Hi, hi everybody. Isn't this exciting or as I like to call it terrifying. I'm Charlie. This is Tom. We're gonna give you kind of the JRuby State of the Union to start the day off.  It happened in a very short time. I think we started discussing this around the beginning of September and then within weeks we had it up to go. And the funny story, yeah, big thanks to Engine Yard for this. You know, the funny thing is when we opened up the registrations I was terrified that no one was gonna want to come to JRuby.com and then they sold out like that. So that was a really exciting day for us. You know, a couple words on Engine Yard. It's really been an amazing reception for us here. Looking at getting JRuby development support, cloud offerings out there. Anybody who is interested in looking at the cloud stuff or has tried some of the beta support out you definitely should talk to Kirk Haynes. Where are you? Right over here. And let them know what you've seen, what works for you or, you know, if you're looking to do JRuby stuff on the cloud in the future, what is it that you need out of that? JRuby.com obviously is a huge thing and lots and lots of support. It's been really a great experience for us coming to Engine Yard. Of course, when I thank all of our sponsors, I was also worried nobody's gonna want to sponsor this thing. It's just JRuby.com, right? But, you know, we got, we obviously got a lot of sponsors. A lot of people that are interested in this. And, you know, these are all friends of JRuby and we're really happy that you guys are able to help out with the conference. So thank you very much. So who are we? Of course, I'm Charlie and this is Tom. Hello. We also have Nick here somewhere. Raise your hand, Nick. And Ola is here. There are other JRuby committers and of course, lots of folks in the community, but we're the ones that are here at the moment. So the first thing I wanted to find out is who are all of you? So how many people here have never tried JRuby? Okay, there's a few folks at school. Maybe we can pull. That's great. We'll bring you into the fold here. How many of you have tried JRuby and maybe reported bugs, JRuby bugs? Okay, so you're the ones. All right, all right. About 30%. Yeah, now we know. Now we know how many contributed patches to JRuby. It's smaller, it's a small amount. And that's an interesting problem, isn't it? That we have that many with bugs and fewer with patches. How many people are actually using JRuby in production for applications right now? Oh, awesome. Awesome. How many of those are Rails applications? So not actually slightly less than that. That's interesting. That's interesting. All right, cool. All right, so we'll continue on. So we're going to do a little looking back a little history of JRuby. Not a lot of people know JRuby was not actually started by any of the current committers, started as kind of a pet project, toy project by this guy, Jan Arna Peterson in about 2001. So it's actually a fairly old project. Since then, we've basically replaced almost all of the original code.  We've never met this guy, never talked to him in person. Is he here? Are you here now? We've never met him. But there's some mythology behind this. We're not sure if this is true that someone noticed that the C implementation of Ruby used a .wifile. And then someone said, well, I bet you can go and make that .wifile work in Java. And then I think it was Stefan Matthias Haust of all people who cranked it out like a day later. And I think that was the motivation for starting. Right. But it's mythology because we don't know. We still have not met any of those original guys. So someday we're gonna have to travel to, you know, wherever those guys are and find them. About 2002, Tom came on to the project. I joined in 2004 immediately after RubyConf 2004, because I was so excited about Ruby at that point. 2006, Ola and Nick came in. And then since then we've added lots of new folks. We've had lots of community folks come in. And we're at around nine active committers right now. The most recent ads would be Yoko Harada, who did all of the JRuby embedding APIs in the new one for really awesome work. And Sabu Sastri, who's our compiler guy working on the new JRuby compiler. And we'll talk a little bit about that later. So big milestones. 2006 was was the beginning, really, of where JRuby started to actually be useful. In winter 2006, we thought, hey, maybe we can actually make JRuby run stuff that regular Ruby use Rubyists are using before that time it could run Ruby code sort of. But the compatibility just wasn't there to run things that people are used to. So we started out with IRB. That's kind of the first thing that you want to get going because it has a lot of weird behaviors and requires a lot of core libraries. Got that working, you know, took a couple of weeks worth of work, but it got got it functional. And then rake and Ruby gems. And then, you know, towards spring, we start thinking, hey, we've got these basic pieces working. We've got most of the core libraries functional. What if we can actually get rails to run on JRuby on the JVM. And lots of people thought, no, this is impossible. It's never going to actually run with JRuby. But I guess Tim kind of Tim Bray kind of lit a fire under us and said, hey, you know, if you guys get rails working in time for Java one, there might be some surprises for you. And of course, the surprises meant that we spent all of Java one doing press and other nonsense. So that wasn't quite the surprise we were hoping for. But in the fall, we finally managed to work with son and come on full time. And we got a lot of help over the years from Sunday to really make JRuby go. So I would like a quick round of applause for everything that son has done for us. So we should probably tell at least one story. So it was less than one week, I think like three days before Java one, we got accepted for a talk and we did a few pretty late runs to try to get a spike to get rails working. And then we were really excited. It was like three days before and rails was running. But we'd go and like try to load a simple view and it would take like a half a second or three quarters of a second for one page view to come back. And we're like, well, this is really impressive to us because we know how much work it takes to get rails working. But the Java people are going to look at it and go, oh, wow, when can I start using rails? But we don't know anything about rails development. We certainly know more now, but we're not rails developers. And then we're at a coffee shop and then Charlie's like, well, why don't I go and look to see how you tune rails apps? He's like, hey, we can set it in a production mode. Who'da thunk it? And what an amazing discovery. All of a sudden it ran fast enough to demo. It was like a like a switch flip. All of a sudden, hey, maybe this actually will be useful for some people. So that was pretty fun. And then, you know, proceeding on 2007, you know, it was roughly seven or seven, eight months or so after we came to Sun, managed to get JRuby 1.0 out. And that was, that was a really exciting time. We had it running well enough that we thought people could put real apps up on it. And to our surprise, a few people did. Thoughtworks in Oracle being among some of the earliest adopters that actually started building stuff off JRuby 1.0. We look back now and we think, God, you guys were nuts. That thing was nowhere near ready for production. But it worked. And they managed to get it to go. In 2007, summer, we started working on the JRuby compiler, which led up to the 1.1 release in the winter of 2008, which was really the first JRuby release that actually ran Ruby code faster than the C implementation, which we really was, we really knew we could get there, but we weren't sure when it would happen. So it's pretty nice to have that in JRuby 1.1. And then, you know, continuing on, the fact that JRuby has always had native threads that actually run concurrently. In 2008, the Rails thread safety work started, leading up to the Rails 2.2 release, the 2.2 release that was, that had thread safe support. And now there's a lot of folks running with JRuby in thread safe mode and getting some, some amazing performance out of that. You know, in the fall of 2008, we started doing some more Java integration rework, trying to clean things up. And that brings us to 2009, which is obviously a huge year for JRuby. We've had three major releases. I ran some of the numbers last night and we've had over 1,300 issues resolved in the past year. I don't know what that, that works out to four or five issues a day, something like that. Thousands of commits, thousands of commits. I think we have more, more commits in 2009 than in the entire rest of history of JRuby. And of course, the move to Engine Yard and JRuby comp. So it's been, it's been a great year. Over these years, we've gathered lots of friends, of course, son, oracle, dot works, Collaborative Software Initiative has been a real big fan for their trisano product. LinkedIn's polls was running on the last time I checked. Relevance has a whole bunch of JRuby stuff. And of course, there's lots and lots more. I mean, there's too many people to list that have been our friends over the year and helped us go, helped us get to where we are now. So we've come a long way from, from being the, the joke at Ruby, RubyConf 2005, where people went out of their way to put jokes in slides after my talk about how goofy JRuby was to now actually people are running stuff in production with JRuby and people are really, really excited about it. And that's, that's great. We've really, we managed to get a long way. So, so where are we now? JRuby 1.4 is the most recent release just at the beginning of this month. Again, massive amount of work, 300 plus bug fixes since our 1.3 release in the summer. 1.8 support is now up to 1.8.7. So we finally made the move to 1.8.7. Seems like it was the right time to do it. The 1.9 support in JRuby 1.4 is improved. It's not quite complete yet, but it is, it is a lot better.  And the, the basic apps do work in 1.9 right now. You can generate a simple Rails app. You can run Ruby gems, rake, IRB. Right. Exactly. So it does, it does work, but there's a lot of edges that you'll hit if you start running it. So there's more work to do, but we're really glad with how much we've gotten done. An installer and a native executable for Windows. We'll talk a little bit more about really trying to prioritize Windows support a little bit better. But this was a huge help for anybody that's running on Windows. Lots of Java integration improvements. The new embedding API I mentioned from Yoko, which has made it far, far easier to embed JRuby into existing Java applications. We have a bug for bug port of the Psyc YAML parser, SIC YAML parser. Thanks to OLA. I think this is number four now. Number four YAML parser for OLA. But it means that we actually have no open YAML bugs in the tracker anymore, which is, well, I have a couple that I filed. And there's a few others, but no, no user reported ones, I think. So OLA has almost done as many YAML implementations as there are YAML implementations. So yes, if you want to know about, if you want OLA to implement a YAML parser for you, you can go right to him. Never say never. All right, lots more memory reductions. We did a little bit of work in one three additional work in one four, updated all of the libraries we ship with and then, you know, a little performant focus performance fixes. So it was a really big release, at least as big as one two, which was probably the other gigantic release that we did in 2009. Again, a note on compatibility. We mentioned this in our JRuby talk at RubyConf. JRuby actually runs more tests than any other Ruby implementation. We run all of the Ruby spec, up to 37,000 of them passing, which is, you know, high 90%, 98 something like. We also run a whole set of other suites of tests. There's some overlap, of course. We don't know exactly where the overlap is, but we're terrified to pull out any of those other test suites in case they're not being covered by Ruby spec. So we run tons and tons of tests. Continuous integration, we have the machine in my box that's keeping my basement warm, is actually running Java 5, Java 6, and Java 7 versions of four different vendors of JVMs on every commit. And that's Ruby spec and all of the other tests. And then every night we run on one of those, one of those Java implementations with all of the different JRuby settings and configuration options, which is about a about a 30 minute test run. So we've got a lot of testing going on. I think that machine runs continuously. And we're also running unit tests for Ruby on Rails. Yep. And we've also got Rails stuff running on there. And we're just going to start pulling in some specific gems, some important gems, so that they run on continuous integration as well. Incompatibilities, there are a few things that we still need to work on or may never be able to support, like fork. You're not going to be able to fork a JVM anytime in the near future. Strangely, we do have an option to turn it on. Yes. Yeah, you can play with that if you really want to. And fork is there, but I don't recommend it. Don't use it. No continuations, at least until the JVM has continuation support. Startup is always a challenge for us and it's probably one of the main things that drives people away from JRuby. So we constantly are trying to improve that, trying to solve startup issues and make it make it a little bit faster each release. And I think I saw that Vladimir is working on that a little bit now too. And of course, the C extension thing, which we'll talk a little bit more about later and try and find ways that we can work around that problem. So a little bit about the JRuby community, which is a lot of you folks and a lot of folks that weren't able to make it here, nine active committers, as I mentioned, we've had dozens of external contributors, probably hundreds of external contributors over the years, but dozens that are active right now submitting patches. We have no idea how many users there are. Every time we go to a conference, we hear from another dozen people that we didn't even know about before. So there's lots and lots of folks out there that are using JRuby. And it feels like we're kind of at a tipping point. There's more and more people that are actually starting to use it. We've gotten to compatibility point where people can just take their apps and run them. And that's great. And we're really happy that things work so well. So if we can ask one thing, if you've actually deployed a production JRuby application and you're allowed to talk about it, please tweet it or blog it or let us know. We want to know. Join our mailing list and say it because it's really nice to actually see that people are using JRuby. Yes, yes, definitely, definitely. A lot of shy people in the world. Yes, yes. Well, and I think a lot of the Java world is kind of, you know, will keep everything behind the firewall and never really talk about it. I didn't subscribe to Struts lists when I was doing Struts development. So I can appreciate that. But we really would love to hear from you guys. OK, so we got talks at just about every Ruby conference more than we can cover. And so there are other people that are picking up some of the slack for us. We'll talk a little bit about that later too. And we feel like JRuby really is part of Ruby. It's part of the Ruby community now. And that makes us really happy that we've kind of been accepted into the Ruby world. JRuby is everywhere. People are doing stuff with JRuby all over the place. Everything from cloud applications to JRuby in your pocket. There's all sorts of stuff that's going on. We're trying to support all of these different layers. If you're interested in any one of these, please let us know. We'd really like to know who's doing desktop and games and mobile and whatever else. Because there's so many opportunities. Since Java is everywhere, JRuby can really bring Ruby to all these different domains. And that's what we really want to make possible. And we've gotten even more friends over the past year or two. Guiltgroup, we heard, is doing a whole bunch of JRuby stuff. It sounds like a huge amount of traffic going through their JRuby servers. Oslo's airport now running the JRuby point of sale terminal for refueling airplanes, which is a little scary for us. But it's a lot scary for us. It's a lot scary. It's almost like running Twitter. Oh, not quite that bad. Not quite that bad. The Alan Telescope Array up at UC Berkeley is using JRuby as kind of the glue to script together all the different components and all the different drive systems and everything. And the great quote we got from those guys is, if we find intelligent life out there, JRuby will have helped to find it. So that's pretty cool, too. Pons.eu is a very large European dictionary site. They switched to JRuby because they needed to basically have the entire dictionary in memory, multiple gigs of data. And the only way they could do that was to run on JRuby, and it runs great for them. Detect Wireless has some stuff going with JRuby. And of course, Edgecase is doing JRuby stuff. So, again, more people than we can list that are actually using JRuby in production and are really happy about what they're getting out of it. And so if you're not shy, your name could be here next year. That's right, that's right. All right, so I'll hand it off to Tom a little bit to talk about some of the future of where JRuby's going. So these are some near-term goals that we have, at least near-term issues that we recognize that we have. So the first one is Windows.  We don't like Windows and working on Windows. So we didn't really give it a lot of attention because we have MacBook Pros and whatnot, but how many Java developers are on Windows? So, how many people use Windows here? Wow. Less than people supplying patches to JRuby. Yeah. Yeah. But be that as it may, a vast majority of people who do Java are on Windows and we think we need to go after Java folks more. Right. Well, an interesting story about this, we put the Windows installer out there and suddenly we had a whole bunch of new users coming and porting issues with our Windows support, which is actually why we ended up doing an RC2 and an RC3. All these Windows users realized that there were things that just didn't work and until we had the nice installer, we didn't even know these people were out there. It's probably one of the biggest upticks in traffic was when we got nice Windows support. So those people are out there and we really do need to support them well. It was literally bad enough that we realized that our .bat script sucked so bad that we had to make a native launcher. So, hey, it's great, we're gonna keep doing this and see how many more Windows users we can get. And JRuby may be the cleanest and most compatible way to run Ruby on Windows right now because we have put in a lot of work. And we have a few problems that we've had forever and we know we've had them forever. Our JRuby launcher on Unix is a shell script and there's some libraries that'll actually in the she bang line at the top of scripts put options to JRuby. Well, you can't pass that to a shell script and have it see that. So we have a large motivation to actually make native launchers for all the Unixes. Right, hopefully in 1.5 we'll have native launchers for all the different platforms so we can get around the bash script stuff. And then we also have this problem where we'll submit a issue for Mac ports to say hey, 1.4 is out now, you need to put it in there. Four or five months later it shows up and by that point we're already on the next version. So we wanna have native installers so that people can just download it off her site. Right, so have a package installer or a shell script installer, something like that that actually puts it in place for you. Horizontal Java integration. We wanna just kind of fill out the rest of the spaces that we know haven't been implemented yet. We wanna make Ruby to Java, really generate a .class file for any particular feature of Java like annotations. Right. We have tons of little corner cases that most people don't run into when they actually consume Java classes but they're there and so we wanna fix those. Right, we know about those. And really this is about trying to get across all libraries, across all use cases, all the little Java features in JRuby working really well. And vertical Java integration. This is similar to the whole Windows problem that Java people actually use Java in their own Java projects. Surprisingly. Yeah, unbelievable. But if you want people to use JRuby and use Ruby on Rails, you wanna integrate into their environment. So we'd like to be able to easily consume hybrid aid objects from Ruby on Rails. And if there's any experts out there, I think we'll reiterate this call for experts like two or three more times. Or we wanna make sure that their testing environment, it's very easy to plug in to JRuby and their build, just their environment in general. And also there's been a lot of interest lately in people actually calling across to different languages on the JVM. So there was, what was it, Scallop? What was the? Scooby. Scooby is the Scallop JRuby wrapper. And I know there's, I saw there's a lightning talk proposed for JRuby with closure. And we wanna make that all as easy as possible and make it fit really well. It's really a benefit of being on the JVM that you can use these other languages for the purposes they're really good at. Startup time, as Charlie mentioned earlier, is an issue that we're working on. If you learn nothing else today, learn that stat is the root of all evil. Yes. It's almost always your performance problem for some strange reason. So we actually have a statistic up here. A medium-sized Rails app, we measured the number of stats that happened. And it's stated about 113,000 times to load 3,000 files. It's a lot of file system access and a lot of memory access. A whole lot of nothing going on. And I think we're doing like four times as many stats as the C implementation of Ruby, so.  And file system access is extremely slow. And those guys, there's almost unusable to get it to start up. And this is a large reason why. So we're gonna look to try and fix this as much as possible. And there's a bunch of things that we're doing that aren't being used. Someone recently brought up to our attention that Set Accessible is getting called like 5,000 times when Rails starts up. And this is to do things like set protected methods so that we can call them even though we're not in the same Java package. But we probably only call these methods like once or twice. So we're doing 4,998 too many Set Accessible calls. Exactly. And we also have this thing called Nailgun, which is a separate process that gets spawned in the background and it starts up the JVM. It loads JRuby up. And then if you invoke command line invocations of JRuby, it'll actually forward that response there. Yeah, it just sort of tosses it over to that running instance. Now things like Autotest will execute extremely fast because it doesn't have to wait for everything to start up next time. There's still some issues trying to get Rails to boot fast even on that remote system, but it's helped. We're getting there. And the reason is stat. Yeah, it probably is. Here's that. C extensions. Similar to not reporting that you've deployed production apps, we also don't know which gems aren't working for people. So every time you run into a gem that doesn't work, or because it's a native extension or there's just a bug in it, please report it to our issue tracking system. Or at least know that it doesn't work. Right, don't assume that it's the gems fault either. We're willing to do a little footwork ourselves to see if it's JRuby. If it turns out it is the gem that's got a problem, we'll toss it back to the gem authors or try and help them. But we just want to know what works and what doesn't. Right, there is also visitjruby.com, which you can start to use to report things. And hopefully we'll get some metadata like that included in rubyforge.org stuff. Or yeah, rubygems.org. And we've been pushing foreign function interface as a way of solving native C extensions. If you go and do the work and provide that to the gem maintainer, they're probably fairly likely to accept it. But of course, you can write Java native extensions if you want, and then that's a little more friendly for Google App Engine and solutions like that. Right, there are a lot of environments that simply, even with FFI, are not going to be able to load native libraries. So there is always a push to get a pure Java version of anything that's native for regular ruby. And of course if anyone has any ideas on how to fix this disparity between C extensions and Java extensions, come up and talk to us. It's likely we didn't think of something. Active record JDBC, these are sort of some hip ironic statements. MySQL adapter is not yet perfect. What this means is for the last three years, we've never had a green run of MySQL unit tests on Active record. And the other adapters are in various states of district pair. They generally work for common stuff, but we know that we have to work on this.  And if anyone's having performance issues with Active record JDBC, come and talk to us. We did some optimizations for queries like eight or nine months ago and got the performance pretty good, but... There certainly is a chance that it's Active record as well. But if it's something specific to us and we're significantly slower than running on regular Ruby, we definitely want to know about that. Geeking out. Okay, so we'll talk about some cool stuff that's coming up for JRuby, a little bit more, kind of a more positive spin on some interesting things coming for JRuby in the future. Java 7 will be coming out someday. Someday, yes. I think it was pushed back again, so... It's up to milestone five, so they're moving along. I think October. October 2010? October, wow. All is always the source for the latest up-to-the-minute Java reporting. He told us three days ago that closures were gonna be in some. Yeah, so. So InvokeDynamic is a way of informing the JVM how we want to do method dispatch as opposed to how Java actually does method dispatch. And the benefit of this is that it'll do a whole bunch of optimizations. We'll get to get rid of a whole bunch of special code we do to get good performance out of Java 6 and Java 7. Basically allows us to inform the JVM of the best way to do a dynamic call for Ruby so that it can optimize our dynamic calls the same way that it optimizes all the other Java calls. And I think they're talking about the JVM guys are pretty convinced that they can make this at least as fast as running with like an interface call in regular Java, which should be pretty exciting. And we're looking forward to all the optimization coming from that. Sun recently started having these JVM language summit conferences. And it's been really great because we've had direct interaction with JVM engineers. Well, of course we did when we were working at Sun, but they started to realize that some of the ergonomics they have for tuning garbage collection and these various internal settings are pretty good for Java, but they're not so good for languages like Ruby where you create a lot more objects than there's different needs. Yes, yes. There should be some better ergonomics for supporting different languages on the JVM. And escape analysis is listed at the bottom, but there's always a collection of new optimizations that are coming in each version of Java. And whenever we upgrade Java, we're always pleasantly surprised to see our benchmarks speed up by 15 or 20% and we're not doing anything other than upgrading. Yes, nice to get free performance upgrade just by going to a newer JVM. We're working on a new internal representation instead of our older AST. And there's a next generation compiler in fact, we have this compiler guy. He's his nickname, Sabu. I can't pronounce his name. Sabermanian. All right, good, very good. He got his PhD in writing an optimized Java compiler and now he's trying his hand at making an optimizing Ruby compiler. And the interesting part of this versus our old compiler is that these are higher level Ruby optimizations. So we'll do Ruby method inlining. So in the old compiler, we would still generate the byte code for doing a method dispatch and then hope that hotspot would go and optimize it away. And actually hotspot does a really good job but there's still a certain level of irreducibility that we couldn't get past. Right, we hope that we're gonna try and give hotspot a little bit more information about how to optimize Ruby code. Maybe do a little bit more upfront so that it doesn't have to work quite so hard and then we'll get a better performance as a result. And so there's some other cool stuff like maybe type propagation. We might not actually create a Ruby fix num at all. We'll just use a Java primitive to go and loop over something or Ruby block inlining. I don't know how many people know this but invoking a block is quite a bit slower than invoking a Ruby method. If we can get that to inline all the way back to the place you call each or map or whatever, we can probably just reduce it down again to a loop. So, Duby is one other thing I've been playing with. I did a talk, my second talk ever on Duby at RubyConf. It's something else that we're looking at as kind of an experimental thing for future JRuby contributors can possibly use this to help write JRuby. If you need to write one-off Java code and you don't wanna write Java, you can use something like Duby to generate that code. And learning different ways that we can use this to improve JRuby and bring some of this back. If you wanna know more about Duby, I know that my talk from RubyConf is gonna be online. I did another talk at Strange Loop. And hopefully this will help bring more Ruby folks that really don't know Java or Java syntax so that they can help JRuby move forward a little bit. So, library optimizations. Realize, recently we realized that one of the most common innumerable types or innumerable consuming types was Ruby array. And we realized we could make a fast path through there. And by doing that, we ended up getting a 20 to 30% speed jump over what we had, which already was pretty good performance. And for very common types, we're gonna start doing some profiling with Rails and figure out what things are getting hit and try to do more optimizations like this. Right, getting things to run is only the first 10% of doing Ruby. Then you have to go back and figure out all the core classes and all the bottlenecks and make sure everything's running fast. And that's an endless process, but we're coming back around to some of those now. There's a lot of interesting side effects like these optimizations also produce less garbage, which has less GC pressure, one of our favorite terms now. Yes, yeah. And actually there are paces where we're doing very well. Some of the numbers reported in RubyConf were that JRuby's hash operations are probably the fastest of any of the Ruby implementations at this point. If we can spend that kind of effort on other core classes, things will be that much better. The array can be that fast, will be in great shape. Okay, taking a little inspiration from Yagui. Yagui in her talk at RubyConf was, had the word help written in like 96 point font. And this is a common thing that all open source projects have is they have a need for help. They always want more people to help contribute. One of the things that Yagui wanted was for people to go and try to take maintainership of certain aspects of the Ruby Standard Library. And that's also helpful for JRuby. So if you're interested in doing that, she's in like the fifth row right now, so get her. Definitely help out Ruby Core or JRuby or whatever. Contributors are what keep these projects going. But from this point on I'm gonna talk about how you can just help the JRuby project. So here's a graph of our issue tracking system. And this is pretty illustrative of how development works on the JRuby project. So when you see green, that means we're fixing more issues than are coming in. When you see red, well, we're hemorrhaging issues. We're falling behind. Yeah, so when you get close to a release like JRuby 1.4. That's that line in the middle there is the JRuby 1.4 release. We start to get much more anxious and nervous about fixing issues. We're spending a lot more time triaging. We're begging people to go and submit patches and we make a dent. And then we release a new version of JRuby and then people try it and then. Then it goes the other direction. It goes the other way. It's kind of hard to read on here, but this 30 day summary shows that in the past month we've had 110 issues reported and that works out. And that's about right. We've worked out to three or four issues per day every day for the past three years. So the fact that we've managed to only fall behind by a couple hundred issues is amazing, but it's a constant stream of things and a constant amount of work that's required to keep up with it. Okay, but before we talk about new people joining the project, we should probably acknowledge a few people who have already been helping. We had a committer of Latimer. He took like a one year hiatus or maybe health leave, I don't know, but he's a phenomenal developer. If you look at issues created in the last two weeks, like 75% were actually created by him. And thankfully he actually fixes more bugs than he reports. Yes, he's carbon negative, I think.  And David Calavera, they're sort of tag teaming to address failing Ruby specs and they do a lot of great patches and triaging of the problems. And there's just so many other people in the project like we had people raise their hands earlier and it was like 15% here. It's very impressive. And again, your name could be here. We'd love to have you help out and contribute in any possible way. And we're willing to hold your hand the entire time and try and make it easy for you. Help. Okay. Evangelism, we made a recent realization that Charlie can only do so many presentations a day. So, we need people in different parts of the country or the world to be able to do regional Ruby conferences, regional Java conferences. Java conferences especially, if there's a lot more than we can even cover. And that's the huge, huge area for JRuby to grow and to grow the Ruby world. And user groups and the truth is people that actually use JRuby on a day-to-day basis can do a better job of selling it than we can because people will always think that we have an ulterior motive because our jobs are developing JRuby. Right, right, especially people that are running this stuff in production and know that it works great.  It was mentioned before, but we don't know Ruby on Rails. Nick does, but we need people that are willing to go to particularly Java conferences and do JRuby on Rails tutorials. How many screencasts do we have? I think it's still zero. Zero, yeah, so. If anyone likes doing screencasts, that would be great, people love screencasts. We're willing to walk you through it and provide scripts and all the details that you need to build it. We just have no idea how to do screencasts ourselves. Blog, tweet, generate interest, have fun. Documentation, this is always the saddest plea because no one likes writing documentation and we're not writing documentation, so why are we asking this? Yoko Harada recently got her new embedding framework merged into the JRuby project and one of the reasons why she was able to do this so easily is that she wrote awesome documentation. She set up a wiki and we have nice like little cut and paste snippets that we can go and paste in and compile. It was very easy for us to review and figure out how well it fit the bill and. We've had an overwhelming response from folks that are doing embedding of JRuby with this API. It's an incredible amount of work on the documentation and it shows how much that really can help when you have a good set of examples and some good walkthroughs. We just wish we had this for everything in JRuby. So has anyone used Redbridge yet since it came out? Used the JRuby embed container stuff? I think two people. Okay, okay. All right, so again, a call for feedback. Try to test gems that you use, try to run the unit tests or specs for that gem and if there's problems report them. It could be a problem in holler testing which you'd be helping that project and if it's not, then we'll fix the problem. Yep, yep. Multi-threading is kind of a bigger order to ask of you but if you're running your Ruby on Rails app in multi-threaded mode, just doing a simple code audit looking for like lazy initialization of class variables or things that obviously couldn't work in a multi-threaded environment. Globals are not something that you should probably be using in multi-threaded environments. If they're not putting locks around these things and they're obviously wrong, so. And then definitely we wanna know if there's performance. So specific gems have performance issues and really if any piece of Ruby code has performance issues, we have a performance category in our bug tracker and we wanna know about those so we can figure out why it's not running as fast as it should be. In Ruby specs, an amazing project. It helps us to find what Ruby is and more specs gives us more confidence that we really are Ruby. Yagui's and her talk brought up the fact that we have this language divide between Japanese and English and but we all speak Ruby and Ruby spec gives us a really unambiguous way of talking about what Ruby is. Right, it's our chance to really show that Ruby is a great language and help define what it means for the rest of the world. This is what's going to ensure that all Ruby implementations can run Ruby and are reliable in the future. So we all need to try and contribute to it. Everybody should submit a pass to Ruby spec at some point. That's right and it's very easy to get a commit bit. Yes. Ruby 1.9 support is something that we all wanna make sure is a great first production release. So if you can in particular work on Ruby 1.9 specs that would be even better. That's a perfect example. We can't really do want Ruby 1.9 support and know that it runs well until we know what Ruby 1.9 is supposed to do and although the MRI tests are great and they do cover quite a bit, we need to have full-on spec support and have all of the Ruby 1.9 features in there. And of course hacking. I suspect most of the people here actually write code on a day-to-day basis. So this is probably the easiest slide to help with. Help us fix any of the pain points that we listed before, obviously, but try to scratch your own itch because odds are if you're having a problem someone else is having the same problem. In vertical integration, again, if you know Hibernate well. Hibernate, JPA, Spring Persistence, other libraries. We'd love to have people wrap some of that stuff. And actually that's one of the biggest ways that we've drawn people into using JRuby. They wanna use Lucene or one of these other libraries but they hate using the Java API. Someone comes along, writes a nice Ruby wrapper for it. Really easy to do if you know the API and then everybody's able to use that library from within Ruby applications. And if you're in a mixed mode environment where you have Java application, framework stuff, and Ruby and Rails stuff running side by side, you should talk to us and help identify what the pain points are because we wanna improve that picture. Absolutely. So in general, the future looks really bright. Everything is running really well. Performance continues to improve, release on release. We continue getting Java integration all solidified and fixing all the remaining issues and we're really excited. We're really glad that you're all here and we wanna keep making JRuby the best possible tool for you. Oh, and we have one more thing, one more little announcement which is exciting. Yes, we finally will be getting a JRuby book out. We have several chapters done already. It's the core JRuby folks and our friend Ian who's been an amazing lead author for us. Raise your hand Ian. Yes, great, big thanks to Ian for this. We're not sure when we're gonna have a beta or when we're gonna have a final book, but it is moving along and it's looking great. We got a lot of good content in there. Hopefully we'll be able to accelerate a little bit after the conference season kind of calms down now. And so that's it. Enjoy the show everybody. I would love to talk to each and every one of you about your JRuby uses. I'm not sure we're going to get to that, but if you have something specific, come and grab us in between and at lunch, in the hallway, whatever, and have fun. We got a lot of good talks and a lot of other JRubyists here. So make sure you talk to other people and meet other folks. Thanks a lot. Schedule, I think this was supposed to go to 1050 and we're...


Hello and welcome to NewsClick, today we have with us the Raghunandan from Delhi Science Forum. We will be going to talk about the ISRO launches. Sir, we know that ISRO has launched 104 satellites and everyone is talking about what a big record it is, almost 2 to 3 times of the previous records. So what do you have to say about that? So, I think there has been the usual Indian tendency to blow your own trumpet and talk about big records. We went to town when India sent a rocket to the moon to Mars, although in technological terms neither was a great achievement and to me frankly this launch by ISRO also falls under that category, yes it is a world record. But I do not think there is any great technological innovation that ISRO has done to enable this record. It is a record, but as the chairman of ISRO himself said that the launch was less about records than about proving the viability and reliability of ISRO as a launch vehicle which can service a variety of clients. And I think if we are to really understand the significance of this launch, one ought to be looking at where does ISRO fit in the global picture of commercial launch vehicles, what ISRO has done with science and technology, what it hopes it would do. And I think the more interesting part which almost no media has covered has been what are these satellites that have been launched, we are talking about 104 satellites, but if you looked at the media coverage they could be match boxes, we do not know what these satellites are about and I think there is a big story there which I think people would like to know about. Should you then please tell us about the satellites, I mean we are talking about the records, but we do not really know what these satellites are about. The satellites fall into two broad categories. One is in India has launched its own satellite which is a remote sensing satellite, part of what is called the CatoSat series. As the name suggests it is a cartographic satellite, it is remote sensing, mostly focused on coastal areas, on road networks and so on, that is what the satellite would do. That is roughly half the weight of the total payload carried by C37, the launch vehicle, about 700 odd kilos. The remaining 680 odd kilos are distributed among the 103 other satellites which. So most of these satellites, these other satellites are what are known in the parlance as nanosatellites, they are very tiny satellites. The Indian ones, two which ISRO has put up ISRO nanosatellites are both roughly in the 8 to 10 kilo range, but almost all the international satellites we have put up are much smaller in the 4 kilos range of satellites. I think of particular interest is the fact that almost all the international satellites that this launch put up follow the CubeSat standards. That is a new standard that has been around for about 15 years where most other satellites which are put in space are custom built, they tend to be very large and so on. With the advances in technology, particularly miniaturization like most of the jobs that a huge mainframe computer would have done 30 years ago is today done by a small laptop. Same thing is happening in space technology where small satellites are able to do the job which earlier you would have required very large satellites to do. One particular company has put up in this launch a total of 88 satellites. In one go, basically because this company wants to have a set, it is called a constellation like with stars of 150 odd satellites all in an orbit around the earth which together will provide you 24-7 coverage of the entire planet at any given point of time. So a client can go to that company and say I want a photograph of the port in Vishagapatnam and you will get it. Another client can ask for a shot of the port in London, you can get that as well and they are doing this not with these large satellites but with these tiny satellites. The other advantage of these cube sats they are called is that they are all in the 10 centimeter cube range or multiples. So it is 10 by 10 by 10 or 20 by 20 by 20 like that. Most of these satellites are in the 3 times 10 so it is called a 3 cube standard and the good part about these satellites is that they all use standard electronic components which you can buy in the market. So designing satellites is no longer the big mysterious custom made job it used to be earlier and in fact the cube sat standard arose out of universities in order to get students and academicians involved in this which otherwise they would not be able to do and because of the standard size the launching also becomes easy. So in fact in yesterday's launch by ISRO you had these 100 odd satellites which were together and they have a special launch container and the ISRO launch vehicle basically once it entered orbit just every 10 seconds would show out a canister each of which released 3 nano satellites and thereby covering the earth. So I think the methodology of this was interesting the nature of these satellites is interesting and it indicates a future of what is likely to happen in space. I think more and more you are likely to see the large custom designed satellites being replaced by smaller satellites and I think that is going to be a trend. I have just spoken to you about the constellation of 88 satellites called the Dove satellites the other highly innovative set of satellites put up by the ISRO launch yesterday were the Lima satellites 8 of them put up for Spire Global. These are extremely innovative in the sense that while most other satellites do imagery capturing visual images from the earth's surface this satellite is engaged in capturing radio signals. So it is audio based they look at GPS signaling from ships and other cargo vessels moving around on earth for various clients and in theory a few years down the road with sufficient satellites around they should be able to capture the movement virtually of any cargo carrying vehicle whether on land sea or air. The same set of satellites also uses a technique to use GPS signals use the effect that they have going through the atmosphere which bends these signals and then from that obtain atmospheric data weather data and data that relates to climate change and I think these would be of very high value both scientifically and commercially in the years to come. I think ISRO could do very well in learning how to innovate products in terms of satellites and how they are used rather than only be looking at launch vehicles. International media is focusing a lot on this achievement by India they are calling it the new space race so can you please throw some light on that. Yeah well in I think that is the significant part of the ISRO launch is that it cements India's position in the international launch market particularly for launching small satellites in low earth orbits part of this like with many areas in which Indian science and technology has worked has been India is constrained we do not have access to the latest technologies we have not developed the latest technologies ourselves but within the limitations of what we can do we try to achieve the maximum that we can and do various innovations within that we have done that in space and we have done that in nuclear as well and I think this is an example so we have specialized in a niche market if people want a large communication satellite for television coverage big military satellites they will not come to India at the moment because India still has only the polar satellite launch vehicle the PSLV we do not yet have our GSLV which should be used for the larger vehicle launches but for smaller launches people are now increasingly looking at India. This example I gave you of these 88 nanosatellites the same company had come to ISRO before had launched 12 satellites earlier and have now come with a repeat order to complete their constellation by putting 88 satellites across another company which has also been put in there which is an equally interesting exercise in satellite usage has come and put up a dozen or so satellites again coming specifically to ISRO having looked at other options earlier so ISRO is establishing its position and consolidating its position in launching small satellites in low earth orbits which even in in Asia China does not do as a commercial venture and Japan and South Korea have not yet reached that stage so it's certainly true that India has marked out a space but I think to put it in perspective India has carved out a niche for itself but in a 300 billion dollar space launch market in the world this is a very small niche India for even for its own communication satellite needs is still going to the European space agency or to other launches and is not able to do those by itself what do you think is the ISRO's plan next well this year should mark the beginning of India stabilizing its GSLV launches we've got two or three GSLV launches slated for this year and I think that will be interesting to watch because India has had three successive successful launches of the GSLV which is a landmark and normally is used as a standard to judge whether you have reached a level of competence and you can say yeah we've got a good reliable launch vehicle if we do another two or three successive launches of the GSLV this year I think we would have entered a new phase India is also trying out a reusable launch vehicle that is a rocket that you send up but which comes back and the prototype that India has developed looks very much like the American Space Shuttle it's that kind of a thing whereas reusable rockets in the US and elsewhere which are being designed are standard vertical rockets which go up and come back down the same way whereas the one India's designed will land like an aircraft on a runway the way the space shuttle did if you do develop reusable launch vehicles that will further reduce the cost of launches so India would have then gone into another league in terms of the competition it can enter for commercial launches and then as far as the science is concerned India is planning a couple of interesting shots to Mars and to the moon and that we will watch out for not this year but in the years to come thank you so much sir that was very informative thank you for watching news click we'll come back to you with more such stuff


Who says you can't have it all? Not Appalachian Wireless, we know what you want. Appalachian Wireless offers the hottest smartphones and unlimited data plans, all on the region's number one network. An anonymous tip in Floyd County leads to a drug trafficking arrest. Floyd County Sheriff's deputies responded to a complaint Monday of possible drug trafficking out of a light green vehicle seen in the water gap area. One of the things that stood out about the identification was the car supposedly had a bungee cord holding the trunk together. Later that evening, Sergeant Oliver Little spotted a vehicle matching the description. After stopping the car for not using a turn signal, Sergeant Little called for Floyd County's K-9 unit to assist. When the K-9 got there, he indicated on the passenger side where Ms. Robinson was actually sitting. As Ms. Robinson was getting out of the vehicle, for us to conduct a search in the floor beside her seat was a small bag of a crystal substance that I believe would be meth. I went ahead and detained her. At that time she stated that she had more hidden on her person. She had over 140 empty bags. Along with the plastic bags, police found six grams of crystal meth and digital scales. The passenger, 28-year-old Keisha Robinson of Prestonsburg was arrested and lodged in the Floyd County Detention Center for trafficking in a controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia and tampering with physical evidence. Six grams, we normally see, you know, personal use, you know, somewhere around a half gram of grams somewhere through there.  That's the street term for they had just, she had just went and bought more. She refused to give me the information on where she got it at, but they still earned her investigation. More charges are pending in the case. In Prestonsburg, Shelby Porter, EKB News.


Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today, we're talking about selling eSports with phenomenal sales expert, James Hess, with Encore. Welcome, James. Thank you, Catherine. I appreciate that. I also appreciate you setting me up for failure by saying how phenomenal I am. So good luck to both of us. All right. So let me just ask you, why is sales important in business? Well, what a great question. So I got into sales kind of like a weird pathway. I was a very young person going to an after-school daycare program called Class Act. And Class Act taught you singing, acting and dancing. And I had no idea that I would ever use those skills for anything other than what they taught. But long story short, sales was what I ended up using those things for. So by learning how to act and sing and dance, I learned how to do sales. And sales became the thing that has created so many opportunities for me in both the eSport world and in the traditional sales, well, field. The most important thing to remember about sales in general is that everything is sold. I had a wonderful mentor, a sales leader, back when I was first getting into like a true corporate level sales position, who said, James, you think of sales and what are you here? Use car salesman, somebody trying to trick you into doing something, but look outside. And we were on the 17th floor of a building. He said, look outside and pick me one thing out there that you can see that wasn't sold. And we happened to be right next to a movie theater. And I looked out there and I saw the concrete on the ground and I saw the trees planted in the medians. And I saw the building and I said, you know what, the air wasn't sold. And he said, James, look on top of that building. You see those giant units, those are air conditioned. So even the air outside had somebody who had to sell it to somebody else. And so while selling is important in esports, selling in general is just the tip of the spear for every industry. Okay, we hear words like sales, marketing, advertising, branding. How is sales different from marketing, advertising and branding? Well, that is a great question. I did not give that one to you to ask me. So I'm very excited about this one. So I don't know a ton about marketing. I don't know a ton about branding. I don't know a ton about reaching out to a group of people. What I do know is that sales is understanding a person, the other person on the other end of this pitch. So for example, when I do my sales techniques, no matter what industry it's in, the first thing I'll do is identify the person or the group of people who are the most important or who the sale is going to go to. Then I identify a specific person who I want to pursue. And then I spend a tremendous amount of time, sometimes a full day researching that person, anything they've ever written, anything that has been written about them, anything that they have, let's say company-wide, that's been, this is a great, here's this person and here's how they got into the industry or even their own Facebook if it's open or certainly LinkedIn or justnews.google.com. But I think the difference between sales and then branding and marketing and those other things is that I try to, or any good sales person, should try to understand the exact person that they're going to be selling to so that they can tailor that message so that it's not the same message to the next person. It's not a form letter and that's recognizable. Okay, I can think of an example that I think a lot of our audience would know, not sure thing, because when someone does a pitch, they're actually doing that pitch to the shark and you see the individuality of that pitch and then in eSports Trade Association, which I believe you're a member as well. Anyway, we have an elevator pitch that is done at the conference. And so is it kind of like that where you're pitching? Yeah, that is a great example. So since you mentioned it, the eSports Trade Association is actually something you and I are both part of. I'm on the board of advisors and I am the chairman of the Events Committee for the eSports Trade Association. I will also just quickly mentioning that we will be hosting a panel on parents in eSports of which I am one later this month. So that's just thrown out there if you wanna check out the eSports Trade Association. But your point to the pitch competition is fantastic so that I have sat through a lot of pitches, both from being part of the eSports Trade Association and from people who recognize that A, I have connections in the industry and maybe they can pitch me their idea and help them reach somebody else. And I can tell you 100% of the time whether that person knows anything about me before they start that pitch because it's a very different concept. For example, we have somebody on our board at the eSports Trade Association who won Shark Tank, who got an investment from both Mark Cuban and Alex Rodriguez. Now he happens to be the brother of an NFL player so that could have helped. But his product is literally right here in my hand. And his message was tailored to that industry. He was a sports person talking to sports people about a product that could be leveraged for sports purpose. And that is how that pitch was tailored. Now I've sat through pitches on the other side where nobody knows anything about me. They don't know if I'm an investor or if I'm there to help them, but they have a planned pitch that they are going to repeat.  And that is the only thing that they know how to do. And there's a huge, huge difference. So yes, pitching is a lot like sales in that you should understand the person that you're pitching to. And it may be a different pitch depending on that person. But I could see that the initial pitch might be similar to a lot of different people. However, the follow-up after and how you deal with the question, that may be more individual. Is that right? That is excellent insight. And it's probably the exact opposite of what I think of when I talk about selling. So I do all of that personalized stuff beforehand. Let me give you two examples. So when I was working for a recruiting company, I wanted to work with Southwest Airlines. And I thought, who better to pursue at Southwest Airlines than the chief people officer? There's a gentleman named Jeff Lam. Jeff got his start shining shoes. So I found this out by just reading his bio that the Southwest Airlines had put out there, that they mentioned how he got his start and how he became part of the organization. I put a box together and I put a shoe shine kid in there and a little note that said, Jeff, you got your start somewhere. I'd like to get my start too. Can we talk? And once I got that part of it, once I had gotten to that point, then I had a pitch that I was ready to go with because I knew how to sell to a recruiting person. He's the chief people officer. I've talked to them a billion times. But Jeff in no way was going to talk to me until I showed that I cared about him. In fact, sales is understanding people. Like that's the bottom line. Like if there was one lesson that I could give to a future salesperson, it is try to understand the person to whom you're pitching. The second one I wanted to mention was actually for one of the directors of baseball operations for the Colorado Rockies, the director of baseball operations for the Colorado Rockies. I found out that he, through research, had actually gotten Hank Aaron, had been the first person to give him a job. And this is the same year that Hank Aaron had died. It turns out that I am a huge baseball fan. You can say I have a brave jersey on my wall over here, but I also own a Hank Aaron jersey. So this was during the World Series. So I had my daughter put on the jersey.  And I took a picture of her watching the World Series in Hank Aaron's jersey. And I just said, listen, the stories that you told about Hank, because he had some really good stories too, before he left the Braves to go to work for the Rockies. I understood him enough that he will pick up my phone call right now. This is the person who was in charge of making sure the Colorado Rockies have their hotels, the money, everything. But he says, James, if you have anything you need to know or any questions you wanna ask, that is call me anytime. And there's no way that that would have happened if I had opened up my email with, hi, I'd like to tell you about Encore as a company, not in a million years. So understanding the people is actually the first thing you do and tailoring that individual message is how you get to the pitch. You know, that makes a whole lot of sense. And it reminds me of when I pitched my book to agents because I know that almost all the time I can get the agent to answer my email by directing it in a particular way where I, and the word commonality comes to mind. Like if you think about something that you have in common with that person, would you say that that would be something that would be incorporated early on? Yes, it's the absolute very first thing. So there's a really good book that I read called Influence by Robert Cialdini. And if I mispronounced his last name, I apologize, sir. But it gave you, it gave me an understanding of all the things that you and I don't think about when we make a decision. They're all the things that marketers and sellers do to us to help us to, he calls it the click where response. Click, something happens. So one of the things he talked about in that specifically was the idea that you wanted to have something in common with that person, right? And if you look in my background, you can see there's pretty much something for anybody to talk to you. I do most of my sales over video conferencing these days. So what I do is I make sure that no matter who I'm talking to, something like that might feature in the background. So if it's a creative discussion, I've got a guitar, I've got Star Wars stuff. If it's sports, I make sure to focus on my jerseys or I'll put a football helmet or something like that back there. But if it's a money discussion, then I put something like, well, I've put change down on the desk before. And that's actually something that he, in the book recommended. He said that they did a great experiment, social experiment where they had two landing pages for a furniture company. One that had pillows on the background and one that had like pennies and nickels in the background. And at the end of the experience, they asked people what they cared most about when they made their purchase. And the people who saw the clouds in their background cared about the comfort of the furniture. People who saw the money in the background cared about the cost. So I can help whoever it is that I'm talking to create that opinion of me based on what I have going on. And certainly if it's something I can speak to, which I try to not put anything in my background that I have no concept of. To be fair, I only hit no like the first three chords to satisfaction and I don't play them well. But there is an acoustic guitar back here just in case you are a music fan. But it creates that level of commonality.  And that is a huge selling factor. There's a bunch of other ones in that book like creating scarcity. I've got a couple written down by creating scarcity, giving someone a gift or a favor in the beginning. And that also actually helps out a little bit. So the reason that you are more likely to donate to somebody when they give you a flower is that you feel like you owe them a favor. One of the other things he says is if you do somebody a favor, you don't say you're welcome or no problem. You say you would do that for me too. And you create that kind of reciprocal relationship with the person to whom you gave the favor. So I would say that commonality is incredibly important and you can generate it authentically by being yourself. Let's focus on eSports. And how do you sell eSports? Like what are you selling? Yeah. So I work for a live events company. We also are the in-house partner to over 2,100 venues around the globe. So places like even Wembley Stadium in London and Fenway Park in Boston. And then almost every hotel and convention center you've ever been to, you'll see the Encore or formerly PSAV name as the in-house AV provider. So I sell that to these industries. However, eSports is way bigger than events. So eSports is $1 billion of $160 billion gaming industry. And eSports has been growing in double digits. One thing I thought was really interesting and we can talk, I'm getting to your question, I promise. But these are all things that are interesting to me. So I apologize for digressing. But one thing I thought was super interesting and as an events person obviously I wanna highlight this is that eSports actually took a step backwards in 2020. So in 2019, the revenues for eSports were by, and I got this data from New Zoo. So the revenue estimates for 2020 for the eSports industry was $1.1 billion. It actually came in at about 910 million which is significantly less when you're talking about an industry that has double digit growth basically since its inception. And nobody could figure out why. But what I found was that there were 5,591 global tournaments in 2009, live tournaments with people in the stand. And in 2020, there were 4,478. So that's a reduction in 1,100, almost 20% fewer tournaments that year. Now, does that account for $200 million in lost revenue growth? I think so. I think that live events are incredibly important to that. So my pitch to the eSports industry is not that different than my pitch to concert goers or accounting firms. We are a company that can take any idea that you have and create it. The problem in eSports, not the problem in eSports, the opportunity in eSports, you can tell I'm a salesperson. The opportunity in eSports is that we can, we are dealing with people who have very little money in general because the event space is so fresh and so young. Many of these people are putting on their first or second tournaments ever and they're shoe stringing it together. They're getting borrowed gear or they're using their own equipment or they're using OBS instead of vMix. There are things that they are doing to keep the cost down and that is not where my company fits in. So when I talk to somebody about an eSports event or a company that produces eSports events, we're talking to companies that do like EVO. My company has done the AV production for EVO since 2010. We're talking about BlizzCon and QuakeCon and those kinds of things. So those would be the types of levels of eSport companies that I would be pursuing. Having said that, we have gotten so many requests from people who want to do something they just don't know how to do it yet. So we can come up with ideas to help companies like that. Like say you have a small, there's a great company that's part of ESDA and one of the owners of the company is on our board. And his idea is to create tournaments in movie theaters. So he already owns movie theaters and he has all the equipment and he's able to stream. So instead of having a movie from two to four, he's gonna have an eSports tournament in there and it's going to be viewed on the big screen and it'll be able to be live streamed. That type of infrastructure is what I can help people to sell to the future, right? So you do have a small tournament right now, but you don't need to put it on yourself at George R. Brown Convention Center in San Antonio or wherever it is. You can put it on at a movie theater in Boca Raton, Florida, have it streamed out to the web and have a $5,000 prize pool or something that creates the excitement for the next event. Because as soon as you have a story to tell, that is where the next step happened. And we know this as much as anybody, Catherine, because we went to the first of the eSports next events for the eSports Trade Association last year in Chicago. And this year, we have a full story to tell. We have content, we have people's experiences, we have testimonials. All of that stuff helps you in your next sale. So I said all of that to say, eSports is just like any other industry when you wanna sell to it, but you need to understand the person that you're trying to sell to. And that goes back to understanding people as the most important part of sales. Sure, and I will note that I have interviewed Heather Blair, who's with Cinema eSports Association. And we did talk about having eSports events in theater, movie theater. And I think that that's a fantastic combination of where a need of filling space and making revenue meets opportunity. But I think that this kind of reminds me when you talk about selling eSports, it reminds me of the Olympic Games in that you can call the Olympic Games a sporting event. But then in 2012 and after the Olympics, 2012 and after actually it was probably earlier than that, you can call it a security event because they had so many security people to every athlete and every spectator. But now I think you could also, and I think it's been this way for quite some time, you can call it a sponsorship event. And so when I look at eSports, I think about one of the big sales targets for you is selling to sponsors. How do you convince a sponsor to buy into an event? Katherine, I would love to give you that answer, but if anybody knew that, if anyone had that silver bullet ready to go, they wouldn't be sharing it with either of us, right? So that is a great concept. It's actually a question I asked to a panel of people last year talking about partnerships. One of the things that is very unique about eSports is that the audience is not in a seat, right? Like, so we work a lot with traditional sports. In fact, my background and how I got into eSports here at Encore was that I was the sports person after COVID, essentially. So my company went from being the biggest in the industry to having like zero employees for multiple months throughout 2020 and the live events industry, anyone who works in live events was in that same position, whether it was a movie theater or a Chuck E. Cheese, right? So anytime, anywhere live. What we did was completely shut down for a year. So when I came back, they gave me five hotel properties. Out of the 2100 we have, five of them were assigned to me. I used to be one of five sellers at a big box, we call them, at one of the big hotels here in Dallas where I live. Anyway, I got to be in charge of one hotel that was near Arlington Stadium, well, the baseball stadium in Arlington and eSports Stadium Arlington was right around the corner from there. I did one event for a local Texas Rangers pitcher and I became the eSports guy. So that is how I fell into eSports. Now, when you talk about selling sponsorship and things like that, those people are not aware of what they're gonna get in return. I just literally wrote an ROI message for my own company so that I could explain what ROI we could produce if they invested more in eSports. And like you said, sponsorship is one of those things that nobody really knows how to define it. When you talk about ROI, are we talking about X number of dollars are gonna exactly come from this event? Well, how do you figure that out? Okay, you can sell merch on the event or something like that, or you can do influencer type marketing stats where you see in the number of impressions and how many people click through rates and things like that. So selling sponsorships is its own animal and is not something that I think anybody has a good handle on. But there are other things to make money in eSports and I don't wanna sound crass that I'm only in eSports for money. I'm thrilled, I love eSports. I have been playing video games since I was a young man. I know I don't look that old. I am in my 40s and I do have kids and they love video games because I love video games. But besides sponsorship, there's media rights. There's publishing fees, the publisher fees. There's merchandising and tickets. There's digital and streaming rights.  Are they the type of person who would buy an ad on Instagram knowing it's gonna get a certain number of impressions and sell to them like that? If they're the type of person who's like, hey, I need a direct ROI. I won this event because I went to your live sporting event. That is the person that you need to tailor that message to. So again, it all goes back to understanding people and knowing how you can convince them, not convince them, but how they would love to get the ROI back. So when you're talking about sales, I know that sales people have to deal with objection. And when you're dealing with objections in relation to eSports, one objection that I can think of is, oh, eSports isn't that big. Shouldn't I be doing something in with regular traditional sports? How, let me ask the expert, how do you deal with objections? That's fantastic. So objection handling is absolutely sales 101 and you should be prepared for that one. And there are a lot of good eSport objections. One thing I always hear is I can't believe that there are actually people who watch this. Like I thought there were just children. Like you're a 40 year old man, what are you doing? Like those are some of the objections that I have to deal with. And that is just education, right? That is the education part of it where it's super simple. You could point to, if you know the type of person you're talking to, if they're the type of person who would say to your face, I thought you'd be a sweaty nerd instead of a cool guy, then you need to have raw data for that person. So what I like to say is, again, the gaming industry is bigger than music and movies combined. People spend more money in a year on gaming than they have spent on movies and music combined as industry, $160 billion. eSports is $1 billion of that pie right now. I tell them it's like being part of the WWF in the 1980s. I knew there was something there when I was watching the Royal Rubble and I was watching Hulk Hogan, Body Slave, Andre the Giant. I feel the exact same way when I see Team Liquid and Face Clan up there. Like I understand that completely. And then I like to talk about personal experiences. So in general, whenever, I'm probably giving too much information away, Catherine. Hopefully nobody I try to sell to is going to watch this podcast. But what I always say whenever anybody gives me an objection is if I was in your position, I would 100% agree with you. Or from your perspective, I see exactly what you're saying. There's also a technique called Feel Felt Found. It's a great old sales technique that says I know exactly how you feel. I know other people who felt that way and here's what they found. And so that's one of the techniques I use. So I know how you feel. It seems like it's nothing. You've never heard of it. It's not traditional sports. There's not a 10 million people watching an eSport event. But you know what there are? There's 75,000 people in your demographic who are watching this eSport event right now. Can you promise me right now, if I advertise on the Super Bowl that you would get 75,000 18 to 24 year olds with disposable income and interest in video games? Maybe, but you'd be taking a risk. I can promise you that anyone who tunes into a Twitch stream of an eSport is one of those people. So that's one objection that I have. And then I talk about the people who I have heard who do believe in eSports. There's a great person. I talk about ESTA a lot, but this is only coincident because it's a great organization and it's part of what I know about eSports. But at eSports next last year, the fireside chat was a gentleman named Bruce Stein. Bruce Stein happens to be one of the founders of Axiomatic Gaming. Axiomatic Gaming invested a quarter of a billion dollars in Epic Games before Fortnite came out, back when they were a billion dollar company. And he bought it because of the Unreal Engine. This is the same person who brought Batman and Star Wars toys to Kenner. He was the CEO of Mattel. He was the CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment. And he believes so much in eSports and gaming that he invested $250 million into a one billion dollar company that's worth like six or 10 or 30. I can't even remember what Epic Games is worth today. But his personal investment has grown that much.  And that's how I handle that objection. And do you think about someone's decision making styles before you or during the process of selling? Absolutely. So that is a great question. So in a selling process, and I'd love to have more time to give you my complete rundown, but I wouldn't because it's mine and you can't have it. But in my selling process, in that discovery call, I always to make sure, hey, how do you get measured on success? How are you going to be judged on this? Because that a lot of the times is the most important thing to them. If the surveys at the end of the event that I'm putting on are all 10s, I get a bonus. Okay, well then we need to make sure that the audience's experience is the best. If the answer is my CEO is standing up on stage and if she doesn't have a wonderful experience, I'm fired, then we make sure that the presenter support is the most important thing. So you just, like you said, have to understand exactly who you're talking to, but you won't know their decision making process unless you ask for it. Sure. Yeah, you know, I am an attorney, but you know, I actually read sales book and it isn't because I'm like directly a sales person but I sort of assume that a lot of information about anything like a broad knowledge of anything regarding marketing, branding, sales, which I all read about, you know, I think it's important to just any regular person on this earth, do you agree with me? Listen, it would be hard for me to say no to that given that I spent the last 15 years doing sales. But I would say specifically that selling yourself is something you will have to do in every interaction you have for the rest of your life, whether it's a job interview for an account role or whether it's, you know, meeting somebody for the first time and starting a relationship, you are selling yourself the whole time. So the more you can learn about how to sell or the way that people respond to selling, like I mentioned, Influence is a wonderful book because it didn't teach me how to sell to other people. It told me how people were selling to me and it's like, if somebody tries to do this to you, here's how you respond. Another great book that I love is The Challenger Sale. It goes beyond becoming the friend, relationship maker and talks about really bringing somebody something they didn't think about before. Really quickly, I will tell you one more story. My own company, I wanted to get my company to be part of the ESTA, but I couldn't think of a way to do it. I found out that my company cared most about recruiting right now. So I told them that they can reach people in esports right now through recruiting and they 100% bought into it. It wasn't even a question. Like they signed the contract that next day. So yes, selling and understanding that person and the part of it is incredibly important no matter who you are or what you're doing. James, I've learned so much today about selling and I'm looking forward to hearing more of your success in the future. I'll give you the last word. You can let people know how they can find out about Encore and how they can connect with you. Yeah, wonderful. Encore is the biggest live event company in the world. We've done every presidential inauguration since 1948. We light the national Christmas tree. We do EVO. So you've heard of us, you just didn't know it was us. So come visit us at encoreglobal.com. See what you can see about our virtual and hybrid events which is where I focus. And me personally, feel free to look me up on LinkedIn just as James Hess Encore, if you wanna put it into... Oh, thank you very much. As James Hess Encore down at the bottom or you can just look me up as James Hess. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, James. It's been a great opportunity to learn about sales and about Encore. Thank you, Catherine. And this went as fast as you promised it would. I have so much more I wanna talk about but this is very exciting. I appreciate the time. We'll have to do a part two. Okay. Anyway, thank you to our viewers for joining us today. Next week, my guest will be Esports Business Consultant, Sharon Gill. See you then. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. The Omicron strain of COVID-19 continues to spread quickly across the world. Cities such as New York and London are especially hard hit. On December 23rd, the UK recorded 120,000 cases, while the previous day, the US recorded over 230,000 cases. Meanwhile, there are hopeful reports which say that the peak in South Africa may have passed. The spread of the new strain takes place during the holiday season, in many parts of the world, and even as people's behaviour has relaxed over the past few months. As the strain spreads, fresh discussions have emerged about vaccines. While poorer countries and those in the global South still need to vaccinate a large part of their populations, richer countries are focusing on booster shots for their already vaccinated people. How do we understand the spread of Omicron? What does the available data show? How are countries dealing with issues around the vaccine? Immunologists Dr Satyajit Rath explains. We are going to talk about the most recent status of the Omicron strain of SARS-CoV-2 that is spreading COVID-19 with renewed speed and concern across large parts of the world. Clearly, the evidence is now quite emphatic that the Omicron strain spreads in communities at a much faster rate than even the Delta strain did. We need to keep a number of differences in mind between this time last year versus this time six months ago versus today. In terms of different conditions, this time last year, the world was far more concerned, was far more COVID-appropriate behaviour. Six months ago, we were across the world in large suites, undergoing very rapid spread of the Delta strain. So compared to that, until last month, we had all across the world begun to breathe again, begun to withdraw even further from COVID-appropriate behaviour, begun to gather in large numbers again, thinking that vaccination, particularly across the developed world, is likely to have brought the pandemic under control. And it's quite possible that that shift in community behaviours has fed the very rapid spread of the Omicron strain of the virus. However, there is also laboratory evidence that the Omicron strain does transmit and does grow much more rapidly. So there is likely to be a whole range of reasons for the rapid spread that we are seeing of the Omicron strain in South Africa, in the United Kingdom, as well as now in the United States and in countries in continental Europe. That said, there is this indication that the Omicron strain in South Africa appeared to be causing relatively less severe illness. South African researchers were cautious in pointing out that this had to be seen in the context that unvaccinated people catching the Omicron strain in South Africa were likely to be relatively young and non-comorbid because that's the group that hasn't as yet gotten vaccination, the elderly and the comorbid who were catching Omicron were a little more likely to be vaccinated in South Africa. And therefore, as an outcome of this, it may be that the Omicron strain was showing up as causing relatively mild illness. Data from the United Kingdom are now beginning to show that this may be the case, even though the data are very preliminary with very different numbers being compared between the Delta variant cases and the Omicron variant cases. But nonetheless, there is some evidence emerging that what the South African researchers had thought of may in fact be real. In other words, that if the Omicron strain begins to spread in unvaccinated communities containing a fair proportion of the elderly and comorbid, then it is likely to cause severe illness with the same likelihood. And if that's the case, then national health authorities across the global South need to worry and need to plan for this. That said, there is a little bit of evidence from laboratory studies in Hong Kong that suggest that the Omicron strain tends to grow much better in the upper airways as compared to the lower airways and the lungs. And that may lead to it causing severe illness with somewhat lower likelihood. And if so, that would be to our advantage in terms of healthcare policies. Finally, the issue of whether we should be expanding basic COVID vaccination or we should be expanding booster vaccination is an absolutely black irony and an awful choice that we have landed ourselves with. We have spent the last year in vaccination campaigns across the world. And if we had committed to a globally integrated vaccination campaign where we steadily vaccinated the susceptible, the at-risk groups, the healthcare professionals and related at-risk professionals, the elderly, the comorbid, the adults and then children across the world, not based on nationalities but based on who needs it, then we would not have been in this situation where we have to make this awful choice of whether to expand the basic vaccination across much of the global South, which doesn't have access to that basic vaccination or to begin giving booster doses in a display of reasonable but nonetheless vaccine nationalism. And in this, as a final point, what needs to be remembered is that the evidence, the strong evidence of the effectiveness of all current COVID vaccines is that they prevent serious illness and death, hospitalization of death. The evidence that they slow down transmission of infection in communities is much more fragmentary and much weaker, yet it is that evidence that national health authorities are using to give booster doses. And we are therefore in this situation of not having sufficient vaccine doses even now in the WHO Covax Initiative for distribution to very large numbers of countries in the global South. This is a situation that we in terms of the global elites controlling these policies have brought upon ourselves that all of us in the global South particularly need to remember.