sfspark.org: Deepak Thakral Interview

sfspark.org: Deepak Thakral Interview

Recording: sfspark.org: Deepak Thakral Interview

you all right hello everybody i'm alexi Crowborough the organizer of SF spark and actually this time it's a part of the cognitive frameworks festival is a citywide series of meetups we start on Mondays use it today and have it all around the city it's College spark is data pipelines for machine learning and AI and here are chartboost with Deepak tocrawl who is a VP of Oracle engine earring here and the service is very interesting stuff Deepika tell us about Buddhas sure so Chad booth is the world's largest monetization platform for gaming audiences we have our SDK which is basically a piece of code for mobile game developers in over 300,000 apps so my a percent of the top ios and android developers use our sdk solution for monetization which basically means that they utilize us to show ads mostly video as playable ads interstitial ads and they make money to that right and so we have all these 90% of the top closing ios and android apps on one side we also have some of the largest gaming studios like EA Zynga big fish casino Kane running ads to drive user acquisition and to drive app installs so we see somewhere between 700 million to a billion unique devices each month so these are basically like the monthly active users we see on our network which gives us unprecedented scale and since is the performance driven ad network we really I would I always say that you know while it looks to people they're an ad network but really behind the scenes they're a big data shop because we utilize we harvest all the data that we see in terms of billions of events like impressions and clicks then installed and post install data to utilize that and the utilize technologies like Scala for our ad serving and utilize spark for a complete class you know the cluster computing to really understand and design the right models to make predictions about which is the right ad to show to the right person at the right time a billion devices certainly something doesn't right so this is this really cool and I mean I knew sure boost for a long time you know turbos is a player in the community been at all the sherbet offices are obvious et so it's really good to be back right then see you guys the doctors part because I think that just happened right during this period of time but kind of before we kind of dig a bit into that so at Jack I think we talked about this is kind of an elephant in the room because it still seems to be the main earner on the internet right and some people say Google is just a tech company right and so essentially it generates the most income but it's not as much talked about AI and other things so why do you think is that is it because a VC investment level of the technology is mostly known or the rate of innovation so down or what like I think what we've seen is there was a time derivative is an explosion of investments in a technology it was new and emerging I think where I take is now is in a period of maturity from an industry perspective but I actually a lot more innovation happening today than it was happening before it's just that people have gotten used to it and like the newer trends like AR and VR and there's always the buzzwords but if you think about where the Israel money is being made you know the global estimates are that the ad tech industry is basically about 140 billion dollars and 2017 that's a lot of money yeah and even if Google and Facebook dominate mobile advertising there is still a lot of money for a number of players to make and you look at chartboost for example we are a niche player in the mobile gaming industry but because of those the depth of the data that we get and the kind of unique personas we have about beginning user you know we do really well call ourselves and so this is I think a spec is a great place which actually shows the application of AI and machine learning Big Data scale to make very precise like recommendations and they're very data-driven as to which ad the show to the right person right right now this is interesting right and I think there was this mobile a revolution right there you guys are kind of started riding out of the mobile okay there's only like I don't see mobile mention anymore because everything is mumble just assumption now that everything is mobile right away at the point where a bicycle consume mobile first I think for us at least like that is the DNA of the company it was born in a mobile in advertising world so to us we don't take too much about it it's the language through which we speak but a lot of times when we do interact with people who are mostly still on desktop and knows web you know even though it's all advertising but mobile in-app advertising a lot more about performance because the advertisers only pay us when an install happens so there's a huge incentive for us we don't get paid on impressions or clicks you know we get paid on somebody installs the app and opens it up and in fact increasingly advertisers actually will care about what is the quality of the user right is that a pain user is a returning user so do as mobile is like yeah you know that's granted like that's the the ecosystem we operated but there's just so much nuance and depth that we are always like innovating and figuring of better ways to optimize it right all right so I at some point that kind of looked at some of the app store dynamics and actually I was kind of committed by people who who run app store Thursday I was really amazed right like they're companies whose only job was to look at the state of App Store right and kind of report on this data and I think that like the top earners make so much money there if they somehow you know managed to kind of get a cup of that that like it's tremendous right so so so they're kind of beautiful in this like what small citizen they're like a I guess following this wear of this app ecosystem going sure so the app ecosystem globally is about 40 million dollars so you know that's that's use amount of money and it's been growing at a at a rapid pace what we see now is again like more maturity in the market because there was an explosion the AppStore evolved in 2011 a lot of people started to play mobile games and so there was like a rocket stage kind of a growth but now the market is more maturing the number of gaming users is reaching a steady-state the number of gaming sessions are reaching a steady-state but the time spent playing games is still enormous so if you look around you when you're on the BART ride home or you're on your commute or you look around you to see a lot of people playing games and that's what we are really counting on so just to give you some statistics there are in the United States about 192 million gamers well if you think about the publisher of the United States about 300 million people you know 2 out of 3 people are playing games right and out of that Alex see 1/3 of them or what we call it like you know heavy users these people will play basically somewhere between like you know five to six hours a week right so somewhere on like 2025 hours a month there are on their games and they are very immersed in their games so we are able to build very rich personas and graphs of their gaming behavior what kind of people like casinos and if they like casinos do we also happen to like Lea apps some will kind of utilize that affinity show apps and recommendations or what we think they have a high propensity to click upon you say so you know and then even from a gaming perspective like people are making these games some of these games like casino games they need like two to three million dollars a day from these games so think about it in a month in a year these are billion-dollar franchises and like companies that are like machines oh that's a great example like they have three or four big titles but they'll easily make millions of dollars each day just from like pinna purchases that drive so much virtual currency then it's a huge economy right all right looks like it's it's it's major it's a virtual economy right and so now I kind of get even better idea where all this big data comes from right and also because you guys have this long session times and it's as opposed to kind of web ads right so you have better this is sounds like a suitable promotion learning even better right because you could look at temporal patterns right like it look at all kinds of correlations so so now I can see kind of better right so clearly it seems to spark and I mean I knew that a scale company can you tell me like how spark happens how Scala happen like in a white guys found this is a good match the process this kind of data sure I am we've always liked I did on myself on like investing in open source cutting-edge technologies and so for us arranging team is very acutely like in tune with like what's going on in the environment the ecosystem where we have to make the right investments spark ml makes a good fit given our investments in machine learning nai and the model that we have to build and given this kind of you know computing that we have to do in the right of clusters we need the kind of big data scale that we have it just made a lot of sense for us to invest more in spark so they can probably tell you a lot more about any come winners - like what are some of the specific use cases of how we are using spark and you know on the scholar side we kind of moved from having a much more simpler code base with PHP to move it to scholar again like the functional programming and some of the aspects of it Len very it's very well to what we're doing with a right side solution I noticed multiple human coming to this transition like they started it with PHP think excited for the bunch of PHP and kaboom like I'm not just like a bunch of you know government said PP and then they move to something else right so actually several six color so it seems like a is it because of gdm is it because of whom were cast industrial long running servers like what are some other advantages with this you know probably a good better question for me beg to answer but I know that we did look at various technology which cook you know coding languages to utilize and we just felt like Scala was a better fit for for where we are but some of these decisions previously so salty patel all right all right a-and definitely you know with ourselves whether that's talk following yeah and so maybe to tell a little bit about what attracted you to the tech industry what's what's really exciting about it for you sure so for me you know I'm an advertising guy has been building ad platforms and advertising products for the last ten years plus so kind of evolved from like having a lot of solutions which cater mostly to desktop because that's where the primary traffic was and then my career trajectory is kind of in a way followed by the eyeballs are gone we've gone from like mobile from basically desktop to mobile and the mobile web and then to mobile in app you know clearly the opportunities that have emerged has been on mobile in app monetization people spend 60 70 % of the time of the time on mobile within apps so how do we like more capitalize those those interactions between users and their apps so it was kind of a natural fit for me to connect evolve and go and both for companies where it's all about advertising but it's also about apps and then of course gaining is fun I play games we all play games that kind of makes sense to kind of figure out how do we do better at gaming monitor days all right so it's kind of someone who follows attacking each other's was going to be next where is this going you know like what after apps is just going to evolved inside apps is going to be in the eye I always have yeah I you know absinthe VR like the dis have any feeling was going I think I think there's some very interesting trends that tell us as to you know what's going to emerge I definitely see you know AR and like especially like more than VR AR lends itself very well to like the gaming experience we saw that with Pokemon go rest but I also see like more immersive experiences will come in both virtual reality and augmented that'll allow users to really experience the game right and to become part of the game they can choose to be a persona in the game they can say I want to be this character or that character and then how the game experience develops and as that happens I'm sure companies in the advertising world will figure out how to make ads more enticing but more a part of the ecosystem then just being like a static kind of display like given video if you think of it it's great to have mobile video within these games but they're more like a passive form medium so with playable ads we made a lot more interactive I think with VR and AR we'll get even more interactive what I really add kind of fits in and blends in very well I the color becomes native to the ski yes I definitely see those kind of trends I think you know what Google sign to do with like you know interesting - and half an apple with like happening so I think we'll get go stage where the the the distance between like an app was a mobile web will start to just converge and people will want to play games and they'll just play instant games like we see that happening with Facebook so I feel like there's some of the friction that's immoral and like looking at an app downloading it then opening it or start to kind of go away as html5 gets better there are some functions which are related to an app I suspect there'll be some like really heavier you know like apps which I have very clear use cases I will continue to stay but a lot of the casual games stuff will probably move towards more like a blended environment interesting so just like in the way it'll come full circle to the web where it's stateless and they just start where it was right yeah this is interesting but if you have all this richness right yeah I think the good part is like this flexibility because we've kind of gone to full circle app developers can make better choices about what is the right gaming experience and what's the right delivery mechanism whether it happens to be mobile web or app and then let the user kind of decide what that is all right so this is a really good overview and maybe we can wrap up with you know we're here with meetup is a really good friends of the me topic and all the community what makes it interesting for you to to host meetups what do you expect from the community and how the community kind of can help you guys sure so you know we're big fans because we believe in the community we believe in high tech we believe that you know we all benefit when we share the knowledge and the wealth and the depth that we have it's also great opportunity to get our name out there and if there are people who are like looking for a career in big data or an attic then you know we're always looking and hiring people we have lots of opportunities and data and data science in observing in a front end ebooks are interested you know always like feel free to reach out to us but that's pathetic sounds great and you know I can't just say the locations awesome in all the team is great so thank you very much Kevin are looking forward to the talk great Thank You Alec see this bar is [Music]