I will never forget the day my younger brother Samuel came over to cook for me  when I was studying for finals. He said, I can't believe it, your diet consists of  noodles with more noodles. You know that actually cooking is not half as hard as what most people think. With the right ingredients, it becomes fun and super  easy. And he was right, the more I cook, and even with simple ingredients, the  easier it gets, the more fun I have, and the more ideas I get for new dishes. He  was giving me great advice about my diet. Yet whenever something needed to  be fixed at his house, or whenever he had an idea to create a connected  doorbell or smart fridge. As an engineer, I was on his speed dial and I told him,  Sam, you know that engineering is not even half as hard as what most people  think. And that's when I realized and understood that engineering is exactly the  same thing as cooking the same way we've got at home the ingredients to cook  almost any dish, I decided to create a company after my younger brother and I  called it Sam labs. And at Sam we build little Sam's the ingredients behind any  hack app or product. Think of Sam's as the LEGO for the iPad generation. The  more you use them, the easier engineering gets, the more fun you have, and the more innovative your ideas become. Let's see how it works for kids playing  around their house to hack things together, or adults creating entirely new  products they need the right ingredients. And here I've got a very simple one. It's a SAM button. When I turn the button on, it appears immediately on the top left  of my interface. And see that when I drag it on, it automatically activates when I  press it between my fingers. You can see that on the software, it's immediately  pressed to create a light system. I turn on another ingredient, the SAM lamp,  once turned on, I can control my lamp with my button by connecting the dots on  my interface, and now, as if by magic, when I press the button, the light turns on  without any wiring or without any coding. I want to throw more ingredients into  my mix. I want to be using a little buzzer to create music and a vibration motor to do movement. Now, when I press my button, it all activates. I can start playing  music with my buzzer, or even change the color of the light in my lamp. Once  I've understood, basically, cook up anything together with the right ingredients. I  of course, want to go to the next level. I want to build a car, and this car should  be operateable from anywhere in the world. So I'm turning on my little motors,  and I want to be steering at first with a slider that I'll turn on, and my button will  operate the car, loading up my Batmobile on my interface, I'll now be able to  control the car and the motion of its motors from anywhere, and you can see it  moving this way. With the same ingredients, we created something entirely new.  But it doesn't stop there. Once I've understood this, I can go further. I want  anyone, anywhere in the world, to activate this car, and now I'm going to add  something else to my mix. How about Twitter as an ingredient, connecting  Twitter to my motors. I'll make sure that anyone can hashtag TED talks, and  once it's tweeted out, the car will start moving. And we'll see during the talk how  we'll actually move along. And there you go. Someone somewhere talked about 

this talk at home. I usually want to read and to do this, I've hacked together  something, the light that's sitting there. I want to make sure that I never waste  energy. And so creating a new project, I'm able to use a light sensor that's in my  hand, and that light sensor tells me how bright it is. Here, if it's a high number,  we're seeing 85 it means that it's very bright, but if I cover it up with my hand in  darkness, it gets to zero. I want to make sure that when it's bright outside, well,  my light dims down, but whenever it gets dark, it brightens up, so I don't lose  any eyesight. But also so I make sure that I don't waste energy. And now in  darkness, it gets bright, but whenever it's bright, it gets dark. The same thing  happened. We used the same ingredients in a very easy manner to bring ideas  to life. I think it's pretty easy to get an email, but I never get notified. Whenever I  get mail in the box. How about I turn on some ingredients in my mailbox. Here's  a few Sams, a light to notify me, a server motor inside and a sensor that can  sense a letter. Now, whenever I get a notification and the postman comes  through the door, we'll see what happens. You got mail that's pretty unique. How about adding my camera to the mix? That's actually pretty neat, and it could  serve for selfie. Well, for selfie, I need Twitter again, but a different kind of  Twitter. I want to push onto Twitter rather than receiving information from it. So  I'm adding my button, my camera and Twitter together, and now I'll just tweet  Sam lab says hi to Ted, talks, looking at myself, I look okay, there you go. Let's  see what happens. What we've actually done, we've brought the camera, the  internet and Twitter all in the same frame. It's amazing to see what people can  do with technology. It can go from my nephew who was interested in creating a  Batmobile that could drive around in the dark, and it gave an amazing effect. Of  course, we had to wrap everything up afterwards, which he wasn't happy about.  All the way to my friend who wanted to create a robot that could see who was  around and react accordingly. It was used by a fashion designer who wanted to  create a skirt that would move to the sound of music. I thought that was  gorgeous, all the way to his colleague who was more interested in something  else. I'm telling you, it's amazing to see what people do if you give them the right ingredients. I was really impressed when a granddaughter used Sam's to create  a smart pillbox to make sure that her granddad would take the right pills on  Friday and not Saturday and be notified if he did. I thought it was really cool  when her friend saw it and hacked her cushion together to notify her boyfriend  whenever she missed him. It was an entirely new way for the two of them to  communicate. I thought it was also pretty cool to see two parents create an  entirely new game around waking up making sure that their children would keep  score as to who was performing best and was the best behaved. I wouldn't have done too well in this game, and this one makes me really proud. This is when  Samuel used Sam he created his connected doorbell with the simple ingredients that actually he opened my eyes to seeing, and now I'm only on speed dial  whenever he wants to show me his latest inventions, his latest of which is a cat 

feeder to ensure that his cat never grows hungry. And I had no idea that they  actually liked almonds. The last thing you need when you're bold enough to  want to fix something around you and to want to build something that people  haven't thought about is to give up because you're not an expert. Well, with  Sam, you become the expert. You get the powers of engineering whenever you  get the idea. This is the beauty of giving the good ingredients to create to  anyone who would be cooks like myself and would be engineers like my  younger brother, Sam. Thank you. 



Last modified: Tuesday, July 8, 2025, 8:50 AM