 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here in San Francisco, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference, hashtag SDC 2017. I'm John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media Coast theCUBE. My next guest is Ken Young, tech reporter here inside theCUBE. I've known Ken for almost 10 years now, plus been in the Silicon Valley beat scene, covering technology, communities, and all the cutting edge tech, but also some of the old established companies. Great to see you. Likewise, thanks for having me. So, you tech reporter, let's just have a little reporter session here, because reporting here at Samsung, to me, it's my first Developer Conference for Samsung. I stopped going on the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference when it became too much of a circus around close to just a couple of years before Steve Jobs died. Now it's a whole scene. We'll have to talk to Steve Dowling and get down there, but here, my first one, my report's an awakening. Okay, I get the TV thing, but I mean, I'm like IOT, that's my world. I want to see more IOT, so it's good to see Samsung coming into the cloud and owning that, so that's exciting for me. What do you see as a report that you could file? You know, so that's funny, because I actually did write a post this morning after watching the keynote yesterday, while I was at VentureBeat a few months ago, I reported on Bixby's launch when it came out with the Galaxy S8. And when I heard about what that was, it was kind of interesting. That was one of the biggest selling points for me to switch over from my iPhone. And when I tried it out, it was interesting. I was kind of wondering how it would stand up against Google Assistant, because both of them are installed on the same device. But now, as you see with Bixby 2.0 and now with the smart things, you start to see Samsung's vision, because right now on a mobile, it's just very piecemeal. But now when you tackle it on with the TVs, with the fridges and the monitors, smart with the ovens and everything like that, it becomes your entire home. It becomes your Jarvis. You don't actually have to spend 150 bucks or 200 bucks on a Alexa-enabled device or Google Home that most people may not be totally familiar with. But if you have a TV, you're familiar with it. Also, you mentioned Jarvis, that's reference to the old sitcom. But, and when Mark Zuckerberg tried his Jarvis project, which was, you know, wire his home from scratch. Although, science project, you talk about real utility. I mean, so we're getting down to the consumerization. So let's take that to the next level. If you look at the trends in Silicon Valley and certainly in the tech industry, blockchain and ICOs are really hot, initial coin offerings. That's based on utility, right? So utility-based ICOs, communities using gamification, game apps, utility, Samsung, smart things, using their intelligence not to try to be the next Amazon, e-commerce, cloud company. They're just trying to be the better Samsung. Which they've had some problems in the past. And we've heard from analysts here, Patrick Moorehead, who was on, pointed out, illustrated the point. They were stove-piped company. And with Dixby 2.0, they're like breaking down the silos. We had the execs on here saying, that's their goal. Exactly. Yeah, this is the, everything has been siloed. You look at a lot of tech companies now and you don't get to see their grand vision. Everyone has this product roadmap when they start these companies and when they expand, then you start to see everything come together. Like for example, whether it's Square, whether it's Apple, whether it's Google or Facebook, right? And Samsung, a storied history, right? They've been around for ages with a lot of great technology. And they've got their hands in different parts. But from a consumer standpoint, likelihood of you having a Samsung device in your home is probably pretty good. And so why not just expand that, leverage that technology? Right now, tech is all about AI. You start to see a lot of the AI serves get acquired and or heavily funded and heavily invested. And it's all about- Really, theCUBE is an AI. We're AI machine right here. Right here is the bot that wants to report. People are AI washing. But I mean, AI, what the hell is AI? AI is machine learning. It's all about data. Using software and data. Data collection, data collection. Nailed it, nailed it. And personalization. And you look at, I interviewed a Samsung executive at CES last year, this January. And he was telling me about the three parts. It has to be personal, it has to be contextual, it has to be conversational in terms of AI. And what you saw yesterday, during the keynote and whatever they've been executives and the company's been repeatedly saying is that's what Bixby is. And you could kind of say that's similar to what Google has with Google Assistant. You can see that with Alexa, but it's not, it's still very, those technologies are very silent. All those three things again, personal? Personal, contextual, and conversational. That is awesome. In fact, that connects what Amy Jo Kim was talking about, the CEO of Shufflebrain. She took it from a different angle. She's building these game apps, but she's becoming more of a product development because it's not just build a game like a Zynga game or something on the mobile phone. She's bringing gaming systems. Her thesis was that people are now part of the game. Those are my words, but she's actually saying the game system includes data from your friends. The game might suck, but my friends are still there. So when it's still, there's still some social equity in there. You're bringing it over to the contextual personal. This is the new magic for app developers. Is this leading to AR? I mean, this, I mean, we're talking about series. This is, these are the new convergence of the new formulas for successful app development. I mean, we're talking about earlier like what is AI? And I mentioned, you know, it's all about data. And it's absolutely true. Like your home is collecting so much data about you that it's going to offer that personal response. So you're talking about what is, you know, is this going to lead to AR? Absolutely. So whatever data it has about your home, you might bring your phone out to, as you go shopping or whatnot, you might be out sightseeing and it might, and have your camera out and it may bring back some memories, right? Or you might display a photo from your photo album or something. So there's a lot of interesting times that could come into it. And obviously Samsung's camera on their phones are one of the top ones on the market. So there's potential for AR. So I got to ask you, Ken. So looking at the bigger picture now, let's look outside of Samsung. We can look at some tell signs here. Google on stage. Clearly not grandstanding, but doing their thing. Android, you know, AR core. Starting to see that Google DNA. Now they got TensorFlow and a lot of goodness happening in the cloud with Sam Ramje over there. Kicking ass at Google, doing a great job. Okay, they're in the big three. Some people call it the big seven. I call it the big three. It's Amazon, Microsoft, Google. Everyone else is fighting for four or five, six, depending on who you want to talk to. But those are the three I call native clouds. One is they're going to be wholesaling resource. Amazon is not Google. Amazon has no Android. They dropped their phones. Microsoft, Joe Belfure said, hey, I'm done with phones, they tapped out. So essentially Microsoft taps out the device. They stick up the Xbox. Amazon tapping out of phones. They got commerce, they got web service, they got entertainment. This is going to be interesting. What's your take? Well, your interesting, an understatement there. I mean, you look at what the, Amazon's right now is basically running the show and as it comes to virtual assistance or voice powered assistance. Alexa, Amazon launches a bunch of Alexa products recently. And then soon after, I believe it was last month, Google launches a whole bunch of Google home devices as well. But it's interesting, both of those companies are targeting, have a different approach to what Samsung is, right? Remember, Samsung's with Bixby 2.0 is all about consolidating the home, right? And in my post, I coined it, it was basically, it was their fight to unite the internet of things kind of thing. So, but when it comes to Alexa with Amazon and Google, they're targeting not only the smaller integrations with maybe like August or smart logs or maybe thermostats and whatnot, but they're also going after retailers and businesses, right? So, how many skills can you have on Alexa? How many, what are they called? Actions can you have on Google Home? I mean, they're going after, you're going to see businesses, they're going after businesses. Well, this is the edge of the network. So, the reason why, again, coming back full circle, I was very critical on day one yesterday. I was kind of like, data, IOT, that's our wheelhouse on the queue. Not a lot of messaging around that because I don't think Samsung's ready yet and nor should they be given their evolution. But in Amazon's world. I think the way they played it yesterday was pretty good. A little humble, like they didn't set that expectation, like, oh my God, this is going to, like, we, like. They didn't dismiss it, but they were basically not highlighting it, right? They did enough, they did enough to entice you to tease it. But like, look, they have a long way to go to kind of unite it. I mean, look, SmartThings has been around for a while. So, they've been kind of building it behind the scenes. Now this is like, hey, now we're going to slap on AI. It's similar to. What do you hear from developers? I've been hearing some chirping here about the APIs, got to be standardized and not sure. Oh, absolutely. I think a lot of developers will probably want to see, like, hey, if I'm going to build, if I want to leverage AI and kind of have it consolidate, I want to be able to have it, to leverage, maximize my input, maximize my reach. Like, I don't want to have to build one action here, one skill here, whatever Samsung's going to call it for Bixby, you know? I want to make it that one thing. But Samsung's whole monetization, that's going to be interesting in terms of your marketplace. How does that play out? Amazon has recently started to monetize or start to incentivize, as it were, developers. And Google will probably likely, if they're not already doing that, will has plenty of experience in doing that with Android and now, and they can do that with Google. So I got to ask you about Facebook. Facebook has been rumored to have a phone coming, but I mean, Facebook's- They tried that once. They're licking their wounds right now. The love on Facebook is not high. I mean, fake news, platform inconsistencies. You know, move fast, break stuff. Zuck is hurting, it's hurting Zuck. I know, and certainly the Russian stuff, I mean, I think first of all, it's really not Facebook's fault. They never claimed to be some original content machine. They just got taken advantage of through bad arbitrage points. But there's no lost love there. People are not happy with Facebook right now, so it'd be hard for them to introduce a phone. Well, you're right. There are rumors that they were going to introduce a phone again after we all remember Facebook Home, which was, you know, we won't talk about that anymore. R.I.P. You know? But I think there's talk about them doing a speaker, like of some sort of a video thing. I think they're calling, I believe it's called Project Aloha. I believe Business Insider and TechCrunch also have reported on that extensively. So that is going to compete with what Amazon's going. So everyone is going after Amazon, right? So I think don't discount Samsung on this part. I think they're going to be, you know, I don't want to comment dark horse, but they, you know, people are kind of ignoring them right now. Well, if Samsung actually aligned with Amazon, that would be very interesting because they'd have their foot in both camps, Google and Amazon, and just play Switzerland and win on both sides. Samsung, I think that might be a viable strategy. I think Samsung has, yeah. And Redshift, Kinesis, if customers want to do that, Google complied some cloud for them, don't know how they feel about that. Yeah, I mean, Samsung will definitely be, I think has the appeal with their story history. They can go after the bigger retailers, the bigger manufacturers to leverage them because there's some stability as opposed to why I'm not going to give access to my data to Amazon. You look at Amazon now, as Amazon's now the, one of the, probably the de facto leader in that space, like you see people teaming up with Google to compete against them. You know, there's an anti-Amazon-E type of, I mean, I would say there's a jealousy factor. True, true. But a lot of the fud going out there, I saw Matt Assay's article on Info World and it was over the top, basically saying that Amazon's not giving back an open source. I challenged Andy Jassy two years ago on that and Matt's behind the times. Matt, you got to get with the program. You're a little bit hardcore pushed here, but I think he's echoing the fear of the community. Amazon's definitely doing open source to be involved, but the same thing goes for Alibaba. Gaiasty, founder of Alibaba Cloud last week in China. You guys are taking from open source, are you giving back? And it was off the record comment and he was like, you know, they want to give back, right? So there's all kinds of political and or incumbent positions on open source. That to me is going to be the game changer. Linux Foundation, Apache that's growing, exponential growth in open source over the next five to 10 years. Just in terms of lines of code shipped. Linux Foundation's showing those numbers and 10% of that code is going to be new. 90% of the code is going to be reused software. Absolutely. I mean, you're going to need to have a lot of open source in order for this ecosystem to really flourish. I mean, to build it on your own and do it proprietary. I mean, it basically locks it down. And didn't Sony have that deal with that? Like when they were doing their own memory cars for cameras and stuff. And, you know, now they've, now their cameras are using micro or using SD cards now. I mean, so you're starting to see, I think a lot of companies will need to be supportive of open source and in tech, you start to see people boasting that, you know, we are doing this in open source or like Facebook is constantly announces, hey, we are releasing this into open source. LinkedIn will do that. And any company that you talk to will. Except Apple. Apple does some open source. Apple does some open source in a ton though, but they're a closed system. And they're cool about it. They're up front about it. Okay, final question. Bottom line, Samsung developer conference 2017. What should people know that didn't make it or watching this? What should they know about what they missed and what Samsung's doing? What they need to do better? You know, I think what really took the two-day conference is basically Bixby. You look at all the sessions that it's all about Bixby. SmartThings, like sure, they consolidated everything into the SmartThings cloud. Great. But you know, SmartThings has been around for a while and I'm interested to see how well they've been doing. I wish they released a little bit more numbers on those. But Bixby, it was kind of interesting. 10 million users on them after three months launching in the US, which is a pretty good number. But they still have a bit of ways to go. And they're constantly making improvements, which is a very good thing as well. Ken Young, afraid of the cube, tech reporter formerly with Venture Beat now onto his next thing. What are you going to do? You know, take some time off. I'm going to continue writing about what I see and who knows where that takes me. Yeah, it's good to get decompressed, log off for a week or so. I went to China and I was kind of off Facebook for a week. It felt great. It's like no more political posts. Like one more Colin Kaepernick kneeling down, National Anthem or anti-Trump post. I was going to, yeah, it's just disaster. And then the whole me too thing hit. Oh my God, there's just so much hate. A lot of good things happening though in the world and good to see you're writing out there. It's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, live in San Francisco, Samsung Developer Conference, exclusive CUBE coverage. Live here, we'll be right back with more. Day two coverage of two days, we'll be right back.