Mobile Dev Memo Podcast

Julian Togelius, NYU professor and director of the Game Innovation Lab, explores AI for games and games for AI. He discusses why games are perfect AI sandboxes. He weighs generative tools, consumer backlash, and faster production. He imagines infinite, procedurally generated worlds and how designers shift toward system architecture and human-in-the-loop pipelines.

Philip Black, game economist and consultant who worked at Scopely, DICE, and Amazon Games, joins to map the modern mobile gaming economy. Conversation jumps from why puzzle and 4X now dominate to how hyper-casual mechanics feed deeper loops. They explore AI-driven personalization, Android vs iOS install gates, direct-to-consumer web shops, and emerging monetization like warbonds and sampling-based event boxes.

Andrew Lipsman, independent analyst of retail media and e-commerce, breaks down agentic commerce’s shift from autonomous AI to AI-assisted shopping. He discusses why instant checkout experiments flopped, why retail platforms like Amazon gain AI utility, the improbability of western super apps, and rising opportunities in performance TV and in-store digital retail media.

A deep dive into how AI could dismantle old rules of market concentration and make niche products viable. Discussion of personalized storefronts, dynamic merchandising, and AI-driven matching that helps tiny audiences find tailored goods. Exploration of how better discovery and coordination could expand variety, spark new supply, and turn commerce into a tool for self-expression.

Dan Taylor, VP in Google’s global advertising business with ~20 years at the company, discusses how generative AI is reshaping search and ad tech. Conversational, longer searches change attribution and ranking. LLM-based ad ranking can cut irrelevant ads and open new monetization moments. Automation, Direct Offers, and universal commerce protocols point toward AI-driven checkout and ad experiences.

Ben Sperry, a senior scholar at the International Center for Law and Economics who studies Section 230 and platform regulation. They discuss recent jury rulings reframing liability as product design, how that could force age‑gating and redesigns, risks of collateral censorship and punitive damages, potential spillover to streaming and search, and how LLMs might be treated under speech laws.

A defense of personalization and advertising as engines of expressive commerce in an AI-driven economy. It explores how AI could free people from tedium while preserving shopping as personal expression. The talk critiques autonomous purchasing agents, revisits classical economic ideas about market signals, and explains why advertising better supports diverse products and platform incentives.

Felix The, SVP of Product and Engineering at Unity who leads ads, ML and runtime data efforts, explains Vector as Unity's ML-powered growth platform. He discusses integrating engine runtime signals for better predictions. They cover unified large models, generative creative exploration, personalized micro-cohort creatives, and using playables to de-risk soft launches.

Christina Augustine, COO at Bloomreach and former software engineer, leads AI-enabled personalization and agentic commerce. She traces the move from predictive models to generative agents. Short takes cover real-time one-to-one personalization vs cohorts, channel trade-offs like SMS versus email, data quality as the main bottleneck, conversational shopping benefits, and the rise of agent-to-agent personalization.

Michael Komasinski, CEO of Criteo, leads the company through commerce and adtech innovations. He explores agentic commerce and Criteo’s role as a commerce intelligence layer for AI assistants. They compare recommendation systems to large language models, discuss the OpenAI advertising partnership, Criteo GO self-serve ads, and how recommendation tech reshapes product discovery and retail integrations.