"press: here" is sponsored in part by -- this week, a pop singer tries his hand at high tech, a san francisco start-up tries to introduce new products without angering early adopters, and game developers try to tone down a game with a sexy history. our reporters and business insiders this week on "press: here." good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. you wouldn't think that steve jobs could disappoint any apple fans. but he did. that just shortly after the introduction of the first i phenomenon. he lowered the price. that sounds crazy now, but the i

phenomenon didn't sell very well, so apple lowered the price and that enraged the phone's early adopters, who were apple's biggest fans. early adopters are incredibly supportive and incredibly critical if you make them feel they bought too early. i was giving this thought when one of the start-ups i like, eero, announced a better version of its first product. it's easy to use wi-fi system for your house. i asked the founder, dick weaver, to come back on the show and talk about that moment when version one of a product becomes version two. troy wolferton with us and cnet. you'll fight me this is not version two. can we for the purpose of short hand say version two? >> that's totally fine. >> fair enough. you made one of the wi-fi units smaller. it no longer has a cord that pets will chew through, et cetera. >> yep. >> first of all, did you have that idea back when you released

version one? >> yeah, so we've explored lots of form factors for the product but one thing we do a lot is look at how are people using it, what data can we collect to improve product experience. one thing we found with our first gen product was over half of them were plucked into kitchens, stairwells, hallways, basically places you don't want cords. we took everything back to the drawing board to try to fit the same high performance product into a unit half the size. >> and did you get pushback from people who said, come on, it's smaller, easier to use, and i can plug it directly into the wall but i bought your first version? >> to be honest, something you think about while you're delivering any product, it's not feedback we of had much from our customers. most people were just excited to see continued innovation. one thing we do that's really important is we run one operating system across all of our products so all the new software features we rolled into the second generation product are also backwards compatible with our first generation

product. so it's all about keeping, you know, consistent software across all the products. >> i think your analogy to apple is a good one when it comes to eero because what you did far lot of people was make a router, which is not a piece of equipment but a lot of people say, oh, wow, look at my router in my living room, but you made it pretty, but it was also pricey compared to other things on the market, and those people who wanted it early on, you know, are the kind of'inger early adopters who want to give feedback, want to be seen as on the cutting edge, which for apple is about to do with this iphone x or 10, depend hough you pronounce it. you were going to use a lot of that data to it rate early on because that seemed to be your strategy. >> yeah. you know, we think about it as the same chip from the feature phone to smartphone too. part of this is your internet connection increasing in speed dramatically and so you go from having one router in the corner of your home to now you have to

have multiple pieces of equipment which just because you have more units it will be more exopinionsive. we anted to get to market quickly, get the software up and running, see how it performs in the real world, take all that data and reinform this next generation of products and we'll keep doing that over and over. >> since you launched your product there's been a slew of competitive products that have come out, net hero introduced its own multiple router system. how much of this new system is in response to what the competition doing and how much of is it you saying what the shortcomings were of your first generation product and what you improved? >> the time lines for product development particularly with hardware, you know, you're talking 12, 18 months so, a lot of the work that we put into our second generation system was already up and running before anyone else had a product in the market. and that was -- you know, that's why we wanted to get to market quickly, be the market leader, create the category, because it allows us to get more data about how it's performing, how people

are using it, what you test your hie appomattox seize and go really fast in the direction of your new product. >> give me an example of something you can learn from data that would help with a future version or say we know something that the other guys don't? >> yeah. so one is looking at what types of devices are connected to networks. we never look at where people are going on the internet, we don't want to know that information, but we capture diagnostic information like how well iphones roam, how quickly devices join the network, and so when you're revving the software, how powerful to do we need these radios to be, what other features to-do we want to put in the networking stack, you look at how devices are using the network and have that inform your product roadmap. >> what was the biggest surprise that you learned? >> i think, you know, one of them was just how quickly people went from having wired homes to wireless homes. so because we made this mesh technology really scaleable and

fast, a lot of you are customers have ethernet in their walls but they use eero wirelessly because it's easier to set up, they didn't have to deal with it, and they wanted it faster. >> in terms of the idea of po po trenchly upsetting your initial customers, any backwards compatibility? if i have an older system can i use the new pods with my older system? >> yeah. it's all backwards compatible. they all fit together seamlessly. if you have a gen one system, you want to add a beacon, add it, it will add automatically to your system. if you want the gen two, plug it in, you can do that just as easily noop you talked about creating the category. jeffrey moore talks about crossing the campaign finance reform between the first early adopters and then the next early majority. where is the whole category in this? because i have it, and i love it to death, but i think most people don't know what the mesh network for a home even is. so are you past that early

adopter stage? >> you know, from the data we've seen, sales data, how the category's doing, if you looked at the beginning of 2016, so no products on the market, zero percent of the home networking category was home wi-fi systems, by the time we hit the holidays last year, 30% of sales in terms of dollars spent were on wi-fi systems. >> mesh wye pie phi, the entire house. >> exactly. if you look at the category coming into this holiday season it will be over 50% of home networking dollars spent will be in systems like ours. >> one of the things i think is driving it, you had some tv ads, which i think is fairly unusual for high tech these days. normally you learn it on kickstarter or something from your facebook feed. what was your return -- i'm asking obviously selfishly, but what was your return on investment on that? >> we started these ads four or five weeks ago, so with tv it's really hard to calculate the roi. it's a lagging indicator. we'll know more this year.

but an ek dottily we of soon huge spikes in traffic to our store, a lot more vizs to the category and retail locations so what we found is, you know, people want to fix connectivity in their homes because it runs everything, runs our streaming videos, it runs these voice assistants that people are putting everywhere. it runs every experience. so there's a lot of interest in the category, how to make sure your internet connection works like you're running water and power. >> i started this conversation with moving from one to two. any hints on version three or when we might see a version three? >> our team's always working on new products and new experiences. nothing specifically coming out. >> i knew you couldn't answer that question.

welcome back to "press: here." one of the industries we haven't talked about in a while is the video game industry. one of san francisco's earliest high-tech industries. this is a look inside crystal dynamics as programmers work. one of theirs be nontitlknown ts is tomb raider. one of the few to put women at the center of the action, protagonist, laura croft. the tomb raider series is one of

the most successful in history. what you're seeing here is the latest version of the game. now, laura croft has been around since the' 90s and she has come a long way. early versions of her character were able to attract young men's interests in ways that i think are fairly obvious. this is 1996, primitive graphics appealing to primitive instincts. this is how you sold video games in the 1990s. rich briggs is now in charge of laura's look. he and her marketing. call him lara's agent. the director at crystal dynamics. thanks for being with us. >> thanks for having me. >> fair that you're lara's agent? >> a good way of putting it. >> i wrote down this terrible premise so, horrible. whala ra croft's evolution can tell us about the state of equality in the real world i know it's horrible, but it's something i do want to talk about, this amazing transformation from this busty video game player, who was a heroine in her own right in the 1990s, to a sophisticated video

game character now. i realize your company was not responsible for the original lara croft, but when you got it, you got quite a history. >> absolutely. and that's one of the things that is tho -- so exciting about crystal dynamics. and right now we're looking at our 25th anniversary as a developer, and as we look back, we realize that it was such an honor to inherit an icon of the gaming industry, but i'm really proud of what we were able to accomplish because we took lara croft and retained what made her special, the fact that she's a brilliant archaeologist, the fact that she is, you know, in fast-paced combat, the tombs of course, the way she moves around the environment. but we also brought her into this modern very grounded survival action world, and we made it about her intelligence, her skill, her will, the fact that she will push herself beyond physical and mental boundaries that would make other people stop for what she thinks is right. this is what i think makes her so special.

the fact we're able to tell her origin this way as an inexpoorned young woman before she became this big adventurer and the fact it's been absolutely embraced by millions of gamers around the world, i think that does say something. proud to be able to work on a franchise like that. >> is it really so much the evolution, though, of lara croft or the people making the game? >> i think a little bit of both. again, bringing her into a very grounded world was something that i think was needed and people wanted to see. you always love to see how did your heroes get their start and so when we looked at how would we reboot such an iconic franchise, there was a lot that we took into consideration but at the end of the day, we realized going back and telling laura croft's origin story, what was she like when she was just trying to make her mark in the world. >> i think to your point, also, but in 1996 young men were by far the biggest gamers and i suppose in some ways they still are. but i play video games and i'm

just about to be 50. >> i play video games as well. >> women play video games. the you count in some of the app games and stuff, more women play video games than men according to the international -- what is it, entertainment software association, something like that. >> absolutely. and even on console we find roughly 40% of our audience is female so, the fact that laura croft in the current vision has been embraced by so many gamers around the world, both male and female, as a great way to represent a female character in a game i think is very encouraging. i think it is the character evolving, gamers' tastes evolving and the people making those games evolving as well. >> what was the team like that helped you reinvent what she looked like and what she wears and the size of her hips and waist? >> it's a wide variety of people. there are artists that are designing what would a new look and feel be, you know, what would be a realistic way of what a tomb raider would go into these adventurers wearing. we have narrative pool who say

how do we actually try and bring out the most relatable character in gaming? we have designers saying, what are moves that look like, combat engineers, how does she move away from the twin pistols to the bow and arrow? so all these people work together to come up with what that new look is. >> and a diverse team of people? >> absolutely, very diverse. >> while i'd like to embrace this notion we're all becoming more enlightened, it's well-known that there is a very conservative element in gaming to say the least, and some reactionary people in the gaming community. what kind of pushback if any have you gotten on the new look? >> well, we always have our fans that say, hey, you guys are not doing enough to raider in the tomb raider games. but what's really encouraging is whenever we see that online in our group, we see just as many fans jumping in to our rescue where we don't have to say anything, where they're saying, get with the program, this is where gaming is going, this is

how people can be represented in a realistic setting. so yes, there's always going to be people that are -- don't like what you're doing and most of the time the online show voe cal minority will be the ones yelling the loudest, but i think the fact we of won awards for our writing, you know, the fact that we are held up as standard for how females can be represented in gaming and the fact that we have so many people writing us letters. you know, for every one person that says they don't like where we've taken lara, we'll have ten that will send us a note saying thank you, either her mantra of just keep moving forward or do what's right is what got me through a hard time in my own life. >> you speak about the evolution of gaming. we just saw a.r., a lot of it, now that the ios 11 is out and people are playing with that, and virtual reality. the one thing i'm not convinced about with virtual rae reality, when i play xbox i flop on the couch and hold the controller and this is as much notion as i have. that's recreation to me, relaxation. what i do not want to do is put on a suit of armor and dance

around the living room, right? i'm not convinced that vr is necessarily -- but what are you doing -- you've been doing this 25 years. what are you looking ahead to in video games? >> i think that vr is incredibly exciting and it's all about the level of engagement that you want. i of had vr experiences where i can just sit on a couch and it's less about getting up and moving around -- >> i'll play that one. >> duck and cover. right. more about immersing myself in the world. with rise of the tomb raider we had a mode it was more of an exploration, slower pace, you're moving around lara's manor, solving puzzles, learning about her history, and we're always trying to -- >> but do you have a team working on vr saying oh my gosh, this is future, or are you still sort of in the we'll see? >> we are in the let's look at the technology, let's explore it, get familiar with it because we absolutely do think it is where the industry is heading. inside and outside of gaming the applications are staggering. and so when you think about the

things that are going to hold it back and where it's eventually going to g, eventually there will be that tipping point and we need to be on the cutting edge. >> i'll hog the last question. one other one. san francisco has been making video games i mean vega and is do and all kinds of things. now we don't think of necessarily video games. are you able to recruit the same sort of people, people who are looking at other companies that made their preipo. are you still able to recruit? >> absolutely. it's e lsz about the specific role and more about the shared passion. at crystal we are all about looking forward, trying to use the best technology, being on the cutting edge, but creating highly engaging experiences for our fans. the people that come there say i'm a coder, artist, but i want to build an amazing interactive experience. >> we appreciate you being with us. >> thank you. >> up next, a pop singer tries his hand at entrepreneurship when "press: here" continues. after a winter washout- we

examine the effort to prepare your roads. marcus and - )define lifetime." one man tells our consumer investigator - he (thought his vehicle was under warranty. he thought wrong. laura the lesson we all can learn. gfx ♪ everything i pulled you through i know that you ♪ welcome back to "press: here." pop singer michael has toured with 'nsync and britney spears but has found a new career as an app developer. his company emoji offer asset of

emo emoji-like icons, add your chat app, some are silly, some are corporate, icons from starbucks or the latest movie like "it," send it to a friend and say, hey, we should totally see this movie and your friend can see the trailer and even buy a ticket. michael has said in the past his emojis have 100% quick-through rate. thanks for being here. what led you to g from music to high-tech and app development? >> i get asked that all the time pip think it was a little bit of both, necessity in life because sometimes your career goes a certain path and you get to a certain point and you want to do other things, expand -- >> could have been a doctor. a mad scientist. decided to be an app developer. >> i noticed a lot of the synergies between, you know, what's been going on in tech and the fact you're bringing content to people on devices that are able to bring media. so it was a pretty seamless move for myself because i had been very active and involved in my

music career. i was a part of all my deals, a part of all my licensing and contracts, i understood the mechanics of bringing content to a media like an app or like a person's phone. and so because of, that i was able to sort of parlay a lot of relationships i had and use the environment and make that viable. >> what's your favorite app? >> wow. theiss a tough question. >> obviously you spend a lot of time using your phone. there's text messaging apps. you must have an app that inspired you. i want to do this as well. >> i think right now my favorite app is tan go because that's where we are. >> this is a chat app. that brings up -- there's tango and a number of them i was trying out with your emojis to send people these emojis. and they have millions of users. it's not some obscure -- did you know tango existed in sn are you coolinger than me? >> i didn't know millions of people and there was a

click-through rate. >> i remember the first time i used tango and it was a long time ago when messaging apps got started and i liked it because it had messaging and i know i could message from the new apps to another country for free and i liked the video calling. they were some of the first to have that. then they took on a huge investment and they sort of expanded but i didn't realize myself they had 400 million users. then as you're starting a business like we started and looking at who the viable places are for you to place your technology and see, wow, tango has become something meaningful, and a lot of people in this country know it and a lot don't, and factors on ios and who's on android, discrepancy -- >> and tango or -- >> more so, i think the apps with the messaging tend to lean a little more android because that's the marketplace and the marketplace is socioeconomically driven and those people are benefitting from the free features that they offer. >> did off background in software coding or programming

before you -- >> absolutely not. i don't know anything about it. i've got an little more versed in it now and i try to understand as much as i can, but, you know, i definitely am an entrepreneur and i understand what i'm good at and what i'm not, and i am not a coder. >> what are you good at? >> not much. >> right, right. and ceo of the company, what to you bring to the company? >> well, i think i definitely -- vision. i think we certainly came up with this idea, you know, back when people were still wondering if emojis were even going to be something. was it something beyond just cute expression, something beyond just sending somebody a heart or the poop emoji. what does that really mean? and that was almost four years ago. whatsapp had not yet been bought by facebook for $20 million and people weren't calling message what they're calling it today, social. and more time is spent on that and i think what i bring to this company is the idea of where this can go, where we started from, and at the same time, i

think that it does take a special ingredient in your group. this can't just be a text play because we're dealing with media and we're dealing with technology, dealing with aps and licensing, dealing with commerce and all those things. and i find myself in a unique position sh i think, in my life and experiences to lead that sort of a team. >> do you overuse one of the emojis? >> well, that's interesting. i don't, actually. i use them all evenly. >> we love all of your emojis evenly. when the company first started you were saying 100% click-through rate. >> every single time. >> it is amazing because you do see the trailer. there's so much more functionality. >> it makes sense on a behavioral -- basically what happens is when we started this company there was 98% of all text messages are open within three minutes of receipt and the people -- 98% of people have

their phone within seven feet of them 24 hours a day. >> when i get something odd like an emoji or something i haven't seen before, i do trust it in a way that i wouldn't if it came over e-mail. connie sent it to me, it must be something -- it will be a safe click. >> think of hit the way. we're tapping into a different social graph. long gone are the days of wishing somebody a happy birthday on facebook you've never met before or congratulating someone on linkedin for a job that you don't know. we're topping into the top ten people in your phone, who you're text, your mom, dad, wrother, wife, girlfriend. have you ever ignored a text message from one of those people? >> never have. >>? someone says you should see this or i got you a coffee, you don't blow ta off. >> michael, ten seconds. the most important question. more fun to tour with britney spears or 'nsync? >> i didn't think you were going there.

i love them both equally. >> of course you do. out of time. be back in a moment.

thank to my guests. we are available as a podcast and online at presshere.com. we talked about jeffrey moore about crossing the chasm. we have a fascinating interview with him. highly recommend it. i'm scott mcgrew. thanks for making us a part of your sunday.

. new york city. from the big productions on broadway to big business on wall street, expectations in the big april apple are really simple. this week across the river they'll get it. set to welcome the greatest golfers in the world n the shadow of this enduring symbol of freedom, so much of what is good about sports should be on display. the united states against the internationals in the 12th edition of the