Gadgetory

hey everybody I'm Hollywood from cnet com here at South by Southwest 2012 we're in our fabulous second market recovery lounge where we have just given Dave more in the CEO path a nice big cup of blue bottle coffee it's the best idea I've seen yet at South by so thank you it's like survival it's survival technique yeah Southside does that to you so I'm hurt you guys brought the San Francisco coffee out here so let's back all the way up for the people who don't know what rap is there may not be that many but you never know yep what is the deal with that so if path we are creating sort of a modern journal then the idea is that you sort of capture the experiences and special moments in your life and then you can share them with your close friends and family so we're very focused on family and making it a very intimate place a very trusted place to connect with less people not more and share more often and you do have some interoperability widow Facebook yep yeah we interrupt really well actually with Facebook Twitter Foursquare and tumblr so you have a new release which adds kind of some cool new features music match I don't think we've said that encryption of user data yep privacy is kind of unfortunately yeah no big deal you seem to go together yep um encryption is coming later yeah so you know our next release so this is two dot one we're doing a couple of two dot one to two releases but when we went through this interesting situation where we found that users you know wanted us to take a different approach to how we help them find their friends I'm Pat and what's been interesting is that people basically much more interested in how applications work on their mobile phones I think much more so even than the world of computers in the web so initially you were not uploading or story user data before you started uploading the address books what made you decide I think it depends on which type of data you're talking about yeah with with paths and we think of privacy we think of this experience we've created for people you know we've created this experience where only you can contribute to your path when you post whether it's a thought or a photo to path we use SSL to transmit the data we store it you know using very advanced database technology we use mom go for everything how long do you store address book information we actually store it in perpetuity now but the opposite so if you deactivate your account is that information deleted yeah so we offer both deactivation and deletion so one of the things from working at Facebook for years that I found it where the we found I should say is that users sometimes last to deactivate their account sometimes they'll ask to delete it sometimes they want it back after it's been deleted so we offer to two step which is a really important thing to offer for social systems I think because there's a I'll tell you we've already had people that asked to delete and then wanted it back and so offering the two step is really important I think so the first step just like to actually write deactivate means you know you deactivate it that you can get it back deletion means the data is gone you're gonna have to start over so but I think it's important to offer the user control and do both so what happened to I'm just curious about this you said that you deleted the user data from address books you waiting for but if those people are active users or they then kind of grandfathered into like a super private experience or did you go back then and asked them if they wanted to reupload we just went back in and asked them to if they wanted to reupload so all of the data that we had prior we deleted it was pretty interesting watching the number go to zero and but now you know we've had a large large number large percentage of the users have chosen to opt in so I think it's I think that's a good thing were you surprised to discover I mean I think you know you talked about the attitude toward the mobile usage and I think that phone is it really it's an intimate device yes were you surprised though at because it seemed like it kind of you became the poster for it but you've said many times a lot of other apps do this I don't know if I was surprised i think the intensity was it was obviously very intense but you know the reality is that mobile is a pretty new thing you know it's only been a couple of years into some of the more advanced social experiences that have been created you know i mean us and Instagram and Foursquare and a lot of these experiences are two to three years old if at most and so privacy in a mobile context i think is still something that there needs to be a lot of education around a lot of interesting sort of conversations around one of the best practices what are the one of the ways that consumers want this to be handled and i think also there's a genuine interest amongst consumers around how are these applications built I know do you think one of the things that's kicked off a little bit among the technarch journalism community was a discussion of whether there is a culture of respecting user privacy in Silicon Valley and because there's a natural tension possibly between the data collection that's necessary to create the experience that you want and the users sense of their own privacy do you think app developers are habitually kind of creating apps that that don't necessarily put privacy first most people doing the most sophisticated social experiences certainly put privacy first I think the challenge comes when you are developing a new experience or a new social context right so for us we're developing this new context which I actually think hasn't existed on the internet yet where you know it's an intensely personal sharing experience it's meant to be very private it's meant to be a place where you can share thoughts which you might not share at other places I think you end up when you're developing a social experience especially you end up in this situation where you're both defining social norms and sort of trying to figure out where they are and what consumers want and are comfortable if all sort of in real time and so I think the best thing that you can do is be very transparent about what you're trying to do and you know I think if you look at you know any of the big apps the facebooks the Foursquare of the instagrams everyone is trying to build wonderful experiences for people and I don't think anyone has a has a you know direct disrespect for anybody's privacy it's it's mostly that we're all just innovating and trying to create new experiences so you have a new partnership just announced it stopped by with Nike tell us what is next the first thing that we're releasing is an integration with the 90 plus running application and we're doing some fun unique things wear when you go out for a run we update your path in a very contextual way saying dave is going for a run through the rain in austin and then your friends can respond to that and when they do respond you get tears in your headphones really yeah and then when the run is over we update your path with a beautiful map which shows the the route of your ride your fastest pace and it actually shows the phases of your friends along the run as they cheered you on so that's the first thing the second thing we're rolling out in a couple of weeks is integration with the Nike FuelBand so the FuelBand is a new new gadget new device wearable computer that nike just released just a couple of weeks ago actually which basically tracks your everyday activity the number of steps that you take the amount of time that you're active like that up yeah and it translates it into what they call a fuel score I gotta asked you before I let you go it's a nice sleep thing I mean I'm weirdly addicted to the sleep thing but like where did that come from that's a big part of people's day and there's this clear trend towards capturing more data about sleep and so we sort of just put a tiny you know different tone or water there around you know building this kind of beautiful experience for going to sleep and we added some utility to it so that it turns off the notifications and it puts the application to sleep it also sort of tells you how long you've been asleep and we're going to do some fun things with visualizations around it in the future but it makes it so that you know as we work with more companies in the health space whether its jaw bone or other people that are interested in sleep we can that'll become a big big piece of it and the good news is is that it's actually the third most popular type of content on top I really like at first I saw it and I was like really i'm gonna tell it i'm asleep I tell him sleep all the time by kid stuff and so I realized just doesn't like a feature suggestion you need a nap word yeah we hear that we do need a nap but like nagging me about how I only got an hour of sleep like that was a great now that was go down what we'll do we'll do the nap future this career alright I appreciate ya i will good luck itself i sell you thanks for coming to talk to us you can find this interview and all of the rest of our interviews from south by 2012 at Cena TV com