Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Sapphire Now, headlines sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Consolink, the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. We're live? Okay, we're live, we're back here. Live at SAP Sapphire. I'm John Furrier, and we just look at the site of our guest, Sandeep Ravandi, who's the president co-founder of Innovaptive and Thorsten Lyduck, vice president of platform partners at SAP. Welcome to theCUBE. I got so excited, I missed the intro. So, one of the things that's going on is obviously the certification of apps, and it's kind of a nuanced story, but the partnering and the platforms that are out there are enabling ecosystems to grow very rapidly, and this is coming down to this notion of are you a platform or are you a tool? And certainly, developers will have platform-like features, but ultimately, if they're in a big enterprise ecosystem, they're just a feature or a tool. It's the classic line, oh, that's not a company, that's a feature. That used to be the story for venture-backed companies 10 years ago, but now you could really do well being a tool or a feature if you're on a platform. Sandeep, you do this. Yes. Share with the audience what's going on in the market, how are you guys succeeding, and what's your company doing? I mean, when we started off, like I mentioned earlier in our conversation, we come from management-consulting backgrounds, and we understand business processes and the gaps in business processes, and where mobile can dramatically transform how people connect with processes. We evaluated several platforms back in the day where we had an opportunity to look at different platforms, and we saw SAP mobile platform back in the day before HANA Cloud platform was available. As our doorway and segue, to be able to create application that can resolve those pain points in the business process areas where mobile is mission critical, and we built upon that, but then we quickly also realized that if these productized solutions cannot be personalized to meet specific business needs, then it's hard to capitalize and monetize on that. And what does your company do? Just share real quickly, what is your company doing? Absolutely, so our focus is really to enable instant digitization by connecting people, processes, and things, and the way we approach that is through a very large portfolio of mobile solutions that go across multiple lines of businesses, prepackaged, leveraging SAP mobile platform and the SAP HANA Cloud platform, and then we built a patent-pending technology which is called as the Rapid Application Configurator Engine that allows instant personalization, which ties back to the mission I spoke about. So you put a wrapper around a traditional app, SAP app, and provides some integration or modernization. So the applications are innovative as IP, but we are leveraging SAP's technologies and their SDKs to develop these applications. Okay, got it, okay. Yeah. Thors, so talk about the dynamic. Is this a new breed of partner, or is there a trend here where you're starting to see these new relationships? Share the trends. Yeah, so this is I think one of the amazing stories which we have to tell, right? When SAP really invested in the ecosystem on the platform side, and I think everybody agrees that without an ecosystem and successful ecosystem, nobody has been successful adopting the platforms, then we have been able to attract really a huge amount of net new companies working with SAP. So in fact, 60% of all the partners who are part of the CartNedge built program, how we call it, are basically net new SAP. They're born in the cloud, native mobile social, so they really add these great capabilities like innovative that, right, to the ecosystem and basically complement the core portfolio of SAP very well. So if you think about SAP's history, SAP has been a company that showed a very large integrated, comprehensive approach to thinking about applications. A lot of your competitors started down at hardware, middleware, database, and eventually built themselves up. Platforms tend to be more comprehensive large. Does the historical perspective of SAP comprehensive give you an advantage as we think about platforms versus some of the other companies that are trying to cobble things together from the piece parts a little bit more? Yeah, I absolutely believe this for the various reasons. So when you think about the opportunity any partner gets when he joins an SAP platform is actually instant access to 300,000 plus customers, right? But it's not just customers, it's also business content. So when you think about HANA Cloud Platform, it's the only platform in the market who has really business access to all the various backend systems of the customers, right? So think about business suite, ERP, all the different disciplines. When you think about line of business, HR, success factors, procurement, Ariba, Concord, you know, so you can't name it. So basically the different shade, I think, which we have from a value proposition is that we have very broad platform capabilities, but we have also the business content access and this is exactly what the other companies are lacking when you start something up from scratch, where you don't have this kind of customer environment which you can expose to the ecosystem. You have Sandbox, really. Yes. HANA Cloud is basically a money-making Sandbox for developers because SAP already does big business, pretty much everything runs on SAP. Right. So for a developer to jump into this environment allows them to do some integration. So if someone wants to build custom app, they can just jump right in. Absolutely. Is that the mean? Am I getting it right? Yeah, absolutely. So we have three key use cases. Either companies build new applications, that's what innovative is. You can integrate, this is the second one. You know, and then the third one is obviously that you extend the existing SAP solutions on the customer side and drive innovation in the cloud. So when you think about HANA Cloud platform, it's really a agility layer for the customers to drive innovation in the cloud and they can basically keep a stable environment on the backend side. So and the ecosystem is obviously enabling this kind of innovation, right? So for the customers who really want to get to the next level, they have access to a wealth portfolio of partner solutions which they can instantly deploy, where they can instantly consume value to get basically this innovation into the company. And this helps them to get basically executed, to execute on their digital transformation story. I want to build another 300,000 number though because that 300,000 number is companies. That's customers, yes. But it's companies that are customers. Companies, yes. So how many actual users are in your ecosystem right now? I mean, it's what, 1,000, 1,500, 2,000, 5,000 on average at your company? So we're talking hundreds of millions of people are under management, so to speak, within the SAP ecosystem, is that accurate? Yeah, so I mean obviously HANA Cloud platform is actually any customer of SAP should consider to have it, right? And we are pushing this as a strategic platform with all the sales cycles. So what it means is actually, when you buy, when customer buys, success factors, he needs to think about, how do I add the other solution components? How do I keep basic innovation going? HANA Cloud platform is enabling that, right? When you think about IoT scenarios, when you think about use experience, mobile, independently, if you are on the business suite, if you are the next generation business, S4 business suite, it doesn't matter. You need an extension capability to be agile and to extend. So we have driven HANA Cloud platform via all the sales channels, via all the portfolios which we have in SAP to our customers, right? So basically our goal is to drive HANA Cloud platform adoption, basically very broad and ideally, every customer should have it. That's the goal. I mean a great example is, we, one of our top selling applications is in the enterprise asset management space, right? Where we are offering a mobile enterprise asset management solution for preventive maintenance and calibration maintenance on the cloud, leveraging HCP, where we can deliver it both as a software as a service or we partner up with SAP to deliver that as a platform as a service and the software running on top. The great example of the value that we see as independent developers in the platform is to take this above and beyond because our customers are asking us, great you gave me preventive maintenance, I'd like to move to predictive maintenance models. The fact that we're already on the HANA Cloud platform, I have the ability as an independent developer now to leverage the HANA databases to drive predictive analytics and I can also bring the internet of things services to drive sensor-based connectivity that can further monetize and give me upsell opportunities as a business. That's extensibility, so you provide the head room, basically. So I've got to ask the question, I'm sorry, Peter, you got that. No, no, I was going to, well, very quickly. So one of the things that SAP did right early on was start to weave together its partners into something that looked like a network. So partners, especially application providers and service providers, could work inside the SAP ecosystem to add new value. Are you actually starting to extend that now and make it possible or easier for partners to use each other's tools, to use each other's APIs so that you are able to publish out and other partners are able to apply your stuff within the SAP ecosystem to drive new levels of value. Is that becoming a feature of how you're presenting the ecosystem? Yes, it is. I mean, even though that, you know, it's obviously kind of roadmap and steps which have to happen to fully enable that. But, you know, when you think about cloud foundry, right? Which is basically an open platform standard which I have joined by many of the IT companies. What it does, it gives openness to developers to leverage their tools, the development tools to deploy it. And in principle, you get access via this construct to multiple ecosystems. So if a company has built application A with an ecosystem A, it's immediately available also in all those ecosystems where cloud foundry is represented, right? So it's a huge value from a reach and from a reach perspective, right? The second important area with regards to where we cross promote is obviously what we call the microservices area. So we have micro building, microservice framework where partners can publish their microservices, where customers can pick and orchestrate and also developers obviously can pick and orchestrate those microservice and build us into the application. So basically we promote the cross-pollination of innovation within the ecosystem via this kind of market microservices concept and framework.  SAP has been also at the vanguard of thinking about some business model innovations. Inside the ecosystem is there going to be an SAP way of doing business that makes it easier to do contracting, joint go to market and other types of things? Yeah, sure. So I mean from a go to market perspective, obviously what we do is we publish all these solutions on the SAP on our app center. That's where customers can go to discover, find and basically try those solutions. Customers can navigate by industry, LOB, so it's very comprehensive and it gives them a good overview on what is available in V-Cousins. The second important thing is where we empower the partners to be successful is we implemented a model that companies like Innovaptive can bundle their solution with the HANA Cloud platform on a very simplified model. So we basically ask for a revenue share for based on their application value. It's simple, it's predictable, and it allows them to consume all the parts of HANA Cloud platform end to end without thinking about, hey, do I need to switch on another storage element? Do I need to switch on the portal? Do I need to consume some kind of mobile services? We, in principle, don't care. Take us through that. This is the big, I think the big deal you guys have is an opportunity. Monetization, yeah. It's a really on-board developer in a way that's elegant, but yet they get in and they can enjoy the benefits. I'm a developer, we have an app, take me through what's in it for me. Yeah, okay. So why do I join? What do I get? Exactly. Do I get people to talk to? So the reason why you develop is to build something that you can sell to customers. Yes, we have an app. Exactly, so when we have built an end-to-end engagement framework which guides you very effectively through the different steps in the lifecycle to get reached this point, right? So we give you access to developer resources, HANA Cloud platform, they give you enablement packages, including high-touch enablement for strategic areas where we know you complement our portfolio very well to get you effectively trained to build those solutions. We give you feedback. Who pays for that? SAP takes care of that, right? So we give every partner standard enablement. So the developer doesn't know how to pocket for the developer yet? No, out of pockets. I was talking to a price, but it costs to the end, but I can tell you the investment for any partner, the investment for any partner is literally 3,500 euros per year to be part of the program and get all the services which I was referring to. So is that upfront or can I back-end it? No, that's a subscription. It's an annual subscription to get the SAP partner status, to get access to the developer resources, to get access to enablement training packages. We provide feedback on the solution use cases in terms of is this complementing what SAP has? Is it only a roadmap of SAP so that partners don't make the wrong investments? We review the solution from a quality perspective to ensure it can be deployed to a customer seriously and instantly if a customer wants to buy it. And then we promote it via the various routes to market. I was relating to the HAP Center as a digital property, E-PASS, this is the embedded license model where we empower the partners to buy it on a revenue share model to sell the solution self-sufficiently. And obviously in certain cases we orchestrate the engagement with the SAP field as well. So the fixed fee for the subscription, I get that's a good developer fee, I got that. Out of pocket is going to be actually hiring developers or labor to write the code. And then if I go to the marketplace, if I go to market with SAP, that's where the rev share comes in. Correct. And other partners. And other partners, so distribution. Right, so when they sell, say a 100 license deal, an annual subscription deal, we would typically do a percentage revenue share with SAP. And SAP's shown tremendous flexibility in how they help us monetize on that model. So we work closely with Tarzan and the different go-to marketing and the GCO guys that come together to make that deal happen.  So you think this is a good deal. Perfect developers.  We have only good things to say, I mean, quite frankly. I have other things that I can share as well that where I would like to see improvement, which, like I- Please share. Yeah, I think the area is that where I think we need some clarity, apart from the fantastic technology stuff and monetization models, is really the roadmap alignment, right? We don't want, as a developer, we're always threatened as a small developer that what if SAP comes up- You don't want to get rolled over by the big elephant. Yeah, so our ask to SAP has always been that if we are spending so much money and I'm getting investor money now, into building our business out of the platform, that we align well as true partners in the ecosystem. Over time. Over a period of time. You don't want to be in the crosshairs of a trajectory. So just speaking very straightforward and honestly, that's really where we as developers believe that if we have made some traction in the market with a certain product, we don't want our partner to compete with that. Just like, you know, force.com or Salesforce does not do that, right? I mean, they let the partner ecosystem progress, which I think SAP's already committed. Yeah, I mean, Microsoft used to have a great developer system. They were very clear on how they articulated where their core was. So essentially the train is going down the track. So, and everyone wanted to draft off that. I think that's right. And I think, so Torsen shares a URL. Where do people get information? So I'm an app builder. I want to check this out. Where do I go? Yeah, so the easiest place to go, we have an app center. So it's www.sapapdc, you know, that's the app developer center. And that's where you find all the information. It's basically guided end-to-end. SAP.com slash, no, not .com. It's really just SAP AD, PC AD, PC for application development partner center, right? And that's where all partners would land, you know, to basically get information on a program, but also to sign up, right? So we help partners to give, to, we give them a complete overview on the program along the various steps. Get started, development, you find your enablement training materials there to a certain extent, even the go-to-market support is already there. So they really fully understand what is ahead of them, what are the different steps and where to find it. And they sign up electronically on this page as well. SAP AD, PC. Yeah, okay, got it. Make sure you pull the URL up. Well, thanks guys so much for coming in. I really believe, and again, Peter and I were just talking about the developer opportunity. It's no one really has won this new modern developer community yet, certainly great track. You see a lot of growth over 10 years with Amazon. You guys have a great developer community in the enterprise and new opportunities are there, right? So it's going to be fun to watch over the next few years. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, thank you for having us and we're very confident, right? Yeah. We are here, we are here live at SAP. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.


Well hello everybody and welcome back to my channel. Today we are going to be talking about my budget for 2017. I wanted to kind of explain what I am going to be using for this year to track all my budget needs. I previously talked about this in an Erin Condren haul, but I didn't really label it that it was like a budgeting video because I just hauled this and kind of showed you guys. So I'm going to show you how I am going to set this up for the year. So let's move right along. So this is an Erin Condren Deluxe Notebook. I got the Silver Coil and then I customized a cover. This is just the dot cover and then I did a lighter green and a darker green and then I just put budget 2017. You know, I'm pretty basic. You could put like your family name if you want to use it for a budget or whatever. You can totally customize it to whatever you want. So when you open up the first page it just says 2017 Monthly Planner. I haven't used this for anything yet. I might start tracking some stuff in this. I'm not sure. But this is just how I'm like going to set it up for right now. So here's the beginning of January. There's a dot grid page, the quote page, and then the monthly view. So let me show you what I'm going to use for my monthly view. I actually made a custom order with Coffee Break Planner. I'm pretty sure she might have these up in her shop at some point once I start posting these videos. But we'll see. I'm not 100% sure. Oh, and before I get going on the custom order, just to let you know, this book did not come with tabs, which is like my only complaint that it didn't come with these little tabbies. So what I did is I actually went to Michael's and bought these and then hand wrote the months that I needed. I actually had a couple of left, a couple left over this I bought because I'm weird, you know, whatever. So, yeah. But let me show you what I am going to be using for my month view page. And then we'll get into like my actual budget page and how I'm going to set that up.   This is a little planner. This is like fuel. I got a computer, a fork, knife, and spoon.   And so these are like kind of my main categories of like where I spend money. I'm sure I might do some more customized like little mini icons later. So I've got these three pages and I'll explain what this means in a second. Obviously, the no spend means that like I can put on like Sunday, January 1, I can peel one off and say that I didn't spend anything. So that is the idea is to not spend any money like ever. And the green ones are going to be like my paydays or if I have any incoming money. And I'll be able to like the little dollar sign is already prefixed on there in a darker green. And they fit perfectly this size. So which is nice. I'm actually going to lay one down right now just so we can like look at it together. So I think I want to put at the top my paydays and then at the bottom I can put in like anything else. So so yeah, like I have a payday every single Friday. So that's awesome.  The nice thing about coffee break planner stickers is they are matte removable. So which is great because I can just like dig my nail underneath here and then just lift it up. Super simple, really easy. Whoops. There we go. Just got to hold the sheet down. But yeah, no sticky residue, no nothing. So I'm actually going to put this right back. So anyway, then the other idea would be that I would put, you know, a little yellow one down at the bottom, which would be like anything outgoing and then whatever it pertain to. So say if it was, you know, auto maintenance for my vehicle and put my little vehicle there and then I would write in how much it was and like a little description of what it was to say like oil change or what I don't know, whatever it is. So yeah, that is the idea.  So yeah, that's what I actually customized and ordered from a coffee break planner. I will leave her link below. I do have a 20% off coupon code for her down below. If you guys are interested, I'm actually going to take this off and then because obviously I know I don't have, hopefully I don't have any like car repairs or anything happening that Friday. But you know, you never know, but we'll just leave that like that. But I know I'm getting paid on Friday. So yeah, whatever. But yeah, so that is what I ordered from coffee break planner and that is how I'm going to set up my months. So the idea is at the end of every month. So like when I'm doing February's budget, I will show you what I have left for January. And then the idea is that this would be filled with incoming outgoing and no spend.  So yeah, so that's what I'm going to do for that over here on the right hand side right now. I'm just putting a little sticky note. These are the sticky notes that I use. These are just a brand new one that I just purchased recently from Erin Condren. They are like the stylized sticky notes. So they have like the little teeth on the side. So they fit perfectly into here. I think what I'm going to do actually just because I have most of my stuff figured out for 2017. I'm going to probably snap this into here, but like put it in the front, you know, if I have any other like little things I want to notate or whatever, I totally can. But anyway, maybe I won't do that. Maybe I will, but it's just a nice little thing to have.  And so I just put the year and the month and then I just put in kind of like whatever my, I would say like sinking funds are right now. I've gotten a lot of questions on my sinking funds. I did a video on it last year. And the reason I did is because I needed a sinking funds fund this year because of my housing situation, my living situation. I'm really just taking those items as they come because I have enough income to do that. I think at some point I still will do a sinking fund video for 2017. I know a lot of you guys have been asking me how to do that. It just wouldn't be what I would be using it for, but I could show you like a projected, like if I was in the same situation I was in last year, here's how I would do it, you know? So let me know if you guys are interested in seeing that video, even though it wouldn't be like what I would be personally using. If you just want to see how I would kind of mock set it up and how I would kind of project it out through the year, you know, let me know. But in 2017, I want to be 100% authentic with every bill that's going out and every dollar that's coming in. So I just want to be able to show that a little bit better because I think it's a lot easier than all these like kind of mock budgets that I've been doing. All the outgoing has been correct, but the incoming has not been correct. So that's something I'm a little, I'm still working on even though I'm like filming this video right now, but whatever. This is my monthly view and this is kind of going to be like my holy grail of what I am going to use for tracking spending. As for the next page, over here on the left hand side, I'm not sure what I'm going to use this for. These are just like little bullet pointed items. There's five of them, but I'm not sure what I'm going to use this for. This side is what I would normally use for my monthly budget, which I believe is I'm still going to be using for my monthly budgets. So I'll just use it kind of like I had used it before. I did have a notebook while I still have a notebook. I should say like, here's my have it right here. Here is my Aaron Conner notebook that has these pages in it already. So I really liked kind of having a column over to the right and then like doing it, you know, a different way over the left. So yeah, I've been really, really liking that, but I think this page is still going to be dedicated to my projected budget. And then over here is going to be like actually what happened, even though it's not in chronological order. That kind of bothers me, but whatever. So actually yesterday in all of the months, I already put in a little sticky note. So if I have something coming up, I can, you know, project out for it like for March. It's my nephew's birthday. So obviously I want to be able to factor that into my March budget. So, you know, to like get him a gift or whatever, like April, I don't have anything. There's a lot of months right now where I don't have anything that I can like think of, but I'm sure there's going to be things that will come up that I will end up writing on these little sticky notes. And that's just a note to myself to like in May factor that in to the budget. June is usually when my dog goes to the vet for his yearly exam. So that's definitely needed, needing to be put into the budget. July, I don't have anything.  I have my car tabs, which is not fine. That's I don't like that. But then I'm also going to factor in that in this August, the end of the August early September is when the Minnesota State Fair happens. And so I would increase my food budget or I would have another line item for the state fair.  So and then also, you know, like if I want to have any extra additional like spending money, they always have like really cute products and things like that there. Like it last year, I got myself a t-shirt. That's all I bought. But actually, no, I think my mom bought that for me now that I think about it. But yeah, it's just nice to have a little bit of like extra wiggle room if you can budget out for it. You know, it's all about a budget, a budget is giving yourself permission to spend, you know? So like September, I don't have anything. October, I have my life insurance in October. I pay that annually. And then also I have AAA.  I pay AAA once a year and thankfully, I haven't had to use it in a couple of years. But I remember the first year I had it. I had to I used it actually, I think like three times because it was just a really horrible winter. So, and as I'm saying, that is actually snowing right now. So yeah, and then in November, I just put in my December Florida flight because I'm sure that I'll be booking that in the month of November. And then also to budget in for holiday gifts. I like to get all of my holiday shopping before Thanksgiving, if possible, or I just shop online on Amazon or whatever. But I like to not buy anything in the month of December just because I'm gone for quite a while. There's always like additional expenses. I feel like in December, even if you don't factor them in, you know, holiday parties, gatherings, little small gifts here and there. But you know, I try to keep it a little bit tighter.  So those are all of my kind of sinking funds, if you will, that I can think of for right now. I'm sure I'm missing a whole bunch, but that's why I have these little little nice little tabbies to tell me what to do and where to go, you know. So anyway, that is the end of December. So this is the next page, which is forecasting out through 2018. I'm sure I won't be using this until a little bit later. This would actually be really nice to kind of mark out, you know, the sinking funds that actually happened in 2017 for 2018 here. So I can kind of forecast that out when I set up my new one. So yeah, I mean, that's something that I'll probably use more towards the end of the year. Here's just a little cute little watercolor page. And then there's a ton of just blank and no pages back here, which is really cool. I like that because then I can kind of mock up some stuff. If I end up doing that sinking funds one, I'll probably put it over here. I will also be putting my savings forecast in here. If you guys want to see, well, I don't know. If you guys want to see my projected savings for 2017, let me know in the comments below. I know I never really shared that before because it kind of made me uncomfortable, but I think I might do a video on that if you guys want to see it. And then also want to see kind of like how I do it if I'm because I get paid every single week. So if I'm doing it every other week, if I'm doing it once a week, how often I'm adding in and how much I'm adding in. And then at the end of the year, projectively, here's how much I would have, not including gifts, bonuses, any tax rebates, refunds, things like that. So anyway, let me know if you want to see that. And then also in the very, very back, there are these little sticker pages. And I also have, I can't get to it. Here we go, like a little pocket folder, which is nice. So, you know, you can put your little stickers that you most use in here, which I will probably just end up leaving in here. And then this one has like a little like lower one over there as well. So you could put like, you know, like that in there, but that's the back cover of the page. And this is how I'm going to be setting up my budget for 2017. Every month I will have a new budget. So January will be coming up very soon if it isn't up already, depending on how I post these. So I, I film a lot in advance. So I film a lot out of order. So I never know what's actually up when it's up. So anyway, but I will link the budget series on my YouTube channel down below. If you guys are interested, that whole video playlist only has things to do with money. If you're interested in just the finances. Also, there will be a link to the Aaron Condren website. If it's your first time ordering, you can use that link sign up.  And then if you decide to use that coupon code, when your item ships, I'll get a $10 off coupon code as well for me to use on future purchases. So you can purchase this. I believe this book was around the $30 mark. It's not too bad considering Aaron Condren.  And you can do whatever you want to, you can buy it on like these as well. It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be like a book can be anything you want to off the website, which is really nice. So there's no like minimum, you know what I mean? Also, speaking of links, I will link these below if I can find them. I know that I found them for somebody just recently that had asked on, I think it was Instagram or something. I can't remember, but if I can find these on the Michael's website or anywhere, I will link them below for you guys. Also, Copy Break Planners link will be below too. That's where I got all of those customized stickers from. Again, she did those all as a custom order. I'm not sure. I'm sure she'll end up listing those in her shop as soon as I start posting all of these videos, especially if you want to set them up the same way that I have them set up. So that is going to be it for my walkthrough for my budget 2017 and how I am setting it up. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. I am so looking forward to doing my budget in 2017. I know that's kind of crazy, but now that I've been doing it for so long, I really, really love the process of budgeting and I also love the process of tracking because it makes me feel like I'm getting traction. Even though I'm not necessarily paying off debt, I'm saving, but it makes me understand my habits a little bit better. And I think that that is the main reason why I budget is because I want to understand my habits and know what my triggers are. So I hope you guys will thumbs up this video and subscribe if you want to come along on my financial journey with me for 2017. And that is going to be it for me. Thank you guys so much for hanging out with me for a little part of your day. And I will talk to you all in my next video. Bye guys.


We found in our late fall 2012 survey that there continues to be an uptick in American belief in the existence of global warming. We've now seen in recent surveys a jump back up from levels of the last couple of years where belief was around the 50% level, to our nearly now seven out of ten Americans believe there is solid evidence of global warming over the last four decades. We've noticed a significant increase in the level with which Republicans believe global warming is occurring. Now that still reflects substantial differences between Democrats and Republicans, but for the first time in over four years a majority of Republicans, now 51%, in our latest survey, believe there's solid evidence of global warming. Doesn't necessarily mean the parties are converging, but there's a significant movement on the Republican side of this. Political affiliation still is a very very good predictor. That said, certainly we see continued reliance on some personal experience or reference to climate change, especially amongst those who believe that it's occurring. On the flip side we've noticed that people who do not think there's solid evidence are less and less inclined to refer to some weather experience, much more inclined to talk about natural variation or perhaps politicization of the issue.


Okay, let's just take it. Hi everyone, thanks very much for having me. So, this is the second time I've spoken in a voice account. Which is, and I've got the t-shirt to prove it as well. In 2019. All right, so, that's good. So, just a quick bio. My background is SEO. I've done it for a very long time. And I work for a big French ad group. And I manage the SEO for very big Hong Kong brands, like AIA and many others. And I've worked in many different niches. So, that's what I think. What is this talk? So, this talk is all about taking data from Google. And then spinning it. And then putting it back up to Google. And then benefiting from that. So, really, this presentation is about taking data. And then indexing it. Or basically improving it. And then indexing it. And then getting traffic. So, how does this work? I'm going to give you an example. And then at the end of this, I'll give you some real examples of the directories that I've built. So, first off, we need to think of a niche. And for this example, I'm going to use SEO agency Hong Kong. So, what we're doing is we're taking all of the GMB's Google My Business profiles. And we're going to scrape them. And then we're going to spin them. And then we're going to put them back up on Google. So, the first point, though, is to think about the niche. So, maybe just some ideas are solar energy, junk boat rentals, locksmith plumbers, whatever it is. Whatever niche you're in, this can work. And you can get traffic. So, let's talk about the process. So, step one. There's four steps to be. So, step one, data scraping. The tool that I recommend is called phantombuster.com. And you can get a free account. It's very affordable. It's only like maybe 40 bucks a month. 50 bucks a month. But the app that we need within the application is Google Maps Search Export. And that will then scrape the listings from Google Maps. So, the data that we're going to get from Google Maps and all of the business profiles, for example, the types of the business, the URL, the ratings, and all of that kind of thing. Everything you see in Google Maps, we can extract and download for our own benefit. So, the niche that I'm going to do, for example, is Hong Kong SEO agencies. So, on Google Maps, Hong Kong SEO agencies is going to list all of the businesses which have profiles labeled as Hong Kong SEO agencies. And I'm going to scrape all of the businesses which are listed in Hong Kong. So, what we do is we copy and paste the URL of the Maps, and then we put it in the tool. We launch it manual, and then we click launch. It's really, really, really simple. You just have to watch the video on the site. It takes two seconds, and it's very, very easy to do. So, there you can see it's scraping the data. And so far, you see at the bottom of the slide, that 120 or so businesses were scraped, which is exactly what we want. And then we can download the CSV file. So, this is really quite super, super basic stuff. There's nothing complicated here. So, step two, data hygiene and data enhancement. So, we open up the CSV file in, for example, Google Sheets. And then we have all this information, which is all very useful, like the category, the address, all of that kind of thing. But what we want to do is we want to improve this and add value. And then I'm going to get into the SEO bit about this shortly. So, we want to add value to this data that we've just downloaded. So, fortunately, we can turn to AI and, for example, chat GPT can help us with this. What we want to do, and what's missing here, what's missing from this data is, in this example, what's missing is the description of the business. We don't know all of these URLs. We know that they're like an SEO agency, but we don't know what specialization or their background or whatever. So, we need to get that data. And to get that data, there's really three options that I see. Maybe there's a fourth option. I don't know. But the three options I see is, number one, you can go to a human being and hire a virtual assistant to manually copy and paste the props into chat GPT4. That's the basic way of doing it. The second option is to use an adult-like sheet GPT, which is very nice and works great. And then the third one, which is my favorite, is to write a Python script, which will do this for you. Because with a Python script, and by the way, I can't write a single line of Python, but I use a little bit of it. I use chat GPT to write Python scripts for me, and then you can have a file which just has the props. So the prop would be, for example, visit this website and write me 80 words on what this website is about. Then you do that 180 times. Now, why is this important to talk about data hygiene and data hygiene? It's important because I write tens of thousands of words of content every single week using AI. And what I do is I basically use AI to generate the content, but I then remove the footprint. Because the best way to explain the footprint is like an auto prompt on your phone. So AI just predicts the next obvious word in a chain. So it's really good practice, and this is my personal opinion. It's very good practice to spin that. So once you've generated the AI content, it's not good enough. You need to paraphrase it, which is spinning it. And for those that don't understand that, paraphrasing is this. So I am speaking at WordCamp 2023 in Hong Kong. By the way, this isn't AI. This is really, really, really old technology. But this tool is called QuillBot. It's a very good tool. And it spins it. And it's exactly the same meaning that the benefit about this, what I'm saying, is it makes it more human because humans speak in a strange way. Like the way that I speak is unique. The way that your speak is unique. See that fingerprint? It's trying to remove the AI obviousness of the content. So now we have spun the content. By the way, there's 50 slides. So I'm going to talk about classes here. So now we've got our descriptions of our SEO agencies.  That is if we want to have individual pages, like a massive page website, that's what we need to do for that. Right. So now we have our data which has been enhanced and we've got our AI content as well. So data upload. Do you guys, if anyone technical will find this incredibly simple? And anyone who isn't very technical, please don't be scared because it's simple. The plugins I've used before, like I said, I'm going to give you examples of directories that I've built. So two plugins that I recommend are WP All Imports and WordPress Pods, which is custom, which is basically like ACF, advanced custom fields. I just prefer pods. So the first thing we do is we create a custom post type, which they call a pod. And we create the singular label and the plural label. That's all we do. We just create the pod. Once we've created our pod, then we need to create the template for that custom post type. And what we need to do here is to match the fields. We have to match the fields to the Google Sheets. So we then upload the data, the CSV file that we created. Just to go back one slide. Here we create the template of the fields that we're going to use. We upload the data and then we then match the fields. So this is the template that we create. For example, websites, description, title, reviews, anything you want. And then when you upload the data, you simply match the fields. The basic stuff, you just match them. Once you've matched those fields, then you upload and that's it. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. I always recommend doing this on a test website just to make sure that it all works correctly. And then upload it. It's not complicated. You'll get it. So, indexation. This is my expertise. This is what I do. So indexation means basically it's getting your content into Google because the issue at the moment is every single day, you know, millions, trillions of words of content have been produced. Google will not index it. It has to be unique, it has to be interesting, and it has to add value. So what we've done is we downloaded data from Google. So why should Google now index content that was simply taken from there? Well, we're going to figure that one out. So some ideas to get the site. If it's a fresh domain that Google knows nothing about, it won't trust you for a week or it could be one year. It won't trust you. The ways to get your website indexed and online and getting traffic is here are the top five tips. So one, to create Google Search Console accounts in GH4 and then submit your site map to Google Search Console. Submit the home page to an indexer tool like Omega Indexer, which is a very nice tool to get content indexed. You can submit the home page to, you know, Reddit or Twitter because very simply, Reddit gets crawled millions and millions of times by Googlebot. So it's not going to hurt. Try and get backlinks. I'll talk about them in a second. And then another good idea is to create a press release which you can get from Fiverr or the JIT, these two services. This can cost like $30 and it's a very nice way to get the site indexed. Or this is another way of getting the site working in each of these.  A very good place to buy them is Facebook groups. This is typically very expensive. These are, you know, five, ten, $20,000 to buy a website with traffic. But on Facebook groups, Discord channels, people are selling their sites. A lot of people give up with their business. Well, that's where we can jump in and then take that. As long as it's in our niche, we can buy that website, put it on directory and this is one way to get traffic. So let's talk about SEO because this is my specialization. It's really not that complicated. A lot of people overthink it and they try and get really creative and crazy ideas and so on. It's not that difficult. And the reason why I've put it, the cards up here is because it's like playing poker. But the difference is I can see your cards and you can see my cards. Why? Because the search results, this gives you the answers. All of the answers are here. Plus I can look at your code, I can look at your back links, I can look at your keywords, I can look at the types of keywords, etc. The very simple way of doing this is like this. Can you honestly put your hand on your heart and say I can beat number one position because I have better content? If the answer is yes, go for it. You probably will. If you feel that you can't, like if you're competing for Amazon sneakers, it's not going to work. Don't bother with it. One tip is this. If Amazon has an answer by Quora or Reddit, then that's good news. That means you can probably win that position. That's just my personal belief. Let's get back to our directory website. The other technique which works, which is very, very 101 SEO at the moment, is what's called topical authority and content clustering. What that means is that we just add authority to the overall concept. This green here, for example, could be the database directory that we filled. To explain this better, this should explain it better. Imagine that we have... This is our image. We have the Hong Kong visa immigration e-gen. That's what we want to get indexed and getting traffic. We can create content that all answers aspects to that topic. Why? Because it adds authority. Each of these can have a certain amount of... If this brings in 30 clicks a month, that's fantastic. That's very good news. This brings in 30, this brings in 100, and this brings in 10. That's good because Google says, okay, this guy is covering all different aspects of the subject. I'm going to give them a chance. That should definitely help. That makes is very, very important. Some people believe that they're losing importance. As long as there's a good link. For example, a backlink from SEMP is always going to be better than Henry's junktruises.com. That's a fact of the matter. There's many ways to get backlinks. Frankly, you can pay for them. You can do guest posts. You can do parasite linking. You can get very creative. But for the purposes of time, I won't get into all of these tactics. The thing to say about links is this. It's a signal of popularity. It's as simple as that. The more links you have, the more basically it looks like you're a popular person and Google wants to know about it. But one link from the SEMP can be worth 100 crappy shitty links that won't do anything. So that definitely helps with indexation. Just a quick word about this. Google releases its... It has to release its patents publicly because that's how the patent office works. And a very, very old patent was all about seed sites. So what's a seed site? Google bot that controls the internet and indexes the websites, it doesn't start at my blog and it goes all the way up and down the internet all day long. It starts at a seed site and an authoritative entity. So for example, if you're in a fashion niche, Vogue.com is a highly trusted entity in fashion. So the Google bot will start its journey here and then it will then go out and see who's linked to Vogue.com. So you want to try to be as close as possible to an authoritative website because, again, this isn't complicated stuff. It's just the closer you are to a niche specific entity the better it is for you. Well, so let's talk about some examples of directories that I've built and there's four of them. So the first one is growthhack.hme which is a kind of a SEO agency that I used to manage about three or four years ago and everything that I've told you about it that we're uploading, it worked really well. So the top page all of these screenshots are from this morning and last night. The top page is this Hong Kong SEO agencies directory and currently the keywords with this domain are Hong Kong SEO company, SEO company Hong Kong, Hong Kong SEO, blah blah blah and all I did was I just springed everyone else's directories, I've stopped the content and I re-uploaded it. Last night's so this tool is quite interesting because Google is always testing, it doesn't just give you position three and good luck to you it doesn't work like that, it's constantly it's constantly testing different results. So for example this tool has 10 IP addresses so there's one person in the entire one person in cycle, three people in central and then it finds the average so for Hong Kong SEO company most people saw me in position two some people saw me in position three the desktop Hong Kong SEO the websites which I built using this directory a few people saw me in position one and a few people in position four and so on, you get the idea it's all about volatility so this website here SEOhero.io what to do. For some people position two, some people position 11 so anyway, this is another discussion I'm just showing you this because it works the point here is it works and there's the screenshots of of this. I'm not showing this to show off or press or anything like that because the truth is I honestly I've done nothing to this website for one year I haven't touched it, I haven't written any content I've done nothing and it's still very high in search engines for Hong Kong SEO again, all I'm doing is validating a theory that this works now, will it work forever? definitely not because Google is constantly doing different algorithm changes all the time I'll talk about this in a second but anyways, what works today will not necessarily work tomorrow however, this has state consistent so it's a good tactic another example is typhoon.hk I got the domain because I just think it sounds cool to generate it and I did exactly the same thing again, identical process with the same tools and all of that and so one example that the niche in that website is drone shops in Hong Kong and so 10 people see me in position one for drone shops in Hong Kong so it's even above the dji.com website and even above fortress so again, it works mobile repair shop 3 people see me in position 5 and look at this guy, he's even got a website devoted to phonerepair.hk.com and I'm beating him with this tactic and then crack mobile phone screen in Hong Kong another example is there's Korean this is just a kind of test I was doing getmekimchi.com and it's a mass-picked website which is targeting the US it's on a US hosting and you see the structure is very nice and clean, this is the kind of thing which Google loves, it's just make Google bots life easy, make it really really easy to understand the content and you'll never go wrong with this so this website is if you type in Korean stores in Texas it does pretty well and this content is I haven't touched this for about 2 years and it's still, this is only like yesterday, and it's still doing you know, okay and this content is not even AI, it's horrible, it doesn't even make any sense but they're ranked okay, so Will this work in 2024? yeah, kind of, gotta be a bit careful it really depends on the niche you're in because there's a lot of updates like every single week Google will kind of tweak the algorithm it won't announce it, it'll just do it but it does announce the core updates which are exactly what we think that is they're the big important updates but one thing which I believe and I do see it all day long is that I just believe that this helpful content update this is going to become more important next year because of the amount of AI generated so that's really important to talk about this is interesting so with the algorithm updates Google gives you some documentation and in January of this year, Google says that we want to see helpful content written by people by human beings for people this is January, in September they changed their tune now it's helpful content created for people not by people so now they're beginning to say we can work with AI but it's going to be helpful useful, that's the important thing I think I spoke about this earlier but we want to remove that because this is my personal opinion we want to remove that footprint of AI using that tool or a paraphraser just to make it more human and this is really big, there's human verification so what's human verification? human verification is called EEAT which is experience expertise authority and trust what is that? that is this, it's human verification because a human being it can't go on a holiday it can't buy a handbag it can't do any of that, we can and typically a human likes to read about the human's experience so this is really important for your content and any business that you do with any aspect of digital marketing to get it in there so how do we do this EEAT again, not that complicated ideally you have a real human working on your brand alright and ideally hopefully that human has citations and credibility online, so for example is a human being that's written an article if they've written it before or they've been quoted or they have a reference or they've tinned so for example, I'm now on Hong Kong website, this is really good because it means that I can link to that so Google knows that I am a real human being and it will connect the dots and it will give you the benefit and that means that you can beat you can beat your competitor by doing this human association so if you want to use schema which I'm sure you will know about which is a little bit code which tells Google hey, these words are a human being's name so SGE SGE is a search generative experience which in Thailand this was launched in Thailand two days ago so it's rolling all around the world and this is going to change everything or not, it really depends on many many things but one of the challenges for all of us in this room if we have digital assets which I'm sure we all do is the first of, one of the thick fears is zero conflicts because if I get the answer what's the point of me going to your website but it's slightly another subject for another time but in summary so far the concept and the method that I've shared it works today and it should be okay for you and the final thing I'll say is that it really really depends on the niche that you're in the more kind of long tail and uniqueness then the more that your directory can actually add value to the conversation and you should do okay that's it okay thank you any questions or could you tell us more about the long tail yeah could you tell us about the long tail of Q and Q and why is it so we can get more value to the conversation yeah okay so let's add more value to the conversation because it's a good question because if you think about it AI people are simply taking existing content and they're just basically doing writing the same article for example top 10 junk trips in Hong Kong it's the same content adding value means introducing new concepts and new ideas to the conversation that's much more interesting so the directory piece I did that I've shown maybe it's not enough to simply just write content about the business maybe just try and consciously make that conversation and say that these 10 agencies are similar because of this reason they are pioneering AI in Hong Kong which has these results for that industry in summary what I'm trying to say is just add value to the conversation make it interesting as for long tails long tail in my opinion has a lot more clickability and intent because if you rank for hotels in Hong Kong for example figure that example if you do like car hire in Hong Kong it's okay but if you rank for car hire in Lantan or car hire in Shenwan for example that's someone who wants to hire a car in that place so there's more intent Thanks everyone