Move forward then. So welcome everybody to the technical steering committee for hyper ledger, everybody's welcome to attend this meeting and be respectful of the other participants here. Questions on what that looks like you can always check out the code of conduct that we have linked in a variety of places, including the agenda. We've got some work in flight that there's no report out today, including what you see there for the CI CD. And then one thing that didn't make it onto the list that I'm going to drop into the chat forum on chat hyper ledger.org is an earlier proposal for some cross language support spoken language. And it would be helpful if each of the projects took a look at that report and or took a look at that proposal and provided some feedback on how that would work or not work with their particular project and hyper ledger. And with that, I think we can go right into the quarterly reports. If I could for the for the CI CD committee, we had a fairly good turnout last week. The next meeting is tomorrow. We would of course like more projects to be represented. So if you're doing CI CD, please do join the meetings because we we want your input on the future of kind of where this is going. Thanks. Okay. All right, so we had the saw tooth update go in. I think yesterday. So I don't know if it has been widely read yet. Somebody had the link for that handy. I'll post it in. Thanks. It looks like it's been reviewed but all but two of the TSE members. Which one was this saw tooth. Oh, I had, I, yeah, I looked at it on the plane last night, but I wasn't logged in. So, thanks. Okay, great. And then thanks for pasting that link, but that's to a PDR. There we go. Yep, I fixed it. But we would like more eyes on on that pull request. So. All right, so any, any questions or comments on this update. Andrea as long as I have one question then. Yeah. Yeah, I saw the thought was had supported the PBFD. So how about the performance on the large sustainability. So on a large network, what kind of performance characteristics is that showing. Yeah, I think it's a native PBFT and meditation, right. Yeah, it's a rust based. I'm remembering correctly. Yep, it is rust based. You, you get any number. Yeah, I think the question is, how good does how well does it run if you're running on large networks. We're at what level of you tested it. So we've been running some LR network tests with 10 nodes, I believe. I don't know what the, we're able to do a lot more than what poet can do currently with the settings, but I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head. And are you testing. Have you tested. Failover and. Adding or moving notes. Yep. What's the level. Okay. Yeah, we have, we have shut down notes and restarted them. And we've had some nodes. Due to some hardware issues. Die out on their own and we're able to bring them back. Okay. Thanks for the information. There's also some RFCs that we have around consents around PBFT consensus that might be interesting for the community to look at to one that comes to mind for the question about leader election is a forced periodic leader election. And so that might be interesting for people. And once that gets implemented, that would of course ensure that that feature is constantly under test. Yep. And all of those RFCs are already implemented within the code base. Okay. Andy, any, anything else that you would like to highlight on this? We are. Yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead. I was just going to say that we are working towards. One dot two release, hopefully happening. Within the next couple of months. As a part of that, the PBFT will be released as a one. Oh, as well. Also, we have some new mobile SDKs. So you can write. So to the applications in Swift and. And so Java so for Android. I had a question on the diversity of contributors. You talk about there being 13. Different domains. Is that. Like do you mean 13 different companies, if you will, or. So I pulled a stats for that. And what I do is I parse out the sign offs. And then I, I grabbed the domains off the email signatures for that. So there's 13 different domains that are contributing. I've been trying to go in and scrub the numbers this month to see if there's. Any sort of overlap. Okay. Because it says there were 41 committers and 13 different domains. So, all right. Yeah. So you would expect several committers to be from the same companies. Right. Yeah, I just was. Yeah. So I would read that as a high water marker or an upper bound on the potential companies that are contributing. Okay. Yeah. Probably something a little bit less than that. Probably people using their Gmail account and stuff as well. All right. Cool. Thank you. Yep. There's now quite a few repositories. So the script does a lot of work for me that I don't want to do by hand. Any thoughts on making that available to everyone for all the projects. Sure. Sure. Yeah. When I suggested that before several months back, Tracy showed me a script that she had that she was using that was a lot better than mine. Oh, okay. But I've put mine up as a gist somewhere. So I could, I could find that link again. Okay. Well, I mean. Pull requests for Tracy's scripts are, are, you know, also accepted, right? They're in the hyper ledger labs repo somewhere. What, what does she use? I use get DM. She used a get and bash scripts. Oh, okay. And like unique, you know, UN IQ and mail merge and all that stuff. She used.  The rust bindings to live get to are pretty amazing, but, you know, rust is a pretty heavy lift for something like this. Hey, right. This is James. I remember that conversation we had on rocket chat about running Tracy's scripts and you needed pretty high level permissions across the repose. Yeah.   Contributor rights. Well, I don't know what her scripts are doing. Her scripts just work against the public. Get. Yeah. I was gonna say it was, it was an API token thing. It was, it was something, it was something weird. Maybe she's changed them some center or maybe they, there was a mistyped URL in there. And so it was trying to use admin access to access the Hyperledger account on GitHub because the full URL didn't resolve. I pushed a PR to Rai about three weeks ago or something to fix it. I don't know if it's landed yet, I can check on it. But yeah, there was one that was misspelled. It was like the healthcare working group, but it was spelled Heath care. There's something like that. Yeah. But basically, yeah, I mean, all that stuff is in the GitHub, so. Yeah. I was running those scripts on privilege. That's how I found it. I drop all my privileges when I run these things that are supposed to be for public consumption. Yeah.  I don't know if it's Solona on it, but what's the status on getting sort of, you know, the vanity metrics and stuff up? I know everybody hates them. I know Brian hates them, but everybody asks. And I think it'd be useful to sort of make it public to sort of encourage. I see that Solona's on, but she's been out this week. We are working with the community bridge team to bring those metrics in. That's what I heard. Right. So that's... Sorry, I took a little while for me to find my mute button. Someone's like, somebody has a cold. Yeah, I think it was a little worse than that, but I'm doing a lot better now. I can move without pain. So yeah, right now we're working internally with LF to try to get to where we would like to be in regards to gathering those metrics. We haven't gotten there yet. Rye and Dave have been, obviously Tracy have been doing clever things behind the scenes to try to get there. We're also, that's one of the reasons also, Chris, for wanting to do the... Solona, I think we lost you. Well, that virus took a sudden turn for the worse. Am I on? Sorry. Yeah. I dropped out for a second. Rye, Dave, and previously Tracy were working on some internal scripts, but we're trying to get some of that stuff a little bit more production-wise. And we are looking at trying to gather other numbers beyond just off of GitHub, but also Confluence, Chira, and Chat. So it's just slow progress. Okay. Always a good idea to have a reason for data first. So we don't need to discuss it more now, but just dumping a bunch of numbers. Oh, I need all those numbers. My team doesn't know how well we're doing. Our team doesn't know the status of the different projects very well, unless we do know how contributions are going and how all of that is working. So they're very much so needed by our team. It's just we've got to work within a lot of different, varied constraints. Okay. So we kind of covered the fabric last week, but were there any questions? Yeah, so Chris gave us a quick download last week. And it looks like everyone's already reviewed it. Yeah, there's only a couple of questions I tried to answer. The ones that had been, I don't know, everybody. So Mark, to your point on CUBE, and so for this, not quite in alpha, but we hope to get it into 2.0. And then Nathan, if you're on, and in regards to ERSA integration, that's not currently planned. You know, maybe we can get an update on how mature that is and so forth and figure out where it fits. And when, you know, is the right time. And then as far as idMix, idMix is in there, has been since 1.2. We finished a lot of the work in 1.3 and I think in 1.4 we added the revocation piece, which was sort of the last remaining support item. And so that's in there. And what, in what ways that integrated in, is that? What do you mean, in what way is it integrated? In code it's in the, like the SDK support, or that's? Yeah, it's in the Java and JavaScript SDKs. Don't know if it's in the go one, I'd have to ask Troy. And I don't know, I don't know about one. Maybe you know if it's in Python, but... Not yet. In terms of the supported SDKs of Java and Node, it's in there. I think Java actually might have been in 1.4 as well, but the Node was in 1.3. And yeah, so I mean, the support is there, right? It can be used. I'd have to go and double check. It's been a while. I believe we have an example, you know, tutorial. Okay. Well, Chris, about the idMix, I have one question. In the documentation, they are missing there's still some limitation for the idMix, right? I remember one major one, it's a limited organization number in the network. So do you know, is there any plan to improve that? Oh, you need to add in sort of random people, kind of support people that are not in part of, in the consortia. Yeah. Yeah. I'd have to research that. I don't know the answer. Okay. I think if you ask on Fabric Crypto, they could tell you. Any further questions? Cool. All right. Thanks, Chris. On to the architecture work group update. I think this was Rom. I don't see. Is Rom on this morning? Yeah, that's the Rom. I can answer most of the questions if it's Rom's the one that's in it and Rom's down and I put it together, so. Okay. I didn't see any questions on it and it's basically the, there are two parts of the message. The first is that we're continuing to make progress. The second is, and this is, I just want to make sure that everybody sees in the issue section, we are writing about your platforms for both the system identity and privacy and confidentiality. We are writing based on our best knowledge. We have reached out to participants and contributors to each of the platforms. If you don't get back to us, you're stuck with what we write. So that's the nasty part of it. The positive part of it is, please, we need your help in clarifying some things. So if each of the platforms could make sure that they reach out to Rom, stay on there myself. I will point you to the documents in the sections that we've been writing up for. So. Hey folks, Tom here. Looks like I was using the privacy and confidentiality feature and couldn't find myself on here. Thanks for covering that, Nick. Yep, that pretty much was it. Okay. Well, I think with that, pointer to next updates coming from the identity work group, Iroha, and I guess that's the two that are the soonest on our list here. We don't have any further agenda items. So I'll give just a minute for TSC members that wanted to raise something, but didn't get a chance to get that on the list. But in general, it's best if we do have agenda items, we get them up there first so that people have an opportunity to prepare and we have constructive use of our time. We need to discuss the backlogs. I think, I don't know.  I just heard from Dave that he's not ready to present today and Mark and I still need to work on the overall engagement. So. Sorry, Ray, I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna apologize to TSC for not being ready with the project readiness stuff. My daughter broke her foot and I've spent the last three days in doctor's offices and so I've been unable to prepare my presentation, but I'll put it on the calendar for as soon as I can. I'll have to look at where I'm at and it'll likely be next week, but I think that's gonna butt up against internship stuff or something. I gotta look at the calendar, but yeah, as soon as possible. And again, I apologize. Sorry to hear about your daughter No apology necessary. You weren't on a specific deadline for that. In fact, I think it's best that once you have some ideas put together, make sure that you get those circulated on the mail list and then we'll be able to have a more thoughtful discussion when we do get it on the agenda next week or the week after. Yeah, that's really the piece that's missing Dan and thanks. Yeah, I was gonna float it on the mailing list last Friday and we can talk about it over the weekend this week, but yeah, I'll do that as soon as I get it all together. Thanks. All right, well with that, thank everybody for their time and we will speak again probably next week. Thanks. Thanks. Have a good day.


I work for the Secretary, the Climate Change Secretary.  And we're also supporting the regulatory system for these flexible mechanisms, the three in particular, the two, CDM and JI. I'm going to speak a little bit about CDM today because it is one of the first international and the first international climate financing instrument available with a vast vault of lessons and learnings that one can draw from. I like to call it a little bit the window on the developing world to some extent because there is a vast amount of information that is buried in there and needs to come out, needs to be used for design of future mechanisms, future carbon market mechanisms and instruments. And we've realized this going through a lot of the documentation up to now. And I'm going to use a little bit of the work that we've been doing in the last three years to assess every single project and read into exactly what's happening from a financial point of view, from a sustainable development point of view and from a technology transfer point of view. We also did some comparative analysis with other projects that are not CDM related in non-developing countries so to try and juxtapose the differences between what's happening in the CDM world which is often criticized and that which is happening in the rest of the non-CDM world so to speak from a project point of view. As you know, the CDM was basically set up to facilitate an efficient response to climate change. The premise underlying the CDM was that the greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced at a lower cost in the non-NX1 countries so the developing countries then in the developed world. The non-NX1 countries would host the emission reduction projects and would then reap the sustainable development benefits and other benefits. And the profits from the sale of the emission reduction credits would fundamentally flow to the NX1 countries. So fundamentally NX1 countries could lower the cost of meeting their emission reduction commitments by buying from the CDM projects themselves. I'll show a little bit of how that's actually happening and I'll show a little bit of how that financing is actually taking place and some of the benefits that have come across as a result of it. So coming to the end of the 2012 period, the first commitment period, we asked the question, have all countries really benefited from the CDM? What have been those benefits? What has been the flow of finance? Has that finance come from what was thought to be primarily developed world and flow to the developing world? Has there been benefits, co-benefits such as employment, pollution reduction, access to energy, et cetera, poverty, which Balgan will talk about later. So just moving on quickly, I'm going to run through a profile of the CDM, carbon market overview, impacts of the CDM, and then some future prospects. So just looking here at what has been happening over time now, this is a bit of a time series of the number of projects. This is now new entrants, new projects coming onto the market. And we can see that there's been a gradual growth of later and exponential growth and to some extent a decline at the end there as we come towards the end of the commitment period. Most of them being in the large-scale area with small-scale projects capped to 50 kilotons, relatively stable for that time. Most of them being big investments, big hydro wind in the red and blue lines at the bottom. This is new entrants. The projects themselves that are actually being registered by the CDM Executive Board on the other hand have also seen an exponential growth of late as we get to the end of the commitment period. Most of these coming from China, India, and lesser extent Mexico and other countries. So dominance in the clear pattern in the distribution of these projects and I'll try and explain a little bit why. The fundamental benefit from this carbon finance is naturally of course the realization of the emission reductions, the certified emission reductions. And here we can see a time series of what's happening over time in terms of scale as well of the tons of emission reductions over time. So also dominated by the big three or the big two to some extent. In terms of what's happening in the carbon market itself, you may well know that the price has fundamentally collapsed. There are many reasons for that over supply to some extent. The demand is primary driven at the moment by the European emissions trading scheme. CRs can be changed and can be swapped between EUAs. And these CRs have typically been cheaper over time so that's happened. There is a cap of course to that and that's not going to continue entirely well into the future. We expect also, and a lot of people are saying this in particular, one quoted here the New Energy Finance magazine, that the carbon market itself will grow. Not necessarily as the CDM carbon market, but the international carbon market is likely to grow. So we're going to see carbon finance as being a major player in the future. Most of these CDM projects as we go beyond 2012 will probably likely come from the renewable sector. As we see the industrial gases being phased out due to limitations from the EUTS and also simply because methodologically and structurally within the CDM they are no longer really feasible. We will also see, as I've said, that China and India and a few other countries will dominate the pipeline to some extent. So what happened? What happened to all these projects? How did the CDM actually benefit and what were the design objectives and how have they actually been realised to some extent? Parties got together in the early days and said, well, we're going to agree on this instrument and now the question is, has it really benefited? And some of these benefits are shown, for example, in the happy faces on these pictures, which we launch every now and again in a photo competition. People send in pictures and say, well, I'd like to demonstrate what's happening here. And in other areas, there's a lot of criticism, of course. Yung Fu has mentioned, of course, that the governance has been mentioned this morning also that the market itself is also suffering from an oversupply scenario. So geographic distribution. As I've said already, there's an unequal distribution of projects of the 129 projects with a designated national authority who's there to authorise and agree to the projects at a country level. 50 do not have registered projects. 50 countries do not have registered projects. 27 out of 48, just under half of countries with a DNA, have no registered projects. 25 of the 41 of the LDCs with a DNA, LDC countries, less developed countries, have no registered projects. Well, why? Some high-income countries may have no interest in the CDM, for example. They don't need necessarily carbon finance. Countries affected by domestic unrest and war may find it difficult to implement them. There are also 21 countries without any DNA at all yet. What we found is that the projects tend to follow the mitigation potential in the country. So that's why it's really key to also address the issues of suppressed demand. And that's been done to some extent now in some of the new rules that are coming out and working. We did however found statistically that there is a weak financial sector, limited supply of funds and domestic investment limits CDM activity considerably in many countries, in particular in LDCs and in Africa. So therefore, financial infrastructure, de-risking, instrumentation, et cetera, is needed and capacity building in that area. We also looked at sustainable development claims. So the projects themselves, they send in the documentation to us and we go through it. The Board eventually agrees or disagrees to issue or register the project. But in doing so, they actually describe to some extent in quite detail what's actually happening from a non-greenhouse gas benefit point of view. So a co-benefit essentially. Issues such as stimulation of the local economy, promotion of a rival energy, improvement of health, et cetera. And what we found, and by the way, these are just claims. So to some extent we verified them through a survey, but essentially anybody could be saying anything. But it does provide some insight into really what's happening, or at least what's being claimed to happen on the ground from a contribution or assisting sustainable development on the ground. And as you can see, there are primarily economic and environmental benefits that are claimed, certainly within the projects mostly. In particular, the most prominent being the stimulation of the local economy, reduction of pollution, promotion of renewable energy and energy access. So that's one area where I think it's relatively new in terms of findings. And unfortunately the data needs still to be verified. There's a lot of work that needs to be done on this. And we're now engaging with some scientists to look at doing that. We also found that through the claims themselves, it actually provides an expression of the sustainable development goals in the country. So what's happening through the approval of the project at the DNA level, you're actually getting a quasi-expression of the sustainable development goals for those countries. So in a way, as I said, it's a bit of a window on the world, in a sense. And as you can see, the host country has a significant effect on the mix and balance of both the dimension, environmental, social, and economic, and also, of course, the effect on the actual indicator themselves. Moving on to an aspect of sustainable development, in particular the transfer of technology. Now, this was not necessarily a goal of the CDM, but it was something that sort of came out of the CDM in a sense of what we saw was there is a very strong and relatively reliable way of, well, put it this way, a message coming from the projects to show that there has been transfer of technology. And what you see in this graph is fundamentally a decline over time in the transfer of technology for the big three countries and relatively stable transfers of technology for any other country. It indicates that on average about 40% of all projects are claiming to transfer technology. On average, they tend to be large projects that do transfer the technology. The rate of transfer has obviously been lower for larger projects, sorry, a more common project like Cement, where the technologies are more mature, so you don't necessarily need the transfer of technology across international borders. And as I've said, the frequency of technology has declined over time. And this basically has indicated to some extent and is still being tested to some extent that the CDM has helped, not been the only driver, but has helped in growing the expert base within the country. It's been the initiator to some extent, or the catalyst. The transfer of technologies used by CDM projects appears to be happening through other channels as well, for example, via licensing, foreign direct investment, research and development networks, mergers and acquisitions, recruitment of foreign experts, et cetera. And this has been shown through work done with patent data at the OECD, who we are also working with closely. Finally, the change in the mix of registered projects over time will also affect transfer of technology. We also did some rather intensive statistical work, which is available in last year's report and the report after that available on the CDM website, where we found that GDP per capita, foreign direct investment, renewable share of electricity generation and knowledge stock are a host country characters that have a significant impact on sustainable development, sorry, on transfer of technology. And these are these changes, or these characteristics, if they tend to change, they would have a relatively quick effect on the transfer of technology over time. We did some time lag tests on that and found that within periods of two to three years, if any of these indicators are changing radically, it has a massive effect on the transfer of technology rates. Can we check this again also with using another measure namely patents? In the project design documents, you also get to understand who's supplying the technology. And so we were able to show in a previous report and we'll do so now where this technology is coming from, primarily annex one of course, but increasingly a large section of the technology is also supplied from within the countries where the projects are taking place. Particularly as you know, in the wind sector in China, it has predominantly, and Soran may touch on this after me, from local content. In total investment was something else we looked at. What has been the total investment on the ground in terms of projects? And taking the total investment at the current portfolio, which was about June this year, it's about $215 billion have been invested in infrastructure in those countries. This may not necessarily be additional investment, but it is the quoted investment as stated in all the documents. And we then looked at how much of that is actually operating. So there may be projects on the ground that are not actually running. They may just be paper-based. They may have discontinued. They may have gone to another financing structure or maybe just not occur at all. And of those projects that we know are actually operating, i.e. they've really sent a message to us to say we want the CERs. Fundamentally, there's about $92 billion in operational investment to date. This investment is typically occurring once again in eastern Asia to a large extent. The type, the comparison between non-NX1 and non-NX1 countries in terms of the project level, these graphs compare the average capacity per project by project type for CDM and non-CDM projects. With the exception of solar thermal power projects, CDM projects are larger than similar non-CDM projects, often three, four times in size. Capital intensity on the lower graph is the average capital investment per unit of capacity, basically. And with the exception of hydropower, CDM projects are 15% to 50% less capital intensive than similar NX1 projects. So this may be due to economies of scale, which we're looking at to some extent to try and work out. For some technologies, larger projects have a lower capital investment per unit capacity. And these projects in the developing countries may also benefit, of course, from lower labor costs as well, so that may be a reason why. NX1 countries' projects tend to be much more capital intensive than CDM projects. And this is an overall capital investment is increasing. This is just the renewable sector, by the way. And what we've seen is an increase of late since 2009, 2010 overall for both CDM and non-CDM or NX1 projects as well. This graph is rather complex, but here we're looking at the share of domestic versus foreign financing. So where is it coming from? Is it coming from the actual host countries themselves or is there foreign financial flow? What we're seeing is on average 90% of CDM projects are domestically financed. That means it's really key to address domestic finance issues in regional distribution and trying to regionally expand the CDM or any carbon market mechanism per se. And 65% of NX1 projects are domestically financed, often in both cases with multiple sources of financing, which is very complex to work out. Although the dominant trend in this figure is increasing foreign investment for both CDM and NX1 over time, we've observed an inverse relationship between the share of foreign investment in renewable energy projects and renewable energy projects in NX1 countries. This suggests that some of the foreign investment available for renewable energy projects may shift between NX1 and non-NX1 projects as conditions in those countries change. Using the 90% and applying it to the $215 billion around about 10% or $2121 to $40 billion of foreign investment has actually flowed as a result of the CDM one could probably say. So what has been the savings also? That was one of the things for NX1. What NX1 countries embarking on and taking part in the CDM and its approach. And basically the estimated savings we've been able to calculate through the gap between the pricing structures, the compliance use of CEOS by EU tests installations, for example, the total amount of savings for NX1 parties to date is about $3.6 billion. This is quite a sizable number and it's portioned into various parts at the moment. So where do we go from here? From a future perspective, market trends, as I've said, an incredible build-up of carbon market mechanisms worldwide. The negotiations that are going to occur in Doha and Qatar are relatively important for the carbon markets. There's going to be a lot of discussion on developing new markets, frameworks around trying to incorporate all these different players and market mechanisms. It's likely that these new markets, these emerging markets will compete with and or perhaps even merge in with the CDM. The supply and demand side on established, for example, the EUTS, is impacting the CDM as we see it today. Some of these markets emerging in the world over look like, for example, the Australian carbon pricing mechanism, which is linking up now with the EUTS, which is now affected to some extent the demand on CRs considerably was likely to. China is certainly working in a voluntary scheme and is likely to take up a lot of the supply of CRs as it builds its systems. And there's various others that I won't go into now for time reasons. As I said, supply and demand is a very difficult thing to work out. A healthy post-2012 carbon market depends on robust demand. So basically, commitments from countries to provide a strong supporting price signal incentivizing investment in mitigation and clean technologies. So therefore, it's highly reliant on the supply and demand as tied to mitigation targets. CDM is likely to remain a major offset supply until 2020, assuming, of course, some of the recommendations that have been put forward by the CDM policy dialogue also to some extent looked at or maybe even decided to be implemented. We've been asked by the CDM executive board to take that policy dialogue, which was a big study of the CDM over the first six months of this year and see how much can actually be implemented within the current rule system and how much can't, where there may be legal differences. So I think that's round about it for my presentation. We're expecting quite a lot of work in Doha on various parts of the negotiation process. I'm not going to go into that now. Certainly from a carbon market perspective, there's two things on the table at the moment. The new market-based mechanisms where modalities of procedures and rules and whatnot have been designed. And we're feeding a lot of what we've learned from the CDM into that, where we can, and helping policy to be at least informed. And then there's the framework for various approaches. So building in the green slide that you saw earlier of all the approaches to try and provide a hopefully international carbon market. Then there's the discussion on the start of the second commitment period under the Curio protocol, how long that's going to be, who's going to be signing up to it, et cetera. And then, of course, the Durban platform, which is a new platform launched to replace the LCA. There's still early days as to see where this is going likely to be resolved to some extent from at least an agenda-wise point of view in Doha. Conclusions, time of intense development in the carbon market area. A lot of institutional building has taken place and still needs to take place. The changes of the environment for both the CDM and other markets is clearly dynamic. There is a clear need for co-financing of carbon finance. It can't exist on its own. The CDM is a good reference. As I said, it's a window on the world to some extent. And we should not lose sight of some of that. Certainly, what has happened in the Curio protocol and these mechanisms provides us with carbon accounting and reporting and sort of a flight deck of what's really happening worldwide in terms of mitigation action and adaptation. A lot to discuss, a lot to say. I've tried to pack it into too many slides as you can see and that's all from my side. Thank you.


You find the hottest hype up asset could be the stock doesn't mean you pay the top price for that What you do is you wait you identify the hot assets that you want to buy then you wait for a dip The trend is still up on those things doesn't mean that you stop buying you just wait for the dip within that


Lady of the moment, the lady of everything, she's just up there right now, this is Cloud9, Jennifer Gatero, the producer. Hi, beautiful. Why? How are you doing? How is everything? I am good, first of all. You look really stunning. Thank you. I thank you, Sana. I am getting out of the black, mimee. Black and white, to close out, close out. Hello, K. Hello. Anyway, beautiful. Thank you so much. First of all, I'd love to know, what made you choose Nairobi as the name of the film? What story are you trying to tell? Okay, so the movie was originally called Nairobi, but it brought a little bit of issues, so I decided, because I don't want anything to be issues with this movie, I decided to change the name to Nairobi. And so the reason why I am being the name Nairobi is because I think it just encompasses what this movie is about. It's about Nairobi as a hasla, it's a hasla city, it's a hasla nation, everyone is trying to get by, everyone is trying to make a living for themselves. So it's just Nairobi. And when you watch the movie, I think you'll understand. Okay, and you know there's Nairobi and there was Nairobi Half Life. Is there anything that's similar to those two? No, I mean I don't think they're similar at all. Like in terms of the storyline, it's quite different actually. It's quite different, yeah. So I'd love to ask you, the cast are very, I'd call them new faces. I don't know about the experience at all, but new faces, why not the oldies? Why new faces? You know, I'm a director who likes to give people a chance, people who've never been on TV, so whenever I do casting, I always try to do open casting calls so that I can find people who have never been exposed, have never acted, and the people that I have now almost actually pretty much all of them are new faces and they are amazing. Like they carried my story, they had my script, they carried my story and they did such a good job. And I think with this way that I prove to people that you don't have to keep, you can also try new talent because there's a lot of talent in Kenya, so much talent in Kenya. So sometimes people should go out there and look for that talent because it's there in plenty, in plenty. So I'd love to know, what was the biggest risk you have taken as the producer for Nairobi? Even when it comes to the production, the whole thing, the whole movie was a risk. The whole movie was a risk because when I decided to do this movie, I didn't have the budget for it. Actually, I didn't have any money at all. I had to put up a post on Facebook and I was like, yo, does someone want to help me finance a movie? Because that's how I got my first finance, actually through Facebook. So yes, through a Facebook post. Yeah, so it's basically the whole thing was a risk because I had no idea that we would get here. Because now walking into this place, I'm like, are you kidding me? I know, the place is packed and guys are here and it all started with a vision that I didn't even know how I was going to carry it out. So we got my first post and now we're here. And it's so exciting for me. And this is my first film. So, wow, congratulations. First film and the tell-up is amazing. There are so many guest stars.   It's not all the time that our first film just does this good. Because it's doing this good and we have not even yet seen the premiere, you know, we haven't seen the movie itself. So I'd love to ask you, what's the need? What's the need? See, come on, what's the need?  And when it comes to their work and, you know, comparing their work and their pay, at times they complain. For Nairobi, how was that? So for Nairobi, everyone in this movie is a co-owner of the movie. So what that means is everyone has a percentage. And so, well, if the movie does well, oh, sorry. Okay, so now how it is in Nairobi is that everyone here, even that you see is the cast and crew, are co-owners of this movie. They all have percentages. I paid people with percentages, which means that the pay depends on how the movie does because we all own it together. So the movie does well. It does well. If the movie doesn't do well, then it doesn't do well. But because everyone is an owner of this movie, then it means that we're all in this together. We win together. So that's what it is. And also, we have, you know, our Kenyan stars. Actually, actors don't really have that much recognition in Kenya. But in Tanzania, there's so much recognition that comes to actors. What do you feel like our industry, our audience should change? I think the audience are getting better because, you know, before, we didn't have so much of an audience that we're consuming so much of local content. But our audience is getting better and better as time goes by. And it's as such producers as well to give them content that's good enough for them to watch. Because Kenyan audience are very discerning audience and they want the best quality. Yeah, they're used to watching a kind of Game of Thrones and whatever. So we may never get to that level or we may take us all together at that level. But if we deliver to them something that's good, the good storyline and everything, then the audience as well will start to reciprocate with love. So for a young producer, for a young artist out there, you as a producer know challenges that you've gone through. You know how hard it is, you know the risks you have to take? Kind of give them a word of advice. Okay, so young producers out there, the first thing I want to say is just produce, produce. You have your phone, you have YouTube. Right now the world is open, the world isn't the way that it used to be. This girl for insecure started by doing a website with her phone and then got a deal with HBO.  Therefore I can't do something. So just do it. Just start with what you have and don't start telling yourself, I don't have this or I don't have that. Just start with what you have. If your phone is what you have, go ahead with it. Thank you so much, beautiful. This is an amazing premiere. Everything else looks so nice. The arrangements, just everything in general is amazing. I'm so sure the movie is going to be a total success. Because you know, there is so much that is riding on it. And thank you so much for your time. Again, you look amazing. I can't wait to watch the movie.


Welcome, everyone, to today's Google Webmaster Hangout. My name is John Moore. I am a webmaster trainer here at Google in Switzerland. And part of what we do is these Webmaster OfficeHour Hangouts. As always, if you're new to these Hangouts and want to get your first questions in, you're free to jump on in now. All right, John, I'm not bashful. How can you hear me? Hello? OK, AMP is my question. I've got some AMP pages I'm building, making a mirror of my HTML site. My question is, I understand that the reciprocal canonical and AMP HTML link that each page must have. What I don't understand or what I'm curious about is the navigation within the site itself. If I have an AMP page, should those AMP pages be pointing to the other AMP pages, or does it matter at all? That's usually up to you. So you can link to your other AMP pages. If you want, you can link to your normal mobile pages. If you have a responsive pages, link to those pages, that's kind of up to you. So the tricky thing there, I guess, is that you need to make sure that you're linking to something on your site. Because if you just leave it, if you point to the cached AMP pages, then there's no guarantee that those cached pages will actually exist already. So in any case, when they click on a link in the cached page, they'll go to your site somewhere. OK, so from an SEO perspective, it doesn't matter. As long as you're connected within your site, absolutely. OK, thank you. Joan, can I step in with the question, please? Sure, go for it. I want to know if anything changed within the mobile version, because I want to know if it's OK to hide the breadcrumb navigation for mobile version. Because it takes a lot of space. And of course, I know for sure that in the past, we could even change some of the content to make the mobile version to look more appealing. Is that the case? So now can I? At the moment, we use the desktop version for indexing. So it wouldn't matter what you show or hide on the mobile version. With the change to mobile-first indexing, it's more of a matter of what you actually have on the mobile version. So at the moment, we haven't nailed down the exact suggestions or recommendations or requirements specifically for structured data on mobile versions. It's very possible that we'll say you can simplify the UI on mobile pages and still specify the full breadcrumb markup on those pages. So I don't have anything nailed down yet. I understand. Do you know when it's going to be live, the mobile version first index? It's pre-programmed? We don't have a fixed timeline. So the team is currently looking at it in the way that they want to roll this out step by step. And that means we'll look at sites individually. And if they're ready for the mobile-first index, if that works for them, we'll switch them over to the mobile-first indexing. And those that aren't ready yet will wait a bit longer. But we'll have more to announce around that later on. So, of course, these parts with hiding or showing the breadcrumb and hiding and showing some of the content will be announced also because right now it's not defined. Thank you very much. John. John. John. John. John? Sorry, my husband's also called. John, he's shouting. I'm here. Sorry. You know what you said about the staging system like a staging system of adding people to the mobile-first index. Will people that are kind of for the next phase or their sites deemed as ready, will they be notified perhaps by Webmaster Tools or will it just happen for them and not for everybody else? Perhaps. So if there is something useful that we can tell them about that, then we'll try to tell them. If it's just we changed something internally and now we're counting your site differently but everything is the same, then there's nothing really to kind of tell them about. So if you're on a responsive site and we index the mobile version, then nothing changes. Yeah, because it might stop the whole like the sky is falling in, mobile-getting thing. If people just don't have it all up at once and they know about it, do you know what I mean? Like when the tax man has put you onto a staging scheme for a certain change, they'll sort of do people in batches and stuff and it stops the chaos. Yeah, I think as much as possible, we want to let people know what's happening so that they're not surprised by things. But it's still a matter of messaging overload. I think some sites get a ton of messages through Search Console, some sites kind of panic when they suddenly get a message from Search Console and finding the right balances is not that easy. But it's definitely something we'll expect, especially if there's something that we can tell people to kind of help them get them on the right path. Prepare, yes. Thank you. That's great. I'll stop right now. Cheers. All right. Cyrus, I think you've been trying to get in. Yeah, hello. Hey, thank you. I was wondering about near-duplicate comparison sites. For instance, if you had a couple of very, very, very similar sites, but not quite, like where just certain things differ on those sites, how would you address these duplicate content issues if there are any? So across different websites or different ones? On one website, if you had dozens of sites where different elements just differ and you had one with a check mark here and a check mark here and there, you had a cross instead, where it shows that you had certain features on one product and one without these features. Because I fear that this is getting a bit of a duplicate content issue, or the product might be too similar to really stand for themselves. Yeah, I think that's really the main point that you touched upon. It's not so much duplicate content that we would penalize a site for having these very similar pages, but it's very often just the case that these pages don't stand by themselves. And that makes it hard for us to rank them appropriately. So if, for example, in extreme case you have a shoe store and every shoe size is a different page, then those pages have to rank on their own and they have to collect links on their own and they're competing against each other in the search results. So that's something where you're diluting things quite a bit and you're making it harder for your content to be visible. Whereas if you had one page as really strong for this type of shoe and all of the different sizes are just attributes shown on that page, then that makes that page much, much stronger. But it's not something where there is a clear guide that all sites have to follow. For some sites, it makes sense to be more granular and to have more specific pages. For other sites, it makes sense to have very broad pages where you maybe have a lot of very different products. So you want to make sure that, I don't know, all of your sport shoes are on one page, for example. Because would it make sense to no index pages then? I wouldn't recommend no indexing them because then you're still competing with these other pages. It's just that the other pages are not shown in search. It's better generally to use the rel canonical and say, this is my preferred page for this topic. And all of these variations essentially fold up into this preferred main page. But doesn't the canonical stand for, if you showed different, let's say, review pages or such for one and the same product, wouldn't it count as different content for this specific review? These are different reviews, though, aren't they? Well, if they're different things, then they're different things. And I would keep them separate. But if it's the same thing, just variations of the same thing, then it's something that you could fold together. One more question, please. About no indexing pages at all, do you think that is for category pages, does that make sense? Like if you had lots of news, for instance, and a vast network of sites. And for instance, you had the old news which are outdated. And then you would just no index them so that they wouldn't be shown anymore. That's totally up to you. You can do that if you want. If you think these are pages that aren't relevant for search anymore, totally up to you. I think that's generally a good strategy if you constantly rethink what you want to provide in search and to say, I want to focus on this. And all of these other things are things I did in the past, but they're not important now. And I will cut them out. That's always a good strategy to keep the garden clean and to focus on the things that you really want to have shown in the foreground. Fair enough. Thank you very much. Sure. All right. Let me run through some of the submitted questions. And I'm sure we'll have more time for questions from you alive as well. And as always, if there are comments in between, from any of you, feel free to jump on in. All right. You mentioned previously that when the mobile index comes out, it can affect the results of desktop search. Are you therefore saying that a bad mobile site can have a negative effect on desktop search? Yes. Theoretically, it can. So if your mobile pages exist and your mobile pages don't have any of the actual content that your desktop pages have, then when we start indexing the mobile version instead of the desktop version, then we'll lose all of that content. And it'll be really hard for us to show your website in desktop search or on mobile search appropriately. So these are the type of things where it makes sense to make sure that really your mobile site is equivalent to your desktop site. And that's something we've been recommending since the start, essentially, that these should be equivalent. And people should be able to do the same things on both of these sites. Like I mentioned in the beginning, we do want to try to recognize well-working mobile sites and separate those from not so well-working mobile sites so that we don't switch them over immediately. But it's something where sometimes these differences are subtle and hard for us to recognize. So that's still something that I'd recommend kind of looking into and double checking how your mobile site is set up. So there's still a time to fix everything around half a year? Yeah. I mean, a lot of these are issues that we've been bringing up for a while. So one issue that I know the team ran into recently is one of the sites they were double checking had an end-to-one redirect issue. So that basically means that any page that you open on your desktop page, when you open that URL on a mobile phone, it redirects to a single page that says, hey, this is our mobile website. Thank you for visiting all of this. So basically, if we switch to mobile-first indexing, then the whole website would be replaced by this single one page. And that's the kind of issue that we've been flagging in Search Console. We send messages in Search Console about that because it's also bad for mobile users in general. But that's the kind of issue we try to recognize ahead of time to prevent it from causing problems. But obviously, there might be subtle variations of that that we can't recognize, that you do need to solve on your own. So ideally, if you have the chance, use some of the SEO tools that support mobile crawlers. If not, definitely use a mobile phone to navigate your website. And if you don't want to use a phone, then you can also use a lot of the browsers have the ability to change the user agent and the design to also match the mobile UI. So, for example, Chrome has a nice option for that. But anything you can do to really make sure that your mobile site works just as well as your desktop site, that's kind of what I'd aim for. And I think there might even be some extreme cases where you say, well, my mobile site is so terrible, like it's totally unusable, that it might make sense to even switch off the mobile site and say, I'll just keep my desktop site, users on mobile phones can still use my desktop site, it still works, it's not great, but at least they can do everything there. And if we have a desktop site to index for mobile first indexing, that works just as well. But believe it or not, I'm still finding out that people don't know what Webmaster Tools is and where do I find my messages and how do I get there? Yeah, that's definitely a challenge sometimes. I always say, do you know where your car keys are? That's pretty much your password, it's your website. You know, they're like, oh really? But it's also understandable, like this is the type of thing that you need when you have problems, if you don't have problems with your website and like why bother looking into all of these crazy tools that are out there?  That's something that I think will happen anyway. Yeah, okay. For the most part, I think we're pretty good at recognizing sites that do well with the mobile first indexing and we can kind of handle that switch properly. So I don't expect this to be a big thing and I assume this kind of subtle transition is going to take quite some time until we kind of force the last person to switch over and hopefully that'll give people time to actually clean things up and fix some of the mobile problems where essentially a lot of people are already on mobile and they're running into the same problems already. So it's not. Well, sites that are not, sites that don't have the M.dot without the M.dot and sites that are not mobile friendly, will they be impacted as well? The just the one domain, like the whole site without? If there's only a desktop version of the site, we'll just index the desktop version. If it's not mobile friendly, and if it's not mobile friendly, what's gonna happen? If we only have a desktop version, then we'll just index that. So that's, I don't see any problem there. It's almost better for sites not to have a mobile version than to have a really bad mobile version. So that's kind of tricky to bring across sometimes, but it's something where if you use your phone to use your site to try to do a conversion to buy something from your site, to try to contact them through a contact form, then a lot of these issues are just so obvious that you wonder how people even manage on mobile phones. But yeah, try it out and... Your eyes open. All right, totally different question. We've been tidying up our citations. How important is having accurate maps listing on third-party citation sites as well as name, address, phone on, opposed to just making sure the maps listing on Google My Business is correct? So this is mostly, I think, with regards to the local search results on the maps listing. So that's not something from a search point of view that we would worry about too much. So from personal point of view, I think it's worthwhile to clean these things up because sometimes you run across situations where things clash, like opening hours say it's open and this site says it's closed, which is correct. That's kind of confusing to users, but from a search point of view, it's less of an issue. It's really more a matter of the map side where they try to use this kind of metadata. We offer services within a 10-mile radius of our branch. So this kind of goes into the same type of question. I don't have any advice with regards to Google My Business listings. That's something where you'd need to ask in the Google My Business forum. Can the alt image text have any bearing on the algorithms affecting desktop search results? Or is it only used for image search? Yes, it can. So the alt text is essentially shown when the images are turned off in most browsers. So that's something that we would count as part of the on-page text. So if there's something in the alt text that you don't want to have associated with your site at all, then obviously we might still show that in desktop search. And people with accessibility, of course. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense.  Some people have screen readers. Even on mobile phones, they have screen readers that try to read out the text that's shown, the alt text that's kind of behind the image. So using alt text is a great idea. I mean, it's just part of the content like anything else on a page. Excuse me? Are you saying that if the alt text is actually that important, do you think that the title attribute might be getting more important again? Like, for links or such? Image, I guess. Huh? For the image, do you mean? No, for regular links or like for anything. Basically, you could put a title attribute to anything, couldn't you? As far as I know, we do use that. But it's... Yeah, we can add context, John. Add context. I mean, it's kind of like additional anchor text, essentially, for whatever is embedded. And we do use that on the page as well. So as far as I know, that's just something on the page. All right. Also, the alt text thing is something that I specifically heard about from the mobile first indexing team as well, in that a lot of sites don't use alt text for images on mobile pages. And for us, that is a big loss of context, where especially for image search, we do use the alt text quite a bit to understand the images better. And if we switch to mobile first indexing, and we can see the images, but we lose all of the alt text, then that's a big loss of context there. So when you're viewing sites for mobile first indexing, I'd really recommend making sure that the alt text for images is there, that the images are embedded as well, so that we can actually get those images normally and use normal image search and show those images there as well. Isn't, John, isn't there like quite a huge amount of evidence as well that on mobile, people use images loads to do. Yeah, there is quite a lot of evidence in research. I have no idea. Yeah, no, mobile is mobile in images. Mobile? Do you feel? I don't know. I'll find the stuff, but it's a big deal anymore. Yeah, but this is something where, especially with mobile first indexing, apparently we notice that a lot of mobile sites, they don't use alt text. So they assume that it's important for mobile devices, but it is important for those that use screen readers and it's a best practice in general and it does make a difference for mobile first indexing for us. How do you handle alt text spam when they abuse that? Do you ignore that? Kind of the same as any other kind of keyword stuffing on a page. So it happens, we deal with it. It's been around for a long time. Sometimes it's pretty crazy when you look at the pages and it's this nice image and the text on a page is normal and then the alt text for the image is a big paragraph. Crazy. All right. Can adding tags or categorizing the blog section of your website help with regards to SEO and how your site is perceived by Google? Currently all we do is we link similar articles together and have links to relevant articles on language pages, but nothing more. So adding more context between pages is always a good idea, I think. So if you have category pages that you feel stand on their own and should be indexed like that, that can make sense. Some sites go a bit overboard and that they create like hundreds and thousands of tag pages that don't really provide a lot of value to users and probably that's worth blocking. But if you're doing something reasonable and these category and tag pages make sense for your users, then why not? It was you, I think, and I think it was you and Gary. I'm not sure where it was, but you were saying, don't block. Oh, it was an interview. But you were saying, don't block the tag pages because then Googlebot can understand all of that. So if you're running CMS, so with a lot of tag pages, don't block anything we understand. For the first part, I think we picked that up properly. Sometimes tag pages essentially turn into search results and that's something that we'd want to have blocked because they don't provide any additional value. Why would you do them anyway? Why would you do them if they were just like, I've seen them, I've looked at sites where people just go absolutely nuts the minute that they can add tags and they just add ridiculous generic words like their own name and the one at one. They're just anything that just enters their head and they're just rubbish. So I think that's the point really. Yeah, yeah. The block is to simplify SEO.  Yeah, I guess we could simplify SEO into be reasonable. Yeah, that's irrelevant. Yeah. So if there's a lot of tags, then you do the site colon and then whatever, abc.com and then take a look at everything and then if there's a lot of tags, you're saying block, it's worth blocking. I mean, it's something where you need to look at what's actually happening there. And sometimes it makes sense to no index some of those. Sometimes it makes sense to no index all of them. Sometimes it makes sense just to keep them all but that's something where you kind of have to use your own judgment and think about like if someone were to land on this specific page, am I providing anything of value for that keyword? Or is this basically just like trying to rank for gazillion keywords but not really rank in a way that people will have value from visiting them. One more question regarding the no ODP tag, is it like landing on the graveyard of meta tags like the keyword tag? I think it already is, yeah. So I think we already stopped using, I'm not a hundred percent sure but at least we don't have the data anymore so it's kind of gone now. And I think we did a blog post about that where you end making sure that your titles and descriptions are actually useful on your page because without the DMOZ data we don't have those additional sources of titles and descriptions. All right, let me run through some more of the submitted questions and maybe we'll have more time for questions from you all as well. When Google looks at the importance of content on a page as a location of that content above the fold matter for the most part, no. But this is something where I think the usability aspect has a much stronger effect than the SEO side where if people land on these pages and they can't find what they were actually looking for they're not gonna do anything on your page. So any ranking that that page gets is kind of irrelevant because users are not going to convert and do something useful on your side. Content behind fold, behind tabs still going to be discounted on mobile site like it is for desktop. And no, the current plan is to treat content on mobile in a way that even if it's behind a tab or behind kind of a user interface element that will counter this normal content on the page just because on mobile the UI is obviously much more limited. So there are fewer opportunities to do that differently. Is it against Google's guidelines to mark up reviews with micro data that are gathered by a company through websites like TrustPilot specifically rating stars for local businesses. What's up with that? So I double check with the team. Let me just pull out my email so that I make sure I say it correctly. So from our point of view using reviews on third party sites is fine. The things you should be aware of is you need to reference the third party source. So kind of link to the reviews so that people know where they're coming from. You need to make sure that what you mark up on your pages stays in sync with what the third party has. So kind of the, if you're using a widget that probably works automatically and you need to make sure that you're using this markup only where it's really appropriate. So essentially using the markup on pages that are specifically about that item that you're marking up. So for example, if you have a company-based reviews and you're on a webpage about one of your products then the company reviews would not be relevant to that specific product. On the other hand, if you have a page about your company and you have reviews for your company then that would kind of fit. But it really kind of like with rich snippets and structured data markup in general it should be appropriate to the type of page that you're actually on. Hi, John. Hi. Hi, just have a question about some of the sites we have. So with the mobile first index we currently have a site which when viewed by desktop user agents you've got all of the HTML links but then when resized to mobile view with a mobile user agent you don't see these links because we have JavaScript for accessibility. Now we just wanted to know how we should handle this, whether or not we should be including, for example, the links in the source of the page so that they can be crawled. And so when we simulate a crawl with a mobile user agent all of the pages can be accessed or whether or not maybe you will be able to crawl the JavaScript, what we should be doing essentially. If we can crawl the JavaScript and render the page with those links from the JavaScript then that's okay for us. On the other hand, if the JavaScript doesn't actually include the links to those other pages when it's kind of accessed with a mobile device then we wouldn't have any links to the other pages. So that would be kind of a loss. But the JavaScript executes and it generates these A elements in the DOM and they're just not visible on mobile or they're visible when you kind of like hit the tab to open that then that's fine. Okay, and what's your view on, for example, having these HTML links in the source of the page so they're also accessible? Perfect, yeah, I mean that's the easiest solution. If you can do it like that then you don't have to worry anyway because it's in the HTML, we see it in the HTML, we see those links. That's perfectly fine. Even if they're hidden, they're not like when you resize they're not actually on the page but they're hidden, that's fine. I mean, I just make sure that from a usability point of view your site still works. It's not that you're removing all navigation and users are stuck on that one page. Okay, great, thanks. All right, on our news blog section all the articles are put into an archive date folder. Should these links be no index, no follow given that in effect duplicate content. Again, that's totally up to you. Sometimes it makes sense to have archive pages index, sometimes it makes sense to no index them, sometimes it makes sense to just show a snippet on these archive pages so that you actually have the full content on the individual articles themselves. That's really kind of up to you how you want to deal with this. If tons of canonical URLs are pointing to one common page, is that harmful? No, not necessarily. The one situation where I have seen that be problematic is if all of the URLs on your website have a canonical to the homepage of the website then essentially our systems kind of realize that something is probably wrong with the way Dwell canonical is implemented here and we'll probably try to ignore that that's set up on those pages. But if you just have a lot of different parameter URLs and you're using tracking URLs for different traffic sources or have session IDs or anything like that where you have tons of URLs but actually it's just always the same content and it can be simplified to a cleaner URL then that's perfect use of rel canonical. Hi John, just to ask this question. So we have this page is similar to that one but the thing is like it is not by the, you can say by the family it is something like it is like by the sorting option. So maybe it is a color or maybe it is a type of fabric. So ultimately the product is the same basically it's the listing page but I mean the differentiation between them is it colors or maybe you can say size. So something like that. Is it good I get to like apply canonical to these pages to my what a problem parent main page. Good. For variations of a product if you wanted to. The thing to keep in mind with the rel canonical is we will focus on that one canonical URL for indexing. So if you have one page for a red shoe, one page for a blue shoe, one page for a green shoe and your canonical is the red shoe, then if someone is searching for a blue shoe we'll just have the red shoe in our index. So that's kind of it's essentially up to you if you want to do it like that. My recommendation is really to have a canonical page be equivalent to the other pages so that when we index your canonical URL that has all of the content that provides all of the information that we need for search. John, I'm sorry, I bought it in here. Sorry, I'm gonna go in a minute. I was reading about that and I was thinking about canonicalization last week. You know, I was looking at the all the RFC papers and it was kind of quite clear really that it either has to be duplicative or a superset. So ultimately you have to, the context URI or IRI or whatever has to basically refer to something that includes what you're referring from. So like a Russian doll type thing. So as you said with the red shoes, blue shoes, et cetera if the page about shoes includes red shoes, blue shoes, green shoes and all the different shoe sizes that would be that you could canonicalize the shoes because actually if there's a section on red shoes, blue shoes, green shoes in there that's basically correct, isn't it? It's like a superset. Yeah, yeah, I mean that's a perfect use case. That's kind of like a view all page I guess in the case of pagination. It's some sites still do it kind of the theoretically wrong way in that they pick one of these versions and say this is the canonical and systems will just follow that but they have to be aware that when they do follow that they'll lose kind of the faceted information that's not on the canonical page. So whatever you're, whatever you canonicalize to effectively you're saying, right well we're canonicalizing from blue shoes to red shoes because the page is the same but actually you're never gonna show up for blue shoes then. Exactly. You're gonna show up for red shoes. So you better to make a better shoe page with all the shoes in it or make a really good page with loads of blue shoes in a really good page with loads of red shoes in and focus on the topic of blue shoes or red shoes and make them stand on their own two feet. Perfect, yeah, exactly. Yeah, okay, thanks. All right, so completely different type of question. I'm considering adding an email capture modal to my site. I've had concerns around interstitial penalties would a delayed pop-up still be considered intrusive? Yes, for the mobile pop-up, mobile interstitial ranking change that we had even delayed pop-ups would be considered that. I'd recommend more doing something like a banner on top or on the bottom of the page or maybe something that happens when you navigate within your website after reading that page. So don't just delay it, don't just show the interstitial when people scroll really provide it then when they've had a chance to actually digest the content that you're providing. What's the best way to handle duplicate content in e-commerce website? Wow, lots of duplicate content questions. So I think this is kind of covered already, so different variations. Another question about duplicate content, we have a product page in Germany where we're selling it, we're not selling it in Switzerland, a partner is doing that there. They're selling it with another brand name and they have their own website. They copied our text saying that they have to change the text because of duplicate content. Let's see, should we create our own website for Germany or for Switzerland and redirect from this fake domain to their Switzerland website? So in general, this is less an issue around duplicate content but kind of around internationalization. So I wouldn't worry about the duplicate content part, that part kind of takes care of it's on its own but what you could do in a case like this where you have one product in one country and the same product under a different name in a different country is just use the hreflang markup between those pages. So it doesn't mean it matter if the product name changes, if the company name changes, if it's the equivalent product, you can use the hreflang links between those pages. So that might be an option there, especially if you're working that closely together with the other company in the other country that maybe they'd be up for doing something like that. What happens with the hreflang markup is not so much that there's a big ranking change but rather for users in the appropriate country we'll try to show the appropriate URL in the search results. So people in Switzerland would be more likely to see the Swiss URL and people in Germany more likely to see the German URL even from a ranking point of view it might be slightly different. I'm looking at using the free CDN by Cloudflare. Would this affect my SEO images or indexing? CDNs are perfectly fine. Cloudflare is fairly well known. So I assume that there's no issue there with regards to any of these problems. On the other hand, it's something where crawling will be a bit faster probably. It might take a bit of time for us to pick up on the new crawl rate and for users, of course, it's something where if your site is faster you'll probably see more indirect effects there and that people stick around on your website more. They click around, they convert a little bit better. So that seems like a good step. I spotted one something the other day on that John because I just added Cloudflare, Railgun, Rocketloader and all sorts of things. And I was doing some testing on the various tools, GT Metrics, Pingdom, blah, blah, and Google Search, PageSpeed Insights. PageSpeed Insights, Gary kind of confirmed that it doesn't pick up on all the Cloudflare optimizations that you make at this moment in time. And then GT Metrics came in and explained the reasons why. So that's one thing that people maybe should know about Cloudflare. If you're trying to optimize it for speed, which is often what people are doing it for, when you go and check it with PageSpeed Insights it'll still show up as pretty slow. But when you check it with other tools, it will show up like A and B and stuff. Yeah, I mean, these are all tools. It's not a machine that's happening behind the scenes. You kind of have to know what these tools are doing to interpret their output. And sometimes it's easy to take something that's like a grade from A to F and just say, oh, I'm doing good. I don't have to do anything. But usually it's more important to actually understand what actually is being tested and what that actually means. It might so mean that there are things that you need to do. It might mean that you're actually doing things fairly well. It's something that you kind of, I don't know, you have to have a lot of knowledge to also interpret the tools. Can I ask you a question since we're in the CDN topic. Does Varnish have an impact on ranking? I don't think so. So Varnish is pretty caching. You know, I'm just going to ignore all the articles out there. Almost 90% of all the SEO articles should be removed from Google. We're going to do that starting later on. Like there's just so much talk. I mean, honestly, what's the point in having these articles online? I just went through looking and also talked to this guy and he was saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. He works for a very serious hosting company. So Varnish, from what you know, has no impact on HTTPS. On HTTPS. So Varnish is just something that you can install on your server that, depending on how you set it up, can make your site faster. And of course, site faster is something that we could pick up for search or that we could pick up and kind of indirect signals for. If people stick around on your site and they tend to recommend it more because of that, then there's kind of these indirect effects as well. But I think it's important to understand that a lot of these things are not direct ranking factors where you can say, I saved 10 milliseconds here. Therefore, I'll rank, I don't know, half a position higher because of that. But they're good for users.  I imagine that depends a lot on how you set it up. I mean, just by turning a feature on doesn't necessarily mean you'll improve your site by that. So that's kind of something where, like with a lot of things, you have to kind of know what you're doing instead of just picking checkboxes and saying, oh, I heard this is a good thing. Therefore, I'll turn it on. Because if you have competing caches on your server, it could end up being that you actually slow things down or that you've barred your server down more than is necessary because maybe you have a different kind of cache that's happening outside of your server. And all of these things, you kind of have to know what you're doing, I guess, to basically pop from them. So if you're in the milliseconds, then there's no need, basically, to turn on AMP, right? Since you already have a fast website and you've got the Varnish and it's working amazingly for you, there's no need to turn on AMP, right? Well, AMP is something different because it's not just about speed. It's also about speed. If your site is fast already, you don't need AMP. I can send you the tweet. Well, it's something where AMP does a lot of different things. So it's like the AMP cache is there. The ability to preload the content, to pre-render the content above the fold so that when people click on a search result, it loads instantly. There's some search features that require the AMP markup so that we can embed the content better in search. So it's not just like a speed tweak. There are a lot of other aspects around AMP that are kind of relevant to some sites. They're not relevant to all sites. If you're loading in the US at one second and I'm loading in New Zealand at two seconds, I still need AMP, right? It's not just a speed thing. So I think that's important to keep in mind. AMP is not just the way to speed up your site. It has various aspects that are all there. The page takes quite a while to paint, for instance. So I know that on one of mine, there's like a huge image that we're looking to replace. It's like when we looked at the video, that loading, it seemed to get to the first byte reasonably quicker, even though that needs to be speeded up. But then it seems to take ages to paint and then there's just this massive image that comes in at the end. So that's kind of the thing, really, that is picked up on, isn't it, painting? That's something that could affect users as well, yeah. If like part of your page loads quickly, but actually until it's usable, it takes quite a bit of time. That could be something that users are upset about. And these are probably also things that would be interesting to test on your side, where especially if you're aware of something like a giant image slowing things down, you could set up a kind of an A-B test and say, well, here's a fast image, here's the slow original image, or maybe an artificially slow image and monitor the conversions for those different types of users. Imagine that would be a really interesting blog post to kind of follow along, too. Yeah, good idea. Excuse me. I was wondering, picking up on this, like using page speed insights, like with all my clients in the last year, like one of the main issues which I have encountered all the time was that actually Google was serving me the browser caching, like it was always complaining that browser caching from apis.google.com were not really optimized or so. And I was wondering how to address those issues. You kind of have to understand the details there, I guess, because some of these static files, especially from a larger host server, served in ways that are very optimized for specific user agents. So for example, this is something that I believe used to affect the analytics JavaScript file as well. Depending on the user agent, we would do fancy optimization with compression or not, and using a random testing tool, we wouldn't do that optimization because we weren't sure how much we could optimize for this testing tool. So that's something kind of to keep in mind there. The other thing to keep in mind is that we try not to special case Google services or scripts for these testing tools. So if you use a lot of AdSense on your pages and analytics and lots of other code from Google, we will still flag that as being slow, even if it's using Google services because for the user, it's still slow if you use a lot of these different things. So we want to avoid saying, well, this is from Google, therefore we all say it's always fantastic. We want to kind of mirror what actual users would see when they go through that. Let me double check the questions. If there's anything really kind of critical to call out that we haven't looked at in the past. One thing I guess worth mentioning, someone said that the CTPLD as a domain hack for non-English speaking country negatively affect my site in English. So for example, read.it. So from our point of view, what happens there is we will promote that site for queries that are kind of leaking content in Italy, for example, and we'll treat it as a normal site elsewhere. So if you don't mind that it's kind of being shown more in Italy, then that's generally fine. On the other hand, if you're trying to target a different country, so if you have read.it and you're trying to target users in Germany, then you need to keep in mind that you can't set up geo-targeting for that. But if this is a global site, then you can definitely do it like that. That would be fine. Yeah, wow, so many questions left. Okay. I think I probably need to take a break here. So if I didn't get to your questions and you're still really curious what the answers might be, I'd recommend either copying them to the next Hangout or maybe even just posting them in the Webmaster Help Forum and checking them out with other webmasters and the fantastic top contributors that are active in the Help forums there. So maybe I could take one more live question from one of you and then we can take a break. What happened on the weekend? What happened on the weekend? I don't know, some sun, some rain. That was an easy one. I haven't seen anything like that in a long time. Okay, so Mihai has a one in the chat. Can AMP be with the same URL as desktop and dynamic serving? Do we still use very HTTP header? What about real alternate? Yes, you could theoretically do dynamic serving for AMP content, but I suspect it's very tricky to get right and very tricky to diagnose issues with regards to that. So if possible, I'd recommend using separate URLs for AMP pages or just saying, well, my AMP is my canonical page. AMP could be a responsive page that works well on desktop as well and just using everything on AMP if that works for your pages. Is it also a problem if the headers are not set properly for HSTS, like for HTTPS? Is it also a problem if they're not set up properly? HSTS is optional. It's something you can do. Essentially, it means that you've committed to moving everything to HTTPS. So if you want to do that, that's perfectly fine. If you aren't sure about your HTTPS setup or if you're wanting to double check that everything is actually working well, then I'd wait with the HSTS setup. Okay, so if it's still there and it's not sitting correctly, that's okay with Google. Yeah. I ask if Google can detect the AMP without a real alternate. As far as I know, we need that kind of back and forth link with regards to the real alternate anyway, for AMP pages so that we can recognize, actually there's an AMP page that we can fetch here and from the AMP page to rel canonical back to the desktop page or whichever page you want to be canonical for that. So we'd need that setup. All right, let's take a break here. It seems like Mihai still has a bunch of questions specifically around AMP. Maybe you can send them by Twitter to me or post them in the Web Manager Help Forum and I can get some of the folks from the AMP team to take a look as well. There's also a dedicated AMP HTML forum that you can post these type of questions to and the AMP team is fairly active in response to that. All right, thanks a lot for jumping in. Thanks for all the questions that you speak. Really, I wish you all a great day. And I'll see you again in the future hangouts. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you.


Hold Duke Johnson. So with Hugh Jackson and Todd Haley with the Browns this year, Duke Johnson, who by the way has led running backs and receptions from 2015 through 2017, he averaged 3.6 targets per game with those two guys there. Without Jackson and Haley in week nine, Duke Johnson saw nine targets. It went from 3.6 per game to nine. Maybe this was just a match-up thing, because Kansas City entered the week ranked second in receptions allowed to running backs, and according to Number Fire's expected points model, the Chiefs also allowed a top 10 success rate to the running back position through the year. And it's not like we saw an abnormally high snap rate from Duke Johnson. He had a 46.7% rate this past weekend when he's hit that in three other games this year. And while his routes run number was one of the higher marks at the running back position in week nine, the 26 routes run, according to pro football focus, was actually on par with what we'd seen from him in weeks five, six, and seven. Now I love me some Duke Johnson. I think Duke Johnson's a really good running back. But I'm just trying to be level-headed here, because really there may be just as much of a chance that he's not back than he is back. But you don't need to bet on that this week, because in week 10, Cleveland just happens to be facing Atlanta, who have easily given up the most running back receptions over the last few seasons in the NFL. So you might want to just hold on to Duke Johnson for one more week, get his value even higher, and then just reevaluate.


We're back. This is Dave Vellante from Wikibon.org. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of sapphire now. 2012, I'm here with Jeff Kelly, Wikibon's big data analyst. Jeff, this is our third year at sapphire. You know, great events, and we're seeing the transformation of SAP. You know, SAP obviously known, Jeff, as we were talking about, for ERP and supply chain, and you know, very well known for that, but over the past couple of years we've seen a major transformation. One of those pieces of that puzzle was really the acquisition of CyBase, which when I first heard it, I said, wait a minute, what was that all about? And now we're learning, and we've learned over the past year or so, it's really about mobile. And we're here with John Sims, who's the president of CyBase 365. John, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. So tell us about CyBase 365.  Talk about that a little bit. Well, CyBase 365 is really all about mobile. That's everything we do. And we specifically focus on delivering mobile commerce solutions to our customers, cutting across a number of industries, historically focused on the telecommunications industry, mobile operators, and banks. But we're also now, because of the involvement with SAP, we're starting to expand into other industries like utilities, retail, consumer packaged goods, that kind of stuff. All focused on the consumer. Yeah, so talk about how you relate to the traditional CyBase business. I understand you guys own the whole SMS business or not own it, but you have a very large proportion of that. And that's you guys, right? Yeah, so there are really two parts to CyBase 365. There's the mobile commerce business that I mentioned a moment ago, and there's also our messaging business. And our messaging business, really, we do two things there. We interconnect operators around the world so that if you send an SMS message to another person and they happen to be on a different network, it goes through our hubs, and we route the message, make sure it gets there. And we do that for about a thousand operators around the world. We process about two billion messages a day through our hubs. So it's big volume business. And the other thing we do, because we have that connectivity, we provide those messaging services to enterprises. We want to engage their customers through the SMS channel.  So what are the big mega trends you're seeing in mobile commerce? Talk about what's changed over the past five years and what the big drivers are. I think, you know, if you go back five years ago, people mostly used the mobile channel simply to provide information to their customers. What we've seen change is that people are really using it now to transact with customers and build loyalty programs. So start to make their customers depend on them more. And so it's really become a much more engaged sort of channel. And that's been the big transition. That's been the change. And as that happens, then there's just a ton of information that exists, data about who the customer is, what they're doing, where they're going, what they like, what they don't like. With SAP and Sybase's analytics capabilities and HANA, you have a way of delivering even more value for customers from that customer engagement. Talk about that a little bit. Are those pieces actually coming together? I mean, I talk about the vision and talk about what's real. Yeah, so today around the world for banks and for mobile operators doing payments, and when I say banks, I'm talking about banks in the developed markets like the U.S. or North America, but also banks in underdeveloped markets. So one of the customers who's here, Dutch Bangladesh Bank, is a Sybase 365 customer. And they're providing banking for the unbanked population in Bangladesh. And so they're doing this already. They're allowing people to make transactions, build loyalty. That information that's coming in is now allowing them to target their customers for potential cross-sell opportunities. And one of the key things is that the people who are now running these retail banks are now carrying sales quotas. That never happened before. Their goals were all about whether the channel was up and available, stickiness of the customers. Now they're being tasked to cross-sell different financial products to some of their customers. There was a lot of talk several years ago about micro transactions. I mean, is that actually starting to take hold? Is that a big part of the mobile commerce business? You know, it's interesting. We sort of live in a bubble in the U.S. because we sort of say, you know, it's not quite here yet. You see a lot of things going on with mobile payments in the U.S. experiments, almost. Google Wallet is doing their thing. PayPal is doing some stuff. The company Square has introduced some capabilities. I mean, these are all kind of going on here. They're a little bit still in the experimental phase. But internationally, it's happening. I mean, we've had a customer in Austria, Paybox, who is working with all the mobile operators in that country, a number of the banks in that country, and they're providing mobile payment services where you can pay for everything from a taxi cab to buying goods online by a lottery ticket, by physical goods and a merchant. You can pay for parking. So you go and drive up to the parking meter, park the car, and you pay for your parking. And then when you're in the meeting, you know, like we all are in San Francisco sometimes, and we know the meter's running out, you get a tax 15 minutes before it runs out, and you can top it up right there on your phone. So that kind of stuff is happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was in Arlington last week, and the meter made, said, ah, don't worry about it. I came back, there was a ticket on my car. I need that app. Go ahead, Jeff. It strikes me that we're just seeing the whole, the evolution of the mobile computing around Facebook, for instance, their whole mobile presence, they're trying to kind of revamp that. I think more than half of interactions on Facebook are close to that now, or through their mobile application. So, you know, I mean, talk a little bit more about kind of the cultural shift people expecting to be able to compete in meter. Expect to, about the whole... Well, I think, you know, you look at it, and in the world, there are 6 billion mobile subscribers, right? That's a big number. And in the U.S., we tend to only think about smartphones because there are a lot of them here, and the penetration is high, but there's only a billion smartphones in the world. So, there are 5 billion feature phones in addition to those smartphones. And so, companies are recognizing that their customers live in a mobile environment. What they're finding, though, is a smartphone app isn't sufficient. It's part of the solution, but the rest of these customers, they exist in SMS, or in some countries, they have this technology called USSD, I guess, used. So, Sybase 365 provides a solution that covers all of those channels. So, that becomes very important, particularly if you're a large global bank or a large global product brand company, you need to get to your customers, whether they're in the Philippines, India, the U.S., Canada, wherever they are, and we can provide that whole set of services across all those channels. The people who live in a mobile environment, you've got to go engage them there. So, the other thing that strikes me is this is very much a big data question. So, tell me a little bit about... So, I mentioned our messaging business where we're processing 2 billion messages a day. That's where we're starting with using HANA and starting to learn HANA as an organization, insight SAP, embrace it, learn it, learn what kinds of things we can do, what value we can bring, and have, to be honest, an internal use case that when then I go sell to customers in the mobile commerce space, I can say, look, we're doing it over here. This is what we're doing for our customers in the messaging space, and so... But when you think about it, if we don't find those opportunities to get value, then I worry as an industry, not as SAP, but as an industry, you would worry about can mobile payments really work in the U.S.? Because if you look at it, we also like credit cards. It kind of works for most places. And so, just replacing that action that's happening at home is a limited value. But if you can deliver for the purchase, a lot more, it can cement the investment that needs to be made to get new terminals on their countertops, train their staff, and using them in, you know, SON. That's interesting. It's more than just, you know, something I have to always keep plugged in that I have to plug in my credit card, but other value that gives us this incentive. So, John, my last question is, we got to run to the Del McJervis coming on. You know, and come back and talk to you about what he said. But my last question is, talk about the milestones for you. You're running this division, very exciting in space. What are the milestones that you're going to measure yourself and your team against over the next, you know, four to six months, and then longer term? What are you shooting for? So the key thing that we're doing right now is we're integrating and teaching the broad SAP organization about the capabilities we bring to market. We have been sort of a well kept secret, if you like, within not only SAP, but within CyBase. And we're now, we sort of had our coming out party a few months ago, and we're just ramping that up. So one of the key milestones for us is to get the message out across all of SAP. That's it. And then the other is to migrate into these other industries that are looking for consumer engagement and start to take our capabilities to those industries. Those two things in the next four to six months, we will be very successful and we and SAP will be very happy. Well, and you'll get a lot of leverage from that whole SAP and its broader ecosystem. Absolutely. John, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Great story, and good luck with everything. Thank you.


Yo, I get a lot of hate because I laugh and smile a lot Okay, just because you're insecure about seeing someone else happy and thriving on TikTok and in life doesn't mean you can push all that stuff on to someone else just because you're depressed and not happy Okay, I'm sorry you feel that way, but hey, I love my freaking life. I got a beautiful family got a great job Great-looking wife great-looking kids. I mean Just don't push your insecurities on to someone else just because they're happy and they love what to do Or they love what they do. So let's get this Yo, that's sick though