful.
Here's a quick clip from the video-- a peek, if you will,
at Peak Games.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Peak Games was founded in 2010.
Our aim is to create global technology products
and reach millions of users.
We take the classic game experience
and migrate it to mobile.
Additional to that, we also build casual games.
Android is our priority mobile platform.
Currently, we have 65K open stores every day.
Most of our games are dependent on scale,
and getting more users in Android
is a lot easier than any other mobile platform.
Android has been super helpful in growing
international markets, and that's where
we believe our future is lying.
[END PLAYBACK]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: You can find a link
to the full video below in the show notes below.
They're awesome.
Click on things.
Fred, Cardboard, you have Cardboard.
Tell us about Cardboard, the new release, and all that stuff.
FRED SAUER: OK so Cardboard, obviously awesome.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Yes.
FRED SAUER: But as a developer, you want to build great apps.
So now we have a new SDK that has some performance
improvements and gives you better image quality.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Excellent.
And it has something to do with the distortion and the lenses,
right?
FRED SAUER: Yeah, so the distortion
that we have to put in the image to compensate
for the lenses in there is done more efficiently.
So we can give you more pixels, higher quality images.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And that's just a recompile.
FRED SAUER: Yes.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's awesome.
I love Cardboard.
Did I ever tell you why I love Cardboard?
FRED SAUER: Why?
TIMOTHY JORDAN: I'm sure I have, because I'm
a huge VR geek, which you know.
FRED SAUER: Tell me your Cardboard story.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: They might not know I'm a huge VR geek,
but the thing is, that when I was first getting into VR,
it was so expensive.
I just couldn't see it.
It was prohibitive for--
FRED SAUER: Like $10,000 for head--
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's right, and that
didn't even the include the computer and all the software
and whatever.
But now--
FRED SAUER: It's not $10,000.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: It's $10,000.
FRED SAUER: It's the phone I already have plus Cardboard
and two lenses.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's awesome.
FRED SAUER: And a rubber band to hold the phone in place.
JOANNA SMITH: That's the part I like.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: What do you think
is next for developers with Cardboard?
Like where is this going?
FRED SAUER: Really understanding VR I think is important.
It's a different experience.
So we have an app in the App Store called the Cardboard
Design Lab.
If you're doing anything with Cardboard,
you've got to check it out.
It's best practices, and it shows you what to do and what
not to do, like what makes people sick and what doesn't.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's like a whole new design skill set.
FRED SAUER: Yeah, because this is so immersive.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And kind of important.
FRED SAUER: So you know that sensation
if you're sitting in a train, and then the train next to you
pulls away?
And just for a moment, you think you're moving?
That can happen here too.
And that can make you sick.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: OK.
FRED SAUER: But if you do it right,
you have a great experience.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: So really learning
what makes a great VR app and simple stuff
like not making people sick, too, I imagine another best
practice.
FRED SAUER: And you have to try it with Cardboard.
It's not the same as doing it on your development machine.
You have to compile it, run it, check it out.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Cool, thank you, appreciate those tips.
Let's jump over to Firebase and Google App Engine.
So developers have been working with Firebase
with their Android apps and their iOS apps and so forth.
But this adds a new layer.
This is like a back end intelligence to real time data.
DAVID EAST: Yeah, it's funny talking about Firebase
on the back end of things because most people are used
to using it on the front side.
But what's cool about that is not everything
you can do from the phone, because it's not always on,
so you can't always be routinely sending emails,
or you can't send a push notification from the phone.
So those type of things you can use
Firebase for because you spin it up on the server,
and it's not really like a server, it's more of a client.
So I built a ton of apps, and this is something
that I do quite frequently.
And when you spin up this like smart client that you can trust
so you can put all of your keys on there or your certificates,
and then that way, it can send out
push notifications and response to something
that happened in Firebase.
So now you have this client that's sitting on a server,
and you have your phone, and they're totally away
from each other.
But yet, at the same time, they're in total harmony,
synchronizing the same data.
FRED SAUER: So you have a robot client in the cloud?
JOANNA SMITH: A trusted robot.
DAVID EAST: A trusted robot, yeah.
FRED SAUER: A butler.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Your most trusted robot Jeeves.
DAVID EAST: Robot butler as a service.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Butler as a service, very good.
So that robot can also do like Cron jobs, right?
It's not just responding changes.
DAVID EAST: Yeah, Cron jobs is one of the really cool use
cases because you can essentially
set up a Cron job that sends out like your newsletter email.
So every whatever days or every day,
you can send out the daily push to all of your users,
and that's a simple Cron job.
It queries the database, grabs the data, and sends it out.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's awesome.
JOANNA SMITH: So it's a motivated trusted robot?
DAVID EAST: Yes.
FRED SAUER: I want a robot butler.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: OK, Joanna, let's talk about money.
JOANNA SMITH: Well, specifically let's talk about shopping
and how we can spend the money, like on our robot butlers,
right?
FRED SAUER: I would buy one right now.
JOANNA SMITH: Right, well, that's
why we make money, right?
To like spend it on things?
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And robot butlers.
JOANNA SMITH: So specifically, I think
that Android Pay is going to exciting for our holiday
season.
We can all kind of agree that that's
going to change a lot of in-store experiences.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: It's making things a lot easier.
JOANNA SMITH: So much easier.
But the thing is developers aren't really
looking at that because it doesn't really affects them,
and I think that's kind of a mistake.
That article was so great and Sridhar
said something that really resonated
with me, which is that shopping moments are replacing shopping
marathons.
FRED SAUER: What does that mean exactly?
JOANNA SMITH: So, if you think about it, normally,
you don't spend all day on Saturday running
all of your errands, going to each store
that you need something from.
In fact, you probably don't buy three things in one day
anymore.
You realize that you're out of toothpaste, you order
more toothpaste online, right?
Or you're browsing like some interesting clothes online,
you impulse buy whichever looks most interesting.
FRED SAUER: I think I agree.
We used to do those marathons, like weekend was shopping.
Or I'm from Holland.
My town was Thursday evenings were shop.
JOANNA SMITH: Everybody would go, right?
FRED SAUER: The whole town would go.
JOANNA SMITH: We buy as we need now.
We don't save it up in a list anymore.
And I think that if developers aren't building that
into their app, if they're not creating shopping moments,
they're really missing out on a golden opportunity to monetize.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Facilitating shopping,
like I think one of things that I do
is I don't keep a list of books that I'm
going to read any more.
I just buy them digitally right away, right?
And then I have a stack of virtual books.
If I know I'm going to read the book,
I might as well get it now, and then it's
waiting for me when I have the time.
FRED SAUER: So if I recommend a robot butler book to you,
you'd buy it right now.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: What is it with the robot butler?
Yes.
JOANNA SMITH: Do you have a robot butler?
FRED SAUER: No, I said I want one.
DAVID EAST: We're working on it, all right?
FRED SAUER: OK.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: OK, let's go to our last clip of the show,
and that's all about patent trolls.
They're lurking out there just waiting
to tear down your business.
And our Senior Policy Correspondent Derek Slater
wants to make sure you know how to protect yourself
from these strange beasts.
But first, we asked some of Google's Student Ambassadors
to give their best guess at what patent trolls are.
Have a look.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-I think a patent troll is probably
someone who just comes up with just random things
and just patents them.
-And so basically they're using that patent
to try and litigate, extracts some fees, settle out of court,
and I think they impede progress a lot.
-It prevents you from doing it better
because of that little nasty patent they have.
[END PLAYBACK]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That was really good.
DEREK SLATER: It was pretty good.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: But I know you can tie it together
for us-- put a bow on this.
What is a patent troll?
DEREK SLATER: Yes, so they were pretty close.
Patents are supposed to encourage innovation.
What patent trolls do is they don't invent anything.
They come up with some broad idea
that they get a patent for, and then they
go around threatening to sue people.
Let me tell you a little story to make that clearer.
This guy David Bloom was working at a Fortune 500 company,
leaves to become an app developer,
to start a company called Ordrx, where restaurants
can share their menus, make it easy to be
ordered from any app.
Raises millions of dollars in VC funding, has 20 employees,
is going along great.
And then this patent troll comes along who says,
I am the inventor.
I own a patent on sharing menus, and he sues David Bloom.
David Bloom tries to fight it, but he loses
clients, who get scared off.
He loses investors who get scared off.
And earlier this year had to go out of business.
That's a story unfortunately of too many app developers
and small businesses.
It can cost like $1 million at least to defend yourself,
and it's happened to people who create podcasts, like Marc
Maron and Adam Carolla.
It's happened to people who do online test software.
It's happened to people just running Wi-Fi routers.
Last year there were nearly 3,000 patent troll lawsuits.
That's up 500% over the last decade.
This is a growing problem.
There are more people like David Bloom every year.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: This is crazy.
They're able to get away with this time and time again.
Obviously, there's a growing industry of patent trolls.
What can we do to fix this?
DEREK SLATER: So we need a better system in place
for having quality patents to be issued.
There needs to be deterrence built in the system
so that there's some penalty if you go and file
one of these frivolous lawsuits using one of these bad patents.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: OK, what else?
DEREK SLATER: The main thing that people can do
is they can go and tell Congress to fix it.
That's really where the fix needs to happen.
Fortunately, in the House and the Senate
there are two bills right now, the Innovation Act
and the Patent Act.
If you go to fixpatents.org, you can go and tell
your Congress person, your senator to go and pass those,
and hopefully that will happen soon.
Those bills, among other things, would make it
so that if a patent troll files a lawsuit and they lose,
they have to pay the other side's attorneys fees.
That would be a good amount of deterrence
from just going after and threatening random people.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: All right-- 500%?
DEREK SLATER: 500%, and over the last 20 years,
that's about a half trillion dollars of damage
to the US economy.
Last five years, about $8 billion in lost VC
funding due to patent trolls.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: All right so go to this website.
DEREK SLATER: Fixpatents.org.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Thanks for coming on the show, Derek.
DEREK SLATER: Pleasure.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And that's been our show.
To say goodbye to the panel, I'd like to ask them a question.
What absurd patents are you going to invent-- or patent,
I suppose-- in 2016?
DAVID EAST: So I really want to make an API that tells you
when you're hungry because like I drink
an ungodly amount of caffeine every day,
so I don't always actually know when I'm truly hungry.
So I'd like to be able to build an app that
detects when I'm hungry, then orders me food, and then
just when it arrives, I'm like, oh, my gosh, I am hungry.
Thank you, robot butler app.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Actually sounds really useful for coding days.
FRED SAUER: I would use those APIs.
JOANNA SMITH: Should file that before we release this video.
DAVID EAST: That's a good idea.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: OK, Joanna?
JOANNA SMITH: I'm going to patent
the notion of fingernails that grow in length over time
and need to be reduced.
I'm going to make money every you guys trim your nails.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Fred?
FRED SAUER: I want to patent pockets with holes.
Two reasons-- so when you go to the beach,
you don't get sand caught in your pockets.
And then when you put your clothes in the laundry,
you don't accidentally leave stuff in there
that goes through the laundry.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Pockets where nothing gets stuck in them.
FRED SAUER: Yep.
JOANNA SMITH: But what about the holding purpose of a pocket?
FRED SAUER: Oh, no, that's irrelevant.
JOANNA SMITH: OK.
DAVID EAST: I'm going to owe you a lot of money.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Why would you owe him money?
DAVID EAST: Because I've got a lot holes in my pockets.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: OK, so please tell us
about your absurd patent ideas down in the comments,
or really any other ideas you have about the show
or what we've talked about, and we'll
be sure to respond to you.
Thanks for joining us this week, and I'll see you next time.
I'm Timothy Jordan, and this has been the "Developer Show."