Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante, and we're live here at the Stratoconference in Santa Clara, California, O'Reilly strata. This is the Cube Silicon Angles flagship product. We try to extract the signal from the noise and bring to you our audience the happenings at events like this. We did 27 events last year, and our goal is to do more this year, so we're well on track for that. Thanks for watching everybody, you're a great audience, we appreciate the tweets. I'm at Dave Vellante, my co-host John Furrier is on a break right now, but he's at Furrier. And we have a special segment right now with HP. HP's obviously been a lot in the news lately. They're really trying to put together a big data strategy and go to market, they're a huge player. Obviously, they've got a giant portfolio in this space and some of a few secret weapons, and we're here to talk about that. Sanjay Murray-Medhaya is back, you just met him, he's running strategy for big data and focusing on the products and the portfolio. And also Chris Sennlund, who's the VP of marketing at Vertica, which is of course an HP company. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. It's great to be here Dave. Good to see you guys. So Strata, this is a big push for HP. We've been at pretty much every Strata and this is probably the biggest presence we've seen out of HP. So Sanjay, let me start with you. So what's going on there? We are excited about the Big Data portfolio. We've been in this market long, long. Last year, even before we announced any of our big data strategy, we have sold Hadoop like Vertica solutions to our customers. I mean, what we are doing now since last summer is having a more integrated solutions where customers can adapt. So Vertica and Hadoop are integrated in the app system that we announced in December. We have the Vertica Community Edition with the WebHDFS connectors to Hadoop. So customers can now get an appliance where they can push data into Hadoop, do the initial processing, and we already have WebHDFS connectors from Vertica 6.1 into Hadoop. So we get the best of the both worlds. At the end of the day, we are here to solve customers' big data problems with an integrated solution. So Chris, I remember I met Colin Mahoney. Obviously, you worked very closely with Colin. We were on a plane, and we started chatting, and we finally turned to sort of the industry that we were in, and I had to break out my notebook because I kind of learned so much from him and the perspectives that he had around Vertica. So some of the things that we've been hearing today, obviously you're hearing a lot about the Hadoop distribution wars. You guys have chosen not to compete in those. Thank you. At least not directly, as a Hadoop distribution, SiliconANGLE, I think, last week announced its own Hadoop distribution. There you go. The whole sequel meets Hadoop. Obviously, you are going to participate in that very much directly. And then, of course, the subtext of that is the traditional business intelligence and data warehousing coming together, something that we predicted several years ago. Security's another one, which is not your sweet spot, but really business value is the other big theme that we're hearing. So thinking about those sort of items and the ones that are sort of relevant to Vertica, talk about your play in the context of big data at this event. Sure. I mean, I'll start with the last one first. I think what's really gone on in the last, really kind of 12 to 24 months is that this whole idea of big data has captured not just the technology organization, which of course is where a lot of the excitement around things like Hadoop is coming from, but it started to capture the CFO, the COO, the CMO, the attention of these line of business execs and we were like, now tell me what I can do with it. So Vertica's really become a platform and what we're really going to be doing this year is really bringing out our ecosystem, as well as, of course, working through the HP ecosystem and delivering all these information optimization solutions, Sanjay's offerings, our offerings, our integrated Hadoop offerings, service offerings, and really kind of bringing solutions to market that have real business value behind them. As to one of your earlier points, it's not even just so much SQL plus Hadoop, it's really kind of storage plus analytics plus catalog and managing all of this big data. You know, one of the things we talk about, and you've probably heard Colin talk about this a lot as well, you know, we hate when companies throw away data and so much data is now coming in and Hadoop gives us a great platform to store and catalog and manage it, but Vertica's really the engine for analyzing it. So we see Hadoop as highly, highly complimentary of what we do at Vertica and as you said, we've chosen to really go the broad approach. So as soon as you guys get your distribution and marketing, are you there? We're all over partnering with it. We're partnering with it as broadly as possible. Do the right thing for the customers and really, you know, be as customer friendly as possible. So the other subtext of that, as I mentioned, is the whole BI world, the traditional BI world. And I feel like the traditional BI folks have been sort of sitting back saying, all right, this is a dupe thing. We really don't, you know, want to play or know how to play or organizationally, we're not ready to play. Do you see that changing? What role can you play in facilitating that change and what does it mean for the sort of future of BI and data warehousing? Well, that's something we can help bridge. And that's one of the reasons we're working so closely with these guys. You know, I think you see most of the major, both what you call traditional BI and sort of what I call next generation interactive BI companies out here on the floor. And most of them are partners of ours. Again, we've got like 40-ish partners and I'm just talking about Vertica and that works all across HP. So we've got a very broad partner ecosystem and you know, a lot of what we do with the Vertica technologies help to bridge that gap. Sanjay, your job is you got to pull together this vast portfolio and present it in a way that's cogent to customers. So I just, sort of before we came on, I'm thinking about the pieces. And I'm sure I missed some, but obviously you got the the metal, you got the servers, the storage, the networking pieces, you got Vertica, you got search, search plus, I'll call it with autonomy. You got the security side, you got ArcSight. You've got this new thing out of HP Labs called Express Query, which we positioned, when we first saw it, we said this could be the future metadata indexing engine. I know that's used in things like Store All, but it's got a lot of potential there. And the big one that nobody ever talks about is services. We've quantified, services is the biggest opportunity because you got to put all this stuff together and make it work and extract value. So, did I get it right? What am I missing? How are you putting all that together and going to market? Absolutely, I mean that's what makes HP such a strong player in big data because we have solutions in every layer of the stack. You hit and try it on the Express Query. We take about HP Labs on innovation side, not just Express Query. We have had ARIA, a project within HP Labs which is working on a new scheduler for Hadoop for better managing the jobs on Hadoop cluster. So look at every layer of the stack and when you talk about services, there are two angles to services. One is at business value through information management and analytics division in enterprise services and there is at an infrastructure level where we have technology services where we help customers to put together that enterprise-grade big data platform. It's not just Hadoop. So when we go talk to customers, they first ask us, tell us more about Vertica, autonomy, your enterprise services capability. So we want to talk about Hadoop first but then customers want us to bring every piece of HP together and that's the real value of HP. And we are just starting with Vertica. You rightly pointed out there are lots of solutions integrating autonomy as well but we're excited about this coming year. You'll hear a lot more from us. So I think HP is very well positioned for big data. Yeah, I mean customers are excited, right? You guys got very loyal customers and I'm sure they're looking for, okay, how can HP help us? You're our primary supplier. How can you help us bring these things together? One of the things that I've also heard at this event is that starting to hear anyway is the theme of data management. Some of the traditional ways of managing data don't necessarily apply to big data but some of the concepts do. What are you guys seeing there? Chris, maybe you could comment and then maybe specific to Vertica and then Sanjay maybe more broadly. Is this a do-over in data management or can we actually apply those to Hadoop and big data? Well, I don't think it's so much that they don't apply to because I think conceptually a lot of the concepts hold but it's whether they can scale for. Yeah, we've got to have data quality, obviously, right? Because the need to scale is what's really driving so much. That's a lot of what's different and then as Sanjay said so well and I tried to say it earlier and he definitely said it better than me as he usually does, it's really about where technology meets business value. That's really the point that we have to hit and that's why, you know, not just, obviously I represent one of our business units and I hope one of our core components, I know one of our core components but at the same time it's about bringing this portfolio together, about delivering business solutions to market really and scaling for this world of big data that we're in right now. And again, it's not just, you know, we all know the three V's, it's not just how big it is but how fast it's moving and the amount of structured, unstructured, semi-structured data that companies are needing to deal with these days from all sorts of different sources. So organizations Sanjay are not set up today to really take the concepts that has taken decades for them to apply and data governance and data management and data quality and just slap it onto big data. I mean, clearly there's a gap there. So how are you helping people close that gap and how long do you think it's going to take? No, as you, what I'm observing right now in the marketplace and when you come to conference election strata is that, yeah, there is great momentum, the adoption is increasing for big data but still we are miles away from this being main stage. When you look at it, it's not just about Hadoop. I mean, in a way it's good that strata is making it more strata big data rather than just Hadoop, the theme. So we look at two tiers, HP, there's a data tier going on and there's a storage tier. So it's the life of the day, you follow the life of the data. So data moving from just at the OLTP transaction all the way to age data where you need analytics and at some point you need to have it stored. So we are addressing from that angle as well as when customers are adopting, technology services is a huge component. We are building practices based in TS consulting which is more of the infrastructure level and marrying that with enterprise services which talks to line of business owners. And in addition, HP is big believer in the partner ecosystem. So the SI partnership is important for us. So that's a good example of what Chris, what you were talking about is they do apply. Take the life cycle management, I mean, we talk about information life cycle or application life cycle management for years, that concept definitely applies. It's just different scale, different speed, different volumes. And much more variety, and much more variety, but yes, absolutely. And as we mentioned some of the other, where the autonomy technology and some of the other technology that we have in our portfolio really comes in and provides power and the ability to again integrate all of this into a Hadoop platform. And then as we said, work across the... So I see in some ways your biggest strength is your biggest challenge is your organization. You got, you're so big. Now you got a division, right? But you're working within this rubric of HP's big data strategy. So how does that work? It's obviously a matrix organization. What do you, what kind of latitude do you have in terms of go to market? What do you have to get from the sort of umbrella? How does that all work? Are you still sorting that out? No, I think, and hopefully Sanjay would agree with me that we're working more and more and more closely together. Now again, we're very customer driven. So we love customers want to buy everything from HP, but at the same time, we don't like to force anybody to replace anything. We try to come in and compliment. But that's why even though I live on the East Coast, I find myself out here, it seems all the time because we are doing a lot more together as an organization. I think even if you go see your presence on the floor, you'll see much more of a unified HP these days than you would have seen. You know, I actually joined HP just under a year ago. So I wasn't here a year ago, but I think certainly much more than you've probably seen in the past. Now we, yeah, we all have our separate goals and such, but at the same time, there's a lot of unification going on. So we're really trying to bring a unified message to market. And hopefully we're delivering that today. All right Sanjay, we got like under 20 seconds, but I want to hear from you, I want to give you the last word on the strategy and the vision if you can sum it up succinctly for us. HP strategy and vision and big data. So for us, when you look at strategies, we look at two parts. One is the data sources and the life of the data. So we are addressing holistically. HP's vision is structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. We already have portfolio to cover all the three. And when it comes to the life of the data, we can handle all the way from the source when the data is created, till the data is aged and stored. All the way from analytics and once analytics is done, you need to retain the data. So HP is very well positioned and that's the reason why Whitman has made big data as one of the key strategic initiatives within HP. All right folks, HP, obviously huge company, throwing off a lot of cash, paying off some debt. In big data, we just quantified the big data market and not surprisingly HP is one of the leaders. Big part of that is it's a services business and it's very vast portfolio. So obviously we'll be watching this space. Thanks for watching everybody. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right there. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back after this.


From time to time, we will share with you one of the more intriguing exhibits that can be found within the museums of Giza. Beyond the mountainous displays of precious jewels and finely cast golden relics, which captivate the crowds who flock to experience this extremely rich history, we personally find the more valuable of objects are often overlooked. Indeed, these precious masks and past pharaoh's possessions are undoubtedly exquisite in nature. However, there are some objects never designed to stun or impress but built with a function, functions which could shed light on the most intriguing and mysterious aspects of this past civilization. The Kufu ship being but one of these said artifacts, a boat found disassembled under the Great Pyramid, one said to have floated through the sky. And although the physical idea of this ship actually flying is a leap too far for some, there is in fact an artifact which exists found in 1898 during an excavation of the Padi Ayman tomb in Saqqara, Egypt, which you may find a bit more practically designed for flight through the Egyptian skies. Although numerous sources over the past century have surfaced accusing Egyptian authorities of concealing the discovery of Vimanas, ancient flying machines within the Pyramids of Giza, our said artifact seems to have slipped through this net of secrecy. Often with these well-stocked and well-preserved tombs, resting places of past pharaohs, whom once possessed unimaginable riches, numerous toy models of their once-favored crafts and vessels, will be discovered. Exquisitely constructed miniature replicas of their favorite forms of travel. It seems this artifact may have indeed been filtered through the security netting of public paradigm. As doing so, it seems to have lost its tailplane. Known as the Saqqara bird, it is now largely thought by many to have been a replica of an ancient flying craft, more specifically a glider. Clearly inspired by a bird's flight, the fixed wing upon its back has been found to be perfectly angled to create lift. Egyptian physician, archaeologist, parapsychologist, and dowser, Kaleo Messia, has concluded that the ancient Egyptians developed the first aircrafts. Predictably, he has experienced considerable hostility regarding his expose of evidences. One particular effort was undertaken by a character known as Martin Gregory. A builder and designer of free-flight gliders, he apparently built an exact replica of the Saqqara bird made of balsa wood. After testing this replica, Gregory would conclude that the Saqqara bird never flew. He told the interested parties that it was totally unstable in flight. Even after a tailplane was fitted, he claimed that the glider's performance was disappointing. He finished by concluding that the Saqqara bird was probably made as a child's toy or a weather vane. This clear attempt to suppress the truth, however, failed, and Martin has since been proven to have lied regarding the abilities of the glider. The question is why did he lie? According to Messia's son, Dawood Kaleo Messia, a successful architect who has thankfully continued the work of his father, Gregory's suggestion that the Saqqara bird was a weather vane is impossible, due to the lack of markings or any holes on the model that would serve as a means of hanging it. Additionally, and most importantly, aerodynamics expert Simon Sanderson also tested a replica model in a wind tunnel without a tailplane, and found that it produced four times the glider's own weight and lift. In Liverpool University, Sanderson then subjected it to another more powerful wind tunnel, this time after adding the missing tail. He stated that the Saqqara bird actually flew quite well, clearly to the annoyance of certain people who are probably now regretting not seizing the entire artifacts some years ago, rather than just the tailplane. Over 2,000 years after the ancient Egyptians carved this mysterious bird, modern technology has proven beyond doubt that at full size it could have indeed once flown through the Egyptian skies. A number of people who frequent our work have requested a more detailed video regarding one of the mysteries we so often focus upon here on the channel. There are many sites that we feel are deserving of in-depth focus. Our mission has always been to enlighten those who may not have been aware of the many different, compelling and often controversial realities surrounding countless ancient ruins that throughout their lives have been explained away with a lie. Undoubtedly, the most well-known, most commonly explored and thus the ruin most suited for our viewer's acquirement of a knowledge armory is Giza. Indeed, there are many people you will meet throughout your life that will have delved into the mysteries of Egypt. However, this experience, unbeknownst to them, may have been fraught with a limited illogical academic account regarding the history of Giza's plateau.  The characteristics of the casing stones are undoubtedly one of our own most noted achievements. We feel little, if any, notice has been given to the facts we have realized regarding these stones, yet the evidence we have found will remain clear for all to see. These casing stones, although of an enormous size and as such were left by a lost civilization, are far younger than the sandstone in which they encase. Most of these casing stones, unfortunately, robbed out during invasions within the last few centuries, are protecting stones which are actually far more eroded and thus far older beneath. However, additionally, we began to wonder just how old could the Great Pyramids be? Could these eroding sandstones actually be concealing a far larger, far older structure beneath? Also discovered here on our channel, the supporting evidence to this hypothesis, most notably along the east side of Kufu and in numerous other places where the smaller sandstones have been robbed out, is, as we suspected, a far larger exoskeleton. We strongly believe these enormous megalithic blocks that we have previously estimated to be many hundreds of tons in weight are actually the original oldest blocks of the Pyramids. We also believe that the more modern, currently recognized casing stones were actually inspired by these more heavily eroded smaller sandstone blocks now concealing these mammoth megaliths. This makes the layers, we believe, that adorn the Great Pyramid numbers three, with the two more modern layers being conservation efforts, undoubtedly undertaken at vastly different times within history. Just how old is the Great Pyramid? Just how impressive was ancient Egypt? For example, the oldest surviving obelisk at Heliopolis and therefore in Egypt was undeniably cut, transported, and lifted into position at an unknown time in history, using now lost technology and knowledge. It is a stone 20 meters in height, weighing an astonishing 121 tons. And this enormous, unexplainable, impossible monolith is not the only one left upon the plateau. There are many more dotted all over Giza. For example, the sarcophagus of Aminomet III, a pair of quartzite's monoliths discovered in the early 20th century, hang above this supposed tomb. These gigantic stones effortlessly support the weight above, each estimated to weigh 110 metric tons. The Colossae of Memnon, these two gigantic artworks, were built from single pieces of stone. They are orientated toward the sunrise at Winter Solstice, estimated to weigh anywhere from 600 to 1,000 tons each. Modern technology allows for the movement of such weights. However, any civilization claimed by academia, actually once being responsible for the transportation of such stones, is absurd. Who could have possibly transported such enormous stones to these locations? Not only transported them, but worked them into masterpieces they once were, disposing of all waste, presumably also weighing many tons. And there are many others. In the Temple East of Coffra's Pyramid, for example, there lay blocks regularly, yet quietly estimated to weigh over 400 tons. How can modern academia claim such tasks were undertaken by our modern ancestors? Anyone aware of the true accomplishments involved in the construction of the Giza plateau must now see this hypothesis as severely lacking any satisfactory explanations. Mortuary Temple of Mencara still possesses some astonishing unexplained feats. There are some estimates of the blocks within the temple, most notably within the surviving walls of the mortuary, weighing as much as 220 tons. The heaviest granite ashlars, imported from Aswan Quarry many miles away, weighing in at more than 30 tons. There are many incredible, inexplicable features upon the Giza plateau. Many of them, unfortunately, yet predictably, little shared academically. Yet it remains a place of invaluable, existent truths, many discrediting that which are passed off as current academic fact. Giza is an astonishing place, and the one we feel most likely to expose academia once and for all. It is a plateau we find highly compelling. When one explores the most fascinating and ancient of structures resting all over our planet, you will inevitably be confronted by baffling feats on engineering and ingenuity, tasks that, to modern math, escape understanding or indeed explanation. The main consensus regarding these ancient structures has always been a tricky thing to explain. To claim that these marvelous structures were built by primitive people with only primitive tools at their disposal does not only seem absurd to most who have visited such sites, but ignorant of their true past grandeur and the specific characteristics of each of these places. Ancient sites, such as Giza, Machu Picchu, among many others, still contain very confusing artifacts, anomalous evidence, which tells a very different story to that of mainstream history. Apart from the Baghdad battery, largely claimed to have been an ancient form of electroplating, there has been little in the way of physical evidence to suggest the use of electricity within the academically researched ancient times. Yet there are many remnants left, which suggest such activities. Not only are there countless clear examples of past machine work stone, but most importantly, there is evidence of errors made by these same tools, mistarts and discovered fault lines. These particular stones discarded laid bare in the quarries, revealing all the hallmarks of the machine engineering that went into building these wonderful places, these artifacts, once rubbish, now historical treasures. They can tell you the shape and movements of the tools that were being used, showing just how these machines cut into the stones, core drillings also discarded during manufacture, and cut stones discarded due to faults and cracks, revealing the complete preliminary cut marks left by the ancient stonecutters. These fragments of past activities are clearly some of the most important in unraveling these sites' ultimate secrets, yet it is rarely shared in the public arena and even less frequently researched by official bodies. Along with this vast and perplexing array of remnants, mercilessly left where they fell, strewn amongst the debris of disruption, lay countless extremely hardy machine stone jars, vessels made from some of the hardest rocks on earth. Some of these jars were made with a round bottom, perfectly machined, balanced on a base no bigger than the tip of a chicken's egg. Sir William Flinders Petrie ultimately realized that only lathe turning could have produced the symmetry and balance found on thousands of these bowls and vases, and Petrie was no fool. In 1894 he founded his own archaeological body, the Egyptian research account, which later became the British School of Archaeology in Egypt. He stated, for example, a bowl maker attained curves of exact circularity by rotating the bowl around a fixed blade, and formed a lip by shifting the centering of the bowl. Another round bottom vase had walls of such uniform thickness that it balanced perfectly on a curved base. To have a very well respected researcher and specialist of the ancient Egyptians to admit to a conviction of the use of power tools in these pots construction seems like quite a stunning position to take, especially when one considers that while metal chisels could have been used to shape soft limestone within ancient Egyptian times, the metals that were available to them, copper, bronze, and during the first millennium BCE, wrought iron, were far too soft to work such rock into such exquisite designs. It seems Petrie would like to remain honest regarding his conclusions, yet also incomplete with his explanations, preferring to let the receiver of said information make their own realizations, preferring to avoid complication by a, by this time, rather visible enemy. One could only conclude that these relics and ancient monuments thereof were not the work of the Egyptians, but further evidence to suggest that these baffling structures were built far before the ancient Egyptians, before academic understandings by a highly technologically advanced pre-cataclysm civilization. We find it difficult to see how such work was undertaken, or an explanation for our finding can be made without the use of power tools. Thankfully, the more we learn regarding these enigmatic places, the more we become aware of regarding their true history, and the closer it seems we become to finding those who built them. Hi guys, have you ever heard of Dendera Temple? Known as the sixth gnome of Upper Egypt, it is one of the best preserved ancient temple complexes on earth, and it bears the scars of what must have been the most frightening and destructive of events. An event that is ignored by the majority of modern academia, the complex spans some 40,000 square feet, and within the temple is some of the most well preserved ancient artworks of anywhere in Egypt. Along with preserving the exquisite art and decorations, the temple also preserved evidence of something we were not taught about in history class. Upon the granite steps, which still lead to the temple's roof, in direct alignment with a small window cut into the thick stone wall, is evidence of severe melting. At one time in the temple's long life, the steps within were turned into liquid magma. What catastrophic event could lead to the melting of granite steps through a small window in the wall? Were such events commonplace, or was it the result of an accident? Is this why the ancient structures were built with such huge blocks of stone? Many have speculated that the Dendera Temple is built upon an even older site. Are the steps surviving remnants of this much earlier complex? Were they part of a structure that once witnessed a solar flare, perhaps, or maybe a localized supernova? Many who have examined the steps and the surrounding area have speculated that nuclear blasts may have been detonated within ancient Egypt or even before. The ancient site in India, for example, 10 miles west of Jodhpur, with radiation that was so intense, the area is still highly dangerous. An ancient layer of radioactive ash was discovered that covers a 3 square mile area. Scientists investigating the site where a housing development was being built established that there was a very high rate of illnesses in the area. The levels of radiation were so high the Indian government eventually cordoned off the entire area. They later unearthed an ancient city which shows strong evidence of an atomic blast dating back some 12,000 years, which destroyed most of the buildings and killed an estimated half a million people. Did nuclear war occur in our distant past? Were these ancient structures which have stood the test of time actually built as bunkers? With melted steps in irradiated ancient cities found throughout the world, the evidence is certainly compelling. As always, thanks for watching guys. Until next time, take care. The temple also preserved evidence of something we were not taught about in history class. Upon the granite steps, which still lead to the temple's roof, in direct alignment with a small window cut into the thick stone wall, is evidence of severe melting. At one time in the temple's long life, the steps within were turned into liquid magma. What catastrophic event could lead to the melting of granite steps through a small window in the wall? Were such events commonplace, or was it the result of an accident? Is this why the ancient structures were built with such huge blocks of stone? Many have speculated that the Dendora temple is built upon an even older site. Are the steps surviving remnants of this much earlier complex? Were they part of a structure that once witnessed a solar flare, perhaps, or maybe a localized supernova? Many who have examined the steps and the surrounding area have speculated that nuclear blasts may have been detonated within Ancient Egypt, or even before. In 1988, while in Egypt, hunting for ancient relics, Swiss archaeologist, Gregor Spree, would stumble across a once-in-a-lifetime find. After paying a handsome fee of $300 to be allowed to inspect a grave robber's collection, he would be handed a package, wrapped in rags, and apparently with quite a musky odor. Within, he would discover an enormous mummified finger. It measured an amazing 16 inches in length, resulting in high estimates of 16 plus feet, for the original owner of such a monstrous digit. Spree recounted the moment he laid eyes on the finger to a local press newspaper, when he released the photos to the public. Quote, I was allowed to take it in hand and also to take pictures. A bill was put next to it to get an idea of its enormous size. The bent finger was split open and covered with dried mold. It was surprisingly light, maybe a few hundred grams, my heart was in my throat. Some believe the finger may have belonged to an extinct prehistoric giant ape, but alas, like so many other artifacts of this nature, subsequently vanished, shortly after it gained public attention. Also the aping question died out hundreds of thousands of years ago, and a digit of this ancient animal has never been found, we have only ever found small bone fragments and teeth. Imagine then the odds of finding a fully mummified finger from the animal, within a tomb raider's collections in Egypt. They are probably quite slim. Also leaving the question as to how it ended up mummified in Egypt a tough one to answer. He returned to Egypt in 2009 compelled to learn more about it, but unfortunately, by then, the old man who allowed Spurry to take the pictures had vanished, and with him all traces of the mysterious finger. If there was found to indeed have been a race of giant, highly intelligent humans, that colonized ancient Egypt, it would help tremendously in explaining the construction of the pyramids.


Hey everybody, welcome back to Magic Orthodoxy. My name is David and this is a Magic Review. Hey, today we're going to look at the Force Pad from Warped Magic. What is it? What is a Force Pad? Well, basically it's a notepad, right? It's a notepad. There are about 50 pages in total. The pages are about three inches by four and a half inches. This is printed out in the United Kingdom. And what this is is it's a notepad, obviously it's a notepad, but it's a forcing pad. So it allows you to force anything you want. And really, there was no commercial for this. There's no video teaching when you buy this. You're buying it as a utility. It's 22 bucks. 22 bucks and you get two forcing pads, okay? So there are $11 each. If you want to think about it that way, okay? And I don't think I'm going to give anything away because if you go out to the page, if you go out to the page to purchase one, they actually tell you what it is, okay? So I don't think it's an exposure here if I tell you what it is because the ad copy tells you what it is. It's a force pad because it's built up as a long and short. So it's very similar to a Spangali deck or any long and short deck you've ever used. You've got long pages, okay? You have 25 long pages and 25 short pages. So that means when you flip through the book, it's going to work like a flip book, but every other page. So if you have a forcing image, your spectators won't see it when you flip through the pages one way.  And so I just think this, there's just so many different possibilities with this when you think about it because it looks like a simple notepad, but it's going to allow you to do this very natural, very direct force. And so oftentimes, you know, we force cards, but as mentalists, there's so many other opportunities for you to force something, okay? So just off the top of my head, I mean, sure, you could put cards, identities on the pages, and you could force a card. It'd be an interesting way to do a card trick without a deck of cards. You could say, hey, I've developed this way to do a card trick, but I don't use a deck of cards that issues paper.  You could say, wow, I don't even have a deck of cards on me. I only keep one card in my back pocket, and it is, boom, their card, right? Great way to do a drawing duplication.  You day draw, and you draw instant drawing duplication. Awesome. Force a name, okay? Force someone's name. Great way to do this before you do another trick. So say you're going to force somebody's name, and then do another mentalism routine, but don't reveal yet, and then after that mentalism part, say, oh, yeah, you know what? And you were thinking of a name. And see, here's a great opportunity because now people have come over to watch this trick, and they didn't even see the first part. So now they're watching you and they're like, a name, what name? And you're like, oh, you know, you thought of a name, and it was a name I totally didn't, I couldn't have known, but you know, was the name, was the name you're thinking of, was it Amanda? And then bam, everyone who's watching will be like, wow, how did he know? How did he grab that piece of information? So another great opportunity. Force numbers, you know, if you're doing something with numbers, and you want to force a certain number, or force a certain day of the week, you know, there's that. Force a certain day of the year, certainly with 50 pages, there's so many more opportunities. And the pages come to you blank, obviously the pages come to you blank, so you get to pick what you're going to put on your book. And so for two books, at 22 bucks, I would say, wow, I mean, buy three or four sets of these, and then you can have one of these little notepads for so many other things, right? There's just so many different ways that you could make this. These are well made, totally well made. They're professionally glued and tape bound. They're perfect for close up and walk around. You have precision cut pages. Yeah, what an ingenious idea. I can't wait to get a few more of these. These are so easy to use and so well disguised.  Alright, so that's my review for the Force Pads from Warped Magic. I want to thank Murphy's Magic for allowing me to have this trick so that I could do the review for you. And if you'd like to purchase the Force Pads from Warped Magic for yourself, you can find them at your favorite Murphy's Magic dealer. Thanks, bye.


Hi, everyone. My name is Tal Oppenheimer, and I'm a product manager on the Chrome team. And I'm here to talk to you about how you can use the web to build experiences that work for billions of people. We know that the way we access the internet has changed. A lot of us probably use the internet for the first time on a desktop machine. They were big machines. Over time, maybe these machines got smaller, could fit on your lap, maybe in a backpack. But today, a lot of us regularly access the internet with a smartphone, something that's in our pocket and goes around with us everywhere we go. And we see this trend happening everywhere. On Chrome, we recently announced that we actually crossed the $1 billion mark on Chrome Mobile specifically. And so we're seeing that more and more people are accessing the internet on different form factors than what they had been before. And what this means when you're actually trying to build for billions of people is that if you want to reach all the users, you need to think about where the users are and where they're actually accessing the internet and the experience that you're building.  Now for many of us, when we're building our product or trying to address a specific user need that we're building for, we have a mental image of who our user is. And sometimes this can be in part based on research, but also inevitably based on your own personal experience and what you're used to and what you've experienced. And for a lot of us, this can result in a world that looks something like this. And now for a few of us, we might be thinking slightly outside of the US and you can throw Europe in the mix there too. But this is not actually what the world looks like, especially when you think of internet users. So today there are roughly 3.3 billion internet users. And that's more than 10 times the population of the United States. So if your mental image looked like that picture of the globe, that's really just a small piece of the pie when you're talking about billions of users and really trying to reach all of those users. So what's really critical here is when you're thinking of new users for your experience and for your product, you really need to think globally and think about the users all around the world. And when we look at where the internet users are today, this is just a chart of looking at internet users in 2016. This maps countries and the darker the country, the more internet users today. And you'll see that while the United States is pretty prevalent here, there's about 286 million internet users in the United States, you'll see that there's a number of other countries that start to be very dominant here as well. India has almost two times this many users online today with around 462 million internet users. And China actually has almost as much as both the US and India combined with 721 million internet users today. But beyond just a snapshot of where internet users are accessing the internet from today, what's interesting to see is how this has changed. So looking over the last year, this is a similar chart, but this is looking at just the pure number of users who came online the last year by country. And what you'll see here is that there's clearly one country that's quite dominant in this particular map. And we see that in India, we had 108 million internet users come online in a single year. And for India, this was a growth of 30% year over year in their internet population. And that number, that 108 million, that's 10 times the growth that we saw in China. And over 100 times the growth we saw in any other country over the past year. And so this is an immense number of people. But just put this in a little bit of context. So 108 million people, that's roughly one-third of the United States population that came online in India alone over a single year. So that's a huge number. And so when you're really thinking about who your internet users are and who are the sort of pool of possible users for your experience, you need to think about a lot of these areas. But beyond just where we're seeing the growth right now, you can also sort of project this out to see where we expect growth to continue to come from as you're thinking through your roadmap and the experiences you're going to be building. And so taking a look at the users who are not yet online by country, you'll see that here we see more of a representation of different countries. But we see that over 65% of India's population is not yet online. And that's 864 million people, not yet online. And there's a number of other countries that still have quite a large number of people who are coming online. But you'll see that some of these other areas, like the United States, for example, is just a much smaller pool of potential new internet users. And so the growth that we're expecting to see for internet users and people who have the potential to access your experience is shifting away to some of these countries that we might have more direct experience with. So great. Hopefully, I've shown that there's enough growth in a lot of these areas that we need to think outside maybe the countries that we have direct experience with. And so the question comes up of, how do I actually reach these users? And as mentioned before, one of the really critical things when you're building for any user is to understand who your user is, what are the challenges they face, what are the conditions they face, and make sure that you're taking that into consideration when you build your experiences. So with a quick show of hands, how many of you guys remember the first time that you accessed the internet? OK, it looks like the majority of folks in the room remember that.  OK, no hands. So most of us access the internet, I assume, on a desktop or a laptop machine for the very first time. And last year, I spent a lot of time talking to users in different areas. I spent a good amount of time in India.  And I was sitting in the living room with a woman who's sort of in her mid-40s and asked her the same question. If she remembered the first time she used the internet and how she accessed it. And her answer was yes. She used the internet earlier that year for the very first time because she had borrowed her husband's cell phone and had tried the internet out. And then a few months later, she got her own phone and was now accessing the internet on a regular basis. And this is just one example of how people are accessing the internet. And it's just fundamentally different than what we have personally experienced. And so what it really means, we've probably heard the trope mobile first a number of times. And for a lot of us, that means when we're designing and building experiences, don't just think about porting what you've built for desktop over to mobile, but actually think about the design mobile first. But in a lot of these areas, it's not really just mobile first, but it's actually mobile only. It's not that people will be accessing your experience on mobile and you want to make sure it's good. That might be the only time they see your experience. They're only interaction with it. Maybe they've never used a desktop before. And there's also a chance that they never use a desktop or a laptop. So you can't assume that they're going to be using these other platforms to access your experience. And so you really need to make sure that you're designing an experience that works for a user who is only going to be interacting with it from their smartphone. And if people are interacting with your experience on their phone, it's probably important to consider what their phone actually looks like. So a lot of us probably have a phone or several in our pocket or bags. And this is the Nexus 6P. So in terms of looking at the Nexus 6P, this was released last year in 2015. It's a pretty good size phone. It's sort of 5.7 inches, measured diagonally. It has 3 gigabytes of RAM and 32 to 128 gigabytes of storage, depending on how much you feel you need and what you purchase. Now just to give a comparison point, when we were in India, we went to store owners as well and just talked to them and asked, what devices do you recommend? What devices are people asking for? And this is just one example of a device that folks brought up. So this is a Samsung J1. This was also released in 2015. It's 4.3 inches, if you measure it diagonally. But it has 512 megabytes of RAM and 4 gigabytes of storage. So what this means is looking beyond just the size of the physical device, the actual specs of these devices can look quite different. We see that the Samsung J1 has about 1.6 for the RAM. And even if we make the closest comparison possible, 1.8 the storage capacity. This can make a really big difference when you're thinking about how you can reach your users. But the difference of context goes beyond just the physical form factor and the specs of the phone, and also has some implications just by virtue of the fact that they're using a smartphone. Now as a quick question here, so how many of you guys connect to Wi-Fi, you'd say, on a daily basis? Just another quick show of hands. OK, it looks like most folks in the room see Wi-Fi regularly. If your primary way of interacting with the internet is a smartphone and you maybe never interact with a laptop, this isn't necessarily true. First of all, you don't need to have Wi-Fi to be able to connect to the internet. And your phone's also in your pocket. So it goes where you go, which means that if you go somewhere that has bad connectivity, that's your internet access for the day or for the hours that you're in that area. And we see a growing number of people relying only on cellular data around the world. So this is a stat that recently came up, which is actually even in the United States, about 20% of households rely only on cellular data to connect to the internet. And what's really interesting is that this has actually doubled since 2013. So we see this on the rise, even in areas like the United States. And it's more pronounced than some of these areas where we see users coming online for the very first time. And the fact that people are relying on cellular data means that it's really important to consider what the quality of their connection actually looks like. We see that globally, about 60% of mobile connections are 2G connections. And this is excluding 2G-like speeds, but just explicitly 2G connections. And we see this more pronounced in a number of these areas where we're expecting to see the user growth of new internet users, with over 2 thirds of users in those areas relying primarily on 2G connections. But what's really interesting is if you actually project some of these trends over time, we do expect this to slightly go down. But even by 2020, we expect one fifth of the mobile connections globally to still be 2G connections. And this has a really big impact on the user experience when you're building things. We've seen across the numbers of studies and over time that a delay and the speed of your experience is critical to how many users engage with your experience and how happy they are with your experience. This is just one example of a study that found that a single second delay in page times led to 11% fewer page views, but also a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. So this both has a quantitative and a very qualitative impact on the user experience and your reach. And so it's really important as we're realizing that a lot of people are accessing experiences on slower connections, that we make sure that the user experience is still as fast as it possibly can be. Because we know that if your experience is slow, that directly leads to lost customers. And we don't want that to occur. And we really want to make sure that we're planning for this and building for this. But beyond just the delay that relying on cellular connections that maybe 2G or 2G-like speeds can incur, it's also important to realize that relying on cellular data also has a cost involved. Looking at the minimum wage in India with a few simplifications, because minimum wage in India is actually quite complex. It depends on your country and your job title, et cetera. We see that, on average, 17 hours of minimum wage work is needed to pay for a 500 megabyte data plan. And that's if you spend your entire earnings from 17 hours of minimum wage work just to buy data. And so that's an incredible amount. But just to put this in context of the web, if we look at the average size of a web page, and again, make a couple simplifying assumptions, we'll see that this means that, on average, an hour of minimum wage work will load you 15 web pages. That's it. That's if you spend your entire income from that one hour of minimum wage work just on the data to afford loading web pages. So take a moment to think about maybe how many web pages you've loaded this morning. And it's about maybe 10, 15 this morning. And think of how many hours of minimum wage work you would have had to incur just to be able to afford your browsing habits. This is incredibly challenging for people who are regularly making trade-offs for whether they can spend the data on something or spend it on something else that they might need. And so these connection quality and costs can also directly lead to differences in how users are going to be interacting with their network connection. So connectivity frequency also comes up here. Because data is so expensive and because connectivity can really vary, we not only see that sometimes users just have no data plan, they've either run out or they don't purchase a new one until they feel that they need it or can afford it. We also see that when people do have data plans, they're turning it on and off quite frequently. Some users that we talked to in some of these areas mentioned that, on an average day, they think they turn airplane mode on and off about 12 to 15 times so that when they're not using their phone, their connection isn't there so that they know that they're not using data that they don't need because the data costs are so high. And so all of these together can make it seem a little bit daunting. I've just walked through how people are relying mostly on smartphones. Smartphone profiles look different than maybe what we're used to. Connectivity can be limited. It can be 2G speeds and it can cost a whole lot. So you might be sitting there and be like, great. So how do I actually develop for these users? This sounds challenging. And there are a number of challenges. One of the big things here is that installs are hard. If data costs money and takes a lot of time, convincing a user to install your experience can be really challenging because they haven't necessarily interacted with it. You're putting it forward and you're asking them to not only spend the money that it might take to download the megabytes that your experience or app might be, but you're also asking them to take the time. On 2G speeds, apps can take a fairly long time to actually download. But assuming you can convince a user that they need to install your app even without having tried it, you also have this lovely challenge of the APK size. If you're looking at a device with 4 gigabytes of storage, that's just a different condition under which your user has to make the decision if they want your app or not. And so having a very small APK size becomes really critical because you don't want them to have to delete photos or videos or other apps they might have just to get your experience on their phone. And beyond that, even if you do get it on your phone, you're probably continuing to improve your experience and make it better and better over time. And you want your users to have the latest and greatest product that you've built. And so you need to make sure your users are up to date. And this too can be challenging because, again, I have to have the connection and the data plan and be able to incur that cost and be willing to incur that cost to actually update your experience. And these constraints can be a little bit daunting when you're just trying to reach out to your users. But luckily, there's actually an app for that. And this may have been spoiled by the title of my talk. But it's the mobile web. So inherent to the mobile web, we actually remove a lot of these constraints. The mobile web is accessible without an install. If you're building a web experience, when users navigate to it, they see the experience immediately. And they can use it right out of the gate. You don't need to convince them to install it just to try it. They try it just by virtue of having gone there. What's more is that means that storage constraints are not an issue for that initial interaction with your experience. They don't need to worry about deleting videos or photos or apps that they might really care about just to see if they want to interact with your experience. And you don't have to worry about keeping users up to date. When they navigate to your website, they are up to date. Because as you make improvements, the users are always getting the latest. And beyond this, we've seen that removing these barriers has a real impact on the reach that experiences can have. Some stats that we pulled last year saw that, on average, mobile users use about 25 apps a month. But in comparison, we've seen that on Chrome on Android, users are actually navigating past over 100 websites per month. And so we see that, in short, users have about four times the number of sites that they're looking at over each month compared to native apps. And this also has a pretty direct impact on how many users are interacting with a given experience. So an analysis of the top 1,000 mobile apps versus the top 1,000 mobile web properties found that, on average, we see two and a half times more monthly unique visitors on the mobile web compared to the top native app experiences. And so what this really means is that removing those barriers directly relates to the reach and the possibility of user base that you can have with just that initial experience. But beyond that, we're also seeing that these trends are growing over time. And so we see that, over time, there's been two times the growth in mobile web traffic compared to native app traffic for these same top 1,000 mobile web apps and native apps. And so removing these barriers is very critical to actually reaching users. But beyond just this, we also have been working hard on the Chrome team and with other browsers to make sure that web has the capabilities that you and as a developer need to build good experiences. So some of you may have already heard the term progressive web apps. The idea here is that you can build experiences that have a lot of the features that some of us often associate with native, but with leveraging the benefits that the web has to offer. So just to walk through a little bit about what a progressive web app is and what it really has to offer. So by virtue of being a progressive web app is discoverable by all. It's a website. Users can navigate to it. Users can find it. And they're immediately in the experience. There's no friction or install barrier to try out your experience in the first time. But beyond that, with a lot of the capabilities of a progressive web app, you can start creating very fast and smooth experiences that we often associate with native. They can be full screen. They can take over. And you can really interact with this experience like you would a native app. But beyond that, we know that a lot of users are going to be accessing your experience on 2G or 2G-like speeds. And so you can also leverage new web technologies to make sure that everything loads quickly as possible, regardless of the network type. So you don't incur that one second delay and the consequences of that, regardless of the connectivity type of the user. But what's more is we do know users are sometimes offline. And with progressive web apps, you can actually make sure that your web experience works whether the user is online or offline. And what's more is we do know that installs do have a benefit. It makes it easier for users who have gone through that hurdle to get back to your experience. And the idea with progressive web apps is that it's really easy to get to your experience in the first place. But it's also really easy for users who are engaged and do want to get back to it easily to install it and add it to their home screen so that they can get back to it. And beyond that, for those users who are more engaged, we know that there are some times that it's really critical for you to re-engage with those users, because your experience can offer something exceptionally beneficial to them in a particular time. And so we've also built capabilities to make it really easy for you to re-engage with the web. And so just to give an example here, this is a Flipkart, which is a top e-commerce site in India. And what you'll see here is that they have actually built out a progressive web app experience. And so this is something that you can launch from your home screen or search for directly. It works online and offline. You'll see that it's sort of an immersive experience, and it can scroll through it, and it feels a lot like a native app. But what's really interesting here is that they've also looked at some stats of how this performed compared to their previous website and found that this had a pretty big impact in the user experience. So first they see that their progressive web app, on average, people are spending three times the amount of time on this site compared to their previous mobile web experience. They've also seen 40% higher re-engagement with their progressive web app compared to their web experience before. But what's really interesting here is for an e-commerce site, conversion is really the critical metric here. And they've seen that their progressive web app saw a 70% increase in conversion compared to their previous mobile website. And I just want to walk through some of the principles that you can keep in mind as you're working to develop progressive web apps that can really leverage the mobile web technologies in a way that can work for billions of users. So as we've talked about, there's a few things that really are important here. One is cost. We know that cost can be really prohibitive. If you're making a trade-off between, do I want to access this website or a different website or a native app, or spend my money on something else and not use my data plan right now, you really have to make sure that your app and your experience works as well for users as possible, and that they're not having to make these trade-offs unnecessarily. We also know that connectivity varies. If the majority of users globally are still accessing the internet on 2G connections, we need to make sure that our experience is load as quickly as possible on all connection types. And finally, we also want to reduce complexity. How can we make steps as easy as possible and not only leverage the benefits of the web, but leverage the benefits of re-engagement and making sure users can get back to it as easily as possible? So just to walk through these, so cost. We know this can be incredibly prohibitive. And we really want to make sure that we are taking this into considerations and not forcing the user to make unnecessary trade-offs. So on the Chrome team, we've been working to address this issue across the board. And what we've built is a feature called Data Saver. And this is a setting that a user can go in and turn on. And this will apply to all HTTP content as they use Chrome. And this is a proxy for HTTP content that has no fidelity changes, but helps the user save up to 60% of their data. And we've found that this helps a lot of users, and we've seen this even more so in a lot of the areas where users are coming online for the first time. And we know that data costs are even more prohibitive than in other areas. But what's more is we actually took a moment to think about this more. And we really want to make sure that we're pushing the boundaries on this and helping users save as much data as possible and that they stay in control of where their data use is going. So we actually launched an improvement for this so that for Data Saver users, for HTTP content, when they're on a very slow connection, we actually automatically replace most images on the page with placeholders so that the user can then choose which images they need or want to load, or they can choose to load all the images if they need to. We do try to do this in a way that keeps the page usable so that smaller images, et cetera, such as next pages or hamburger menus or whatever that might be, are still visible so the user can continue to interact with the page. And this has helped us get it to up to 70% of data savings for users. But we know that, as a developer, you often want to be in control and make sure that the optimizations you're doing work for the experience that you've built. And so we've also been working to introduce client hints that help you stay in control to make sure that you're not only taking this into consideration, but doing so in a way that works for the product that you're building. And so in M46 release of Chrome, we launched a number of different client hints, including DPR, Width, and Viewport Width. And these are things that you can all address on the server using data provided by the user agent. So what this means is that you, as a developer, can understand the context under which the user is accessing your experience and make sure that you're only sending the images sizes that users need, and making sure you're optimizing the experience and not using up their data if you don't need to. But we've also added recently a save data hint. And in Chrome, this maps directly to whether a user has that data saver feature on or off, which means that you, as a developer, know which users are the most sensitive to data. And you can take extra steps to make sure that the experience you've built works for them as well. And so what this means is, depending on your experience, you can optimize what needs to happen.  You could avoid auto-playing videos, or you could make sure that whatever sort of background fetching or things that you might want to be doing are only happening if the user really needs it. But beyond that, we know that this gives you control, but we also know that thinking about all these things can be challenging. So we actually have a module called PageSpeed Module, which is a server-side component that you can drop into your web server that will do a lot of these optimizations for you on both HTTP and HTTPS traffic. And what this means is that we actually have the single line of code that's optimized for bandwidth mode that, when on, will do all of these transformations with really no fidelity change and without breaking anything, which means you can get the data-saving benefits for your users without having to worry about any negative impact on the user experience. So we've also gone a step further for this and made sure that if the user does have that data-saver feature turned on, the PageSpeed Module will automatically take a few extra steps to save those users even more data. So just to give a quick example of this, this is a screenshot of a small sort of mock store front that we created. On the left here, you'll see a screenshot of what the page looks like with no PageSpeed Module. On the right here, you'll see a screenshot of what it looks like with PageSpeed Module turned on in the Optimize for Bandwidth for a user who has data-saver on. You may have noticed these two screenshots look quite similar. Actually, if you can point out any differences, let me know. I promise there are different screenshots. So you might be asking sort of what is actually the difference between these two. So if we actually dig into this and look at some of the numbers. On the left here, this page is relatively light looking at average size of a web page. It's 350 kilobytes. But if we simulate a 2G network and try to load it, it can take about a little bit over a minute to actually load this page on a 2G connection. Now, by just turning on the Optimize for Bandwidth mode, we already get a number of improvements here. And we can actually cut the data by about 50% and lead to 165 kilobyte page load. But if a user is data sensitive and actually has data-saver turned on, we can get even more benefits. So for a data-saver user with the Optimize for Bandwidth mode and PageSpeed, we actually see that this page goes down to 120 kilobytes. And so that's about savings about 65%. And what's more, if we simulate it again on 2G, you'll see that this actually goes to an under 30 second page load time. And this has happened with really no difference to the user experience. The fidelity is completely the same between these two. And this is just one example. Across sites, we've seen an average of about 37% data saving reductions without any sort of fidelity change for the user. And that's for users who don't have data saving on. When we turn data-saver on, we're actually seeing even more improvements. But beyond just taking steps to make sure that you're taking into consideration the cost and the data cost of your experience, there's also a number of things that you can do to make sure that your experience is as fast as possible on all network types. So looking for a moment at the different connectivity profiles, we see that the round-trip time or the time that it takes between making a request and getting a response varies quite widely between these different network types. So on Wi-Fi, we can see sort of on average a 50 millisecond round-trip time. But compare that to 2G, which is about 50 times slower. And you start getting to 2,500 millisecond round-trip times. And this can really impact the user experience and also how you want to actually implement and address some of these problems. So one thing that you can do is first know what connection a user is on. So Downlink Max, which started in Chrome M48, can tell you the maximum megabits per second of a user's connection. And while you can query this to just find out what the connection type a user is in, you can also subscribe to updates so that you know when a user is switching between different connection types. And you can make sure that if they're moving to a slower connection, you're keeping your experience as fast as possible so that you're again not incurring that one-second delay that can lead to a really detrimental impact on the user experience. But what can you actually do about it when you do identify these slower connections? So some of you may already have heard of ServiceWorker. So ServiceWorker is a client-side proxy that's written in JavaScript. And you can think about it as sort of this background process that sits between the server and the OS. And when the page is loaded, you can register your ServiceWorker. And then once it's registered, you can actually start using it to cache content and start supporting more offline situations. But you can also use ServiceWorker to actually improve the performance of your page. And so a lot of us has probably been in those situations where your phone thinks it's connected. It shows you that you're connected, whether it's Wi-Fi or cellular data. But you're trying to load something and just nothing happens.  And this is incredibly painful. And this is even more so the case in areas where connectivity itself is just very intermittent. But with ServiceWorker, what you can do is you can actually implement request timeouts to address these slinky connections so that you can make sure that you're caching the content that's critical and still serving it to the user regardless of their connection types. And so this can really help bridge the gap between those sort of fully connected and flaky situations. But we also know that sometimes there's just no connection. This might be because the user has turned on airplane mode. It might be because they're out of data. It might be because you're in a tunnel or whatever situation that might be. And there's just no connection. And you've built a great experience, but you probably don't want this to be the first thing the user sees when they tap into it. Now, I love the offline dino game as much as the next person. And I know there's stickers outside with the offline dino. But perhaps not the ideal way to actually get a user to interact with your experience and see what you have to offer. And so with ServiceWorker, you can actually take this a step further and make sure that even when the user's offline, they're getting the best possible experience. So to give an example of this, this is Konga. Konga is a top e-commerce site in Africa. And they've gone beyond just enabling accessing of their experience when they're offline to actually optimize their experience for the flows that they need, whether a user's online or offline. So this here is a flow of someone doing a purchase. So they've added some items to their cart. And then we're going to go ahead and simulate what it looks like when the user's offline. And so what they've done here is when the user is actually offline, they not only let the user know that they're offline with a little thing at the bottom, but when the user goes to do the checkout flow, they actually have a call to order button instead of supporting their online flow, because the user can't complete an online flow when they're offline. And this allows you to really close the gap and make sure that your user experience for the flows that are most critical to you work regardless of whether the user's online or offline. And so for this e-commerce experience, the user can finish their purchase even if they've lost connectivity completely. And what we've also seen is that this not only helps with the user experience and making sure that they can get to your experience, but it also ties back to that cost that we talked about earlier. What Konga team has seen is that their steps to their first transaction have been drastically impacted as a result of using the service worker technology. They found that compared to their previous mobile website, this new progressive web app takes 84% less data just to get that first transaction done. But what they've also found is if you compare it to their native app experience, this first flow that is most critical to them takes 82% less data than their native app. And so this is huge. It's not only helped bridge the gap of connectivity and made the critical flows work, whether you're online or offline, but it's also helped users save that data. But beyond just addressing the cost and connectivity issues, we've also seen that this benefit helps across the board for different apps. And so Flipkart, for example, also saw three times data savings for their experience compared to their previous mobile web experience. And so these data saving benefits that you can get by addressing the offline connectivity issues can help across the board to address other issues as well. But the other thing you really want to consider here is that's great. We can make sure things load quickly. We can make sure that we're removing cost barriers. But we also want to make sure that we're removing complexity and making things as simple as possible. And when we're talking about costs, we know that every step is going to be time and money. If you're on a 2G connection, the steps both in your experience and getting to your experience can be challenging and just take extra time and ask the user to do more things that are necessary. And so one of the best ways to actually address cost and connectivity is just remove some of these steps. So with the mobile web, we have an add to home screen functionality. This is another example with Conga that has built this out. For users who have engaged more with your experience, you can actually suggest that they just add your website to their home screen. And this doesn't have storage constraints, none of that APK size barriers we had before. But users can still get back to it with a single tap, which means that getting to your experience is super easy. They don't have to navigate multiple times, go through different page loads. And so you've removed those steps, that extra time and money, to let users get to what they actually care about immediately. But beyond this and just getting to your first screen, we know that sometimes your experience needs to get to a particular part of your screen. And you can actually cut out page loads within your experience as well. So with notifications, you can actually send notifications to your users using the mobile web so that you can reach out to your users at the most sensitive or necessary times, depending on your experience, and link them back to the specific part of your experience that they care about. So they don't even have to worry about just loading your experience and navigating within it, but you've removed those steps as well. And so this makes it really easy for the users to re-engage with your experience at the times that are most critical to them. So we've talked a lot about the different situations and the different constraints that you need to consider here. But one of the things that can be really hard, circling back to the start, is we haven't lived under these conditions necessarily, right? All of us in this room first access the internet on a non-smartphone, which is just different. So one of the things that's really important is to make sure that you're trying out these experiences yourself, and you're trying them out under the conditions that are representative of your user base or your target user base. And so we have a number of tools to actually let you do this. One thing that we have is sort of a mini mobile device lab. And what this is is you can actually look it up and download it from GitHub, and it'll let you simulate what your experience looks like on these different devices. And beyond this, though, you can also simulate what the conditions are for users. So we talked about how challenging cost can be and how prohibitive it can be. And with Chrome DevTools, you can actually calculate the page weight for a given user. So looking here for a moment, you'll see that this is the network tab of Chrome DevTools, if you're familiar with it. But what I want to call out is this at the bottom here. So this says that this page took a little bit over 700 bytes to load. Now, that's pretty small, but we can actually call out a little bit of a caveat here. A lot of these loaded from cache. But you can actually refresh the page if you want to simulate what it looks like, even when users are getting to it fresh. So you can get a sense of what the experience looks like as users are interacting with it, as they're going between different pages. And you'll see that if I go ahead and refresh this page, we also have updated the sizes. So you'll see that in compared to that 700 bytes, this page actually took 211 kilobytes to load. And you can really get a sense for what this means and what this costs for your user when you're talking about data plans. But the other thing I want to call your attention to here is that you can also use this tool to understand the time and the loading experience that users are getting. So you'll see that next to that byte count. We also tell you how long it took for this page to load. So this page took about 600 milliseconds to load. And this was just using Wi-Fi that I was connected to. But you'll also see up here that you can actually have no throttling right now. And you can change this. So if I tap into this, you'll see that there's a number of different options. And if you actually go ahead and simulate the same page load on 2G, you'll see that suddenly it's a very different amount of time that it took for this page to load. So we're more at 11 seconds now. And you can actually see what this looks like and start tapping through your experience and see how it changes if you're using Service Worker and some of these other technologies so that you can make sure the experience that you are giving your users is one that you're happy about and excited about and really puts your product and your experience in the best possible light. And the users are able to access it without some of these barriers. So using all of these tools and using these technologies, you can really use progressive web apps not only to remove the barriers that the web fundamentally offers, but to address the cost and the connectivity challenges. And you can also go a step further to use some of these things to remove complexity and actually remove the steps altogether. So you're not doing unnecessary page loads if the user doesn't need it. We also have a number of other tools online, and you can read up more about them. You can read more broadly about how you can build for billions across Android and mobile. But we also have some web-specific tools that you can look up here as well. I'll also be over in the mobile web tent if anyone has other questions. But the main idea here is that using all of these different technologies, you can make sure that you're really thinking globally and making sure that things not only work for those 20% of US households that are relying solely on cellular data, but also work for users who are maybe coming online for the first time. And so using all of these tools, you can make an experience that is built to work for everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


The study conducted by the authors has shown that there is a high prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies in India, particularly among pregnant women. This highlights the urgent need for public health interventions to address this issue. This article was authored by you Venkatesh, Akash Sharma, Velmurugane and Anthon, and others.