 Welcome to Top Shelf, brought to you by Virgin Mobile. I'm David Pearce, and on this show we bring you the best in consumer electronics past, present, and future. Coming up, we'll talk the life and death of Google Reader and the aftermath of Samsung's Galaxy S4 announcement, but first, the week that was. As expected, Samsung last Thursday unveiled the Galaxy S4. It's more evolution than revolution, with a similar look to the GS3, but a larger 5-inch 1080p screen. New features include air gestures for hands-free control and an impressive 13-megapixel camera. Samsung this week also announced a price for its massive 4K television. The so-called Easel set will be $39,999 with pre-orders starting in March. Oculus Rift, our favorite virtual reality headset company, is about to ship some 10,000 completed developer kits. The test units feature a 5.6-inch, 1280x800 display and will support Valve's uber-popular Team Fortress 2 after an update this week. The father of Android has stepped down. Andy Rubin brought the mobile platform to Google in 2005 and has spearheaded its development ever since. He's now rumored to be working at Google's Secret X Lab. Android will now be overseen by Sundar Pichai, who also oversees Google Chrome and apps. And finally, sadly, Google is shutting down its popular Reader service as of July 1st. Google cited a decline in usage and a desire to focus on fewer products within the company. But the announcement left many users feeling lost. Users like The Verge's own Thomas Huston, for whom this has all been a very emotional experience. For eight years, Google Reader was nearly the perfect tool for someone who never wanted to miss the important things on the internet. Newshounds could stay on top of the Times, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, favorite photographers on Flickr, and even Twitter. It was the world's largest newsstand, mixed with the world's best in this period of newspapers and magazines. It also made me a better reader by offering a treasure trove of great reporting and writing that I knew I should be reading. For eight years, I saw the whole internet. All the parts I wanted to see, anyway. I subscribed to hundreds of feeds, skimming thousands of items every day, J and K-ing my way through everything that I'd missed, hitting S to start the best of it, occasionally mashing Shift and A to mark everything red when I couldn't handle the flood anymore. Over time, instead of rousing aimlessly through the web or hoping something interesting was happening on Twitter, I'd unlock my phone and jump into Google Reader's endless stream of news, long reads, and gifs that had only one reader in mind. I tried dozens of apps, trying to find the perfect way to read on the go. Most I tried were slow or ugly or missing some key feature. But thanks to Google Reader, the perfectly reliable and totally invisible back end, I could just install another app and pick up right where I left off. Now comes July 1st, Google Reader goes the way of the Dodo, Hendrix, and the Palm Cree, lost before its time. I'll miss the app itself, but the hole the reader really leaves behind is in the heart of all the third-party apps I use across different devices and platforms. There are still good apps for reading your feeds, like Press or Reader or Net Newswire. There are even a few that sync across a couple of devices, like Feedly, but only if you use Feedly apps everywhere. Gone is the back button, the underlying foundation to let you build a system on top of it like Legos. A few companies have offered to pick up where Google left off. Digg says it's building an API to replace the one that powered so many Google Reader apps. Feedly's doing the same thing. But those products are a long way off, and those companies need to figure out how to turn those readers into a business. Google never did. Google built Reader to help us never miss a thing on the Internet, to organize and collate everything we wanted to read. For eight years, my corner of the Internet existed on Google Reader. Now I'm not sure where it goes. Goodbye, Google Reader, and thanks for all the memories, which I started in Google Reader and won't be able to ever access again. But thanks anyway. Joining me now to talk about all of Google Reader and RSS and where we go from here is Cyril Moutran from Feedly. He's the head of product and strategy. Cyril, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. So tell me a little bit about Feedly, first of all. Give me a little bit of the background and kind of why you decided to build both an RSS reader and one that's connected to Google Reader. Yeah. So, well, we started Feedly a while back, you know, in 2008. And so we've been at it for a while. We saw an opportunity, you know, where there's this rich content on the web today. And in our lives, we have more and more devices. We have mobile phones, tablets, you know, all these devices play an important role. And we thought it was a really good opportunity to try to reinvent the way people access this great content on these devices, across these devices. So when Google Reader announced last week that they're, or when Google announced that they're shutting down Google Reader last week, what was the reaction within Feedly and kind of where did you, you know, did you see this coming? Was this, why do you think they shut down? Yeah, it's hard to say we saw this coming. We actually were preparing for that possibility. We saw over the last few years, since we've been working very closely with the Reader team, we saw the Reader team being pulled first to Buzz, OpenSocial, Google Plus. So we saw really Google kind of stepping back and putting almost the product in maintenance. And we saw that as an opportunity for us to really help the users move beyond the web product that Google Reader was and trying to basically adopt a better reader across experiences. So we've been working for what we call Normandy for about six months now, which really was our backup plan, more than a backup plan. It's kind of the backup plan for if Google decided to retire Reader, but it's also kind of where we see the future for feeds to be. It seems like to me that the two pieces people lost with Google were the Reader web client, which a lot of people liked, it was very simple and very fast, but also Google as this kind of universal ubiquitous backend that powered all these apps and all these different platforms. Is that kind of what you imagine Normandy? Or tell me kind of where you're going forward with that. Yeah, that's very close to what we see. We see really three legs to Normandy. And one is definitely an API that Feedly could use, but all the readers could use as well. It's a very important building block for helping people build valuable content at centric applications. And so we announced the API last week as part of the Normandy program. And we now have more than 100 developers who have asked us about it, who have expressed interest. And so we're in the process of formalizing that part. We saw also a very important place for Normandy to be a better environment for publishers, where Google really didn't really do much in terms of helping publishers monetize their feed or giving more alternatives around how our kind of feed really produced results. We are starting to engage a lot of publishers with Normandy over the last six months. And we definitely see a very, very strong interest now since the Google announcement. And we intend to provide a building block for things like paid content, paid premium feeds, or affiliate programs within Normandy. The thing that worries me is that Google Reader is shut down because Google couldn't figure out a way that it was a viable business for them going forward. Do you see Normandy as something that's both good for your business and as something that people will still adopt? Because it was a free API for everybody. Is that something you can really offer, or are you going to have to charge for it, or how do you see that working? Yeah, so I don't want to speculate too much about why Google decided to shut down Reader. But I highly doubt it's because it was not making money. The truth is that it was not making money, and it was an issue in terms of creating tension between Google and publishers. But I think more than anything else, I think it's the iteration of the product that probably, when they removed the sharing functionalities last year, we saw a huge influx already of users to Fiddly because sharing is a key component that early adopters and people who are very a bit of content need. So this time, in terms of monetization, we are seeing really different ways for monetization. We have a lot of users today that have been asking us for a core version of Fiddly, and we're still in the process of exactly defining what this is. When talking with a lot of these users, we have been asking, I think today at least 5 to 7% of our base said they would be willing to pay for Fiddly. And they don't really tell us which feature. They want to pay for the existing product. So they see it as an important part of their life today, of the things that we do, and they don't want it to go away. So that's one avenue for us is to figure out what is that core version? Is it guaranteed of service? Is that specific feature that we would put in it? But then I think overall, we really want to go beyond that, and we want to offer a couple of other models. One would be a utility-based model for developers, where other developers could come in and create this content-centric app much more easily based on normality. And we would basically work out a pay-per-use model for the API. And the third part is really the opportunity to monetize feeds. So both for developers, giving them an opportunity to create, to basically get revenue from feeds, and giving an environment where publishers could bring content, other premium content, or create, if you get programs where they really, really, really, really, really, really publish on normality. So, you know, you've announced that you're doing this thing with Normandy. Dig has talked about doing something similar. Do you think, will you be working together to make something that makes it accessible for everybody, or are we going to see kind of a fragmented market and we'll have to pick our best option and hope everybody else does too? No, so I don't think the market is going to fragment necessarily. You know, I think there's different layers to it. So as far as Normandy is concerned, we are basically starting to gather two sides. You know, since we announced we have already over 100 developers who have expressed interest in the API, and we want to create a developer-wide advisory board. We didn't have a talk conversation with Dig or some of the other players yet. But trying to basically better understand what are going to be the key needs for developers to be able to create this rich application that we see. That's a key function of the board. And whatever we can do to push things back into the standard, that's where we want to go. And then there's also a publisher advisory board, which kind of act in the same way, but on the publisher side. So when you think about taking RSS today, it's great. You know, we can still do a lot of things with RSS as it is today as a standard or at home as it is as a standard. But if we think about other things that we may do to be able to support different models, then as much as we want, we want to engage the conversation with as many people as possible, and then feed that anything that makes sense to feedback in the standard, do it in the standard. Because in our vision is that the more we have people believing that content should be open, accessible on the web, and we really believe so, the better the world is going to be. I totally agree. Cyril, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. I really appreciate it, and we're definitely looking forward to seeing what happens with Feedly on July 1st. Thank you. So we've seen a lot of Android phones launched recently, from the Galaxy S4 to the HTC One to a handful of others. And they all have their differences, but across the board, there's one certainty. Their version of Android kind of sucks. We just like stock Android a lot better. So we sent our own Evan Rogers on a quest to find ways to make Android lighter, faster, prettier, and just better. The HTC One is a gorgeous device, but the thing is, we're not entirely sold on the Sense interface. And the same is true for Samsung's TouchWiz or any other skin that a phone manufacturer might lay on top of Android. There's something so clean and consistent about Google's stock Android experience, something you can really only get out of the box from a Nexus phone. But thankfully, Android is highly customizable. You can make it look like Google originally intended with only a few minutes and a handful of apps from Google's Play Store. No hacking or rooting required. To get the HTC One a little more in line with my tastes, I focus on three areas. The launcher, the lock screen, and the keyboard. Within the launcher, the home screen and app drawer is where you'll spend most of your time. I chose Nova because it looks almost exactly like Google's default launcher. Nova also includes a number of interesting improvements like support for custom icons and lots of screen transitions. Simply download it and set it as your default launcher, it prompts you to do so the first time you press the home button, and you're set to go. As for the lock screen, we've seen a lot of variety of form and function here. Personally, I prefer the simplicity of HoloLocker. The HTC One's lock screen is kind of busy for my tastes. What HoloLocker does, yet again, is make your lock screen look very similar to stock Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Now the keyboard. There are a lot of insane third party options out there, but my favorite is SwiftKey. Word prediction is great and you can easily change the keyboard's appearance with a few taps. This app is the only paid app on our list, but a quality keyboard can be one of the best app purchases you ever make, and honestly, it's what you'll be using the most. These tweaks only take a minute or two to install, and they bring back some of the best and most beautiful features of Android that many manufacturers cut out. It's a better, cleaner experience on almost any phone. Joining me now is Avi Greengart, the research director for consumer devices at Current Analysis, to talk more about Samsung and all things Android. Avi, thanks so much for being here. My pleasure. I really appreciate it. So I want to talk about Android and I want to talk about the GS4, but first I want to talk about 2010. Let's go back a couple years. So it seems to me that sort of at the beginning of this run of Android phones, Motorola was like the brand. They kind of owned the Android world, and people bought Droids instead of Android. They had the brand. And then Samsung… In the United States, it's important to make that distinction. Right, absolutely. And then it seems like Samsung sort of showed up and all of a sudden just dominated and like brute-forced their way in. Is that fair? What happened? Not entirely, and I actually think you need to go back probably another 10 years before that to the transition… Ten years? Yeah, to the transition between analog and digital TV. That was when Samsung as a corporate brand made a big play as a pioneer, as a technologist. So that was when the digital ad campaign really cemented Samsung in Western consumers' minds as a brand that they could relate to. So then fast forward back to 2010. Samsung's strategy around smartphones has always been to bet on every horse, and whenever possible enter their own horse into the race. Bada, TouchWiz. So they always supported every known operating system. Symbian, Palm, Android, Windows Phone, Windows Mobile. But when they saw a lot of success around Android, they doubled down on Android, and they put a lot of resources there. The first thing that they did that was somewhat unique in the industry was that because they had a massive internal supply chain where they could give themselves good processors, good displays, that was the first thing that they really did, was that they gave themselves the best displays. And then if you went at retail and you saw an array of smartphones sitting in front of you and one was brighter than the others, the retail store clerk was able to point to that one, that one's the best, just simply because it had the brightest display and in some cases the nicest display. And is that kind of, was that unique to Samsung? Like is Samsung the only company in its space that has that particular, like the end to end, we make everything and we give ourselves the best stuff. To an extent, yes. I mean Nokia certainly had a massive supply chain because of the volumes they did, and Apple uses its financial weight to literally buy up supply chain, often several years in advance. But LG is in a similar situation to Samsung and to a limited degree so is Sony, where they had, they would make some of their own components. But Samsung did this to a greater and better extent than anyone else. So that was step one. Step two, they started differentiating around software. And that's something that we've seen pretty much everyone do, and to be candid, the first versions of TouchWiz weren't very good. That's like the kindest way you could have said that. Yeah, stock Android was a lot better. But it's gotten good and they've added things in, particularly at the larger screen sizes, that are genuinely useful. So things like tabbed calendar on a very large display means that you can quickly jump around your calendar and that's nice. And you think that for Samsung was, I mean because we've talked a lot about their stuff as kind of meaningless differentiation, but you think this is actually something that people were like, oh, tabs in the calendars, I want that, I'm going to buy a Samsung phone. No, I think primarily it was, at the time, primarily it was the screen display. The displays and the Exynos, the really fast processors. And the fact that they had great distribution, and I mean global great distribution. And so with the Galaxy S2, that's when they started pouring on the marketing. And there are two aspects to this marketing. One is the sheer dollars. I mean we're talking billions of dollars, but simply throwing money at something and even having decent ads doesn't necessarily equate to sales. I mean you can just take a look at Microsoft's surface for that. But they did two things with that. One was, you know, they spent a lot of money. But the other was their ads were really good. First from a branding perspective, the fact that they made fun of hipsters and said that if you're not a hipster, then you should buy a Samsung Galaxy phone. And the Samsung Galaxy phones have all this advanced technology, that's the brand promise for Samsung. But by doing so in a very clever way, they gave consumers permission to consider an alternative to Apple. I really think that before that, it was really, if you thought of yourself as someone who wanted high technology in your phone, you pretty much were limited to Apple. You were at the GS4 launch event last week. I was. So tell me about that event kind of in this realm of what Samsung is doing. What do you see from Samsung now? Well I mean first of all, that event was insane. It was way over the top. It was overproduced. We can all argue about whether there were not enough women or the women were portrayed poorly. The one thing that they did do a really nice job of, and this plays off of what also they've done in their ads, is not just Samsung as a brand. They've done better than anyone else other than Apple, explaining the benefits of a feature, not just selling you a spec. And that's something that if you go to any business 101, marketing 101 technology course, they will say sell features, sell benefits, sell benefits, not features. But nobody does it. Sure. You can look at Palms launch web OS with a vampire lady talking about the flow of her day. You can look at that. But Samsung says we have this phone. It does this thing for you. And at Radio City Music Hall, that was a lot of what they were showing off. They did a really bad job in terms of being cheesy, but they did a really good job of showing you why these features matter, how you would use them, why someone might want them. Yeah, and so one of the things people talked about a lot after that event were that Samsung is kind of mimicking Apple's TikTok strategy, where they have this big, the GS3 was like this big innovative thing with a lot of new hardware and software, and this was more of an iterative upgrade. Well, so is the GS3 from the GS2. You think so? I do. And the GS2 from the original Samsung Galaxy. Okay. I mean, the design, this is not a Galaxy S4. This is a Galaxy S3. But if I just show this to you, you might think that it is because the screen's a little bigger. I mean, it's the same plastic design. But the GS3 hit a level of popularity that the GS2 didn't ever reach. I could be wrong about that, but it seems to me that it kind of vaunted Samsung into a whole different level of fame. If it's just kind of an iterative upgrade, how did it get there? Well, it got there from the factors I was talking about earlier, that it had the brightest displays earlier, that it had that advertising campaign that gave consumers permission to ask for one, and they literally did. If you spend time at retail, you will see consumers walking into the store, and they don't say, can you show me what your best Android phone is, or can you help me decide which Android phone to get? They walk in, they're saying, I want a Galaxy S. Can HTC and Sony and Nokia and LG and whoever else catch up? I mean, we think sort of objectively they're making a lot of better hardware and some smarter decisions with software, but it still seems like it's Samsung's market to lose. So how does HTC, for instance, catch Samsung? And then on the flip side, has Samsung caught Apple? Everybody seems to say, Samsung is killing Apple, and Apple's going away, and we're sounding these death tolls. Is that happening? And is that even a thing? Will one kill the other? So let's do the iPhone versus Galaxy fight first. There's room in the market for both. They have different areas where one is significantly better than the other. If you want a really large display, if you want certain Google services baked in, if you want to do those things you see in the ads, you'll notice that Samsung specifically calls out things that it does that are fairly unique than the Galaxy S3, or if you want to take a photo of your kids with yourself in it, which I think is the flagship feature of the Galaxy S4. I talked about that a lot. It is a great feature. I want that feature. I think that's a great feature. I want to do that. Then yes, the Galaxy S3, or in this case the Galaxy S4, may be a better phone for you if you want better access to content, if you want a greatly simplified user experience, plus all of the great apps, and in many cases great-er apps or higher quality apps that you find on iOS, then you're going to be very happy with an iPhone 5 or whatever is next. Samsung is still doing Tizen. They're getting into watches. They're doing wearables. Samsung still wants to blanket the market with every possible option. Is that good for Samsung? Is that good for the GS4? How does it fit in here? Samsung has the resources that many of its competitors don't to follow blind alleys and see if they actually go somewhere. Tizen seems like a blind alley. It does to me. At least right now. The other aspect of that though is there is, we've talked about Apple versus Samsung, and that's probably the reason that Samsung didn't mention the word Android more than once in its presentation because they're really positioning the Galaxy S4 against Apple, not against other... Samsung feels like it won Android. It feels like it does. It does. But with great power comes great responsibility or with great power comes great conflict within Google. Some of the things that Samsung has invested in are aimed at maintaining a balanced relationship with Google. Some of it may be simple negotiating techniques. Give me a higher cut on search revenue or don't give Motorola early access to Android because that would hurt me. If they do that, then I could fork. I Samsung could go off and build my own version. And Google has to listen because Samsung is Samsung. So there's a lot of those interplay elements. When you look outside of that, so that's one of the reasons why Samsung is investing in so many of these other areas. But when you look outside of that in terms of watches and wearables and things like that, that's simply expanding the ecosystem. I think we're going to see a lot of that innovation. Sometimes it makes more sense to put NFC on your wrist than it does to have it in the phone for personal identification for retail, for collecting data from your wrist, for presenting data from the phone to your wrist or to your eyes. So we're going to see more innovation in wearables regardless. So Samsung's going to make Google Glass competitors, is what you're saying. We'll see. And then probably take over the market with it and we'll be right back where we were in like four years. I don't know. But that's definitely something to watch for in terms of, pun not really intended. But we will see glasses and watches and pacemakers and embedded tattoos. This is looking out a bit. But yeah, I do think that we're going to see a lot of innovation outside of the phone itself. And Samsung is definitely going to want to participate there. And Google likes to drive some of that innovation. And there's no question that Apple is going to be a big part of that too. All right. Awesome. Avi, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. We'll have you back to talk more about S Glass whenever it comes out. And that's our show. Thank you so much for watching. Thanks to Avi Greengart for being here. Thanks to Cyril from Feedly and of course, Thomas Huston and Evan Rogers. Be sure to check out all this and more on TheVerge.com. Thank you again for watching and we'll see you next week.