San Francisco - Samsung Developer Conference

Dear Friends:

This week, I spent time in San Francisco, California.  The main purpose was to attend a big industry conference.  However, I was thrilled to also get to see some of my family.

My schedule worked out so that I could go have lunch with my oldest daughter.  It was just the two of us, and we had a great time.

We decided to try something new, so we headed to a local Russian restaurant.  I have always been surprised by how much I love Russian dishes.  I ordered Russian dumplings, or Pelmeni:

They are pretty basic - essentially pork and beef wrapped in tiny little pockets of unleavened bread.  They also served it with "Russian sour cream" - whatever that was.  However, it was delicious.  My daughter had some traditional stroganoff, which was also tasty.

After running down to the South Bay for some meetings, I came back and had dinner with my daughter.  I was able to spend some time with my youngest grandson.  We played quite a bit, and I loved hearing him speak...his vocabulary has improved quite a bit.  He's adorable and even let me read some books before bedtime.

For the next two days, I spent my time in downtown San Francisco.  I was there to attend the Samsung Developer Conference.

This is Samsung's opportunity to talk directly to software developers for all of it's main consumer products - phones, tablets and TVs.  They also have a new product line for technology that will connect many of the "smart" devices in the home.  I was there, mostly for the mobile phone and tablet portions.  My company provides Samsung with the technology that powers these devices.  I was focused on gaming and VR.  There was plenty of that, at the event.  It started off with a huge keynote address.  There were 4,000 attendees at the conference, and the room was quite full:

VR is a big topic these days.  Samsung, to its credit, has shipped one of the first VR devices available to consumers.  It uses the Samsung Galaxy phone to power the device.  We've made some real progress on this front, cooperating with Samsung and Oculus:

In another vast area, they had more of a traditional "expo" type of floor.  There were booths and displays covering all kinds of devices and topics:

They even partnered with Six Flags to create a "virtual roller coaster".  Each participant had a VR set to watch the 360-degree video, while the seating device moved them around to correspond with the track in the video they were watching:

The newest Samsung Galaxy S7 phone was on display - of course.

I sat through several technical sessions.  One of my favorites wasn't really technical at all, but focused on VR.  They had representatives from CNN, NY Times, 20th Century Fox, USA Today and The Guardian all talking about how they are using VR in their various broadcast platforms.  I found the discussion really interesting.

Overall, I really enjoyed the event.  Samsung makes a lot of money and they spent a good chunk of it on this conference.  I have some ideas about how to participate next year.  We'll see how that goes!