What is Samsung doing in Silicon Valley?

On the Day 1 of the CES 2014, Samsung West Forum was held at the Venetian Hotel at Las Vegas. Samsung West Forum was a media roundtable on the sidelines of CES 2014 with journalists from various media channels to discuss Samsung’s investments and developments mostly on the software front, specifically from the perspective of three Samsung organizations based in Silicon Valley: Open Innovation Center (OIC), Media Solutions Center America (MSCA) and Samsung Design America (SDA). Here is what they are and how they are making their marks in Silicon Valley.

Open Innovation Center

Samsung’s Open Innovation Center drives software innovation by supporting startups and entrepreneurs through partnerships, acquisitions, early stage investments and building its own products through the Samsung Accelerator.

Media Solutions Center America

Samsung’s Media Solutions Center America is a Silicon Valley-based Samsung organization with a simple mission: to foster software platform innovation. MSCA focuses on two important priorities: Content Services and Developer Engagement.

Samsung Design America

Samsung Design America is an end-to-end product studio. SDA combine and integrate strategy, user experience, design, prototyping, and engineering. SDA work in multidisciplinary teams and our charter is to define what is next. SDA create new product categories and push boundaries.

Innovating in Silicon Valley

Regardless of people’s perspectives on innovation, one thing is true. Samsung has shown people things that they never have seen before. Bendable TV and Samsung Smart Home at the CES 2014 are just the few examples of that.

OIC’s ultimate goal is to capitalize on Samsung’s global footprint and scale to create products that connect all of Samsung devices and eventually building one of the world’s largest platforms for delivering content, apps, services and even advertising. The kind of pride or belief system they work with is very entrepreneur-like, which is very Valley minded. In fact, Samsung Design America is staffed with some of the greatest thinkers in the Bay Area in terms of services.

Samsung has been very supportive of this professionalism and passion of the Samsung’s divisions in Silicon Valley in the human resources and research and development, especially in the software area. For example, Samsung has over 65,000 employees in R&D, and over 35,000 of them are involved in software. For outside developers, Samsung has established innovation centers at the heart of software innovation in Silicon Valley and are providing the tools, funding and guidance required for them to create differentiated experiences on our products. In fact, Samsung has been in the valley for decades, including R&D centers for nearly 30 years.

As part of the result of its aggressive investment in R&D and talents, Samsung has able to deliver a rich history of innovation. For example, from beginning with semiconductors in 1970s to televisions in the 90s & 00s and most recently mobile phones, Samsung became the number 1 brand in those specific areas. Samsung also developed the first digital TV in 1998, first Blu-ray player in 2006 and the slimmest LED TV in 2010.

In the company’s early history our passion for innovation was focused on hardware and components, but over many years as technology has evolved, Samsung has also been evolving and investing more in software and design innovation

Media Solutions Center America has developed two of the most popular Samsung apps: Samsung WatchOn and Samsung Hub. Samsung WatchOn is a mobile app used by several million users for searching and playing contents from top providers on mobile devices and your Smart TV, which also functions as a smart remote control for any TV. Samsung Hub is a digital storefront for music, TV shows/movies, books, games, and more on your Samsung mobile device. Moreover, nearly 20 apps for Galaxy Gear and with Flipboard on Galaxy Note 3 and S4 were result of OIC driving innovation through various partnerships.

Combining the innovative technology of hardware and software has been very positive so far. For example, these kind of collaborations among OIC, MSCA and SDA in Silicon Valley (and the HQ) helped Samsung to ship 400 million mobile phones and 53 million TVs (nearly 2 per second) in 2012.

So what is the future of the Samsung West?

The Samsung’s divisions in Silicon Valley says that they will continue to grow their portfolio of content services in the entertainment and lifestyle categories in addition to working with developers to build great apps for Samsung devices. They also understand that they are uniquely positioned to push the boundaries because Samsung is the display company, the component maker, the first touch experience. However, most importantly, they want to create products that offer meaning experiences to our users, so they will continue to develop products that enable people to use technology in new ways, enable them to connect with the world around us in new ways.