Okay. Well, thank you all for coming. I'm really happy to see such such a big bunch of people. And I think you're probably going to be staying with within voice range. So can everybody hear me? If you can't, you didn't hear the question. Can everybody hear me? Okay, good deal. All right. Well, I'm going to walk into the abbey. This is this is not exactly a replication of Mendels Abbey. I think the architecture is probably all wrong, but it was built to represent Mendels Abbey and Gardens, which is still standing. It's now the Mendel Museum. Oh, is the mic up too high? Let me fix that. Is that better? Okay. Well, this this area of Genome Island is about about Mendelian laws and early studies on the rules of inheritance. So we'll walk into the abbey right now. This is where I usually start my classes. I figure that while the kids are getting used to second life, it's simpler if they all just sit. And this table expands. I think I won't ask you to try taxing its limits, but you probably could all sit here. Because every time somebody sits down, well, you've seen these tables before.  So it's very handy for conferences or for meeting with a lot of people all at the same time. Cool. It's going to work. So mostly what this room is for, besides just conference meetings, is to give some of the history about Mendel and his life and his work. And I always enjoy talking to the kids about Mendel because Mendel was sort of a first generation college student himself. He was, you know, the son of a tenant farmer and he actually went into the monastery not because he had a particularly strong religious calling, but because it would allow him to continue his education. And I don't know too many people that would take the vows of priesthood in order to continue their educations, but Mendel did it and it worked out fine for them. Look at this table. This is great. I don't think I've ever had this many people at this table before. It's nice to know it works. Okay, so we're going to go look at the greenhouse. And fortunately, because it's second life, we can walk right through this back wall here and go into the greenhouse. So the greenhouse contains some simple Mendelian experiments. For example, the monohybrid cross, which just involves one pair of genes is right here. And all of the objects, most of the objects will give you some kind of informational note card if you click on them. And in this part of the greenhouse, some of them will also give you a spreadsheet to put the data on. So for example, this monohybrid cross starts with this poster. So if we cross yellow peas to green peas, the first generation is all the same. They're all yellow.  So these are the progeny of the hybrid. And you can get data into the chat record just by clicking on the ball and it will give you additional sets of progeny. Each time you may notice a little bit different than it was before. And so the data can be copied from the chat record into a spreadsheet. And the spreadsheets are available through a link that comes from several of the objects around here. So that's one of the things that's in here. Another thing that's in here is a sort of little game that is based on the six possible crosses you can do with just a single pair of genes. This is the mating game over here on the opposite side of the room. And so these three sets of peas all represent those six possible crosses. So there's two crosses for each dish. So you just click on one of the peas to get the cross between that pea and the pea on the top. And then by looking at the distribution of traits among the progeny, you figure out which cross you're looking at, what the genotypes, what genes are present in the parents. So next we'll go out to the di-hybrid garden. And I think I'll just go through this back door here. So what the di-hybrid garden does is to illustrate the inheritance when you're dealing with more than one pair of genes. So we've got two pairs of genes represented here, either tall or short and either red or white. So the two parents are in one of these dishes. The first generation progeny are all the same and they're in this second dish that's rotating above the garden. And then the garden itself produces the progeny of the hybrids. Now theoretically you get a ratio of nine to three to three to one, nine for the two dominance, one for the two recesses, and then three for the other two possible combinations of progeny. And again, you get a different set of progeny every time you click on the garden, and that goes into the chat record and you can paste it into the spreadsheet for analysis. So these represent the two Mendelian laws. The monohybrid cross in the greenhouse represents the law of segregation, and the garden out here represents the law of independent assortment, simply meaning that each pair of genes will sort out into the eggs in the sperm independently of the others. Now there were a lot of kinds of experiments that Mendel tried, but they didn't follow his rules, and he sort of gave up on them. But one of them was not the thing I'm going to show you next. He didn't try X linkage, I'm pretty sure he didn't. He was dealing with plants. So we're going to go down to the category. Actually you can just click on the next. Oops, am I following the rules here? Yes. Okay, sure everybody's down here. So there's a bunch of different experiments that can be done with cats, but I think the most interesting one is this one here, which represents the sex-linked gene for orange. So that gene for orange is on the X chromosome, and so it's expressed differently in males and females. Another weird thing that happens with the X chromosome in mammals is that in every cell in a mammal only one of the two X chromosomes is active, which makes it possible to have both of the genes on the X chromosomes in females expressed in different parts of the body. So you also have X-linked genes, and if you are heterozygous for them, if you've got a few different kinds of genes, you may be expressing different genes in different parts of the body if you're a female, but they don't show up in color patches like they do in these cats. So you see the kittens get hatched, making lots of kitten noises. And the nice thing about this particular trait is that just from looking at the kittens, you can actually predict the genotypes of the parents. So this is sort of a fun experiment to do. The shape of these cats is actually based on a simulation called cat lab that was made by the woman who is now chancellor of a university in New Zealand somewhere. Okay, so the next place we're going to go is over to where the B's are. The next thing we'll look at is the apiary. So just look for your apiary link, and we'll go over there and take a look at the B's. It has dark bodies and white eyes, and they should be coming out and they're not. Let's see why. Well, they were working a while ago, but of course they're not working now. Okay, but we can see the progeny of the cross between those two different kinds of B's. Mendel actually did some work on B's, but he couldn't figure them out. And the reason that he couldn't figure them out was that in B's and a lot of the other social insects, the males have only the chromosomes of their mother. So the males have only one set of chromosomes and they get them from their mother, and the females get chromosomes from both parents, just like you normally expect. So he didn't know that about B's. In fact, I don't think chromosomes had been discovered at the time that Mendel was doing his work, so he had no way to figure this out. Ultimately, once the chromosomes had been discovered and seen the problem with the different numbers of chromosomes and the two sexes, it was understood better. The other thing that's in this north Abbey garden are some other things that Mendel either didn't work with or didn't report, and that is traits that don't show complete dominance. So normally, if you, or frequently, if you cross individuals with have two different traits, you know, black versus white, for example, the progeny will express only one of them because one of the two traits is dominant, and that's usually because the recessive trait doesn't have a functional gene. It's not making a functional protein, and so it's just not expressed. However, in some cases, you do get partial expression when you have one dominant, one recessive gene. So you see that up here in this garden with the pink flowers. So in this case, the first generation of progeny between red and white flowers is all pink, and the progeny of the pink flowers are either red, white, or pink in different numbers. And again, this all goes into the chat record, which can be pasted into spreadsheet. So the next place we're going to look at here is the myxolamas, and the myxolamas actually started out to be hippos. I was trying to make hippos, and they just didn't look right, and so I made llamas instead. Yes, different organisms have different numbers of chromosomes. One of the interesting things about cats is that all cat species except one, and I can't remember which one that is, not domestic cats, have 38 chromosomes, about 19 pairs of chromosomes, which is probably why you can get crosses between things like lions and tigers and get progeny from that. Usually you can't do that between species, but with cats they don't seem to be quite as fully separated as some of the species are. So what the myxolamas are for is to show the different kinds of combinations you've got. So we've got six different body parts here that change colors on these guys when you click on them. And so if there are six different body parts, each of them could be one of two different colors, basically dark or light. Then there are 32 possible combinations of different colored body parts. And so what I usually ask the cats to do is to click on them until the llamas are all one color. So the thing that doesn't change color are their legs and their ears. So when they're all the same color as their legs and their ears are, then they're done. And these little sticks beside the llamas keep track of how many times you've clicked. So the average number of times you should have to click to get them all one color is 32. But of course you might get anything from, you know, one or two clicks to maybe 50 or 60 clicks before that happens. And so you can click on all six of the llamas and then just see what the distribution of numbers of clicks is to get those. One of these is a little different from the others. This was my husband's idea, actually. He said, instead of using the sticks, why don't you have the llamas poop and the poop can count the number of clicks. So this is the pooping llama over here. And sometimes I will come in and find a totally buried llama, which has hundreds of clicks on it and which has been totally buried in poop. So that can happen. And sometimes people will do it. Fortunately, I can undo them. But that does actually make an interesting way to count the number of times you have to click it in order to get all of the same color. And you can do the same thing for any other pattern that you might want to look at. So any individual pattern will happen about once out of 32 times. So we can check for that distribution of rates. So the next place we're going to go is up to the tower, which has a number of different activities. And we'll just look at a few of those. So we're going to go to the tower terrace and start from there. It takes the terrace because it's an easy place to spread out. Also, the terrace is one of the places that has discussion areas where a small number of students can gather to discuss things and I can gather with a small number of students to discuss things they might be having trouble with. There are a number of these around the island. There's a big conference room in the abbey and there are maybe half a dozen different small conference areas in addition to that one. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to show you here and I'm just going to walk up this ramp is this is my office, which is much bigger than my office in real life and also much neater than my office in real life. Although there is a free fly floating in the coffee and the coffee cup, which actually does happen sometimes. Frequently when you're transferring the free flies, they will get away and where they usually wind up is in the dean's office in his coffee cup. So I try not to let that happen, but sometimes it does. So this is where I have office hours. You see my office hours for last spring are listed up there. And so I just come in, log in, the kids know I'm going to be here. So they have questions about anything. They can come at these times and chat with me about it. And I also frequently just drop in from time to time to see what's going on. So the tower is where the molecular genetics is and also some of the fruit fly genetics, some bacterial genetics, some human genetics, all of those things are represented in the tower. So I just want to show you a few of those. This first section, the ramps, yeah, the ramps go all the way up, but there are teleporters and I'll show you where those are in just a minute. So this is some of the early history of how DNA was first identified as the material, as the chemical that held the genetic information.  They thought for quite a long time that it must be proteins because proteins do so many other things in the cell they thought they might have enough informational flexibility to hold the information of the genes, but they don't. It turns out to be the DNA. And the first experiment that indicated there was some chemical holding genetic information was this one with the mice. So a bunch of different strains of bacteria were used and the mice were injected with these bacteria and sometimes the mice lived and sometimes the mice died. And the mice died if they got bacteria that had a capsule around them, a carbohydrate sticky capsule on the surface that protected the bacteria from the immune system of the mouse. And so the bacteria that didn't make the capsule didn't kill the mouse, the bacteria that did make the capsule did kill the mouse.  And so once they knew that something from the dead cells was getting into the live cells they finally figured out that what that something was was DNA. And so once they figured out that it was DNA then they looked more at DNA and ultimately Watson and Crick who are shown in this picture here figured out or promoted the proposed the double helix model for DNA structure which you see here. And this is just a history of the development of that model. So what they used was information about the the nucleotides that composed DNA information from the comparison of base composition in different kinds of DNA that was done by a guy named Shargot x-ray pictures of DNA crystals that were done by Rosalind Franklin and all of that information was put together to make this double helix model of DNA structure. And so that's how we got that model. So it's interesting because Watson and Crick did a single experiment themselves but they used the information that other people had collected to create the model and the model made sense and that even suggested a way for the DNA to replicate because there's a pattern to the pairing of the bases. A always matches with T and G always matches with C. So you always get a CG pair or an AT pair. Because of that if you separate the two different strands you can predict what the other strand has to look like. And the cell does that just by matching up the bases to one of the two strands and that's the way DNA replicates. And it turns out it really does it that way. So the next thing we're going to do is click on this teleporter right here where it says teleport to level 7 chromosome café or just click on that ball that will take you up here to the chromosome café. Chromosome café is called the chromosome café because it used to have tables in it but I took the tables out because it sort of got crowded. So this is obviously the a bunch of chromosomes and these are this is the set of human chromosomes and each of the chromosomes will give you information about itself. And how many genes it contains and it will also tell you more about the chromosome and also more about one of the genes on the chromosome. These little arrows that you see here show where the gene that the chromosome tells you about is located on the chromosome. So this is just kind of an overview of the human genome. There's a bunch of other stuff that's on here. I think I won't walk you around those but feel free to come back at any time and look at some of the other human genes that are there are activities based on a number of other human genes like eye color, blood type and things like that which you can play with. The next place we're going to go is down to ribosome row and ribosome row is a place that explains how the ribosomes take the information from RNA which is a copy of the information in DNA and use that to make proteins. So we'll go ahead and go down there now. So these are giant models of ribosomes Proteins are synthesized in several stages. The messenger RNA which is a copy of the DNA information first has to bind to ribosome and then transfer RNA which is another kind of RNA carries the amino acids and matches up with the messenger RNA. So you can get base pairs between different kinds of RNAs just like you can get base pairs between the different strands of DNA and that principle is used to match specific amino acids which make up proteins to the different coding units on the messenger RNA. So each messenger RNA can bind to a ribosome. Do you tell that ribosome how to make a particular kind of protein? The next stage of that is shown over here. So there are several different binding sites for transfer RNAs in the ribosome. One of them always carries the growing strand of the protein and the other one is where the new my dogs are upset about something probably a cat outside. So this A site is where the new transfer RNA always binds and then the two amino acids on the two adjacent tRNAs will attach to each other and the next RNA that's given up its amino acid goes to the east side and then leaves the ribosome and then the other two tRNAs just move over one and that happens again and again and again until you finally get to a stop signal and there's actually a signal that says stop in the genetic code in fact there are three of them in the human genome and that doesn't bind to transfer RNA at that point all of the amino acids are on the tRNA which is in the middle site and that one is just transferred to water which completes the structure of the last amino acid and then that releases the amino that releases the amino acid chain or the protein from the ribosome. So that's how the ribosomes do it it's a fairly complicated process but you can follow the stages during which that happens. The next place we're going to go is to the bioinformatics platform okay well what bioinformatics is about is a kind of combination of computer science and genetics. There are a huge number of databases available now that have protein sequences and DNA sequences and RNA sequences and genomic sequences and sequences for ribosomal RNAs and all kinds of things and that information can be used for a variety of purposes. One of them is to identify organisms that you may not even be able to see in an environment. For example Craig Venter who was one of the people that sequenced the human genome did one of the first surveys of environmental DNA in the sargassal seed he was using ribosomal genes as identifiers because each ribosomal gene is unique in different organisms and by just looking at the ribosomal genes he found evidence for 1800 different microorganisms just by looking at the DNA that was in the water in that area in that region around Bermuda he also found in those 1800 samples 150 previously unidentified species so it can be used as a quick and dirty way to see what kinds of organisms are in a particular environment especially if it's aquatic it can also be used to classify organisms there's a beta-globin alignment over here and click on that it will produce some informational notes it will also make a sequence alignment but I don't see that right now so the alignment that you can see just shows the differences between the genomes or the beta-globin sequences you can compare the protein sequences or you can compare the DNA or you can compare the mitochondrial DNAs or you can compare the ribosomal genes you can compare a lot of different things to identify different organisms and also to see how they relate to one another for example using that kind of technique in the genomes or the ribosomal DNAs it was discovered that falcons are actually more closely related to parrots than they are to hawks and owls so who would have predicted that you can kind of see it if you look at the beak shape in falcons and in parrots but it's not some I mean people just thought well all the wrappers must be related to the raptors as they are to parrots you can also use it for answering different kinds of historical questions for example there is an activity right over here with different kinds of historical problems that have been solved using DNA for example the Romanovs the bodies of the Romanovs which were assassinated during the uprising in Russia were identified using their DNA and some of them were thought to be still alive but they actually they actually did find their bodies another thing is the claim that Jefferson fathered some of the children one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings and so a recent study has tried to answer that question and it turns out that the Jefferson Y chromosome is in the male descendants of one of the Hemmings sons but not in all of them so those are the kinds of things that can be done with bioinformatics and it's lots of fun to do those kinds of projects the next place we're going to go is to the eukaryotic walkway and it says eukaryotic genomes boardwalk so there are libraries of both bacterial and eukaryotic genomes eukaryotes are things that have nuclei and this boardwalk some of the genomes, some of the many genomes that have been sequenced for different eukaryotes and most of the genomes are some of the reference organisms that were first sequenced like horses, cows, dogs, possums, some of them are organisms that have been more recently sequenced like this Komodo dragon here the Komodo genome was sequenced a year or so ago and if you click on these you get information about the genome and one of the interesting things about reptile genomes is that they are a lot like virginomes in that in addition to relatively large chromosomes they also have a bunch of teeny tiny chromosomes in them so these are called macro chromosomes and micro chromosomes so both reptiles and birds have this combination of different kinds of chromosomes which is yet another thing that links the reptiles to the birds in addition to the genomic section down here that gives the genomes of the mitochondria or chloroplasts so they're down in this section so there are some mitochondrial and chloroplast genomes discussed down here we've got bacterial genomes we've got some plasma genomes over in the garden of prokaryotic genomes and then we have the organeller genomes up here plus the nuclear genomes of a bunch of different kinds of eukaryotes so those are kind of fun just to browse through the next place we're going to go is to look at the population simulation I didn't build this one myself, this was done by Cara Davidson and we're going to go up there and take a look at that not just a wait a minute until everybody gets here and in the meantime the birds and the moths are resigning so what this particular activity does is to reproduce an experiment or a set of observations that were made by a guy named Kettlewell on moths and he was interested in why the moths were changing colors so this was a phenomenon called industrial melanism so in the UK when they first started building a lot of different kinds of factories that were putting a lot of smoke out into the air the trees and the bushes got darkened and so instead of let me just change the color of this bark here instead of having a normal sort of brownish bark with lichens all over it the bark got all dark and when the bark got all dark he started seeing a lot more moths that had dark wings and he decided that it must be because the birds were found easier to find the paler moths on the dark backgrounds than the darker moths and so this simulation is based on that experiment and so what it does is to res in a bunch of different colored moths so you get some dark moths and some brown moths you can see the brown ones very easily against the dark background and you probably can't see the black moths here's one here, there's one up here there's a lot harder on the background and once it gets set up then the birds will start flying around and killing off the moths and depending on the background different populations of moths will survive so against different colored backgrounds different colored moths are at a selective advantage so the brown moths tend to survive against the black moths and to survive against the black moth you can show the difference between selecting for a dominant or selecting for a recessive allele you can also show genetic drift because there's a third-bark color here at which the moths are equal at a disadvantage and you can show that if you put the green-bark up that sometimes the black moths win and sometimes the brown moths win and that is particularly pronounced if you start with a smaller population of moths if you start with a big population of moths it may take them a while to win if you start with a small population of moths one of the colors may disappear quite quickly and I usually let it run for about 10 minutes 10 minutes is usually long enough that you can see the changes in the frequency of the different colors of the moths this little ball here shows lists the numbers of different colors and the numbers of the gene frequencies for the dark and the light moths are respectively it takes a little while for them to all get rest in before you can see those numbers I'll let it run just long enough that you can do that and once the birds start flying the simulation starts running they're getting pretty close to 50 okay alright so you can see the elapsed time and you can see if you get close enough you can see how many moths there are of each color and if you're monitoring this over time then every minute you can check on the numbers put that on a spreadsheet run the graphs and see how the population changes over time I'll just let this run and you can come back in a little while and look at it and see what's happening to these moths a little bit later if you like okay so the next thing we're going to look at is the cell platform I think this is the last place we're going today so the cell platform has I think it's 10 different kiosks yeah I think it's 10 that have different experiments related to cell biology this actually used to be on a separate island they're really put together for a colleague who teaches cell biology I don't teach it myself but I thought she might find it handy but when they were talking about raising the server fees for the educational islands I actually moved all that over here so this is what used to be on cell island and in addition to a number of experiments that range from study of macromolecules experiments on enzyme activity different kinds of cell and tissue types there's a part that has cell division or mitosis and my favorite part is what you can see if you click on this big red arrow here and that is the giant model of the cell you can get up on this platform and you can actually go into the cell as in which everybody gets a little closer you can actually go into the cell if you just click on the plasma membrane it will take you into the cell and then if you click on the nucleus you can go into the nucleus and then you can fly around in there to get out of the cell or to find the exocytotic vesicle which is over here you can click on this exocytotic vesicle to get out of the cell or you can simply open your map and use it to teleport outside of the cell so the different structures inside the cell are active you can see the mitochondria are making ATP if you click on them you can start or stop this process also the ribosomal subunits are coming out of the nucleus and the ribosomal subunits actually aren't together unless they are actively synthesizing a protein otherwise they're just separate subunits so those are released from the nucleus you can see the centrioles outside the nucleus which are used for separating the chromosomes and eukaryotic cells so this cell is kind of fun to walk around inside of and if you go inside the nucleus you can see the chromosomes the chromosomes aren't condensed they're not individual chromosomes what you can see is the separate chromatin that makes up the chromosomes you can see a bunch of strands of chromatin that's kind of fun to walk around in and look at the different cell organelles and I think I'll stop at this point and see if anybody has questions I haven't actually been watching the chat log okay I got it up now I have a question when you use this to teach I could imagine two modes one is you bring students in and they walk around like we did and click on things and another mode if students are not able to get into second life you would either make a video of a demo or have somebody go through and do the things while they're watching and saying do this, do that I always bring the students in there are some times that okay I teach two kinds of courses in here I'm semi-retired right now so I'm only teaching my non-majors course which is of course I teach entirely in genome so I teach use of the abbey and the bioinformatics platform and the tower activities for teaching that non-majors course but I actually bring them in and I have a set of activities for them to do assignments that are related to those and then quizzes that are related to the assignments but all of the information is in here oh forensic DNA that would be interesting I have not done anything specifically on forensics but it would make an interesting it would make an interesting feature yeah that would be a good thing to do thanks for that suggestion one of the things I have done recently is up in the tower right up near the top there is a it's not really an activity it's more like a display because when Donald Trump would get confused between the influenza virus and the corona virus I thought well I need to put something up on genome that shows the difference between those two viruses because they're really quite different from each other and so that's up near the top of the tower if you're looking at that there may be videos about genome island there may be many videos myself but I have just started making some recently viruses do a lot of different things in their host cells genome islands I've been using let's see I think this has been here since 2007 I used to have a lot of these activities on the mainland in a different place but I ran out of space and so I moved to what was then the sirens and put this island up and spread the activities out around that island so I've been teaching here since 2007 I have tried to get some of my colleagues into second life for example I have a friend who is an evolutionary biologist and I've tried to get him to use the population biology simulation because it's so good it's just an excellent simulation and I thought he was going to come in when we all had to go online after the virus after the virus sort of took hold and everybody went online I thought oh maybe more people will use genome island and more people have been using genome island except not from my school so he was going to try it but he chained out at the last minute one of the reasons I think was because they shut down the campus and I think he really wanted me to kind of show him the way through it he didn't feel comfortable just coming in by himself but I love teaching here I think I actually have a lot more interaction with the students that are in the online class than I do that I did with my full time face to face students did I miss any other questions you on how relaxed you are teaching us all this deep stuff it's very effective thank you oh thank you well I love doing it I've been doing it a long time and I'm still learning how to do this I probably go through and restructure some of the activities in the non-measures course every time I teach it oh by the way I don't use voice when I'm teaching I only use text when I'm teaching because I can record the orientation sessions or I can record the conversations that I have with the students and they're searchable search voice so the they seem to work with it just fine yeah the fight or conjure probably don't move around that much in the silent pleasant I have the move so they can trail the the ATP out behind them oh well gosh maybe two years for most of the most of the items but I'm always putting up new stuff so maybe you could put another year up it takes a while to build this stuff those of you who've done building know and this is all very very low level building I mean when I first came into second life there weren't any mesh items or any of that I've taken advantage of some of the mesh items for decorating the the island but none of the actual activities are mesh I don't think I'm pretty sure they're not oh what an interesting idea a model cell being infected by a virus that would be an interesting thing to do complicated but it would be interesting I might get better try yes they're all it's all scripted um it's um yeah doing I'm not a an expert programmer by any means I've done some programming and basic but I've modified a lot of different scripts for example the the hybrid garden where the flowers pop up and down that would probably be a light bulb script and I just changed what it did yes that's a central with microtubules oh cancer would be interesting now probably cancer is the cells moving around where they're not supposed to be so I'm not sure that would be sure I guess I could have the cells moving around the place but um that would be more difficult here but I do like the idea of a viral infection I might be interesting to try I still refer to the cytoskeleton is it called something else now oh Steven you'll have to talk to me more about that when I say some stories to see this yeah that's interesting you know when I first put the abbey up it was too small but you've got to make your buildings big in second life because otherwise well if you think about having a building that's got an eight foot ceiling or something like that that's going to be too small mitosis is on a kind of there's a teleporter that takes you out to the mitosis it's on a separate platform adjacent to this platform here oh yeah kind of oh you know I get my best evaluations in the online class which is probably because the students don't have to deal with me in real life I had this sort of grim looking face that they don't have to I think they think I'm grumpier than I really am so I think it's partly that students don't have to look at me I think it's also that they feel more in control here than they do in face-to-face classes they do have to pay more attention they have to take a lot more responsibility for their learning I mean I'm around a lot to help them answer questions or if something's not working to help them solve the problems and when they have to do the assignments they have to do them and I've got stuff all over the island that some of which was also made by Kira the same person who did the population thing that tells me who's here how long they were here, what they're interacting with I monitor them pretty closely and if they try to turn in an activity an assignment without having done the activity I say you haven't done the activity so they have to go back and do the activity but this is open access so feel free to stop by anytime and play with it I don't think you can hurt it so feel free thank you and thanks for coming and feel free to come back and visit and bring your students oh thanks Stephen, thanks Mike and thanks for inviting me to do this because I really enjoyed it oh good I'm glad you said that because I've told you I've just been making some videos and sometimes they make this sort of auto-close captioning line on it and they come out so strangely sometimes I think I must be mumbling, thanks for coming Janne Janne is your real name Millet because I have a lot of second cousins named Millet okay well if you think of a question that you have just I am me and I'll get back to you my pleasure Jess have the spindle actually attached to you but I think that might be beyond my scripting abilities oh our poor research students they got thrown off campus when they were halfway through their research project yes that's what it's for oh yes you can ride the mitochondria I am enjoying it Stephen it's I mean I love teaching and so I'm so happy that I'm still teaching the one class and I hope I keep teaching it till at least as long as my brain works I had a 65 pound dog in my lap oh dude well she used to sit on my lap all the time when she was a puppy and she just never stopped oh tagline look for the exocytotic vesicle or else just open your map are you really trapped? just open your map and teleport out oh okay that vesicle is over there by Hades


Hello to everyone who's watching us on video from around the world. I'm Tao Tran. I work in product partnerships for Chrome and the web platform team, which means that day-to-day I get to interact with lots of different partners and web developers like yourselves as we try to think about what are the new, latest, and greatest web technologies to bring to market and hopefully motivate some of you to ship them, too. So when Chris and I start talking about what kind of talk we wanted to give, we knew we want to focus on what we see as the new standard for really good web experiences, the modern web. Then Chris talked about the new bar, and well, I only heard the words modern and bar. And I thought about my favorite modern bar in New York City, which is the Hudson Hotel, and what a modern bar experience should be like. I know. So despite our shared love of cocktails, Chris quickly got me grounded and said, this wasn't actually our topic. No, no. So I'm Chris Wilson. I've worked on developing the web platform for nearly 25 years, nearly a quarter century, since NCSA Mosaic. And I am the developer advocate lead for the Progressive Web App team here at Google. And we're here together, actually, because we both really want to get you as excited as we are about the user experiences that are now possible on the web. What we both believe is this inflection point today that we're currently experiencing, the tipping point of the web as a universal platform, this groundswell of the web being used to deliver experiences that aren't just useful and real, but they're beautiful, immersive experiences. So we want to inspire all of you on what's possible today on the web. Share really great partner journeys and success stories to give you ideas. But this isn't just about doing something that's never been done before or couldn't have been done before. No, not at all. So I'm an avid scuba diver, and I live in Seattle. And we have really strong tides. And we need a slide update, I think. That's not supposed to be there. But we get really strong tides in Seattle. And this is the experience of how I used to get tides. Let's switch over to the demo screen. And there we go. So this is what I used to use to check tides, to see when I could dive. And it's really kind of a painful experience, because if I want to flip between days, I actually have to use these dropdowns. I have to remember what day of the month it is, which I can never do without actually looking somewhere else on my phone. So it's kind of a pain. It's not the best. And the team at Dockyard actually has built this application that I, frankly, instantly fell in love with. It's called HiTide. And this is a progressive web app. It's actually starting up cold here. So it figures out, loads up, and it figures out, oh, you're in San Francisco, because it has geolocate access. And but I actually want to see what the tides are like in Seattle. So I'm going to type in Seattle. And go check the station. OK, so I'm flying home on Wednesday. Ooh, actually, it kind of looks like Wednesday afternoon is a perfect time to go diving. So I'll have to get my gear packed up. Now, this isn't a killer app, right? This isn't like, oh, my god, I could never get tides before or something. I've been able to look up tides forever. But this is a much smoother experience. It's really smooth scrolling. It starts up really quickly. And actually, it's still kind of half works offline. It gives me an experience, at least, while I'm offline, even if it can't generate the tide tables. And this is really underscoring the point that it's not just good enough to just provide a service anymore. You actually have to prioritize your user experience. This is what users expect now. So let's flip back to the screen. Here we go. I would radically prefer this experience on the right rather than the experience on the left. And so this is what users expect out of something that they want to use frequently. And so the core concept we want to get across today, and our goal for all of you, is really it's time to raise the bar for what you can deliver for your user experiences. We know we can all do better, and we want you to exceed user expectations for what's possible on the web. We all know that the web is great for user reach. It's the front door for so many of companies and services. And now we want you to believe that the web can be used as a great user experience platform. We've been using this term, Progressive Web App, for about two years, a little over two years now. And we want to be clear, this is really just a placeholder for this new hire bar for delivering web applications. Like when we talk about Service Worker, or Add to Home Screen, or App Manifest, Push Notifications, all these different technologies, this isn't really like we wanted to categorize this as an app. It's really care about your user experience, provide a better user experience. In fact, the Progressive Web App pillars are really just about doing that, providing a great user experience. So we're mostly not even referring to Progressive Web Apps. Certainly in our talk, we'll mention it a few times, just as an easy way to say something, but it's just a shortcut for modern web. In particular, caring about your user experience more than anything else. And what users have grown to expect, not just from the web, but from their computers and their devices, they expect these experiences that are fast, that are integrated with the way the device they're using typically works, and that work reliably. And that's how you build these truly engaging experiences. Why PWAs need a Service Worker is because then they can cache and they can provide a really fast initial load. They're installable not for some other reason, just because that's how the user expects to get to applications. And then the browser fades into the background. The experience just feels like it's part of the device. And yes, these pillars do spell fire. I'm not supposed to yell fire in a crowded theater, so we're not making a big deal of that. But as we explain the details of what your users expect, we're gonna show you some success stories too. So on the first pillar, fast. Users don't expect janky scrolling. They don't expect slow load performance. You saw how efficiently that high-tide app loaded, how smoothly it scrolled. Loading an app has to feel instant. It has to feel invisible. And this is really just about keeping the user's attention. As we said before, user attention is a really precious resource. After three seconds, 53% of users abandon sites. Half your users are gone. Now, this is bad enough on a desktop machine. Certainly I'm guilty of this if something takes more than three seconds to load. I will probably just close the tab and find something else to do. But those are usually connected with this reliable fast network connection. But if half of users abandon a site after three seconds, it is frankly a miracle to me that anyone ever loads pages on mobile networks. The average mobile webpage takes an average of 19 seconds to load on a 3G connection. Now, of course I might think, hey, that's fine, I've got 4G LTE or whatever. And I'm usually on Wi-Fi anyways on my mobile device. That's great. Except remember, worldwide, 60% of mobile connections are still 2G. 2G, like not even 3G, but 2G. So worldwide, this is a much more critical problem than you might understand. And in a nutshell, what we're really saying is you have to focus on making your experience fast. Needs to load instantly. And I'm gonna leave most of this to a session from Addy later this afternoon, but we really wanted to share some successes from being fast. For example, LMA is the biggest food ordering and delivering company in China. They launched the first progressive web app for the domestic Chinese market, and they serve 260 million users. 260 million, to put this in context, because a quarter of a billion doesn't really register to me, this is almost as much as the entire population of the United States. That's their customer base. They actually have 1.3 million restaurants listed in their app, and 99% of their users order food from mobile devices. So it's kind of critical for them to have a good experience, right? And LMA set out to improve their mobile experience focusing on speed and reliability, but particularly in flaky connections. So they use an app shell. They wanna get skeleton screens on screen really quickly. And they wanna ensure that whenever a user taps a button, it gives them something. It shows them this feedback that, hey, something's happening, don't worry, we know what you're doing. And transition to that page, and they get their skeleton paint up in 400 milliseconds on a mobile connection. They actually get fully interactive in two seconds in typical conditions. Like, this is pretty amazing to me, this is awesome. And this critical focus on page load time, by the way, this user interaction, was really the goal of the AMP project. AMP's built on web components and HTML. I think that's great. It's a way to easily build fast and reliable pages on the web. So it's amazing to see all this momentum with AMP. They just had their two-year anniversary last week where they announced that there are now four billion AMP pages out in the wild across 25 million domains. That's an incredible milestone. And AMP is really continuing to evolve to support additional use cases, especially when it comes to e-commerce. You see here a couple of examples of e-commerce sites that have built highly interactive pages. It's possible to build a product page that updates the availability of an item, shows a different thumbnail and price, as well as a way to add a product to a shopping cart. Let's take a look at an example of a merchant building a highly interactive AMP page. Here you have Overstock. It's a US-based home goods provider that's built a fast-loading interactive site using AMP. It's also important to highlight that their AMP pages are actually 100% functional parity with their non-AMP equivalents on their mobile site. They're using AMP to sort and filter. They're using several AMP components, the AMP sidebar for the menu, AMP accordion for content that can expand and collapse based on their user interaction. They're live with AMP for over four million product and category pages. And their early metrics are looking great. Overall, uplift in conversions, as well as increase in revenue using their AMP pages. So think about it, a year ago, Overstock couldn't have built this page, and yet AMP has allowed them to step up their game. And I love to hear stories and feedback from developers, especially as they're going through building these new mobile web experiences. And so I want to highlight here that the AMP pages allow the team to realize just how large their regular mobile web pages were and how slow they load. And so it's awesome to see the Overstock team continue to iterate on their AMP design to improve their metrics and then take those lessons and apply it back to their overall mobile website. They're heavily investing in progressive web apps as well to take AMP to the next level and raise the bar. And so AMP has evolved pretty quickly from static pages to now interactive pages. And more recently, developers have begun exploring how they can use the AMP library to build fast, beautiful websites. It's early days and we're eager to get feedback and hear from sites who are exploring using AMP for their full site experience. Up here on screen is Tasty.co, which is a recipe site from Buzzfeed. They went all in on AMP. For them, raising the bar was building an entire website using the AMP library. It's fast and getting interactive in less than three seconds. And so users are getting this amazing experience coming from Google search, from Facebook links, from Pinterest pins. And AMP was a natural way for the Tasty.co team to make something super performant and optimized for their audience. And what's even more awesome is that the site is responsive. AMP then becomes an efficient way to build a site using a single code base. The Tasty.co site provides this experience not only on mobile, but on desktop. So it's a really great overall developer experience. And this is really the theme of this new bar for web experiences. You should provide a good experience across devices. And on each one of those devices, the experience should really feel integrated with the device capabilities. The way the user typically does things. End-to-end, experiences that are built on the web don't need to feel any different than experiences that are built on native platforms. They should be just as natural for the user to interact with. Now, users expect to interact with all apps pretty much the same, regardless of how they're built. Like, they expect to launch apps from the home screen. They expect that they're visible on the task list. They think that apps should maintain your identity, have access to low-level hardware stuff like camera, audio, or accelerometer.  But one good example I really wanted to call out is media playback. When you're listening to a music stream offered over the web, you still have the same expectations as one offered from a native application. As a user, if your screen is locked, you wanna be able to see what song's playing. You wanna maybe skip to the next song or skip back, hear that one again. Maybe hear it again. I'm never gonna give up this song. But with the Media Session API, web apps get to hook into this capability too. They get to integrate with how the user expects to do things. And media companies are actually now seeing a ton of success in the web. So GeoCinema is part of Reliance Geo. They're the biggest 4G telco network in India. And they have 100 million paying customers. This is one of the largest mobile video networks in the entire world. And their progressive web app is basically a one-stop shopping destination for Indian movies, TV, music videos, the whole deal. And this was an app-only business. Like they only had native apps. And they went to the web for the first time with this progressive web app that they built. And they only launched this three weeks ago at the beginning of this month. And already they're seeing 10% longer session times on their mobile app, on their mobile web app than on their native app. And better reach for their customers who are in tier two and tier three cities, because in these smaller areas, they may not have the native app. They may not have the storage space to keep it. And so Chris just walked through kind of this really integrated experience for the most personal device for users. And so I want to transition to talk a little bit more about how you can make sure that you're delivering really great personalized experience, whether it's getting users to sign in, sign up, or check out. So let's first talk about push notifications. And here, this is really a great opportunity for you to provide a much more targeted experience for users. So Mercado Lire is Latin America's largest online retailer with over 190 million registered users. Some of their biggest markets include Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. It's this huge marketplace for buying products. And oftentimes, buyers want to ask a question of a seller before making a purchase. So we want to share this really great use case for push notifications that's highly targeted and personalized. So when a user wants to get in touch with a buyer, they get prompted with a great visual, explaining that they can receive a push notification when the seller responds. So that's the visual you see up here. This is such a great alternative to email, because it's much more real time, again, integrated into the user's personal device. Then when the seller responds, the buyer gets a notification on their device. It contains the title of the product, as well as part of the text of the response in it, so again, users get a bit of a preview when the seller responds. Mercado is seeing a 41% opt-in rate for these web push notifications, again, a whole new channel for being able to re-engage and reach their customer base. So I really love how this type of push notification is specific and shows how Mercado is able to deliver a great user experience, taking advantage of native device capabilities. So let's turn to the sign up use case, which we know is really painful for a lot of you when you're trying to do this on different sites. So Petlove is this innovative Brazilian e-commerce site for pet goods. And we included them because, look, every talk needs a cute picture of a puppy. And so actually, Petlove's offline page is actually a photo of a puppy, in case you want to check it out. Go check it out, the online. So Petlove wanted to avoid the issue of having users go all the way through the checkout flow, only to abandon the cart when they have to go through the painful process of signing in. Reducing sign in friction is a critical step, especially if you require the user to sign in before they're able to check out. So as Ben and Dion mentioned, there's now a new one-tap sign up library that you can integrate. And so for someone like Petlove, this means you can sign up on your mobile device. And then when you go to your desktop device, you're actually automatically signed in. And so there's this great kind of cross-platform story for both sign up and sign in here. And it's pleased to report that there's actually, Petlove is seeing that two X more users are actually able to get to the checkout flow, already signed in, and they're seeing a big bump in overall conversions. We also have the identity demo booth for anybody who wants to learn more about the sign up and sign in process. So in addition to the overall sign up process, Petlove also went ahead and just integrated and upgraded their overall website experience into a progressive web app. And so what we love to see is that sites are actually using multiple features and products. And so it's not just about, yes, you can integrate a particular API, but really the site and the users truly benefit when you're able to do multiple things at once. And so Petlove integrated the sign up, and then they went ahead and just focused on performance and just re-doing and upgrading their experience. They're seeing overall increases in conversion and time spent, as well as it's important to note that their progressive web app is eight times smaller than their native app. This is especially critical for users, where they have a lot of users on 2G and 3G networks. And so this is a big deal, or in this case, a tiny deal, which is actually a better thing. So another great personalized example is Starbucks. And Starbucks, of course, is the largest coffee house company in the world. They're based in my hometown of Seattle. So of course, I had to talk about them. They have 20,000 stores across 62 different countries. And their customers expect a really high quality experience. No matter what device I have, what network conditions there are around, I've got to have my pumpkin spice latte this time of year. And users often end up standing in line at the store rather than ordering ahead. Like a lot of customers use their rewards program. And I personally hate carrying extra cards around in my wallet, so I don't want to do that. And the Starbucks team built this great progressive web app, it's still in beta, with the goal of making it easy for users to come back and sign in and pay with their bar code. And I was actually really surprised to hear, because I thought that it was really just mostly cards that people used, 20% of all their transactions are done using the bar code. And this bar code, their beta progressive web app, actually has a service worker that caches all this stuff. And it enables customers to pay with that bar code, even if they don't have a network connection. Even if they don't have a network connection, they can pull out their phone and pay for their stuff with their Starbucks app. So from sign in to checkout, their beta is a great example of this user experience you can offer from progressive web apps. So speaking of seamless checkout, this is an area where we want sites to think about how they can reduce the number of steps necessary for the checkout process. So this is probably a pretty typical experience if you've gone through the checkout process buying stuff on mobile web, where we see that sites can have seven to eight steps to complete, including reviewing cards, creating the user account, adding the information. So Swim Outlet had a pretty typical new user checkout flow that required login and multiple screens. And even though they were leveraging autocomplete fully, it was still a pretty long process, taking two minutes or more from start to finish. So Swim Outlet, which is actually the largest online specialty SwimShop in the US, did a review of their site and implemented payment requests. So users at Swim Outlet can now go from the cart review page to their order confirmation where they see a payment request sheet, this mobile optimized form that's pre-filled with the user's information, meaning it only takes a few clicks to complete. So similar to the J Crew walkthrough that Ben and Dion did, because the Swim Outlet shoppers are able to skip so many in-between steps, they're able to checkout in 20 to 25 seconds, an 80% reduction in time to checkout, which is huge. And to help with speedier checkout flows, we're now making the Google Payment API available as well. This means you can use credit cards, you've added to your Google account from products like Google Play, YouTube, Chrome, Android Pay, and then the Google can send the merchant the payment and shipping info so that users don't have to type it in. We showed you in the keynote, the merchant fancy implementing pay with Google button. And in this demo, you see on screen that the site calls payment requests similar to Swim Outlet, and that you can see Google as a form of payment enabling a much faster checkout process. And the payment team is also here in the forum in case you wanna check out and have them review your checkout process. So the web, as we all know, has always been this really, really safe place, right? Okay, maybe that's patently untrue. But the expectation has always been at least that websites don't get access to powerful device features, powerful APIs without asking for permission. And as we add more and more powerful APIs to the web, as we enable more and more web capabilities, that permission changes the model of the web and how users have to interact with it. So we're still on this journey of building the best model for this. But when websites need special permissions from the user, they have to show this permission request. Now, the permission requests appear as ignorable banners at the bottom of the screen on Android, top of the screen on desktop, and developers have often shown them frequently. They just pop them up whenever they think, oh, I might need this in the future. Without considering, is this really an appropriate time to ask the user this? And do they have enough context to answer that question? And this results in a really distracting user experience because you have these little dialogues popping up all over the place. And it turns out, this is kind of a bad thing too, because in Chrome for Android alone, we found users either entirely ignore the permission requests or they temporarily dismiss them. More than 90% of the time. So 90% of the time, it's not that the user is saying, yes, you can have that permission, or saying no, you can't.  So to address this problem, since Chrome 59, we actually started saying if a user dismisses a permission request, doesn't accept or deny it, they just dismiss it, three times in a row, we'll actually just temporarily block that permission request in the future for a week. So it will pop up again, but not for another week, since clearly the user doesn't feel like answering the question. Now as another step though, towards making this even better, beginning in Chrome 63 for Android, we really wanna reduce these continuous distractions for users. So we're going to present permission requests as modal dialogues. Now this sounds backwards, because now we're gonna force the user to answer this question, but this really is gonna encourage users to say, yeah sure, that's a good request, or deny a request that they're not interested in, rather than just kind of ignoring that they're being asked. And this is going to drastically reduce the number of permission requests that users actually see, because they'll make a decision up front, and the best part about this is this is going to encourage applications to not only ask for permission in the context of why that permission will be useful to make the user's experience better, but only ask it when it's actually a good idea and they need that capability. And this is really important, because we found that sites that ask for permissions across all APIs without context, on average, they actually only get granted permission 40% as much, as sites that actually ask for something and give you the context. So if you're given the context of, hey I want access to your location because it will help me tell you which restaurant is closest to you, you'll actually grant that so much more often, like 150% as much often as you will if you don't get any context at all, like 40% of the time they would get that accepted. So since a block decision, by the way, is permanent, unless the user manually overrides it, we hope this is going to encourage people to ask for permission and give context. Okay, so let's talk about reliability for web applications. When you click on an app icon on your home screen, you expect it to just work, you expect it to just load and do something. And this frankly has always been something holding the web back as an application platform, because as users we've become conditioned to think that web app equals something that only works when I have a network connection. And native mobile apps never show us this cute little guy. Nothing on my home screen shows this, except for Chrome. And in order for web apps to earn a place on the home screen, we need to make them reliable even when the network isn't. And the worst part is mobile phones actually aren't always online or offline. They're in like this Schrodinger's cat state where they might have a network connection, they show four bars, but it might not actually do anything, or it might not only have one bar, but it actually can get data through. And this is actually even worse, like this breaks the user experience just as much as saying, hey, I'm disconnected completely. So let's talk about a service that I'm sure you've probably heard of, and you might even rely on and need to be reliable, ride sharing. So everyone's heard of Uber, like they're a ride service with a global focus. They actually build products that work all over the world. And earlier this summer, they announced their progressive web app. M.Uber, called Moober. No, really, it's called Moober. They said so in their blog post, so I'm gonna say that the rest of the time. So Moober is this investment in delivering really great global access for Uber everywhere, especially for those users with really low connectivity, or low storage space on their devices, or even devices where their native app wasn't actually supported. And users need to really be able to quickly and reliably request a ride, no matter where they are, or what their network speed is, what their device is. And Moober provides that experience using the web. In fact, they're actually designed to work really well on 2G. They're interactive in three seconds on 2G. Their core ride sharing app is really just 50 kilobytes. Like that's incredibly tiny. I mean, I haven't seen a JavaScript library that small in, I can't even remember when, but it's really designed to work well because they cash these requests and they actually let them serve the content locally, even when they have an intermittent network and they detect this really well. Instagram is another example. You're gonna hear more about this later in the creating media without an app talk. But they do this great job of unlocking the ability for users on unreliable connections to share experiences even when they don't have a connection through offline support. So you can take a photo even when you're not connected to the internet and using Background Sync in the Service Worker API, it gets posted automatically as soon as you're back online. So they'll talk more about that later. And continuing with this theme, eBay is actually currently looking at service workers to see how they can make their experience better for their users. And they're not quite ready to refactor their entire core experience, but they came up with this great standalone use case to try out service worker deployment. So they started caching the users eBay browsing history, like what items you've looked at already. They cashed those using Service Worker. And then the user can actually look at those, like they can flip back through items even while they're offline. And this way they can learn how to use service workers for a really strong offline experience and then use that to integrate back into their main experience. So all these pillars, fast, integrated and reliable, they really just lead to engaging. And an engaging app really goes beyond just being functional. And it ensures your whole experience is really delightful. It makes it easy for users to do what they need to do. And using features like Web Push, it can always be up to date with notifications. You can keep users informed. And it uses the right capabilities, the right time in a really beautiful way. And to talk through an engaging experience, we're gonna take a look at Travago. Great, thanks Chris. So go to demo screen. So in the keynote, we highlighted Travago as this really great progressive web app. And so I wanted to go ahead and give a demo. Although all of you who I know, I think you're really paying attention to us, you're probably looking at your phones already. So if you wanted to go to travago.com, you can do that as well and follow along.  And I'm gonna go ahead and search here. So for those who are unfamiliar with Travago, they're actually one of the largest hotel search engines for travel and they operate in 55 countries. So I'm gonna go ahead and search for San Francisco. Let's take a look at the dates. Let's see, maybe I'll be in the city for my anniversary next weekend. And then if you actually scroll through, it's really, really fast and smooth. And if I actually try to go into the various different hotel product detail pages, you see a nav here where each of the pieces of information is available really, really quickly. You see some of the skeleton screens that Chris talked about earlier. And so it's just a wonderful, kind of immersive user experience. And then one of the things that the Travago team really focused on was the ability to be extremely resilient and still perform it even on a flaky connection. And so I'm gonna go ahead and go to airplane mode. And as you can see here, there's the UI that tells the user you're offline, so then we'll reconnect when we are back with network.  You actually are still able to consume some content. Again, if I'm going into a listing that isn't already cached, there's really nice UI for you for to communicate to the user when they're offline. And I think what's terrific about this is that even when the user kind of navigates through Travago and goes back to a screen or they actually have a maze. So I guess it's their version of the offline dinosaur. But you're actually able to play a game while you're waiting to come back online, which is really cool. But please still pay attention to the rest of this talk. Don't just play the little game. And so what I love about Travago is that it's great to ship really amazing experiences for users, but then a day it's still a pretty large business. And so I wanna highlight a couple of stats here. So again, as I mentioned, they focus a lot on providing a really resilient experience. And a stat that I wanna highlight is that 67% of users who are interrupted by a period of a flaky connection or offline actually come back to continue to browse. Think about that.  In this situation, you're actually Travago is still maintaining some sort of content for you to interact with until that network connection comes back. And so that continuity is really proving well in their business results. So they're seeing users continue to stay with them and continue to browse. Another stat which Ben highlighted earlier in the keynote, and I wanna really emphasize here that 97%, they're seeing a 97% increase in overall conversions. And conversions here is defined by a user browsing through lots of different hotel listings and then clicking on the view deal button. And so that means that users are able to find what they want really quickly and are clicking out. So that's a really, really great experience. And again, I wanna share, one of the highlights here is that Travago actually published a blog post with Think With Google where one of the developers said that mobile users come to expect sites to just work regardless of flaky wifi or poor mobile reception. And so this is really the new bar. It's the standard bar, I hope, for what users expect and for what all of you developers should be able to deliver for all of your users. And another example of an engaging experience I wanna walk through is West Elm's approach. For those who are here at Chrome Dev Summit last year, I actually demoed at the West Elm beta site and I wanna touch upon the journey that they went through over the last year. And I think that's gonna be very relatable because sometimes here at Google, we have a lot of, we move at a fast pace. But when I talk to partners, I have to remind folks that it takes time. It takes a lot of planning, a lot of internal stakeholder management. I see a lot of nodding because people understand what it takes to kind of reinvest or invest in new experiences. So I wanna walk through kind of what West Elm did. And so for those of you who don't know West Elm, it's a major retail furnishings company. It's part of the William Sonoma Group that has eight brands, including Pottery Barn and Williamsonoma.com as well. And so I'm gonna go ahead and walk through the timeline. So this time last year, that just launched the West Elm beta and they kept it as a separate experience and they started to redirect some limited traffic there. But they knew that they had something good and so they actually went through rigorous usability testing and they got positive feedback. And so that gave them the confidence to continue to roll out to more of their traffic. So they were seeing 10% of traffic, constantly, constantly checking what the data was telling them. Again, continuing to see positive metrics. And then at the point where they were rolling out 10% traffic and seeing positive metrics, they said, wow, we're onto something good here. It's actually, let's take this opportunity to re-architect their platform so that they can use web components across all of the company's sites. Ben highlighted West Elm, Pottery Barn and Williamsonoma going through this process already. And so this really means that not only were they building a high bar for one site, but they were taking that learnings and able to expand it across so many other company sites. And when they rolled out to 25% traffic across iOS and Android, and it's important to note that West Elm's traffic is actually over 80% of it is actually on iOS. I want to pause for a moment to kind of share a couple of stats that they saw for 25% traffic. They saw an increase in average time spent as well as an overall lift in revenue per visit. Now, if any of you have actually been on the West Elm site and 9% revenue increase, it's actually a lot if you've seen their furniture. So I think this is, it was a huge testament to the work that the team did in terms of testing and continuing to look at their data. And then that data that I just shared with you was so positive that it actually accelerated kind of folks internally to think about multiple sites upgrading onto this new platform. And so over the next few weeks, potterybarn.com, williamsonoma.com and westelm.com will be getting this new experience through probably most of it coming right after the holidays, but you'll be seeing all these new upgraded experiences. So it's a great example of testing, iterating, retooling and then launching for what makes sense in terms of raising the bar for all of your users. And I hope you're getting the idea as we go through all these examples. We're hopefully showing you, there's a ton of different features here. There's a ton of different ingredients to help you mix and match the recipes to formulate your perfect cocktail or web experience, whatever. Speaking of cocktails, I hear there's some good nitro cocktails at the bar tonight here in SF. For those of you who are here with us, and yes, there are mocktails for those who don't drink alcohol as well, but. So just two years ago, we had this major e-com company in India ship a beautiful new web experience. And so I really want to emphasize that we think about the web as this global, having global reach. And so it's just this one company, and I always like to take a look at kind of where we are like year over year. So two years ago we had one company and today there are so many sites adopting all of these modern web features from AMP to service worker to push notifications, better sign in, better checkout, because these sites want to deliver a better user experience. There's just a small sampling of brands, but it just gives you a sense of kind of the momentum that we're seeing throughout the world. And it's just not about sites. It's about making sure that platforms are able to invest in the modern web. And so we understand that it's also important that we are able to turn on many of these features at scale. And so we're excited to see that automatic and WordPress are continuing to invest here. So most folks have probably heard of WordPress.org. Automatic is actually the creators of WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, the Jetpack plugin for WordPress, as well as WooCommerce. And so with automatic, we've been able to collaborate on a couple of fronts. First on AMP, we're creating the official Google AMP plugin for WordPress and making it instantly available on millions of sites across WordPress.com and the VIP sites. And with ServiceWorker, we're doing some experimental work with the Jetpack plugin to bring the generic ServiceWorker framework to the theme authors. So this means that you can progressively enhance your theme with more progressive web app functionality. And hopefully there'll be more to announce on this front soon. The automatic team is actually here with us at Chrome Dev Summit and they'll be giving a talk about how WordPress is continuing to invest in the web. So WordPress and automatic is just one example. Magento is a major e-commerce platform. They're serving tons and tons of sites, actually over $124 billion in gross merchandise volume goes through the Magento platform on an annual basis. They have lots of huge developer community, tons of technology partners and recently Magento announced their commitment to integrating progressive web app technologies. And it'll be part of the upgrade into the next version of their platform. So we're excited that they are continuing to invest so that users are gonna get modern shopping experiences. And hopefully this shows how you can reach the bar. You can have some support to help reach the bar. You can get some assistance. That's actually what our team is here for. That's why we hold these conferences. This is what we wanna do is help figure out how to help you to reach that bar. So with that, we hope that you take some of these stories, get motivated and inspired to go back to your teams and build something great, actually build really great modern web experiences. We're around the next couple of days. Feel free to come up to us. We're excited to engage with all of you and have a good rest of the next two days. Absolutely, thanks.


We're here at Wicket 2012 in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and I'm very pleased to be joined by Bernadette Lewis, who is Secretary-General of the Caribbean Telecommunications Union. Bernadette, thank you very much for being with us today. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. We're pretty much at the end of the Wicket process now. I wanted to find out what your opinions have been and what your impressions have been of Wicket 12. All right. Well, this is my first experience at a treaty level conference. Wicket has been very, very interesting seeing how so many different administrations could start off in different camps and actually the process by which you work towards some consensus. We're getting there very slowly, but it has been quite intense and I think it is because so many of the issues are complicated and diverse. Just by virtue of the pace of technological innovation, it opens up so many questions and the prospect of what the future holds, it also gives us a certain, I suppose, many of the administrations a certain wariness about how they should position themselves in this particular treaty. What are the most pertinent points for the Caribbean region that are going to be coming from this conference? Well, I think there has been the concern and I suppose it is really because of the intense media attention that has been directed at this conference that the internet is allowed to develop as it has been in the past. Many of our Caribbean governments have indicated their intention or their commitment to ICT-enabled development and I am sure that they are concerned about anything that is going to increase the cost of communications and the internet and so on. All of those things have been occupying the minds of our Caribbean stakeholders. The issues of security, the fact that many of our members within the CTU are small island states, small island developing states, these are some of the things that they would have been very interested in coming into the meeting. And what do you see as being the most positive aspects of Wicked 12? Well, I think what I did like from the very beginning, I think, was the intention of the ITU to work in a more collaborative way and participating more in this multi-stakeholder process that is really the basis on which the internet unfolds or evolves and I thought that was an excellent statement and the fact that you had Fadi Jihadi of the ICANN at the opening ceremony, I think that bodes well for the future. So I thought that was one of the really very good things that were one of the things that was expressed very early in the game. There's also been a lot of discussion about transparency here, what have been your impressions of that? By the way, I was the chairman of the working group, one of the working groups charged with looking at the ITRs and the issue of transparency from the work that we were given had to do with that of roaming and you know what happens to when people travel and they're not aware of the costs or the prices of the roaming services that they utilize and the whole issue of bill shock, that was dealt with and we're very happy with the outcome. I think people need to be aware of the sort of costs they're incurring when they travel so that was one great aspect of it. The discussions have been very open just generally now with respect to the conduct of the conference, the discussions have been very open and I'm very pleased with how things are unfolding. Why do you think this particular conference attracted so much public attention? I think as I said earlier because of the media attention it received, there was a lot of press, a lot of media reports in terms of threats to the internet, it could come under governmental control, it could come under the ITU's control, we don't want you know all of these fears were being played out in the public domain in the press and I think that it, and I'm very sure as well that there was a strong private sector lobby right and this has really I think put people in very definite camps and even before the discussion started right so they would have had entrenched positions but I think that we are seeing their number of very thorny issues that need to be resolved but we are working our way towards getting some sort of resolution and at the end of the day I don't think anybody wants to leave Dubai without having a revised document that they could take back, it would be most unfortunate if we do not come to some consensus by the end of the week. Well let's hope so, thank you very much indeed for being with us today. Good, thank you, thank you very much, good to be here.


Okay, we're back here live at theCUBE. We're here live in New York City for Big Data NYC. That's hashtag Big Data NYC on Twitter or LinkedIn. We're going to have some crowd chats this week. This is theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. We are here for Big Data Week in New York City. Also, Stratoconference right behind us and Hadoop World's kicking off an ending day one. They're all schmoozing the booth duty. I'm John Furrier, I'm joined by my co-host, Dave Vellante, and Clint Sharp from Splunk is back on theCUBE here in New York.  Clint, welcome back to theCUBE. Thanks, John. So, Splunk, a lot of positive articles came out of your event. Obviously, we had so many videos, we can't even count, but you guys are redefining Big Data, and I had in my ending segment, I kind of was throwing the big idea of vision that you guys could be the next Google in terms of the way you're handling it, because one, your product is so extensible and people are using so many use cases around Big Data that you've never seen before. So I want to get your perspective on that. And also, I was very impressed with how many happy customers you guys have.  I mean, my favorite quote was, Splunk has liberated us with our data. So that speaks to the business value conversation happening here. So tell us how your Big Data strategies, it's just kind of like the boats pointed down the river and you guys are just flowing down. What's the story? Yeah, well, I mean, I think we were Big Data before it was cool. I mean, I think all the vendors say that, right? But we were out doing real customer success and we built the whole business on real customer success, which is, how can I go and give customers what they're looking for in terms of enabling technology to make their lives better? We started in IT and we're working to break ourselves out of that mold now. I think HUNK is a great foray into that. But we started with IT and we started with making their lives better. And I came from a customer, so I sort of lived the experience. And when you're working all day every day to try to troubleshoot tough IT problems, just being able to get to the root of it very quickly, we let people go back to their families sooner and that actually sort of matters. And so I think that breeds a sort of endearment that they have towards this as a vendor-customer relationship and it's fantastic to be part of it. Okay, what's your take on the ecosystem? Honestly, when we went to the Splunk, actually it was pretty much their events. It was pretty centric around their value proposition. But obviously when we look at the landscape, this is kind of like the Olympics here. It's the combined work out of startups, big vendors, all positioning themselves for essentially being that platform for big data. What's your take on where Splunk fits in with the opportunity that everyone's put down there? Well, it's interesting. So with new businesses, things are discreet. Everybody's sort of doing their own thing, swimming in their own lane, so to speak. And you're starting to see a lot of people look at things like Splunk, certainly Tableau and of course many, many others. Obviously the platform guys and things are starting to get interesting. They're starting to become a lot of overlap. And I think Splunk is interesting because you guys, like you said, started before big data was termed and before it was cool and everybody looked at it and said, it looks at you now, it says, oh wow, hot company, multi-billion dollar valuation. But we can do that too. So what's interesting to me about Splunk is when you talk to your customers, there's a real affinity, there's real traction and you've got competitive advantage right now and not the least of which is you not only moving first but you're moving fast. So, Glenn, I wonder if you could give us the sort of update what's new with Hunk Post Conference because you must be getting a halo effect from the conference, talk about that a little bit. Yeah, sure, so we are always continuing to improve the product. We are nearing release very, very soon. And we are taking the feedback from Conf and I'll tell you that the majority of the feedback we've been getting over the last, through the entirety of the beta program because we've had over 100 customers in the beta program running on every distribution of Hadoop and looking at all kinds of different data has really been, A, how do we make the product work as widely as possible across all these different distributions because as much as you'd like to think Hadoop is Hadoop, quite frankly, there's compatibility issues between everybody's distribution so it's ironing out all the kinks between working with all the partners that we work with, Cloudera Hortonworks, MapR, Pivotal, IBM and then lastly, making it work with all of their specific data which we've had some really great examples of use cases ranging from claims processing and doing analytics there to your more basic clickstream and also deep diving into security so we've been trying to just make it work as efficiently as possible across all the different types of data our customers are asking for. Just a point of clarification, you mentioned the distros you're working with, are those the only distros you're working with? I mean, anything of Hadoop Hadoop. So Intel, are they part of the mix yet? Yeah, we are talking to them. We are going to certify. At some point in the near future, we're having those conversations just didn't. Okay, so you mentioned the ones that you're currently certified on and it just, it takes a little bit of extra engineering work to make it happen. There's six of them and we got five done by GA which I thought was a pretty Herculean QA effort and now we're going to get to the last one. Excellent. So a lot of startups here, I want to get you guys to take because you guys now grown up, big company now, still growing, fast growing company but like, you're not a startup. I want to get your take, Clinton. You know, take your Splunk hat off for a minute and put your industry hat on. What's the state of the startup environment here? Because some are saying they're late to the game, all the seats are taken, we're in a bubble, valuations are out of control. Obviously that's the Wall Street Journal of mostly people in New York who have that opinion. Silicon Valley people think it's a never overvalued market but the startup ecosystem is really critical and this is not a consumer bubble. Enterprise marketing, mostly, a lot of big consumer companies use big data but for the most part, a lot of the people here are enterprise focused. What's your take on the startup ecosystem relative to the horizontal opportunity, not just your area but other areas? I mean, I think we are in the start of a revolution for enterprise software in general. I mean, for the last probably five years, I mean really since Facebook started five to 10 years-ish, focus in the valley around consumer startups and getting a bright new set of candidates in enterprise software and IT related thing I think is good for everyone. I think in the Hadoop ecosystem in particular, I don't think anybody's late to the game. This is such a nascent market man. I know we're seeing a ton of people here in New York to talk about Hadoop at Hadoop World and inside of this area and makes it seem like it is a big thing. I'm not denying that it's a huge deal but we've tapped such a small percentage of what the real market could be for these products that every startup I think has a huge opportunity in front of them. What do customers need to do to get more value out of what they're doing with Hadoop? What would your recommendations be? Well, so what I hear most from customers is that they've been successful using it as a file system and they've got a ton of data there at rest and that they're struggling to get analytics and visualizations. Obviously we have a product here to help. There's a lot of other products in the ecosystem as well and I think that Hadoop doesn't become successful until people are being able to point at that report and say that's from my Hadoop system. I think there are companies specifically in online services that are very mature in the Hadoop world and the rest of the world is just looking for that software that goes and makes it easy for them to use. So give us the update again. So you're, HONK has announced, you're in beta, what's the timeline for when this starts getting in customers' hands? I would say very, how soon is soon? The very, very, very soon we will be- This year? This year, so soon that it might be before you know it. Now what do you guys got going at the show? Can you share with us any insights, any little previews? Yeah, absolutely, so we've got HONK at the booth so if you want to get a good view of what the product is and what it does, we've got demoers at the booth ready to show you the product, different use cases. We've also got Splunk Enterprise at the booth to take a look at so our whole product portfolio is there and ready for people to look at just upstairs in the partner pavilion. So, got to talk about New York City. What's your perspective of folks out there watching, obviously let me watch the QR in New York, but I mean, why is New York such a big focus for these events around big data? I mean, you see New York is always kind of the hub of certain kinds of commerce, why does big data resonate well in New York? Well, I mean, obviously finance has a huge, huge part to do with that, right? And there is, in fact, I've met with a couple of our larger financial customers this morning because I happen to be in New York and when you come to New York, that's a good thing to do, right? And so there's, these are the guys that with the advent of algorithmic trading and other really, really low latency, high data volume types of use cases are generating these really big data stores and have need and also they're the ones who stand probably to profit the most from being able to algorithmically understand their data the best. Okay, so I want to get a little bit of it inside of what to expect from you guys here at the show. Sure, so we are, we have a big announcement tomorrow, so stay tuned to the PR wire and we will be, we have a session on Wednesday. I forget the exact time, I think it's around 11 a.m., where we will be going through and talking about Hunk and our Hadoop story. So we're just really excited to be here and really looking forward to getting to talk to some more customers. All right, so what about you, what are you gonna be doing? What's your agenda like? Give us the details, parties, meetings. Well, so you know I was here at Cloudera's partner event just upstairs earlier today and yeah, so after this I'm gonna go over across the street to do the booth drinking and then off to dinner. And then there's gonna be, I think there's a number of big events that hopefully I will get to partake in. The Red Sauce game is on tonight. Cue party tomorrow. I'm gonna be at the Cue party. Awesome, that's a definitive. Clint Sharp, we're here at Splunk, we're here live in the Cue, we'll be right back with our next guest live. Early preview here, kickoff session, evening of the Monday here in New York City. Big data New York City, hashtag big data New York City. We're live here inside the Cue, we'll be right back.


Well Looks like either movie day or mess around with something in the garage today. I had plans to do stuff outside today, but Whoo, here comes rain been looking like it's all morning. It is now a little after 12 And it's getting darker and I can hear some rumbling in the background. So Sounds like we got a boomer coming hear that been about five minutes Here's the rain and thunder very dark and gray and gloomy. Oh shoot Really had plans today.   So Let's make some dinner I've had these steaks marinating and some These are T bones I've had a marinating and some steak sauce some seasoning and some Italian dressing But we're going to go one step further, you know 45 minutes 50 minutes, whatever So let's go ahead and lay some of this out here We'll start on the first one. I'm special just kind of kicking it some things to do today That I wanted to do outside. I wanted to get pine needles up blunts. It didn't get done I would have just went to work with monkey. I was hoping it would pack Of course this ain't I'll cook these about medium rare. It's all for sale like last weekend a yard sale and God was supposed to come back never did he just come back and paid me for it. So anyway, sorry about the intrusion But anyway, I'm about to do it for this vlog They don't monkey to get home.  So thanks for watching guys Thanks. Hope you enjoyed my vlog. I appreciate it and don't forget to comment, rate, and subscribe All right guys, happy Easter to all of you. Hope you have a great weekend and a safe weekend. Take care Shea Berry the myth man a legend. I'm gone for now