 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. Okay, we're back here live in San Francisco at Musconi West for exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and the host of theCUBE here. Our next guest is Mary Mann, Vice President of Global Business Development at SE Works, Inc., former entrepreneur gamer, still entrepreneurial in her new world, but has seen the evolution of gaming. Here to talk about augmented reality, virtual reality, and kind of trajectory of life in the digital era. Welcome to theCUBE. Okay, thank you. So we were just talking before we came on about the evolution of your career. You had a startup, you sold it, it was a game, and you've been gaming since the late 90s and looking forward. What is the evolution of gaming and how it relates to augmented reality? Because there's a debate that goes on in the industry. Oh, VR is the next big thing, but yet it failed. Tim Cook recently came out and said, hey, you know, don't get your hopes up. There's still more head room to do. Not necessarily a bad thing, because now augmented reality is winning. You're seeing it in industrial IoT, you're seeing augmented reality. So what's your thoughts about how people should think about the evolution of this new wave of innovation? I think that with any new technology that's really life changing for society as a whole, nothing ever gets done on the first iteration or the first phase. Things will never really take off on the first round, especially when you're going mass consumer, because people need time for learned behavior. People are creatures of habit. They like to stick with what's familiar. And in order for them to move from one leap to the next, you need baby steps. And those baby steps, unfortunately, will include pioneers in whatever field, whether it be AR or VR, that need to blaze the trail for their successors to come and start building on top of that as well. I read something really interesting this morning coming here, where if you have someone who's trying to dig a well and you need to dig 10 feet, the first person fails because they only dug the first foot. Second person, third person, subsequently, until the ninth person, that well is not dug, but that 10th person who successfully has the water filling the well, that 10th person could not have dug that final last foot if the first nine didn't go before him. And I consider that's really the phase that VR and AR are near as well. We needed that first iteration of VR in order to have the new generation of engineers, entrepreneurs, product people, mindset people to start thinking about how to shape the future of this ecosystem. And we needed that to have its course in order for AR to build on top of those learnings. And hopefully as we subsequently start to build on those as well, we don't view this as failures necessarily, but as necessary advancements in order to get to the ultimate goal of integrating more technology into our lives to make it a better life. And the relationship between the hardware platforms, whether it's console, PC, handset or headset, and software is interesting. And I want to talk about that with you, but first I want to tell your story. Tell about your entrepreneur story. You are at UC Berkeley, Cal, here in the University of California, Berkeley. My daughter's junior there, but great school, doing a lot of cutting-edge stuff there at Berkeley, and certainly not lack of protest either these days, but tell us the story. You dropped out and started a company. Tell us the story. So I was attending Berkeley and I'm very grateful that I was able to go to Cal, particularly because I grew up in Southern California, where around the time that I grew up, there really wasn't a lot of startups or entrepreneurial minded people. And I came up here and became really immersed in tech and that was my first foray into it. And during college, I was working at a gaming company to help support myself through school and just really fell in love with it and decided that was truly what I wanted to do. My parents supported my decision and so with their help and approval, I started building games and I've been building games since, again, the mid to late 90s until now. Ran a couple of companies, founded a few of them, and the latest one that I founded was a few years ago called Second Wave Games. We had sold it to a larger company called World Golf Tour. And here I am now building tools for game developers, actually. And what an evolution. We go back, I mean, the Nokia phones, you know, and then the iPhone hit the scene, you got smart phones. So everything in between has been a balance of being creative with software and art, if you will, gaming is art. What has changed? I mean, honestly, things fail because it's a content business, content is games. So there's always that symbionic relationship between hardware and software. Who pushes who? Is it the yin and the yang or is it the good and the bad? What's going on between the relationship these days because we certainly see it on the enterprise side. Software at the edge is driving infrastructure. What's the relationship from the content, from the artistry standpoint and the handset? No, from our point, content makers are not very interested in any platform or hardware that doesn't have the distribution. But the hardware manufacturers need the content in order to push the distribution of hardware. So it becomes a chicken and the egg problem. And it really depends on the approach that people will take. The content distributors do not own the platform, they don't own the distribution of the actual devices that will run things. So it really falls on the hardware manufacturers to decide what path they will go down. We will see more aggressive things like Microsoft when they first launched the Xbox, for example, they took a heavy loss on every unit that they sold, but they were focused primarily on distribution. And then they hit on this magic, very, very like a really, really runaway hit called Halo. You like Halo, you have to play on Xbox. It's not available on the other consoles. And call a duty right after it. Call a duty right after it. The list is endless. And so that becomes a really excellent example of how content drives adaptation of hardware because if you are huge fans of this title, you have to go to this hardware and there's no other argument about it. It's interesting the evolution of the internet early adopters, you saw it's kind of like the adult industry, you know, who was in the leading indicator of kind of the trends in online advertising. That's a big joke in the industry. Now, you know, you're seeing the leading indicators in terms of cutting-edge pioneer blade trailers is gaming, virtual communities, virtual currencies. The gaming culture, you can almost use as a precursor to what you're seeing on the crypto side with blockchain. You can see on the augmented reality that's a gamification of life where now the content is the real world. So how are that? That's a super exciting for someone who's been in the gaming area and software developers got to be sitting there looking there, looking at their chops saying, hey, I want to get in on this. So, your thoughts? At my current company, SE Works, when we started developing our solution, we actually tested it first and foremost with gaming, with gaming apps above everything else. And people were a little puzzled thinking, why would you test gaming above finance or healthcare? And our answer is because gaming is the most complex thing anyone can possibly make. It contains pretty much every single piece of technology that you can ever know. There are communications layers. There have the most sophisticated graphics layers. They have intense AI layers. They have intense algorithms. Anything calculated. And it is in itself an inherit small economical ecosystem as well. So it is a very complex mini world that you're building inside of the constraints of one application, which then has to be very sophisticated in technology in order to run on our current set of hardware and devices. So it's the most challenging thing that we could build for and that's why we chose it. And I see the same thing happening. Gaming is life and life is games. Outside of solving your very basic human needs of shelter, food, and sleep, clothing, what's the immediate next thing that you want to do? People want to be entertained in some format or another and games are really just almost like a primal urge and an instant. Yeah, and you see in the intersection of e-commerce, entertainment, and web services or cloud, which you can bundle in IoT, all intersecting. And that's really what the real world is. I mean, analog digital coming together is the consumerization of physical and digital, which Samsung's putting out there. This is the perfect beginning wave coming. You agree? I think so. As I was sitting through the keynote today and I'm just reflecting on the future where I can watch TV and there's this beautiful scene of a local in Northern California, then I say, I want to go and I jump in my car and the destination is magically loaded on my GPS and my very smart car and it just takes me there and I don't have to think about it and on the way they've already made reservations. It seems like a very seamless integration of everything if it's ideally done. And part of me, I think the security paranoia in me is also a little afraid that too much information is going to be not necessarily a good thing in a lot of senses because what we see and what I've seen in almost 20 years of tech is every time we rush to new technology, new platforms, new distribution, methodologies, people rush in and make the same mistakes over and over again. So I am a little afraid that with this era it's going to be exactly the same where we see explosion of growth, we see explosion of content, people coming in with a gold rush and then a few years later when things are established we're going to start to see the security leaks, the data leaks, the breaches. It's kind of like you don't know that smoking is bad for you until they realize people die of lung cancer. It's like data is the same thing, you don't know how much privacy you have given up. Well, I mean, look at the Equifax, it's going to be more of those. So I think, you know, permissionless, permission-based data security, huge issue. That's big. It is in particular because your average consumer is not very privacy sensitive. If I want to use something, if asking me for permissions is just a hurdle, that if I'm motivated enough to actually use a service or use an app, I'm just going to keep brushing aside without really thinking about it. And alarmingly, you know, the number of apps that we look at, the number of permissions that they ask is kind of scary. Mary, great to have you on theCUBE. Great conversation, great thought leadership. I'll give you the final word. What are you guys doing at SE Works? What are you up to after the event? What are some of the things you're working on? Get the plug in for your company. Yes, so what SE Works does is we do tools for developers to help you alleviate your security needs when you're developing for mobile apps or for IoT or for connected anything, actually. If you're building on Android or iOS, we have a solution for you. We're essentially like your armory, so we outfit you with an incredible shield that protects your application when it ships to the public against hacking and reverting. Where security is a service. Just think of us as your on-call hackers. Great, your white hat shield for the apps for mobile. Mobile development's hot, obviously. New user experiences and expectations are here. There's a big wave coming in. We're seeing machine learning. You're seeing with AI and certainly augmented reality and virtual reality. All powered by unlimited compute in the cloud. Mary Min from SE Works. Secure more live coverage here in San Francisco after this short break. Thank you.