iniatures for videos and so that's why this kind of game is perfect for us because it's like, well, we can finally do something without a collection of randomly painted models, you know? That's what we did. We used some of our painted sci-fi minis, so yeah. Yeah, I seem like, I'm already planning, like I said, I think I'm planning a Vansar medical crew and I'll probably paint that on Twitch and stuff like that because it's just easy to kind of show like some sort of simple techniques and things like that, you know, some of the new, that new contrast or that new wash, it's like white, you know what I mean? It's like a light gray color. I forget what the colors call. A complicated one. Well, that's the contrast one. What was the new shade? So light ginger? That's it, yeah, yeah.  And there's so many different options that yeah, it makes a lot of sense to go down that road but there's tons of companies out there, like I said, that make kind of weird stuff. Another one we were talking about just before, the Anvil Industry is this company that makes these just cool little resin things and I've got like a unit of guys who look kind of like the guys in the first Alien movie when they go in and they find the big egg room and they're wearing those big kind of clunky spacesuits with the big, yeah, all that kind of stuff. There's so many different companies out there. Yeah, did you have a question from your chat? I do. Vincent Adam, what is your favorite aspect mechanic of the game you think is unique to Space Station Zero? I can answer that. If you might have your own answer too. My answer is the fact that every stat matters. The stats are not overwhelming. They're pretty simple, the fact that every stat can be a challenge test, like in this particular challenge we just played, you guys used four out of your five stats to make challenge tests, right? Your life every round for the toxic gas, your reaction for the fabrication, or sorry, for the event, the intelligence for the fabrication and combat for killing the enemies. And there's also, like I said, movement challenges that just didn't happen, have one and those are very carefully balanced across the entire campaign. Yeah, like we did a lot of regression analysis on how many times are we hitting certain things versus their sort of innate value when we were doing the development of this. But I love that everything matters. So you can have non-combat units. There's still like, could be the most important person in your crew, right? That you can have people who just aren't there to just shoot. The medics did a lot of work in this game, you know what I mean? So that kind of stuff, not everybody's just a shooter guy, the medics are very helpful and the scientists and all that kind of stuff.  Yeah, but those guys may just be dead in a room somewhere because they couldn't ever turn off the valve for the whatever machine or something like that. You know what I mean? So that kind of thing. You disarmed the bomb in time. Right, exactly, yeah, yeah. See, this is actually a super satisfying thing that you often see in like MOBAs and also new shooters where your composition for your team needs to have a support, a carry, whatever. But it's in a PvE environment where I get to control everything. Sure. Because the biggest complaint with those games is some person isn't playing their role or is duplicating another person's role. So I get to craft that, it's awesome. Another question from Colorful Soldiers. Actually, need to scope a bit. Someone said, not a question, but I really enjoy the way you have the setup for the cruise ship and edge for the cruise. Fast, easy way to get stuck in. Thank you, Joffrey. And then someone asked, did you use any other games to skim mechanics such ideas from? Not really for this one. It's, this is, I mean, I'm not gonna say that certainly there isn't, I'm sure, inspiration or homage from the, you know, dozens and dozens of miniature games I've played over the years. But there's not really anything I started from here and went to. Like, a lot of this is pretty much like, this is what it is. I think that the mechanic, when you first explained to me the idea that when you're rolling your D12s, and you guys might have noticed this too, it's not about how high you rolled or whatever, it's how many evens versus how many odds. Like, that's a very kind of different thing, but it's really interesting.  But on the other hand, then you also get into the idea of like, yeah, but now it's only evens from six up. Because then all of a sudden it becomes a much different kind of number that you're trying to get so that you can have a lot more granularity within the actual challenge tests. And it's not just like, well, I got to roll higher now because it's a tougher task. It gives you as a designer a lot more to choose from and be able to do stuff like that in the actual challenges. There was a quick one I want to handle over here. Thanks for the video. Any multiplayer rules?  The two of them were a team. You can play from, I mean, I think the game probably goes a little sideways if you have more than five crews in here where just you're going to be so packed on the board. I'm not sure what's actually going on anymore. Yeah, I'm going to color coordinate your crews if you're going to do that. But like, theoretically, there's no reason you couldn't play between one and five crews. Yeah. So low to five. You had a question on the year chat? I had a couple. Where can we get a sweet snarling badge or studios t-shirt soon? Soon. Working on the store and we'll be doing, we'll have these and also rain and hell shirts. And I'll come up with some space station zero shirts as well. Question from colorful soldiers, Don Haney, shout out Don Haney. Curious about the inspiration for the game. Also, what do Vince and Adam envision the troops and aliens to look like in their minds? Are there parallels in comics or movies? Did you draw inspiration for aesthetics or stuff like that? Honestly, the aesthetics of the figures themselves, a big portion of it was the artist that we wanted to work with had kind of a style, which is why I wanted to work with him. I had come across him on Twitter. He had done this really cool, like 40K, like Space Marine guy and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, oh, this is really cool. And I kind of searched out to figure out who he was, found him on Twitter. He had just published a graphic novel called Grenade. His name is Will Kirkby. And I got a copy of that graphic novel because it was just so cool. And then I went from there and then I was just like, I gotta work with this guy. And when this idea came from Vince, I was like, I know the guy, I know who this is gonna be because I know based off of his other work what this stuff is gonna look like.  And so that's why we went with the kind of really, the logo that looks like a spray paint thing, like on the wall in the book and that kind of stuff. And it just sort of became like the headers and it became all kinds of different parts and things like that. Yeah, it's a lawless place, right? Yeah, exactly. I'm also noticing a little stamp here on the brick wall that happens to look very similar to your t-shirt. Yeah, that was one of the notes, like after he initially did it, because he has this kind of little bunny sort of like a sticker that just people were putting all over the place. He's got it in a bunch of different spots in the actual illustrations. And on the cover, I was like, can you put in a sticker that looks like our logo? And he's like, yeah, sure. So we added that in as well. Excellent. Yeah, I honestly had my head a ton of aliens. Like the appealing thing to me about this was I wanted something that people could use anything they could imagine, right? Any alien they could imagine that they could find out there in miniatures. Because the universe is like really big. It's wicked big. It's like crazy big. And so, you know. It's like as big as the mall of America. At least. Whoa, bro. I know, right? Like at least as big. Maybe, you know what? Maybe twice as big as that. Whoa, whoa, whoa, that's impossible. I know. So it's just the idea that people could play, find an excuse to use anything, like any sci-fi stuff they wanted to use. And that the narrative speaks to that as well to bring them in, right? Just really is what appealed to me about it. It was kind of the core idea. Now, there's another core concept that led me to want to do this. I'm not going to talk about it because you have to beat the game to know what that is. That's the answer to the mystery. You mind if I hit a couple of super quick ones? Absolutely. Is the Medicaid a single use item? No, the only thing it's ever single use, they will say single use on them.  Darude Sandstorm on repeat. Adam? The music that I found on the YouTube audio library that I used in the video, which I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head, but it's just as I was looking for music to use in the background of like the intro video and stuff and all this, I came across this thing that's got this real sort of John Carpenter sort of, I don't want to say vaporwave because it's not, but it's leading in that direction, but it's also kind of subtle. And I sort of like this just sort of, it's ominous as well, which I think is cool. Follow the question, is Darude Sandstorm always playing in your head, Vince? 80% of time. Okay. Yeah, when you guys were doing podcast and we were talking about how we need to get a better music license so that we can play Darude Sandstorm all the time. Just constantly. PiaGamerDad asks, is there a set number of missions for a crew to work their way through in a campaign or is it ongoing? Any thoughts on expansions in the future? So there is no definite plans for expansions in the future, but never say never to that stuff. Like I have thoughts around all of our games and what we would do and if there becomes a way we can deliver that without killing ourselves, then I want to do it, but that's always the challenge. Because we are planning on a new game next year that's a totally different game, just like this one's completely different from the last one. So being able to do that and also maybe make some expansions here and there is kind of, yeah. On that note, I saw one a while back, are there any plans to open this up license-wise with an OGL type thing for people to make their own expansions for it or no? So no is the short answer, but in general we don't mind fan-made content if you, as long as you're not selling it for money or something like that. So we've had fans in the Discord create stuff for Rain and Hell and as long as they put it out there and don't charge money for it and say we're not affiliated with Snarling Badger in an official way, I don't care, go nuts. There was a guy who did it. Make stuff. He just made a bunch of sculpts for Rain and Hell like for one of the each of the six main kind of minion type, like normal guy guys and just put it out there and people started reaching out to us like are you guys affiliated with this guy? And we're like, no, and we went and looked and yeah, he's just mentioning the name of the company or not the name of the company. He named the game and all that kind of stuff and we just reached out and we're like, hey, this is cool and all and everything. Could you just like say that you're not affiliated with us? And he's like, oh yeah, sorry. And then he did that and it was fine. But it was just, he was just making a bunch of demons. We didn't use names for the demons that were anything like copyrightable or anything, we're talking about like mephits and like, whatever, all the different types of demons. They're nothing that's like, we have copyright on in that situation. So yeah, I got one if you don't have one. Go for it. I mean, yeah, I assume I always have one. So we'll go back and forth. Cool, cool. What does the even odds do better than just a seven plus or was it just wanting to be different? No, it's definitely not wanting to be different. It does do something better. The evens odds gives me the ability to add in then the target number as well because that's the role over a number. So I can actually slide the two mechanics together. Evens odds means, so think of on a D6. If you need an auto fail on a D6, then like in Warhammer or something, one is always a failure, right? But two doesn't auto fail on evens odds, right? I can have six success numbers. You with me so far? Okay, now so there's six failures and six successes. I don't know, I only have five fingers, I'm aware. But like you can picture what's going on here. With target number, if it was just seven plus, I can't add a second number. But with target number, like the way your armor was working, I can remove these two and now say only these three succeed, right? These remain all failures, but now I snuck two other failure conditions in here as well. And so I can play with the odds in a really interesting way. Target number moves, let me do that. Right. Without your stat changing. Correct. Very interesting. Is Space Station Zero the actual name of the station or just what the crews call it? So that's kind of interesting. The trick is, and this is one of the mysteries in the game, the crews that land here are all different species who've generally never even seen these other species that they've come across. They may come from cultures that span across big portions of space and have bumped into other species and then have maybe adversarial relationships with these guys, but we're like friends with these guys or whatever the deal is, but they come here, they get here kind of by accident, land at Space Station Zero, and they see a lot of different aliens they've never come across before, predominantly all of them. The strange thing is that they can all understand each other. There's something going on and they can all understand each other. They can all read the graffiti that's written on the wall. Like someone went up there and sprayed in whatever language Hoover knows how long ago, but I can look at it and read it. And it's one of the mysteries kind of of the station. Yes. Colloquially, they all call it Space Station Zero, the aliens who were there. Couple more questions, because we have some people who had to make far drives to get back home that are multiple hours. So I'm gonna keep them here for too long. How about if the stats allow for customization based on what you see as what you get? Flight, giant size, et cetera. So some of the gear will certainly allow you to do that. I don't know about giant size situations. I can't think of anything we have that would do that, but there's certainly gear that will give you flight. And the weapons are fairly generic intentionally, like heavy kinetic weapon or sidearm or melee weapon, something like that. Because I don't wanna put people in a corner like whatever their version is. Maybe it's a giant fist tennis racket, whatever they can imagine, right? So that stuff's all pretty generic and easy to reskin. Could you list a couple of inspiring movies to play while making terrain? Nice. Event horizon. I was just gonna say, got it, yeah. Got it in one. Yeah, no, definitely. How about- Sunshine. Jason X. Sure, yeah, there you go. Good stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are we trolling right now? No, seriously, is it all spaceship-y and stuff and everything like that? There's like a lot of spots in that movie, and there's another movie that I can't think about on the top of my head now, where it's like they were trying to do the alien thing, but you're like, that's a warehouse.  Your Hunter from the Future.  Dune, all versions, including the David, especially, but especially David Lynch's version, because that has- Of course, this is the best version. Especially when it's ripped straight from- I was gonna say in television. Now I was gonna say VHS with the tracking problems on the top, but yeah, yeah. Yeah, all those things. It's the iron question. Do you have a question, Friskman? I've been taking over. I was looking, sorry. If you roll two ones and two 12s, is it still considered a crit success? Yes, so the crit trumps the failure. Crit success trumps the trip. Crit failure, that's hard to say. It is. I don't know why. Here's a couple quick ones. Let's see, what do, do, do, do, do, do. Is there a discord for space station zero? Yes, there is. You can find the link to it on spacestationzerogame.com. There we go. Can you? Yes, or just snarlingbadger.com. It's up in the top. On the top. I was gonna link it in the chat. Yeah, there's a little, yeah, there it is. It didn't, it didn't used to be. Like, because we use Squarespace for our website and if you typed in a discord link, it didn't know what to do with it. And I'm like, really? And this was like literally six months ago. And I'm like, discord's been around for a while, guys. But yeah, they fixed that. Oh, congrats, Minniac, you just joined the discord. Nice. What if you roll four ones and two twelves? Then somebody else, what if you roll three ones and two twelves? What if you roll infinite ones and two twelves? Well, then you roll two twelves and a crit success beats a crit failure. So every time, I don't care how many ones you have. Like it just, it's two or more as a failure, two or more as a success. Gotcha. Other things. Fifth element, Valerian in the City of a Thousand Planets. These are all good things. When developing your games to each of you, focus on specific things individually or is it all collaborative? This could be an extremely long answer, but I'll keep it simple. Ideation and that kind of stuff is definitely both of us. I mean, like incredibly back and forth collaborative process.  And then on the, basically all the heavy lifting around art layout, art design direction, production. Printed the whole deal, all that kind of stuff. Is Adam. Yeah, so and all the real work. It's generally like, it's Vince a lot more at the beginning. And again, collaboration. We get online and chat with each other pretty much every Sunday evening. And so we work on that. And then after that, and we've gotten everything written and edited and all that kind of stuff. Then at that point, I've already been working on trying to come up with what the layout's gonna look like and all that kind of stuff. And then we just start dumping the stuff. I start dumping the stuff in there and then going through there. And then we eventually get an actual product that you can purchase. Claire, Drick, can you re-ask your question? I'm unable to look back in the chat history. I'll let us know. You might've missed it. My apologies. I don't have any more questions for the moment. What design space do you wanna explore next? So we already do have our next game that'll come out next year. Yeah, probably, yeah. And I already have a pretty healthy amount written for that, we're moving forward. So, as always, follow the tweeters and the various social media eyes. And that's where you'll see that stuff. Yeah, like, again, the plan is to make a game a year and kind of keep releasing in this same kind of format. But things, new things may come to light. We may decide to make something even else. That's like a little zine or something like that. We've had some talks about that. We kicked around the idea about just doing like a weekend game jam where we would start on Friday night and then publish on Monday morning and just see what we get and then stream some of it and stuff like that. But that's- That's a video idea, guys. There's a lot of ruins a weekend, though. Yeah, guys. Yeah, that's a video idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very cool. Claire Rodrigue restates the question. I don't have a ton of experience in wargaming. Would you say this is a good game as a starting point? Would you call it beginner-friendly? Yes. Like, Rain and Hell, our first game is more beginner-friendly than this. But this is absolutely meant to be very beginner-friendly. It is a, the book is very focused on walking you logically and simply through what you need to do to get playing. It has a very gentle curve in the first couple of challenges so you can like get your feet wet and learn and understand what's going on. We have a nice glossary. So we're not just using a bunch of jargon right off the bat and then you're like, I don't know what that means. You know, like we've explained everything. Like what is a D12? You know, like all kinds of stuff like that. Things that people who've been playing for a while would be like, oh yeah, I know what that means, but we're not gonna take that into consideration. We're gonna say, hey, you know, most likely maybe you should explain this as if you don't know it. But we don't go as far as like, this is how you roll dice and then show you like picking them up and dropping them. So there's a couple of things you might have to come up with, but that's basically about it. How long was the play-testing process? About four and a half months of various development and play and then rewind and update and play again and stuff like that. And we've been working with three people on that mostly? Outside of us? Yeah, Tom is certainly the lead developer. Yeah, lead developer. Yes, outside of myself. Tom runs all the backstop math on me and everything like that. Yeah. Someone asked, any vehicles? Bikes, something like that in the game? No, no vehicles. There's little drones, as I said, but no, no vehicles. That would be, there's no reason you couldn't or make a guy on a bike thing except a space would be pretty, pretty big. But no, in this case, it is people walking. Given the nature of the space station, using a vehicle is fairly impractical. There are lots of places where you're needing to travel up, down, crawl through pipes and vents and stuff like that. The others that are ruined. Yeah. It's hard to take a giant motorbike through that. I mean, it's cool. You just need six skills to ride your motorcycle up a ladder. Yes. And into a ventilation shaft. Easy. I wouldn't check. All 12s. I would argue that if you had the jet shoes that allow you to fly, you could take one of those infinity hover bikes that have fly air wheels. Put it up on an angle, it's like doing a wheelie on a 40 millimeter round base. You guys are riding and doing a wheelie and that's how he flies. I think it's possible. I think you should give it a try. Okay. Yeah. So each game is different down to the mechanics. So each game has its own, you don't reuse mechanics generally. There's something I want to reuse it, but generally they are, the mechanics are an emergent property of the guiding principles and theme of that particular game. All the way down to the dice rolls, the odds, everything. So because I feel that mechanics need to be expressive of the setting and the theme and the tones that are happening, not the other way around. The last game was fast brutal demonic combat and the rules were designed to accentuate that. I mean, it's really the way the game is built but it's designed to, it's not just like normal like kind of mechanics and that's kind of the way that works. The idea behind the activation in the last game was that you would roll all these D12s, one for each unit or each demon that you've got and then you would be able to kind of put them in order and then it was kind of like you're having this sort of big giant scrum with all these demons and you can see as the leader how things are going this turn. Oh, these guys are getting stomped over here and they're getting outpaced by these guys so they've lost initiative and these guys are doing better and then next turn it's completely different but it's knowable from both sides of the table. You know what I mean? Once you've done that roll at the beginning of the new turn, you can look and go they're gonna go on turn 12 twice and then 11 and then nothing again till eight and you look at yours and go, I'm gonna be going so you kind of know what's going on. In this, because there's a dark space station and there's smoke and gas and all kinds of stuff like that, it's a little bit more reactive. You don't know if you're gonna activate your second guy on your thing or if it's gonna go third maybe possibly and then it's back to them again. So it's the rules matter to the story. That's the way we've always kind of done it. I like that. Let's do four more questions and they'll be done. Impending Duff, thank you for a rate of 62. We appreciate it. That's just about to mention that. Good job. Hey Duff. That goes hand in hand with the fact that I've seen a ton of hype for this. The whole stream, people are like, this is awesome. Yes, Riku asked, will this be shown played at a convention? Yes. We're gonna be able to actually play it live at Nova. We're gonna be there. We're gonna do a Q&A in person at Nova. So we have a theater reserved for that and we'll have copies to sell. And some, yeah. Certainly when it comes around to Adapticon I'm sure we'll do like we did last year where we did a full on come see play with us demo thing. Yeah. We'll certainly get that reserved as well for Adapticon.  And I'll just be running from table to table. Here's to you, here's to you. Did you guys ever sit in our other side of the room? No. Oh, okay. I don't know, it looks it, but. I'm combined with a question. I don't remember. I gotta throw it back over now. They call me a fetus like every other sentence. Question for you, we've got three more to go. Okay, oh my gosh. There's so many of these. Let's see.  Here we go. Do you feel your reach audience is growing? I mean, I hope so. It'd be nice, but it's hard to tell with that kind of thing. Do you have any missions or scenarios work well with more vertical terrain? Yeah, I mean, like many of them as you saw here, there's lots of them that actually speak to vertical terrain. Any rules or stuff you had to leave out of the game that you regret leaving out? Nope. Nope, there was something. I cut, but it was all, I never regret a cut.  Like it's just like when you cut something from a video, you're never like, oh, I'm sad that can't be in there. You're like, no, it's a better video now because I cut this thing. In terms of miniatures, which miniatures do you feel come closest to the artwork in the book? Similar look, a lot of different stuff. Anything you can imagine is the answer. Like if you can find it out there and it's a sci-fi mini or even not, I'm fine with it. A lot of people have already said that the Cyberpunk Red miniatures from Monster Fight Club have got a feel that kind of feels along. Like you'd have to swap out alien heads and stuff like that, but there's a lot of pouches and like tactical stuff and whatever that kind of thing. And then I think paint styles can help a lot too. Those minis are also a really good deal. Yeah, no, I like them.  Is there a list type of number of the bodies? Minis, you need to get through the campaign. The answer is we're gonna publish a little thing out on the site that'll kind of guide you, but the short answer to your question is six organic, monster-y, mutant-y type people is the match you'll ever need and six robot-y, inorganic, angry robots. And with those 12 figs, you would be able to account for everybody in the game. And you're playing in a solo. If you're playing solo, six per crew you want to participate. Yeah, thank you. Okay, I'll put them right through them. Nice. Our alpha beta testing for future product, something the public can sign up for from that wing boy. We haven't really done that. We've mainly just been kind of working with the people in board. I mean, I don't know if it, the thing is, is that the way that we release this game is that we release it on release day and nobody even knew the title. Like we were telling people, it was sci-fi, skirmish, solo co-op, survival. I don't even know if we were using the term survival necessarily at that point, but we kind of hold it close to the vest and kind of do that. So when you get into beta, like if you announce we're making this game, it's coming out next year, it's called this, and it's all, here's all the information, then the betas make a lot of sense because if someone's like, hey, you know this game, they talk about it, well, you know. But with us, we're a little bit more kind of insular, I guess. Yeah, the answer is we're gonna bring John and Scott and Sam and Adam and I'm gonna bully all of them into coming to my house, again, for another hangout sometime between now and like let's say Q1 of next year, wherein we do a little hangout paint jam and we play a role-playing game because I'm gonna force more role-playing games down Uncle Adam's throat and we'll test this.  Excellent. And the last question from Davros, the brute. Are characters like engineers able to create stationary turrets or potentially hack a turret in a scenario? No, yes. Yes, the canker turrets can hack them. All the way around. They can't create them. So yeah, you can't make a turret. But there are turrets that can be hacked or in placements or whatever in some of the scenarios that you can then use to attack the attackers. Absolutely. And it's not just engineers. Anybody could generally attempt it, but engineers are gonna be like better at it. Well, thank you guys for hanging out, showing us the game. Thank you for answering all those questions. Thanks for having us. One last time to show, where do you find the game? What is the cost? SpaceStationZeroGame.com. The PDF is 124 pages. It's $13 American and the print copy is $18 American plus shipping. Plus you also get the PDF for free then. So you could buy it, they'll produce it and ship it to you in about a week or two and you get the PDF right now. So you can start taking a look at it. Join the Discord. You can also find that on the same spot at SpaceStationZero.com. SpaceStationZeroGame. Sorry. I always do that too. Dang it. I put in a link directly to the purchase page at snarlandbadger.com slash SpaceStationZero. Whole bunch of them right there in the chat. There's a lot of spam there. Yeah, that's what I did. I'm a spam lord. And if you guys like what you're seeing here, we only do streams on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Tuesdays is painting stream. Thursday is the gaming stream. On Tuesdays it is one to four PMCST and on Thursdays it's seven to 10 PMCST. So drop us a follow. So you know when we're going live or follow our calendar so you get notifications about those things when they happen. For now, I think we're ready to say goodbye to the stream. Bye. Goodbye, stream. Bye, everybody. Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it. If you're watching on my channel, thank you. Also sub, like, all of that stuff. And also go follow and sub to Miniac over on Twitch.


I think oncology is gonna be, and cancer care in general, is gonna be at the forefront of the transformation of healthcare in general. The medicine is gonna, practice the medicine is gonna change more in the next 20 years and it'll change with 100 years. We have made a significant progress since the war on cancer in the early 70s with a dramatic drop in immortality at least by one third. On the other hand, there's still a lot of challenge in cancer with an increase of cancer incidence that is predicted as pro-American cancer society. 45% increase in the next 20, 25 years. There's still a lack of screening because early cancer always does better. 90, 95% of the patient who have a very early form of cancer will survive and that's very important. So what every patient wants is what's my best option? What's the best sequence of care? So that means have data analytics, precision medicine, immunotherapy and combined days to try to customize the treatment for the patient. Harnessing the immune system is not something new. This has been done 100 years ago where they were actually infecting tumors with bacteria to generate an immune response because they had noticed that actually it would make the tumor regress. The real leapfrog in immunotherapy came from a better understanding of immune response regulation and what dampens the immune response and by understanding on how the tumor plays with this and blocks the immune system and puts a break. We were able to design drugs that actually unleash the immune system and remove the break and that's called checkpoint inhibitors, one of the example. The other one is called Byte, which is by specific. It's an antibody structure, not really an antibody but a molecule that bridges the T cells and the tumor cells. CAR T cell is also a form of this. CAR T cell is making cells of the patient, manufacturing the receptor and putting the receptor in the cells to force the cells go after the cancer cells. All of this is to restore the normal ability of the immune system and to amplify this immune response to go after cancer. Why immunotherapy is very important, it's really critical because it shows response in patients who have failed all standard therapy. If you look at CAR T cell, in aggressive lymphoma, the median survival of patients who have failed the standard of combination of chemotherapy and every toxin map, for example, is in a few months at most. Now we can cure up to 40% of patients with CAR T cells. So we have patients that used to be sent to hospice that we can cure now with advanced disease and that's the power of immunotherapy because once you've reset the immune system, you don't have to continue to treat. The immune system takes care of it and that's what the beauty of it, so that's where I believe this is gonna be the foundational backbone of the future of cancer care.


Hello, everyone. My name is Gul Chin. Today, we're going to discuss with you how we can solve the marketplace supply shortage problem with the help of product. Before we move on with the topic, I'd like to give a very brief introduction of myself. Currently, I'm working as a senior product manager at Firmary eBay in New York, DaVinta. But before this, I've worked for the last eight and a half years in different tech companies including Uber, Rocket Internet, etc. Mostly focusing on the marketing previously and on the product management lately. So today, we're going to discover and explore what are the possibilities we can unlock with the help of product to help the market supply shortage problem. But before we move on with the discussion, I'd like also to refer again to the product development framework. As you know, most of us are the product managers. We have kind of a framework we need to follow to make sure that any product we build is successful. Where this product development framework usually starts, first of all, with us discovering problem space, meaning that before we start working on anything, we need to make sure that we have a clear understanding of the problem. What's the problem size? What's the problem? What's the root cause of the problem causing it to happen? Who are experiencing this issue? What's the impact? What's the size of the impact in terms of revenue or other business metrics? How frequently this problem occurs, etc. So all those questions and many more would give us a better understanding of the problem scope. And after we have a clear understanding of the problem scope, then we usually move forward with different phases, starting with ideation. If we have already a clear understanding of the problem, then we move forward with exploring different ideas, how we can potentially solve this problem, also sharing it with internal and external stakeholders. After the ideation phase, if you already have a few wireframes or options, how we want to solve it, we move forward to design some demos or options, and then we start validating it with our main customers to make sure that this idea we came forward with would work for customers and would solve their problems. Without validation, we can never be sure that we are working on the right idea. And after we pass this phase, we usually continue with the development or launch phases. But today, I wanted to once again highlight the importance of the problem discovery, because it's a very important very first step that everyone needs to check into consideration before jumping on the ideation or the solution phases. So if we are working on the under supply problem, it's very important for all of us to understand why we are supply constrained as a company. There might be several reasons, and some of those reasons might be, first of all, to start asking your colleagues or yourself if this is an acquisition problem. Maybe we are undersupplied because we are not acquiring enough suppliers. Or maybe we are not acquiring the right suppliers. We are acquiring the people, but they're not right fit based on our needs. Of course, those are the marketing questions, but you need to collaborate with all the departments if you are given a problem of under supply and you are trying to solve it. So then you need also to check since when this is happening, why this is happening, if this is an acquisition problem. Is this a budget problem? Maybe you did some change with the budgeting lately, which impacted your under supply problem. Or are there any supply limitations in the given area? Maybe they were a limited number of the suppliers available in this area and maybe you already reached this number. Therefore, you are unable now to extend it further. But what if it's not an acquisition problem? You double checked all the lines and asked even more questions, did more analysis, and found out that none of those are causing your under supply problem. Then the next question is to look into is, if there is a problem with acquired supplies conversion rate to the next jobs, meaning that let's assume that you acquired a million people every month, and then you start noticing that only 1% of those people converting to the next job while previously it was higher or historically it has been lower. Then the question is why? Why the minimum number of the people are converting to the next jobs? Why this rate conversion rate is below the industry benchmarks or your company benchmarks or market benchmarks you are operating in? What's happening there? Why people are not converting? Maybe it's a UI problem or maybe there are more steps in the signup funnel or supplier funnel that's causing them not to convert to the next jobs or maybe they find some bugs, experiencing certain challenges with a converting. So it's very important for you to discover if this is a conversion problem and secondly, what's the reason causing it? But let's assume that it's also not a conversion problem. Then third group of the problems that may cause your under supply situation can be average supply being nothing as engaged as you would like. For example, let's say that any supplier is providing a monthly targeted number of the jobs. For example, you expect an ordinary supplier for Amazon Flex to do at least seven or 10 deliveries per day or 30 deliveries per week. But when you look into the schedules or track the data, you start noticing that some proportion of your suppliers and the biggest proportion has dropped below this benchmark you have as a company might. Then it means that your suppliers are not as engaged as you'd like. Jobs per user is dropping. Then it's very important to understand why this is happening. Maybe you can do an extensive research with your UX department or you can do a survey or you can go out and directly ask thousands and hundreds of people just to learn more what's causing this problem to occur, which is a very important metric to keep an eye on. However, let's assume that none of those three problems are causing your under supply issue. All of them are really healthy for your company. Then the next question you need to ask and validate if there is any retention problem in your company, meaning that your turn rate could be high or higher than usual. And again, when you compare it to different companies, competitors, businesses, market benchmarks, you might say that your turn rate is quite high. It's above, for example, 15, 20 percent. Again, depending on your industry or depending on the markets you operate in, this might be a problem to investigate and understand why this is happening, why people are churning. Maybe they're unhappy about their earnings or maybe your suppliers are unhappy with some procedures with a level of customers, quality of the jobs they're receiving or their in-app experience is faulty. So there might be dozens of reasons, but it's very important to understand if it's a churning problem, then why people are churning. And finally, let's assume that none of those are happening or maybe two or three of those problems might also be occurring at the same time for your marketplace. It's also important for you to respond to the fifth group of the questions. Maybe any of the factors here could also potentially impact, could be impacting your supply situation, which is the seasonality and the holidays. For example, if it's a specific season and the holiday happening in the country, it's more likely that your market or one or more of the markets are going to have to differentiate its stocks or sudden change in the graphs for certain metrics, again, including supply availability. Another important factor is any change in the competition landscape can also impact your supply situation. For example, even when the competitor is doing the price increase, price decrease, or new competition is coming to the market or existing competitor is leaving the market, it's all might change your supply situation. So it's important to keep an eye on it and double check verify it whenever you are investigating your under supply problem. The third and the fourth factor is that if there is any change in the company and legislation's internal procedures or governmental legislations in regards to your supply situation, it might also impact your suppliers. For example, if you recently started to acquire new document from the suppliers, new ID check, or any other validation, then because government asked you to do so, then most likely you are going to lose certain proportion of the suppliers in the funnel or their existing suppliers might also leave because they didn't have this document before. Unfortunately, those change that you are driving internally they need to be discussed ahead. And if those happening, then you are most likely going to experience a churn or lose certain proportion of your supply, existing supply. Basically, those are some of the problems that might cause under supply issues. But again, it doesn't necessarily mean that if you are under supplied, it definitely causes one of those problems. However, those are the most frequent problem types causing under supply issue. Now let's assume that you already made your discovery and you have a clear understanding of what's causing your supply, number of the suppliers to drop. If you already have this clear overview of the problem space, then you are good to move to the next product development phases, which starts with the ideation. Now that we know the problem, let's start thinking how we can potentially solve this problem. Here, I'm going to give you some examples based on the hypothetical problems we discussed. But again, those are the potential solutions on the ideation phase. Doesn't mean that those are the right solutions for your company or for your business. You always need to you always need to dive into the problem, discovery problem root cause, understanding it, and then finding the right solution which works best for your customers. But for some of the cases, I can share ideas that might work for bringing more supply into your platform or engaging your existing supply more. Let's start with the first problem group, which was an acquisition. So let's say that the problem was that we are not able to acquire enough supply at a targeted value. This means that we have enough budget, but we don't want to spend more on the suppliers than we should. Given that we have ROI target, we always want to spend less than we expect to learn from those suppliers. Therefore, there is always a budget. Marketing teams prefer to stand with them. And given the situation, if we have the limited resources or limited channels, you might think of bringing new acquisition channels on the board with the help of product. One of those channels is a referral channel. For example, in Lyft, Lyft is one of the companies which uses referral channel where you can go and refer different drivers. And as a driver, if you refer a friend to drive with them, then if your friend completes a certain goal within the given period, for example, within the 19 days, if your friend completes 295 rides, then you will get $350. This is a friend referral program and works in the terms that the company has set for itself, which knows that the company is going to be ROI positive if this goal is hit. But before you start building a referral channel, you need to take into consideration several factors. One of those important factors is the finance. So you need to make sure that whatever budget you set for your referrals, it must be within the company caps. It needs to take into consideration the caps where you would still be ROI positive from the marketing and the product perspective. Also, you need to make a few decisions about what type of referral campaign you need to build. For example, you can build a campaign where only referring person would be rewarded. Or both parties, both referrer and the referring person, referred person, sorry, would be rewarded in the end. This is usually the most popular one where both parties are rewarded because then both parties feel engaged and they want also to try the platform, they're keen, they have a goal, financial goal to achieve the results. The third type of the referral campaigns is when only one party, but referred person is being rewarded. It's the least preferred one because usually you need to motivate the referring person to refer the friend. However, if only referred person is being rewarded, then referrer is less likely to feel engaged to participate in the program. And finally, there might be some referral programs where none of the parties are rewarded. This is also happening sometimes, especially when some companies, they know that they have valuable enough acquisition streams. They just open the channel for inviting your friends, but they don't position it as a referral channel. You still have the functionality to invite friends to the platform to let them use it. However, it's not a referral program because none of the parties have any benefits of referring other person. Another important decision you need to take into consideration when building a referral program is referral value. So what benefit do you want to give to the referring and the referred people? There are a few options without deep diving into financial value of those selections. For example, you can reward them with cash. It can be in credits or in balance. Most of the companies are using this option because cash is the most engaging, has been proven one of the most engaging tools in the referral programs for the last decade. However, some of the companies also prefer using premiums and free product upgrades, especially for referring parties. For example, you might see in internet companies they are doing it really often. If you bring a friend on the board, then you get one month of free internet. Another value type for referral campaigns can be selective benefits. It's when you have two or three options of different benefits available for the referring or referred person, but you let them select out of those options or pool of options that you have. So they get the chance of selecting, which is also one of the elements customers really like. And finally, the forced type of referral benefits can be a chance of participating in the competition. You can run the referral campaign, but you can tell that with referring each friend, for example, you will earn certain points and in the end of each month, based on your points, you will get the chance to participate in the competition where you can earn something big. Here, you know that it's a game of chance, but some companies still prefer using this option. However, there is no data, whether it's engaging or not. It needs to be tested. Basically, those are all the referral channel ideas. However, there is also another important acquisition channel, which has proven to work really well for supplier acquisition or generally for user acquisition, which is called Enablers. It's when you create as a company or as a product, you built new B2B portal for Enablers. You onboard active partner organizations who can build their businesses on top of your business to engage in your supply and they earn money out of it. For example, one of the good examples that I really like is Uber. Uber has built an Uber fleet platform. This is a platform where if I'm a car company or if I have, for example, dozens of cars or hundreds of cars, I can just register my company there and my cars and then I can hire drivers myself on a fixed rate or stable rate. It totally depends on me as a car park owner. And then I would register them in the platform, which is called Uber fleet for Uber B2B Enablers. And then they would monitor their employees. They would bring more people on the board because they have more cars and then they would train them. They would earn money out of it and they would be arranging the payments themselves. So as a company, Uber is winning an optionality here to skip the user acquisition and to skip the user training parts because enablers are already doing it as they are building their own businesses on top of existing platform. So with enabling this new channel, companies may save some time and some resources from bringing the suppliers themselves. Instead, they bring the companies and the partners on the board who are going actively to work on bringing new suppliers. This might be one of the bad valuable channels. Now about the conversion problem. So let's say that we want to solve conversion and some of the conversion problems because our acquired supply doesn't convert to the next first or until the 10th jobs, which means that if this is the funnel you have, let's assume that people come, they sign up, then they get their account activated. If they have all the documentations in place, then you expect them to download an app to start working. They receive the first request, they accept it, then they start completing the jobs first until the 10th one. So you usually want in a healthy funnel job completion rates to grow after the first job or you also expect to sign up to first job conversions to be really high. But if in your funnel, you start noticing that somewhere you have huge dropouts in different phases, then definitely in the product discovery phase, you should have already investigated the root cause of it, why people are lost somewhere in those funnel and why this proportion is so high, what's causing people to leave. Let's say that you already have some ideas why this is happening. For example, one of the ways, one of the problems if people are lost in the funnel is because app is too complicated to navigate within, then you might come up with a solution of showing them enough education when they sign up first. For example, this is from one of the apps in the internet where you can see step by step what's happening when you sign up to the platform so you can understand how this platform is working. This can also be done for your suppliers to make sure you save time on training and you move the training phase into the app directly. Besides that, if people are failing to move through the conversion funnel, you need also to double check your existing processes and existing UI. Maybe there is something in the UI side that makes people to feel challenged and they don't know what to do next or they feel it it seems a very complicated thing to use your product and that's why they're leaving. If you found out any of those barriers and you know why this is happening in the discovery process, then here in the solution phase it's very important for you as a product manager to come up with certain solutions to make improvements in the UI and at least to experiment those solutions to see if this is changing the conversion funnel to the positive. The third group of problems are turn-related problems. So let's say that your supply situation is worsening because your turn rate is really high and the suppliers that you are acquiring and they're converting to the next jobs they're gone after a certain period and you wonder how you can potentially solve this problem. Probably you already made follow-up discovery and you talk to your suppliers and you have enough information why people are churning. One of the churn reasons might be because people think they're not earning enough in your platform. So there might be two different situations here. First of all, if people are really not earning enough on your platform or they are earning money but they don't have a visibility on it because when users don't have a visibility on their earnings they assume that they are not earning enough and they start complaining. So it's very important to show the visibility on the earnings so your suppliers would be happy and then be keen and motivated to see their earnings so they wouldn't be churning often. This is at least an idea first to be experimented for example in Uber each driver can see their weekly earnings they can see their the graphic of their weekly earnings and how it has been changing and they can also see some basic statistics to relate to. Another important challenge for drivers or for suppliers sorry to churn might be because they don't know how they can potentially earn more money. If suppliers are keen to earn more money in your platform you can do in-app education potentially to help them to earn more and this might be one of the ways to experiment and see whether it would be impacting your churn rate or not. Sometimes they just think that it's not possible to increase their earnings and they try to look out different ways or to move to competition for increasing their earnings and earnings is usually one of the most important factors impacting suppliers situation with two-sided market places especially in their real-time ride-sharing companies. Another problem causing the retention issues might be your suppliers and again related to the earnings they might think that they're not receiving enough job requests or they're not receiving enough customer requests so they can earn more. This might be caused from different problems but first of all you need also to double check and verify that your search or matching algorithms are performing really well. Those are the algorithms companies such as Amazon Leafed or Uber has to make sure that customer gets their request done. For example, when you search on Amazon for any keyword the search algorithm is ranking all the results based on your criteria and also based on different criteria market-based or based on the popularity quality etc and then it's trying to show the best results for your search on top of the page. Similarly to Amazon search algorithms for example Leafed or Uber's matching algorithms are trying to look for drivers whenever you are searching for a driver based on the location and also based on the quality for their rating etc to make sure that you are matched with the best and the quickest possible nearby driver. So those algorithms are the basis for the success of those companies and the products. Therefore as a product manager if you want to double check your retention rate or to improve your turn rate and make your suppliers happy you need to make sure that those algorithms are working really well and they're fair to your suppliers. Of course you need to validate and double check and there might be no bugs on these platforms in these algorithms but it's not enough just to maintain those. You need to make sure that you have a team always working and improving search and matching algorithms because you cannot just build it once and leave there because it can get outdated as your business is growing the more cases you are experiencing the newer rules you need to bring into those algorithms or new technology you need to bring in that you don't want to miss. If you don't keep improving the search or matching algorithms one day you might be super outdated and your suppliers might just leave because they're not getting really enough jobs or there are some use cases you are not covering with the help of the rules that's going to cause your business eventually fails. Therefore it's very important to validate if everything is working right with those algorithms and then making sure you keep improving those based on the feedbacks you always validate and double check if there is anything needs to be improved here. Then the next thing that might help with the supplier retention and to make sure you can help them to earn more is smart pricing strategy. So we talked that one of the most important reasons for suppliers to turn is related to their earnings and one way of improving their earnings can be improving your pricing strategy. Of course pricing strategy can sometimes not fall into product management area but sometimes it does because there are so many things we can do with a pricing as product managers. As you know there is always a base pricing. It's a basic way of how price for your product is being calculated but there are also different pricing strategies. One of them is dynamic or search pricing. The way how dynamic pricing works is that depending on the seasonality on the demand and supply situation in a specific period of time you can set an algorithm which can define your pricing estimating how much demand or supply you are getting and it's going to show different prices for different timings. And again dynamic pricing or search pricing in the ways that we know from different companies it's taking into consideration all the market specific characteristics. So it uses real time data sometimes also the future data to understand if there is enough supply for the demand and in case if there is less supply available for the increased demand then it's going to automatically be increasing the price. When the price is increased it's expected demand to decrease and when the demand is decreasing then the marketplace equilibrium is happening meaning that there is enough demand to and supply to meet with each other. This is why dynamic pricing is being used however we also need to be careful with dynamic pricing there needs to be the highest caps and the minimum caps to make sure that it doesn't keep growing all the time and it doesn't hit the unbelievable numbers for the market places. But it's usually preferred because especially during the holidays the peak hours when there is a there are going to be high demand or higher than expected then those are the times when dynamic pricing might help to decrease the demand so the suppliers would get enough jobs and customers wouldn't get dissatisfied. At the same time it's valuable because it's increasing the suppliers earnings and they're getting more money from the jobs they would get within the normal hours. There is another pricing strategy that might potentially help to increase the suppliers earnings which is called personalized pricing. So suppliers might earn more when we charge customers more but of course our aim is never to charge customers more our aim is to make sure that there is enough supply in the marketplace to meet the demand with personalized pricing we show different prices for each customer taking into consideration user specific details for example sometimes the web browser customer using the device customer using or a historical data of customers behavior locations customer traveled we can estimate whether this customer can pay higher or less amount for the given product or given service and then we can create a user based pricing personalized pricing for this user and charge users differently. We need also to be careful with personalized pricing because there are some ethical and legal questions we need to double check and make sure that we are operating within this frame however it's also one of the ways that can improve the pricing strategy in a smarter way to make sure we have enough suppliers to meet the demand not to just dissatisfied customers and at the same time to make sure we help with the supplier earnings so they don't churn. One of the best ways of predicting preventing churn is to predict the churn before it happens. So it's really the smartest way first of all we in most of the companies we already have churn prediction algorithms in place meaning that we have we can estimate any user's probability of being churned before this user is churning and depending on the probabilities we can target those users with different communications or with different benefits and then prevent them from churning. With this we can decrease our churn rate as it's easier to resurrect churned people before they churn versus then later. And finally one of the churn reasons can always be product related we always need to take consideration that maybe there are some barriers on the UI side or there is a boggish experience for users that are causing them to churn. And if this is one of the problems that you validated during the discovery phase probably you need to work improving UI to make sure that users don't leave the platform. And finally the last problem is the engagement problem as we discussed earlier sometimes jobs per user is lower than expected so we want active supply to be very engaged and also very dedicated to the product we want them to complete at least x number of the jobs within the week or within months however if they are performing less than expected for example if they're doing only single or two jobs per month on average then there are certain ways with the help of the product we can incentivize them to change their behaviors. Changing user behavior is not easy but it's very much possible with the help of product. For example one of the ways we can use is incentives or reward programs. Incentives are really easier way of changing user behavior we can just say suppliers give them some targets and say that to do weeks to get why so do certain activities for example complete x number of the trips to earn $200 by the end of the week. So those are the how incentives works sometimes you can make it smarter, automated etc which is going to make it easier to manage and another way of it is reward programs where you set some kind of a gamification or more engaging way of working with your suppliers to make sure they get engaged with your platforms they become more loyal and then they start working towards the goals on monthly basis so they can reach out to the targets for the company. But there are different type of reward program types for example there are perks sometimes supermarkets are really loving this way of working they give users some benefits with every single shopping that they are making it's called perk and it's a reward for each purchase then there are programs such as earn and burn with every single shopping you get some kind of a point or discount that you can use in the next shopping where you burn it another way of reward program types is tiered programs this is where you assign different levels to the users you can say that for example you're a gold diamond platinum etc and then depending on those levels you can give them different goals or different reward types first type of the reward programs is gamifications and this is the favorite my favorite way of engaging existing suppliers or any type of users because gamifications is usually making it fun making it more engaging for the users assigning them badges making smart goals dynamic goals etc and the fifth way of fifth type of reward programs are hybrid programs meaning that you can merge two or three of the above versions above program types into one and build a hybrid type of program there are some criteria for reward programs it's very important to take them into consideration if you are building one the very first criteria is from the product side and from the UI side to make sure that your reward program is easy to use and it's easy to understand of course when building a reward program and deciding on what the reward should be you're going through multiple complicated processes of agreeing on the financial part agreeing on the budget making sure the budget you spend per each supplier is within your profitability cap meaning that it's ROI positive you take into consideration all the future predictions financial predictions behavioral predictions and you keep validating yourself so it's very important to make sure that when you build and when you agree on those benefits or when you agree on the terms they are not complicated and they're going to be easy to use and make it easy for others to join and use this program second important part is to make sure that the reward you are giving in the end of program is very relevant for the users so this part also requires a lot of research pre-work to be done before launching the program itself so you need to make sure that any benefits people are going to get out of this program is going to be relevant for them it's important for their day-to-day lives jobs, etc so for example you cannot give a manicure service for the Uber driver right as a benefit if there is a reward program for them you will really need to make sure that this is what they would be using on their day-to-day lives and relevant for them and the third criteria is to make sure that the reward program you are building is real-time meaning that any behavior users are doing or suppliers are going to show in your platform are going to be automatically reflected on their performances in a way that they can see it somewhere inside app this is one of the most important criteria based on the research made on reward programs that users would want to have for the reward program to succeed and finally it's very important that this program is trustable users are going to turn and leave your platform if they win anything and they don't get it in the given promised period or if they're communicating something inside the product but it doesn't happen in the end of the month so this is something we need to avoid to make sure that we establish trust with our users and they feel safe within this program I want to share one of the examples one of the companies that are using gamifications as a reward program type for example this is Uber Uber has built Uber Pro reward program for the drivers drivers here can needs to hit different goals to fall into one of the tiers which is gold, platinum and the diamond for example with every single trip they complete or depending on their cancellation rates and many other factors they earn points and based on those points they can fall into one of those tiers the program that Uber is using is more likely to be a hybrid one because there are tiers there and there is a gamification inside so it might be considered potentially a hybrid program in my opinion and here for example you can see the badges and badges and the goals how it's being communicated inside an Uber app for drivers each time people are earning the points they're going to see how much more left and then with those they can always unlock the very next level and earn more so basically this is type of the gamification you can also use for your suppliers in the platform to get them to complete more jobs within the months to earn more points and to unlock more earnings for themselves another way of increasing the supplier engagement let's assume that if this is the maximum suppliers can do they cannot complete more than 10 jobs per week but you want them to do 11s within the given time frame then you need to think some of the ways that can help them to optimize existing situation how can you optimize existing supply let's say that any supplier can if any supplier can provide only 10 jobs in an hour why not to take the 11th job in a queue and let the customer know that this job is going to be completed not within the hours they wish but within the hour you suggest them which is going to be a little bit later for example there are food delivery companies market shopping grocery delivery companies in Turkey this is one of the screenshots I got from from the app called Stegalsin here inside the app if you are searching for a product and you want it to be delivered for your home then you can schedule it for any time which is offered to you depending on the supply availability so you can also make sometimes a real time order but here because the supply is not going to be available for that kind of a late night hours they give you one hour gap instead of saying that's going to be delivered for sure within 10 minutes after you request it so basically the customer's expectations are being managed existing supplies optimization is happening because supplier knows that the job doesn't need to be completed right now but the job can be taken into queue and completed after each other within the suggested time frame this is one of the ways that can be used for optimizing existing supply and in the end I want to highlight one of the things that Karl Marx said about the supply and demand situation supply and demand constantly determine the prices of the commodities but they never balance and only constantly and this is true but the cost of the production for its part determines the escalations of supply and demand here are the three most important highlights from the days that I'd like everyone to make is first of all demand and supply problems are going to be ongoing challenges for most of the businesses but you should always start with a problem discovery as a product manager to make sure that you understand the problem space before you jump into the solutions and finally to solve this under supply problem you need to use relevant tool to improve the situation and always validate this tool testing your ideas and then measuring the impact with the right people or right customers or with the help of right metrics well thank you everyone please feel free to reach out to me through LinkedIn if you have any full-on questions but I will be happy to connect with you thanks a lot


So thank you, Mathias, for introducing me. So we're going to speak now about Alfresco, content management system. My name is Philippe Dubois and I'm working for Alfresco since, let's say, one year. Okay. What is Alfresco? Alfresco is document management and web content management open source platform. So as I just mentioned in the title, it covers two main areas of document management, let's say. The pure document management platform and the web content management platform, which focuses more about web publishing, publishing websites and maintaining websites and coordinating the teams that will build the website. Where does Alfresco, where does it come from? Well, who created Alfresco? There are two main, it was co-founded by two person, John Newton, which was the co-founder of Documentum, which was also involved in document management, and John Powell, the former CEO of BusinessObject. And they started in January 2005. And maybe other general information about Alfresco, where are we located? Let's say the idea is to having the engineering located in UK, in Middenhead, and some of the employees are spread all over Europe, let's say Germany, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and we have also a set of engineers located in US. I mean, not on a single location, but spread all over US. So what was the main idea? They had, I mean, the co-founders when they started Alfresco, the key concept is the commoditization. They wanted to give access to everybody to a kind of eye and document management system. And what they were focusing on is efficiency of development and manufacturing. It's general characteristic of commoditization, efficiency of distribution, increasing the quality and based on high volume distribution, and reduce the cost. And then they decided, they found out that the open source could be a good way to achieve that or to go that direction. And why? Because they discovered that they could lower the cost of development and they could rely on community for such things like translations and also some improvement, testing and so on. They could also use the best breed open source components and also they had access to world-class engineer who were interested to join the team and work with us. They also discovered obviously that they could distribute their product at low cost through the Internet and Sourceforge and they could also, they also tried to lower the price of distribution. And one key point is that, let's say if you take a document management like Documentum to settle for maybe $3, you have to invest $2 in commercial expenses and so on. So here the model is discovering alfresco through the Internet. You're targeting a huge audience to the Internet and then they can download, use it, test it and see if it covers their needs. And obviously we try to achieve high quality by using the community for testing. So we're going to speak a bit more in details about the document management functionalities. On that part we have the concept of smart spaces. We have ACL and security on those spaces. We can propose a single sign-on. We can manage groups and roles on those spaces. And why are they called smart spaces is because you can set up rules and through triggering those rules you will trigger actions and those actions will also be performed by aspects, let's say. So we call it an intelligent file system. And also one of the main goals of alfresco was to make it transparent and easy to use by the users and what could be easier than a shared drive. Okay, that just people doesn't know they're using a document management system. They just put the file into the virtual shared drive and it just enters the content management system but you don't have to train your users. Just tell them put your document there and then they will be versioned by the system. They will be maybe transformed. But let's say the secretary won't have to bother to learn a lot about the user interface of the system. We also include functionalities like office integration. That means we interface with office suite. We have advanced workflow. We also having alfresco dashboard and web scripts. That means users can develop their own custom interfaces using web scripts and visualize the data to components called dashboards. We're offering a wide range of access protocols like CIFS, FTP, WebDAF, HTTP and also we intend to achieve scalability through clustering. Okay, this is a general representation of the alfresco architecture. On the center you have the content repository. The content repository relies on full text indexes. We're using Ulysses as a full text engine. The storage is mainly done through a file system. The metadata is stored in databases. On the right part you can see the high availability stuff. You can see also other... If I go on the web service, you have a web service API for alfresco. You can interface what they call the knowledge portals with portals. You can design your own web applications. Again, you have access through virtual file systems. You can see that you have FTP, CIFS and WebDAF, but you have even other protocols implemented. This is the view of the HTTP interface of alfresco. As you can see, you can visualize a new folder, a new smart space. You can visualize the folders and you can visualize the files. On the left you have a kind of navigation toolbar. On the top you have also a general toolbar about the well-known locations into alfresco repository and also a small box where you can do some search. This is the same data, the same repository, but seen through the WebDAF interface. As you can see, you have the same folders and the same documents. Again, the same thing. I could have done it with CIFS, but here it's a bit different. It's what we call a dashlet. That means it's a small component that can be used to visualize and browse your data and enter new documents and so on. That dashlet was developed using Ajax technology and web scripts. We're going to go back later on on the web script. That's it for the document management functionalities. Now let's go through the WCM Web Content Management functionalities. You can author your content using XML. It's kind of presentation independent. Multichannel content publishing. That means you can distribute or produce or format the output of your site in different formats. You can produce it in HTML or whatever. One key concept of the WCM system in alfresco is the sandbox. That means every information provider, every person that will enter the new pages or the information will have its own vision of the site and won't disturb the others. That means he can do everything he wants and he won't interfere with others. That means we have the concept of sandboxing, which is very important and which is one of the main features of alfresco systems. We have content deployment. That means we can publish the information. We have link validation. We can manage the content. I mean you can decide at what time the content will be available or remove from your site. We have dashlets again. We can also use workflows. We can create new user, obviously, and we can enter the information using web forms. Obviously, we can create new web projects. We can import dynamic websites and so on and so on. I'm going to skip it because you will have the slides and I will be short on time. Let's go to the technical part, let's say. Alfresco has been on Java platform. We have used Spring as a cornerstone for our application. We built the application around Spring. The main functionalities that were implemented using Spring is security through method interceptors, transaction again through method interceptors, audit trail, and also multi-lingual functionalities on content and metadata. What are the other open-source components integrated in Alfresco? Alfresco is a set of open-source components that we have put together. We have glued it using Spring. You have the full-text indexing, which is based on Lucene. The database was insured using iBurnit. The web page generation is achieved using GSM. In the document transformation, we have used some libraries like Imaging or also we have used OpenOffice. In the templating, we have used FreeMarker and XSLT. Workflow, we have used Gboss, GBPM. The scripting, we have implemented scripting on server side. We have used Rhino. We have also integrated PHP on server side. And we have incorporated into Alfresco the MegaWiki, which is the engine that Wikipedia uses. Small words about the API structure in Alfresco. The API is structured around the concept of services and what is a service in Alfresco structure. It's the lowest API level you should interact with. That means you shouldn't interfere with lower layers of Alfresco implementation. Amongst those services, you have the node service, the five-folder service, the authentication service, and so on. A few words about the web scripts. The aim of implementing web scripts is to use the rest API. That means all the parameters are put into the URL. And it's extensible. That means you can decide where will be your parameters and you can recreate your own API if you want. So if you want to write a web script, there are three parts that you have to design. The first will be the format of the URLs that will be accepted by your web script. And then you will build your model and then you will present your model, you will transform it and present it using free marker, mainly. You could use maybe XSLT. So there are no limits using web scripts because you can create your own API that suits your own needs and that fits your own business model, your own business. This is a schema explaining, let's say, how a request is handled when you're using the web scripts. So you have the web scripts rest dispatcher, which will analyze and extract the parameters from your URL. Then we're going to build the model, the data model, using JavaScript and that data model will be given to the free marker and the free marker will render the answer. You can also use it to build Ajax applications. That's how the dashlet was built. And you can see the format can be different and multiple. And this is the last page showing you where you can find more information about Alfresco. But you're welcome if you want to ask any question after the speech. Thank you.