 Hey guys doing. I'm excited to be on the evergreen stage because most of the conversations I've seen today that I actually wanted to Actually watch where yeah, we're here. Yeah Thanks for joining us I hear this isn't your first trip to slash or Finland. No, I think it's my 6th or 7th and I was born and raised in Finland So it's always great great to be back here and see the crazy bust that's happening and so forth So it's a really really a pleasure to see everything Sixth time at slush. I think so. Yeah, I haven't been count years ago. Yeah A bit smaller. I think this is kind of a getting crazier and crazier every year, but You know, it's enjoyable and you know, you see a lot of new startups a lot of friends and stuff like that So, you know, it's kind of one of the highlights of the year. Yeah for me. Yeah, yeah What about you? How many times is my first? There should be more smoke machines. I think and like Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Facebook and your background? Sure. So Born and raised in Finland. I'm a startup guy done. I think 60 17 startups Sold one one company to Facebook Decided to stay at Facebook initially I was running our our kind of a growth partnerships and operated partnerships around the world so anything from AT&T to, you know, small islands in the Pacific and Kind of a driving our internet inclusion program So we did a couple of keynotes here a few years ago to talk about our free basics and Internet of dork initiatives and But the last year and a half I've been really kind of leading our engineering and technology across partnerships So so a broad organization that helps, you know partners build their products on top of our products So it's a great great great role We get to work with all kinds of a cool cool companies from Apple and Uber to two guys in a garage type of Scale so you know see all the exciting new innovations Why would you describe? You know the spark platform is being different than a lot of your competitors that are that are out here like Google and Apple sure. Yeah, so if we dive straight to the augmented reality So so I mean a our kit and a our core They are like very device focused high-performance platforms Our approach is a little different So we are building tools that are easy to use easy to scale that are kind of across platform platforms So that's kind of the first different differentiation to the to the kind of the native platforms Then secondly if you look at the kind of the app economy So so in a recent months about 49 percent of the users downloaded zero apps and another 49 percent Downloaded maybe one or two apps. So you have practically two percent that are the kind of at the download ecosystem. So if you use Native AR platforms, you're creating an app and and you have a little bit limited market But you know a bigger app in a way and if you use our tools You can you can create a our experiences on our host applications from messenger to Facebook to Instagram and and kind of use our distribution to 2.6 billion users to to push those experiences out to the market and The AR experience can take different forms. It can be an ad form factor or a game and so forth So in a way, it's a different approach, but we think that you can reach to a certain scale much faster than Using a native app. So that's our kind of strategy there. Hmm. Is there you know as you look at How it's being you know used by developers, are there any unique you get use cases that you've come across or So I think if we look at use cases, we believe that you know AR will be a kind of the future Computing platform. So we think that there will be like a huge universe or spectrum of different use cases and It's early days for augmented reality. So today we see filters and Different types of ad units being created But we see a great traction. So in the last Maybe three months. We've seen 72,000 developers looking at our video streams how to create spark Applications and and you know, we had 20 people in junction. Just I think a week or two ago here so there's a tremendous kind of an adoption happening to these platforms, but we don't have like a Million AR experiences out there on the market. And then if we look at kind of For industry, I think the beauty and makeup is one of these Areas where we see a lot of traction happening at scale with with the AR. So Loreal for instance has ad units running in different countries around the world on Facebook where you can Look at the model and choose a certain shade for the makeup and then you can you know Turn the experience around and look at how that makeup looks on you So you can personalize that that makeup and kind of drives repeat purchase and very personalized kind of a shopping experience When it become full circle though and when it be when it turns from AR being in an app or something like that and it becoming something that you encounter in the real world I know that there was the was it the parametric codes the QR codes that Facebook came out for with messenger Yep, when do we get to the point where you're standing in the make-up aisle in a drugstore and you're scanning the codes and Testing it you just very it'll take a while I think kind of a this there's two types of kind of experiences a lot of people when you talk about AR Everybody thinks about glasses like this that okay Everybody's gonna wear something and so forth. We are getting there and we are investing a lot to develop these type of devices But you know today we have a 1.5 billion devices that are capable of creating and running these AR experiences So there's kind of an opportunity. There's technically addressable user space But then you know, you need to keep your phone like this and so forth. So you have kind of different types of Scenarios where you these use cases happen and if we think about the high-end use case It's it's probably going to be virtual reality something that you wear an expensive head-mounted display and the the whole whole headset and then go into a session and That might be socially social interactions in the session But you know, it's a session and then you step out of it and we think that Kind of the AR or the dominant AR use cases will be a lightweight device that you Keep always on every day. So so you just walk around and do what you do and you get kind of a pushed information So the information retrievable comes kind of changes from pool to to push So the device starts to push you information without doing anything and there We need to be obviously a bit careful how that we don't overload the user or anything like that But yeah, do you have a favorite camera in fact? Not really It changes from time to time my kids are you know love football mainly mainly Osaka in the US So so different different types of teams, but yeah, I mean when we work with you know, millions of different developers We kind of kind of see all the kind of new cool stuff happening So I tend to change things quite often. So I know that portal the Facebook just recently released portal and it's You know this video chat device and it seems to be the distinction between Like a smart display like an echo show from Amazon or a home hub. Yeah, Google is Well that you can have in-call experiences in part powered by augmented reality Where do you see that evolving? Where's where's that going? Yeah, it's a good question So so Facebook for instance is not well known for our hardware efforts, right? But we have Oculus. We build planes. We have satellites and lasers and all kinds of very broad hardware skills, but We have a team called building eight or be eight and that team basically creates disruptive Social hardware devices or hardware-based devices and portal is the first device out of the building eight and I think kind of the theme there is that it creates a Social experience and in the case of portal it's uses AI in a in a Intelligent way that you know it zooms and focuses on the person you can move around The room and it kind of follows you and and it creates this kind of a feeling of presence So, you know, we could have a portal session right now and we would have a similar feeling that we would be sitting across the table and That's kind of bringing the world closer together in that sense And then when we talk about a are in the in the context of portal There's a kind of a kind of a unique couple of use cases. One is that If you let's say a grandmother wants to read a bedtime story for the grandchildren You can create a teleprompter You can get the story for the grandma and then you get the AR effects and animations for the kids So so you can enrich the real world with With the AR effects and that's how kind of a AR works in a way, so yeah story time feature you're talking about yeah Yeah, I know that this is in the conversations that I had with the portal team There was talk about potentially adding things for like adults to do stuff because story time is it is kind of fun Yeah, but what sort of things could be developed for adults to do together in video calls yeah, I think it's like Anything that you can do together in a group. We are not going to create those experiences You know over long term, so we have seeding few and testing stuff, but Portal will be a platform like any other we have Facebook is a platform company and partnerships company. So we are Opening up a portal over time and you know developers can create their own experiences So if you have a great idea in mind, we can find a developer and get that done Yeah Do you think there's any major untackled use cases for AR thus far I know that you know It's not really what Facebook does and it to be interesting. Well, let me stop there Is there any like what do you think about the idea of like building like a like a HoloLens sort of approach for like Is that something that Facebook would ever be interested in doing or yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely So so we are building a kind of a class like device It's not gonna be in stores any anytime soon. So, you know, maybe something like five to seven years But we are investing in significant resources and and money To to create that type of a device that you know, you can wear all day every day and I Think when we have those devices at scale, then we'll start to see a lot of different use cases that are maybe not even Obvious today. So so there's a kind of a few categories, you know, you know Kind of a you get information or you can kind of a get contextual information and why Facebook is doing this in a in the first place is We have a social context. We have the location context and so forth So we can kind of get the most relevant information to the user But social aspect will always be there and that's where we are focusing. So, yeah Are there any learnings or findings that you think that Facebook has picked up along the way and Engaging with the developer ecosystem and trying to build something around your various products with spark. Yeah, I think spark is is It's kind of a early days for spark, but I think that's going well. There's there's a great interest we see universities that want to Teach coding skills and they are kind of a pirating to spark because it's user-friendly and you know You can very quickly create gaming type of experiences. So that that's a kind of a positive surprise to me I think if you take a longer perspective what we learn to kind of work with developers We have this famous move fast and break things it doesn't work very well with developers if you keep changing your kind of APIs and stuff like that So I think we try to be a better actor in the ecosystem and that's something that we've learned over the years that You know, we'll try to keep things more stable and kind of at least into our partners for feedback and take a little bit more mindful approach on our platforms and API's and But is there any space that you see to like get beyond the the lipstick basically the ads and the camera effects Like an enterprise play for example or something like that. Yeah, I think enterprises will will adopt it Today, there's kind of a remote Management you get stuff like that, but that's not kind of a running on a spark platform at scale So so we have a sporadic use cases here and there But over time. Yeah, we'll see, you know enterprises adopting that In VR we see a huge adoption by different companies that have very niche use cases and they use VR to that I think AR will be a bit broader, but that's that's going to happen as well And are you following this broader sort of AR developer ecosystem and the sort of things that are being produced? Yeah, so so we obviously have a partnership team focusing on VR and AR and And we have like people around the world working in different ecosystems and kind of being present there Personally, I'm a little bit distant from from that. We we work with kind of lighthouse partners directly So so a large developers that are building a massive IP around it with our technology So then my team engages directly and then we try to scale those learnings to the broader ecosystem. So so yes We work a lot with with the partners, but kind of not directly with the individual developers for instance here in Helsinki So so that's kind of a it's great to see these these developers here But like we haven't been actively working with many of them some yes, but not not not like at that scale. Yeah And I know that Finland has a lot of Well a few notable companies in the space What do you think Finland is well positioned to have any sort of Presence and in augmented reality. Yeah, absolutely. I mean if you look around you see a fantastic kind of a legacy from the kind of the demo days of assembly and all the gaming companies So a lot of those kind of a skill sets are translatable to to VR and AR productions So so yes, so there's a great kind of a talent pool. There's a great culture entrepreneurship is growing in Finland and So we see a lot of a lot of great companies. I think last year we had a AR VR team with me the product people were here we met like 50 companies during slush in two days and There's not too many places in the world where you can just like sit on a sofa and 50 Developers kind of a show amazing things like this and that so so yes There's there's definitely a lot of things happening in the Nordics and especially here in Finland So partly due to the slush But also the kind of the broader ecosystem in the country are there any other parts of the world Do you think are doing a particularly a good job and producing augmented reality companies? So I think LA seems to be a hub. So there's there's a lot of kind of things happening around Hollywood and If we look at the kind of a demand for our our tools Asia is picking up extremely quickly So we have a lot of a lot of AR VR developers in in Japan Korea in Southeast Asia So that's kind of a growing extremely quickly and I think the Nordics and LA those three come to mind Sort of on that on the long lines of what I was talking about with In-call experiences for portal the ambition of point where these things are able to You know I want to buy a couch Put the couch, you know the augmented reality in my room put the art on the wall Sort of demo things within your home that before you buy them. Yeah, absolutely I think IKEA is doing that already. So you can couple kind of a pick yourself and and try it out And you know, you may save a trip to the shop or or two So so that's happening and today's smartphones are extremely capable of measuring things so so You know, that's one use case another one that comes to mind. We have a Messenger bot with KLM You can measure your back. Is it is it sizable or is? You know small enough that you can put it in the cabin or do you need to check it in so stuff like that It's not maybe the billion dollar business, but you know, it gives a certain convenience. Well, that's practical. Yeah, yeah, yeah And then, you know, find the games and in AR I know that there was one messenger's got one where you can like play a space invaders with your nose Or that isn't a same as practical But there is a lot of sort of games that you tend to bring to the space. Yeah, I mean, I think Gaming typically is the the kind of the segment that adopts the early early technologies the fastest So, you know, so yeah, definitely and messenger is a great platform for distributing games and stuff like that I met a couple of companies that are building a kind of a VR experience where you where you can create a world with different physics And then push that to to kind of a messenger for instance and and let people play on You know using different host platforms. So very interesting technologies and we'll we'll kind of look into those. Yeah cool All right. All right Thanks for sharing your insights. Okay. Thanks. All right