Here are some of our featured programs coming up this weekend on cspan. Saturday night, the state of black world conference discussing the impact of a 2016 election. Author of the book are we there yet . The executive director of the National Coalition and moderator mark, host of fm radios make it plain. Also, mayor of new york, new jersey. We get together as black folks in this country and we have an agenda, we also have to unite with other people. The object is to win. We do not want to just struggle for the struggles sake. There are thousands of people in our community who have been jailed and beaten and who are dead and all kinds of things. We are not activists and revolutionaries because it is fun. For metals, for awards, for twitter, for instagram. To be brave. They did it because it was necessary. American values, the Founding Fathers and the purpose of government. Meaning of america is persuasion, love. The meaning of america is building a better project product or persuading someone to marry you or persuading someone to join your church or synagogue. Civic mindedness in american history. Opioid addiction and treatment. They have to change their mind, they have to have some willpower. To change their brains back. Your brain is that organ. Hey, we took a molar out of your house, hey, you broken collarbone. For a lot of people, those damage that organ. Cspan and cspan. Org and listen on the free cspan radio lab. App. Dio conferenceancisco with begin which began with conversations about the future of Facebook Messenger. They also discussed employee gambling and the daily the Fantasy Sports website called draft kings. This is 45 minutes. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your disrupt mc and tech writer, jordan crook. Jordan whats up, guys . So happy to be back here. A favorite thing for me in san francisco. This is it, literally. You guys live in a great city. Congratulations. I want to welcome you to the hunger games. Were going to have a blast. It is early and you guys are never going to laugh at my jokes. We have an amazing lineup. A couple of things before we get started. We will use disrupt. Directly into the conversation. Go ahead and do that now. Without further do, i will bring up our first guest. Please welcome david marcus from Facebook Messenger and our moderator. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Messenger is always strived to be different from sms. First Group Texting and embraced stickers, animated gifts, what you see as the next big differentiator . We really, really like a realtime communications. As you have seen recently, we Just Announced and opened up to everyone this new thing we call instant video that enables you to have video. It is like you unmute your video for the other press to see while you type in you can start streaming while the other person had the honor a bus or a meeting and type and see you or see what you want to show them. Were going to continue investing in realtime communications. One of the things we have not talked about is we have over 300 million active users of video. Th makes message or one of the biggest realtime apps in the world. Jason your not had video calling for very long, about a year ago. Tell me, how does video get messenger to one million users but many feel like it was because you forced people to download messenger. Does that ever feel at the hollow victory . David we do not feel like it is a victory or not a victory. This is not downloads pretty it is people using the app on a monthly basis and the vast majority of them on a daily basis. It is actually people communicating with one another and using the app to stay in touch and build groups and do a bunch of Different Things. It does not feel that way to us. It feels like well such a great opportunity to serve one billion people and with come to work in her jive by the notion energized by the notion we can build things as then the 4 billion people on the platform will get to use it. Jason there is surely benefits from having a messenger be is on app, more room for extra features. Youre cramming conversation into onesizefitsall and recently you started to remove the ability to message from the mobile website. Dont users deserve more choice about how they communicate . David deal and you know any other mobile apps that have video . Jason that is a good point. You are the biggest so you must be held to a different point. David messaging apps do not work if notifications are not enabled for everyone. On facebook, not everybody has push notifications. An messenger, everybody has push notifications. If you use messenger, you can get people to respond faster and it works. When we survey our users, they tell us they feel like people will respond faster on messenger than text. That is great because the first and you want messaging app to do is be reliable, fast and no people will respond quickly. Just think there has to be situations where people might be and do use a mobile app and not have the time or bandwidth to download an app, would you say to those users . David we have been careful not to remove access to people who are on older Android Devices that may not have memory to downloaded the app or Network Additions to download the app at a certain point in time. The actual we stop serving highend jason sometimes had to make decisions that users may not like and also typically benefit facebook as well. Being a fact an efficient and reliable messenger is good for people and also good for facebook. How do you guys balance facebooks agenda with user benefits . David i do not think we ever think about it that way. When you build a product like no matter if youre a startup or a startup or large company, when you build a product, you want the vast majority of people out there to use it, to like it and engage with it. That is why you come to work and you build things that are actually solving real problems in daily lives of people. We do not think about, oh yeah, lets do that because we think we will make a bunch of money on the other side. Jason facebook mostly makes money from the newsfeed. Still, you must make decisions thinking about the long road and data you are pulling from users or boxing out other competitors in terms of the newest capabilities. When you work with Mark Zuckerberg on these features, how do you guys make top level, Strategic Decisions about where to go with messenger . Is that your job or his . David were doing that together. It is great to work with mark because it can execute really well in the short and mediumterm and has a really bold longterm vision as well. It is great to work with a mark on messenger. The way where thinking about things is pretty simple. What are the fundamental things people want to do when they talk to one another . They have oneonone conversations, group conversations. We needed to make sure we built the right experiences so that people use the product and find more utility in the product. We invested in a lot of things we have not talked about. For instance, in the last six months, we have invested massively in performance. While weve added a ton of features, we made messenger way faster. Aggregate startup time on ios is out there. On android, it is 1. 38 seconds. It is really fast. We cut the latency by 30 . All of those things we do not talk about are things we continue investing in because we want to made messenger the best messaging app out there. Jason you talk about wanting to be useful for people. You launched a Messenger Bot platform. It seemed halfbaked. What was missing from it . David what we want to do here is build an ecosystem. When you want to build an ecosystem and bring developers and bring up and discover new types of experiences and at the same time, reinvent the experience and interaction model on that scale, it is not easy and it takes time. What we wanted to do was put to the stake in the ground and enable all of the enablers, all of the companies to come in and build capabilities. From that standpoint, it has been successful. We have over 34,000 developers on the platform and they are building either capabilities for third parties or actual experiences. The problem was it got really overhyped very, very quickly. The basic capabilities we provided at that time were not good enough to replace traditional apps and interfaces and experiences and so what we have done in the past couple of months is we have invested and built more capabilities and provided a lot guidance on how to build a successful experience. What we have seen as a number of verticals working really, really well. Like news is working really well. Engagement on news boxes is really good and techcrunch is one of the best ones. Cnn is another good one, a bunch of others. What we have seen is that other companies are able to build experiences that covert users to paid users for their services in with a much higher conversion then redirecting to a mobile website or app. Match. Com in europe has a dating experience in messenger and they are converting to pay subscribers 2x the rate redirecting to a mobile site. There are other experiences like in india that does bill pay and all of these things. They are converting 10x the directing to mobile sites. We are seeing more and more of these things. We are releasing a brandnew update to the platform. Messenger platform 1. 2. It brings a whole lot of new capabilities, even more engaging experience. Jason one of the things i thought was the most lacking from the platform at the time of launch was to make a native payments. I was going to grill you about that. You built that now, right . David yes. Jason you are working with Payment Networks to build that, right . It is not all facebook infrastructure. You used to work with paypal. Is paypal who youre working with . David we are working with almost everyone on the solution. We are working with paypal, mastercard, visa, american express. What we have done, the two main announcements we have on this new update to the platform is one, we are releasing a new enhanced web view capability. You can basically draw ui inside of the thread and determine the height of the window so you could have the proper ui in context of the thread. And native payments. Those are the two main updates. More to this new platform release. We think we have the best of both worlds. Inside the thread, you have identity, transactional capability, the ability to draw ui, ability to draw native buttons and interfaces and basically different physics to those different spaces. Imagine you are trying to book an airline ticket. You go into a thread, the actual intent capture is great in a conversational way. I want to go to paris tomorrow. And then you basically have results that can come up in web view, it is really fast. You have native payments and then you can get it reposted back in the thread which is meant to stay. You can check in and do all of these things have Customer Support. We believe bringing all of these type of mobile experiences together is what ultimately is going to make a platform successful. Jason you cited the critical aspects, but many of those were not there when you first launched. What happened is a lot of developers do not feel like that enough time for the final functionality to build a good bot. Facebook will always be in the news. There are so many users. But for some developers, they may only got that one chance to make a splash and they do not necessarily have the functionality. How long ahead of the launch did you give developers . David a couple of weeks only. Jason is that enough time . David probably not. Jason i thought it seemed a little short. In the end you were focusing more on the set launch date. Did you guys end up prioritizing secrecy and making a big splash about putting that stake in the ground over being able to launch . David i think the problem is you can look at this in different ways. I choose to look at it is a long journey. You need to start somewhere. A great opportunity to get developers atttention. We have a lot of developers coming to the conference and starting to build. It has been six monthsish since we launched and welfare to 4000 developers on the platform. We have a lot a middleware that built conductivity. Andonnectivity to our apis platforms that allows big brands to Start Building great experiences. Today, there is a really good bot that is launching. It will actually get you a free drink in new york and other cities it is probably too early. And the way it works is really cool. You get from news feed to messenger, which is something we are releasing today, which is destination ads. You can get people straight to messenger and connect with people directly. You combined intent creation and completion, and with the case, it tells you where to go to get a free drink on absolut. You get a code and you give the codd to the bartender and he gives you your free drink. You get a notification inside a thread that offers a lyft ride back home. When you think about it in the sense of an app, that is not an app. It is such a great opportunity for brands to engage their users in a brandnew way in those type of things are really working well. Jason i am sure bartenders will love me showing my code to them on their own in figure out how to make that work. When you think about the platform, a lot of people are saying bots are a fad, what you think we are going to end up using them for . David it is not about bots but how can you get an experience like, so, we interact with people and with services and we interact with brands and with businesses. There are a bunch of Different Things that the capabilities we have opened up that are really selling. At the basic, basic stage Like Customer Service on messenger based on the api we released in april is really flourishing and a number of large companies. Rogers in canada, which is the largest carrier in canada, providing Customer Support on messenger and seeing a lift in customer satisfaction. News also a messenger and is working really well and has all of these different experiences which brands are building that enables them to connect directly to their customers. If you are a cpg company, like the ability for you to target a demographic and then get one on one with your customer is brandnew. You would never been to do that before. Lastly, when you combine all of these capabilities that we are announcing today, you see companies that are going to launch soon an updated version of their bots where you will be able to Book Airline Tickets and hotels in a really fast, really easy way that i think will be pretty close to having a native app. Definitely better than mobile web. Jason im definitely excited not having to talk to humans on the phone to get a flight. Where do you see the future of the navigation and dictation and voice for Facebook Messenger . David this is not something we are actively working on now. We have the ability if you want to use voice, you can leverage voice clips and process these. It is an ok experience. I do not feel like it is great. At some point, it is obvious as we develop more capabilities and interactions within messenger, we will work with voice exchanges and interfaces. Jason i would love to be the between able to switch i would love to be able to switch between threads and switch around especially if i am to use handsfree while i am working. Not necessarily while i am driving. You can imagine that would be a big deal with amazon echo and alexa a big hit. Do you think you are waiting to long . It seems like a huge opportunity. David maybe. Jason ok, then maybe looking further in the future, you guys have bots, you got it working more with businesses. What does messenger look like five years from now . David when you look at all of these entities that you interact with, bringing it all together. Can you bring your daily life onto messenger in a more organized way and actually have the best highquality, highfidelity intections with people and businesses . And get an opportunity for developers to get distribution. We are driving not only has messenger got over to one billion monthly users that engagement as measured has grown tremendously in the last couple of years. We want to continue accelerating that trend and making it a more essential part of daily life. Jason is group video going to be a part of it . That is what i really want. David if you look at what we launched to date, have nothing to announce, it is a pretty logical thing to build at some point. Jason i feel a little smile. Ok. , what ising about this messenger going to do to kill off the final foe, which is sms . David it is a question of reach in messaging. Messaging is all about the ability for you to reach all of the people you want to reach. Not like 95 of the people you want to reach. We are increasing our reach and penetration in smartphone users and we just need to grow it. As we grow it, people will continue using it. If you look at sms of android versus messenger, nobrainer to use messenger on android because experience is so much better, you can do so much more. Now with the ability to also get your Text Messages inside messenger, you get allinone messaging in one place. Gradually building more and more capabilities is the way were going to make this happen. Jason youre making great strides. You have 300 Million People using audio and video messaging, bringing mobile payments for you admit it maybe you would of light to a given Messenger Developers more time to make something more great. You could do your whole day life and messenger. Thank you. David also, thanks awesome, thanks. [applause] unlike josh, who looks dapper, i decided to dress down. I call this look startup chic. I did i know if you know but i have this on the sweatshirt, which is for sale up front. If you think i am standing up in hawking tshirts, youre wrong, this is the sweatshirt. But not right now. We have an amazing panel. Please welcome our next guest, jason robins from draftkings. And our moderator. [applause] thank you for coming. Are you excited talk about sports in a roomful of nerds, including myself . As ive said many times, i am a nerd. I am at home here. We all are. Lets start with who has played on draftkings before . Draftkings is a daily Fantasy Sports app. What is daily Fantasy Sports . A segment on the overall game where basically instead of play