ReadyTalk at Disrupt NY — Conference Recap

The final two days of Disrupt NY were just as great as the first. The speakers were engaging, and there were some fascinating conversations around chat, Facebook’s bet on bots, and Virtual Reality storytelling. Additionally, Startup Alley was full of really interesting software startups on Tuesday and some neat hardware startups on Wednesday.

Day 2

The two most engrossing presentations on Day 2 were Stan Chudnovsky’s chatting about Facebook’s Messenger platform and Chris Milk of Vrse’s talk on VR storytelling.

With ReadyTalk’s Bot Month well underway, I knew I had to make my way to Stan Chudnovsky, Head of Product for Facebook Messenger’s, spiel about how Facebook is thinking about its Messenger platform moving forward. Facebook bots, the tech world’s obsession de jour, was a big part of the interview. Chudnovsky mentioned that Facebook already has ~2500 merchants using bots and ‘tens of thousands’ of developers already working on the platform. If you’re worried that your Messenger feed is going to be inundated with notifications from just bots, you can rest assured that Facebook is already thinking about how to differentiate the notifications so you’ll have an idea of what you need to respond to immediately and what can wait. Chudnovsky alluded to the fact that Messenger users respond to their notifications immediately, because they know it’s a friend reaching out to them versus any of the 100000s of other notifications one gets throughout the day — and they don’t want to lose that experience.

Facebook understood they couldn’t exactly test bots without letting people, you know, test bots, so they released this platform in part to see how folks would use the technology. Chudnovsky mentioned that Facebook is, ‘focused on protecting users and supporting developers,’ with their bot platform and they want to see what comes from this.

A Messenger stat that was casually dropped was maybe the most impressive part of the presentation. Facebook, as they’re wont to do, released a pretty big feature with limited fanfare. This time, the feature was group calling right in Messenger. How did Facebook do with their new tool? They had 11 million minutes of audio usage on the first day — all without advertising the feature. The Facebook Future is only getting closer.

Hopefully that future will include a lot of really rich, well-developed VR experiences, though. In potentially the trippiest comment of the entire show, Chris Milk of Vrse, said, “The closest comparison we have to VR is our dreams.” Milk contends that the real ‘killer app’ that will drive VR adoption is storytelling, something that hasn’t been mastered in the space yet. He alluded to how film technology existed for years before we first saw a movie of Citizen Kane-level quality — a trend he also sees happening with VR.

One trend that’s already starting to emerge in the VR space is the differentiation in quality tiers between mobile and wired VR experiences. Milk is less concerned about that trend moving forward and thinks that positional tracking and better processing, the things keeping so-called ‘mobile’ VR from joining the Ranks of The Rift, aren’t far away at all. In the interim, though, he also argues that, “mobile will be the path to mass adoption globally,” for VR.

This talk really affirmed what’s well-established about VR: the content just isn’t ready yet. While experiences are getting better and better every day, VR is still incredibly reliant on the spectacle of the product until narrative techniques evolve to catch up to what’s possible. Far and away the most exciting takeaway from Milk’s presentation was the fact that we’re now entering a brand new storytelling landscape. The original movies from the 1920s set the tone, and while quality is obviously far improved from where it was 90 years ago, entertainment today is still a rectangle with pictures streaming across it. VR promises to change that.

Day 3

As cool as it was to see Melo in real life, the best talk I heard on Wednesday came from Ted Livingston of Kik. If you’re unfamiliar with Kik, that probably has more to do with you not being a teenager than anything else, since that is the demographic this chat tool focuses on most heavily. Founded in 2009 as a music service for Blackberry, Kik has grown into a $1 billion company with 300 million registered users across the globe. A full 40% of teenagers in the United States use Kik every month. Kik’s biggest advantage with teens (and other customers) is that they let you take the relationships you’re forming in online communities (gaming and youth-focused social media sites like Tumblr come to mind) into a chat environment without giving away a phone number.

Tencent, one of the largest investment holding companies in China, and developers of the insanely popular WeChat tool, has just invested in Kik. Livingston mentioned that, in China, more bots are added to WeChat daily than there are sites added to the internet. Or put another way:

Tencent saw an opportunity with Kik, because while Facebook is nipping at their heels, they’re currently the most developed bot platform in the west. There are currently 6000 bots available on Kik, and their Bot Shop makes it easy to both discover and create bots. While Livingston didn’t go so far as to say that bots will eat apps, he shared some interesting stats that show why the bot platform is so enticing to companies who are seeing adoption of their app flatten out or fall. In the United States, 2/3 of users do not download an app in any given month. They like to use what they already know and love, and its in this space that bots can help remove the friction of discovery, the pain of setting up a new app, and the learning curve of familiarizing yourself with a new UI.

All in all, Disrupt NY was a great show with a lot of really compelling visions of the future on display. Big thanks to the folks at TechCrunch for putting it together and bringing so many neat startups and speakers together. I look forward to seeing what next year’s show brings!

P.S. — Yes, I promised more frequent updates but then this happened:

Should playoff basketball interfere with my ability to write recap posts? Probably not, but my boys are in the Western Conference Finals now so