>> live from pier three in san francisco, welcome to "bloomberg west," where we cover innovation, technology, and the future of business. i'm emily chang. mark zuckerberg wants you to try apps without fear. we will tell you why zuckerberg says that facebook's days of moving fast and breaking things are over. and my interview with twitter's ceo. while facebook and google are busy buying growing companies, the outlook for twitter and why there is a disconnect between twitter and wall street, with shares hitting their lowest level since the ipo. first, the top tech headlines.

john legere is said to be the leading candidate to become ceo of the combined company if sprint takes over t-mobile. that is according to a person with knowledge of the matter. sprint has been meeting with banks to make debt arrangements for a bit and is expected in june or july. more on this coming up. there is currently a ground stop at los angeles international airport due to computer issues. no word on what the issues are. arriving flights can still land, but all departures are being held on the ground. the lax twitter accounts as there is no estimate of when this will be fixed. fcc chairman tom wheeler said he has proposed rules to create internet fast lanes will not gut net neutrality. he promised to use every power at his disposal if somebody tries to divide the internet into haves and have-nots, after wheeler says he does not believe there is enough competition between broadband providers.

the lead story, move fast with stable infrastructure. facebook is trying to become an even bigger player in mobile. that is why today was all about monetizing mobile apps and making users feel more secure. an anonymous login feature lets users try apps without forking over personal information. take a listen. >> if people don't have the tools they need to feel comfortable using your apps, that's bad for them and you. it prevents people from having good personalized experiences and trying out new things, but it also might hurt you and prevent you from getting new potential customers. we need to do everything we can to put people first and give people the tools they need to be up to sign in and trust your apps.

>> zuckerberg announced plans to make facebook the cross-platform platform to allow apps to work across all devices. they also unveiled an audience network to help developers make more money. jon erlichman is at the san francisco design center. in studio with me is adam berke. he is a facebook ad exchange partner. we also have david kirkpatrick, author of "the facebook effect." david, you're at the event today. what do you make of all these announcements? >> in a way, they are trying to make themselves more boring, i would say. one of the things that mark put up at the early stages of the event and had behind the screen, talking about repeatedly, the idea of a stable mobile platform. it is a very unsexy idea but one that developers will welcome. there were scattered cheers for a number of things that ordinary people would think, why would

anybody cheer for that, because developers want customers, they want money from their apps, and they want to make it easier to build apps. facebook was building and monetizing apps and they had separate sections for each of those. while it was boring, it was a step forward to maturity for facebook. >> as a user, i will be one of the people to log in anonymously, but what does it mean for advertisers? do you guys get less information? >> probably not. what it probably means is that users can feel more comfortable logging into apps. while they may trust facebook, they may not trust every app they log into with using facebook credentials. that does not mean that facebook still does not have information about that person they can aggregate and target on across all of those apps using facebook connect.

from an advertiser perspective, it probably does not have a big impact except that facebook will not have people feeling more comfortable logging in more often. >> david mentioned there were scattered cheers. what is your assessment of the reaction from developers? how do they feel about this? >> to be clear, there's a difference in an audience at an event at something like this versus some ipo roadshow or an investor conference. i think there would have been some cheers from the wall street community for the business of facebook. the reality is that with facebook, they have had so much success with highly targeted ads that come through your feed when you are on your phone, they are able to generate a lot of advertising money from each of those ads. a lot of those ads get you to download an app. they hate when people complain about having too many ads in that experience, so this day is about reaching out to developers who also have ads in their apps and saying we want to partner with you and you make more money and we make more money. it is part of the business

growth strategy for facebook. if that means giving up some of the information they have through facebook logins to cover more territory, so be it. they are looking at this to really grow revenue. >> this gives facebook even more power as a middleman, as a gatekeeper. david, what do you think apple thinks of this, what do you think google thinks of this? >> mark specifically mentioned that apple and google are never going to do some the things they announced because a lot of what they did today was towards interoperability for people with google and android phones but may have an ipad or developers or trying to target people on a variety of platforms. what happened was in the web days, there were some basic things everybody could count on -- html, websites working the same no matter what platform you are on -- but the mobile web is completely different. there are barricades all over the place. facebook was essentially trying

to say, we're going to break down those barriers. ultimately, apple and google would probably prefer those barriers remain in place. they're probably not totally thrilled, but they would have never done this themselves. >> what about the audience network, this ad exchange. how does this look to you, how does this put facebook into the context of the biggest player in the room, which is google? >> to answer the second question first, i would say facebook is out in front of google on the ad products, particularly in the mobile realm? >> what about twitter? >> twitter is moving fast come up the scale and audience is not where facebook is. facebook is combining rapid innovation with a massive reach of users and they are becoming a massive juggernaut in the advertising space right now by combining a lot of aspects that marketers crave -- a legitimate mobile offering with scale and with great audience-targeting capabilities.

>> david, you are nodding? >> i think he's right. it's amazing to me that a 10-year-old company has achieved this kind of scale and can be as ambitious as they are being. they're really trying to do is bring order to the mobile space. that is a fairly big statement. they are also trying to extend internet connectivity to everyone on the planet with the internet.org initiative. mark zuckerberg thinks very big, and they now have the scale and financial resources and the technical talent to take on these mammoth projects. they have oculus virtual reality which they were frequently demonstrating today as a bet on the long-term future which in itself is also super ambitious. you have to be kind of agog at the sheer audacity of these people and their ability to continue delivering. >> one of the biggest problems

people have with facebook is privacy, our information. does the announcement go a decent way in terms of rebuilding user trust? >> well, we highlighted earlier today that when mark zuckerberg first spoke, he mentioned some of the most popular ios apps as part of the world of apple use facebook logins, and he went on to talk about having this anonymous feature is important because people are not always comfortable with sharing information. in some of the discussions we have had with developers, we anecdotally got to feel this comes up all the time -- people are not necessarily comfortable with using facebook login because of the information they might be sharing. it does seem if you're trying to get more developers on your team, that is the card to play. >> you are anonymous to the third party, but not to facebook. facebook still knows what you are doing full stop image, you

are nodding. thank you all, jon erlichman at the conference, david kirkpatrick, and adam berke. still ahead, how will facebook actually make money from its new mobile ad network? we will hear from a company who works with app developers to make facebook ads. watch us streaming on your phone, tablet, bloomberg.com, apple tv, and amazon fire streaming tv. ♪

>> i'm emily chang. this is "bloomberg west." mark zuckerberg announcing new anonymous login options and more ways for developers to make money off of apps at the f8 developers conference. jon erlichman has been at the conference all day and joins us now. >> that's one of the headlines.

another headline is facebook is creating this ad network, getting into the same game as google and twitter. what does that mean? earlier, we spoke with someone who helps create ads for retailers. >> the ad network means that you can use all this data that facebook makes available for targeting on facebook. you can use that to target people in mobile apps off of facebook. if i am a game developer, if i'm the huffington post or a publisher, i don't need to know anything about my users. i don't need to collect all the demographic information from them. all of that data is available through facebook for advertisers to extend their facebook campaigns into those apps. >> this is a way for facebook to make more money, right? they have done pretty well with their own mobile ads. they don't want to clutter people's feeds. they want to limit the number of advertisers, but they want to

generate good money, so they extend with different partners, different app developers who have ads in their own apps and see if they can both make money from the experience. is that basically it? >> it is absolutely a way for facebook to make money. facebook has been killing it with their ads the last 2 years. they have all of this experience targeting, but then you run out of inventory. people like us that social wire will find these great ads and great audience and great match, and then we run out of inventory. this solves a huge problem for advertisers. it makes facebook more money and it makes developers more money. >> one of the things mark zuckerberg said today as about the popular ios apps, people are using facebook logins, which allows people to stay connected with these various apps, but they are also giving up some information potentially with these various apps when they log in through facebook by offering anonymous login.

what is the significance of that? >> with anonymous login, i feel like facebook is essentially saying, you know what, it's not important to us anymore that you pass all this data and information to the app. that all of the collected data, none of that stuff will be passed to the developers anymore. users want to login and test apps anonymously, i think will be hugely popular, but facebook is giving up all that control. what they're really saying is the value in having facebook in the app is moving more towards modernization. how are we helping u.s. developer monetize that app and grow that app, but facebook is giving up a lot of the control they thought they wanted to, three years ago. >> giving up control and a way to possibly get more control. one of the things they talked about today was the ability to jump from one app to another, stay inside the world of

facebook essentially with certain partners. what's the significance of that? >> applinks is huge, and everybody is working on it, google and facebook, and this is their solution. it's open, open source. i think it's a really interesting approach to it. we will see who ends up winning. it will be them, google, something. it's something that needs to happen. i think it's smart. i think it's smart of them. >> why does it need to happen? >> we work with a lot of e-commerce companies and the experience completely breaks down when you tap on a product and it takes you to the mobile web experience and you need to enter your credit card number or log in. it's broken. if they could deep-link you into an app where you have the credit card number already, will we have seen is that experience results in more purchases than

even a website experience. >> so, jon, let's talk more about applinks. some of the supporters are twitter and spotify, but google was not on that list. >> you are right about having a player like spotify, a longtime partner of facebook or dropbox. mentioned in that interview come everybody is working on this, including google. i think one of the new territories everybody knows there is a lot of money to make is tied with commerce. if that experience can be better, if you can go from one app to another and not have to enter credit card information, a lot of money could be made there. it is in everybody's interest to be working on their own version of this. emily? >> jon erlichman, senior west coast correspondent at f8 in san francisco, thank you. coming up, sprint is formally going to bid for t-mobile in june or july. we will talk about that next on "bloomberg west." ♪

>> welcome back. i'm emily chang. sprint plans to push forward with a bid for t-mobile u.s. the sprint's cfo met with six banks to ensure the lenders would be ready for financing when they decide to pursue the takeover. i spoke with john legere about his company's growth in the potential for a merger earlier this year. listen to what he said. >> the question has to be, how do you take the maverick and supercharge it?

we need more spectrum and capability, a lot more investment, but we need consolidations. there are a lot of paths to do this. i think you want to view what is happening in t-mobile and there are a lot of ways to do it. >> is there a chance that the merger happens and you don't have a job? >> listen, i'm so good at my job, i'm sort of like you. could you imagine if bloomberg would decide to do something as a company and leave cory in charge? >> that would never happen. >> right, i'm not worried about it. we will see what happens. i do what i do well. >> one of cory's all-time favorite quotes. jeff, first of all, you heard what john legere said. he is basically saying that the sprint ceo is a sitting duck. >> and that is part of the reporting today in an

interesting development, that the sprint side, they acknowledges or realizes if they do this deal, they will perhaps have to move dan hesse out or perhaps give him some other role. the ceo of t-mobile might wind up running things. >> at the same time, john legere, he has strong opinions, he is also very colorful, but he also bashes sprint on twitter all day long. how can he really make this work? >> we have seen this in other deals. companies will take potshots at each other, with various stock exchanges or consumer companies or health care companies. they will take potshots at each other. we saw when american airlines was being pursued by usair, the ceo's did not like each other, but at the end of the day they came together on a deal.

at the end of the day, it is how the regulators feel. in some ways, it feels like he is thumbing his nose by continuing to pursue this when they have had conversations where they have effectively told him, maybe not with perfect clarity, but they have effectively said we would rather you don't pursue this deal. we're going to look with great scrutiny at a deal where number three and number four come together, which is what would happen here. >> what makes him think this would be any different from at&t trying to take over t-mobile? >> there are a couple of things. there is the comcast deal going on, which you think might create a draft. american airlines, act out through one a lot of people assumed it wouldn't. i think he feels like there is more openness for big deals right now. also, the simple fact that at&t and verizon are so far ahead of number three and number four, he will argue they are just cutting other's throats right now. you have t-mobile cutting prices, which hurt sprint, sprint will eventually try to do

the same thing to hurt t-mobile and get customers back. the only way they could possibly compete he will argue is if they come together. >> you are saying, june, july, this is when the formal bid will happen. what happens then? >> the fcc is going to auction off some spectrum. that's a key. he wants to see how that plays out. sometime in late may, early june, he probably begins formal diligence with t-mobile, gets deutsche telekom to sign something, and they go into high-level, serious talks, talks that did it down into the nuance of this. perhaps they announce a deal in july time frame. have to get the financing lined up. that is what we were pivoting off today with the story, they are meeting with six banks to get the money together. >> all right, jeff mccracken of bloomberg news, thank you. perfect timing. tune in tomorrow on "bloomberg west," where i will be speaking with t-mobile ceo john legere himself. still ahead, twitter ceo dick costolo. can twitter really become mainstream?

dick costolo thinks it already is. he will tell us why, next. ♪

>> you're watching "bloomberg west," where we focus on technology and the future of business. i'm emily chang. twitter's future is bright according to twitter, but their stock is plunging. membership in the first quarter hit 255 million active users, but that growth slowed. stock at its lowest level since it began trading last november, despite strong revenue growth. earlier today i spoke with twitter ceo dick costolo. a lot of people are questioning whether twitter can never be mainstream.

he believes it already is mainstream. i asked him why. >> i think a lot of people think of twitter as the product or just the website, but the reality is twitter risen front of people around the world every day and constantly all over tv. i was watching the adam silver announcement yesterday, the nba commissioner, and there were tweets under the announcement. a couple of days after the oscars, over 3 billion views of tweets just about the oscars on twitter and all across the web. in print, on air, on the web, in mobile, it's already embedded into the fabric of the culture of not just the united states but the world. in that sense, i very much think of it as a mainstream platform. it's a durable and lasting platform upon which we can build

a great business. >> revenue story more than doubled year-over-year, revenue per user is up 75%, but investors and analysts are zeroing in on user growth, which slowed down year-over-year but reaccelerated sequentially. why do you think there is this disconnect between what you see as the products of twitter and wall street? >> i think two things. to answer the first comment about the financials, ultimately we will be judged on financial results. we are delighted in our first quarter financial results, particularly around revenue acceleration on top of the amazing q4. that was delightful. vis-à-vis what is happening inside of the company and the expectation, when we talked the day of our ipo, i told you we have a lot of work to do. what we know we have to do to take that mainstream understanding of twitter as part of the culture of the world and helping those people understand the value, the additional value

of logging into twitter and getting the additional benefit. we have a lot of work to do that we started on, and i love the progress we have made on there, and starting to show great results in q1, but it needs to continue the rest of the year, building on the things we have done to make it easier to use, to bridge the gap between engagement on twitter. >> i think if you took the name off of twitter off of the earnings report, would the response be different? >> in what way? >> the results are strong. why are they focused on this one number? >> i think it's incumbent on me as a ceo to help the rest of the world understand the value of the platform. we have a platform with billions of views about an event in 48 hours when you look at other mainstream platforms -- take youtube as an example, where the

bigger content networks get billions of views over the course of a month. when you look at the ad exchange, if you're never ties are income to the ad exchange, we can get your advertisement in front of over a billion ios and android users today. if you have a cell phone or smart phone in your pocket and you fire it up today, fire up an app, more than likely you will see a twitter ad. it's important for us to articulate how big the broader platform is and it is so much bigger than the website or application. >> you have made a lot of changes, revamped profile pages, i have actually liked it, the ability to pin tweets. i was a little apprehensive. when you change the product, you're always worried about how users will respond, those who are used to using it one way. i'm liking it. what else can you do? >> the kinds of things you just described, making twitter more visually engaging, helping people see the most valuable content on the page are exactly the kinds of things you just described.

the profile page, bringing that to the rest of the product, making it more visually engaging, pushing some of the language and scaffolding of twitter that is opaque to the new users, pushing that to the background, allowing users to mark tweets as highly significant in trying to get them in front of other people. the kinds of changes we are making that are showing great results, we need to thread those into the entirety of the product. and hopefully we will continue to see great results. >> how much product experimentation are you doing on a daily basis? i have heard google saying they are running thousands of search experiments every given day. how are you playing around with stuff? >> on our latest ios or android apps, there are well over 100 experiments running in each of

those, so several hundred. the beauty of that framework we have worked on over the past 18, 24 months is the speed with which it allows us to run more experiments and quickly get data from those experiments that we can compare to a controlled group and understand whether the experiment is working. the faster we move on those kinds of things, the faster we execute changes in the product and the service to the user. >> more of my interview with twitter ceo dick costolo coming up. watch us streaming on your phone, tablet, bloomberg.com, apple tv, and amazon fire streaming tv. ♪

>> welcome back. i'm emily chang. back to my interview with twitter ceo dick costolo. twitter recently coaxed the google maps director over to twitter. i asked him how he sees himself working together with the twitter coo and himself. >> daniel will be working with

me and ali on the consumer product. he was the director of product for google maps. i think we have a wonderful consumer product that has scale one both ios and the android platform. daniel, i love his entrepreneurial spirit that will amplify and to the consumer product. i think you will see daniel coming in and working with ali and i to really implement the product strategy we have laid out and bring the entrepreneurial spirit to the team and probably come up with a bunch of his own ideas that we will let him run with. >> when you talk about getting users more engaged, a lot of twitter is still one way communication. be fully engaged, you feel you have to tweet? >> the majority of active users on twitter tweet.

there have been some strange third party reports that have gotten that wrong. the majority of active users on twitter tweet. secondly, as we scale and grow, adding 14 million net a new users in the first quarter, it will likely be the case that more of those users will come to the platform and be just consumers. and that's fine. we make no distinction on active user perspective as to whether somebody does or does not tweet, nor do marketers. marketers want to make and reach active users, and it does not matter if they are consumers or producers. >> i have heard you call twitter the global town square, calling it a companion to what is happening in your world. others have said it is more like a democratized news wire. does it matter?

>> yes, the thing that i really like about the companion experience to what's happening in your world is it crisply articulates product and design teams what they should or should not be building in service to the vision of the product and our users. while i love the colloquial metaphor of the global town square and the visual that it creates for people and the metaphor that it creates for people, i don't think it is as good as informing the product and design team what they should build for the user. i think the companion experience to what is happening in your world is a more crisp definition of that. >> messaging apps are really hot right now. you mentioned you wanted to enhance the ability to move between private and public messaging. what do you mean by that? give us some color on what that would look like. >> when i talk about direct messaging within twitter and the work we will do to improve it, what i am talking about is

currently public conversations on twitter -- and twitter is entirely public conversations, therefore, only public conversations -- say you would like to grab hold of and take it into whisper mode with a friend and say, hey, this has happened, look what people are talking about, what do you think of this. being able to move fluidly but --between the public conversation and the private conversation is something we will make similar. >> in terms of the bigger picture, we know the class of 2013 tech stocks are being revalued. how much attention do you pay to the market environment, how much pressure do you feel? >> i would say the market environment is always in the periphery, yet we have a very specific way of thinking about the long-term plan for the company. it's about balancing investment in growth and operating leverage and operating efficiencies. making sure we are improving margins in an ever-increasing

drive to profitability and improving margins, balanced against reinvesting in growth. that combination of growth, operating efficiency, and operating leverage is how i think about how we will build the business and company will always of course paying attention to the market landscape. >> the facebook conference today, launching a mobile ad network, getting into video ads. how does this compare with twitter's offerings? >> our mobile in-app ad exchange, i guess the difference is we are already in the market with thousands of mobile apps, over one billion ios and android users. if you're an advertiser and you want to reach people on their smartphones today, you can come to us and we can get your ad in front of over a billion ios and android users today. >> more of my interview with twitter ceo dick costolo coming up, talking about the twitter tv efforts and the growing inequality debate here in san

francisco. ♪

>> i'm emily chang. this is "bloomberg west," on bloomberg television, streaming on your tablet, and bloomberg.com. twitter is bagging more of the coveted tv ad pie, but recently the head of nbc research said that social media is not driving tv viewership. i asked twitter ceo dick costolo how he makes sense of that. >> when we developed our tv strategy, it was a variety of data that we saw and experienced ourselves that helped us understand there was this complementary two-way relationship between twitter and tv.

by two-way, not only did twittered drive tune-ins, but tv was complementary to twitter. as we have invested in that strategy, there has been an ever-increasing and continued drumbeat of independent third-party research, fox, nielsen, and others, that has reinforced and validated that complementary two-way relationship, the nielsen study saying that there are three things correlated with ratings -- prior years' ratings, ads spent on the show, and twitter. that reinforcement we have seen in the market from these third parties and the additional and continued investment of our broadcast partners like nbc and new partners tell us we are on the right path. >> so it is way more than just buzz. >> we think so. >> you're saying facebook and google making big bets on the future, buying robot companies, drone companies, oculus. what is something that makes an engineer excited to work for twitter?

>> we are strengthening our core product. we are extremely focused on strengthening our core products of twitter and vine. most of the acquisitions we have made to date are about strengthening the core. that will continue to be the focus in the near-term. >> i have to ask about gentrification, being here in san francisco, a lot of the heat in the inequality debate directed at twitter. how much are you thinking about that and what can twitter do from a philanthropic perspective, given the uniqueness of the platform? >> yeah, so twitter started in the city. we have been a company that has been in the city since we were created. so many of our employees live in the city. it's super important to us. we have focused on it

significantly, we spend a lot of time as a company talking about it at the all hands meetings, and we have some very explicit, direct connections with community groups in the neighborhoods in which we operate. and we've got some really exciting announcements coming up about those relationships with the specific community groups that we are working directly in the neighborhood in which we work and live. so i'm looking forward to being able to talk more about those in the almost immediate future. >> twitter ceo dick costolo. now for some analysis of what he had to say about the first earnings report, i want to bring back bloomberg contributing editor david kirkpatrick. what was your take away? >> i think he is making a lot of very wise moves. he is absolutely right about twitter being mainstream. if twitter wasn't mainstream, the president of turkey may have not felt it necessary to turn it off. >> already mainstream? >> it is, with a caveat.

is it about tweeting or viewing? is it kind of like a tv tune-in network where you just sort of move between things, get links to things, or are you expected to contribute? i think they should go in that direction. they should really emphasize more to the users it's perfectly all right never to tweet, to use it as a tool for discovery. >> it seems to me that he thinks to be engaged you have to tweet. >> almost everybody tweets, which i was surprised he emphasized. i think people would be more comfortable using twitter in the mainstream if they do not feel like being on it they were expected to contribute. >> just consume. >> people like you and i are loudmouths, we like to talk and contribute, but ordinary people i think they want to communicate with friends and whisper things are a good way to do that, but i think they are not mainstream in that most twitter users are not

comfortable making a lot of noise on twitter. there's a little bit of a schizophrenia there i think. they are definitely here to stay. the other point, they are not a facebook-scale company. they don't have a facebook-scale opportunity because they don't have the targeting capabilities for advertising. i think they have suffered a lot from the comparisons with facebook. >> they ended the day down more than 8.5%, though the financial results were strong. are they held to an unfair standard, being compared with facebook? our investors and analysts expecting more than twitter can give? >> a lot of investors think of social as one big phenomenon and twitter and facebook are one facet of the same thing, which is a dangerous way to look at it. in fact, their valuation is, in my opinion, still a little pricey, considering the scale of their business.

>> while it is being revalued as we speak. >> it is. they are a good business, but not the kind of potential that facebook or google -- google has proven it, facebook is growing into it. i don't see twitter having that scale of opportunity. it doesn't mean they are not a great company with a lot of potential, but they have a high standard because they are thought of just like facebook. >> hang on, david, i want to bring in jon erlichman and the bwest byte. he is live at the f8 conference in san francisco. what is the number? >> 3 billion. $3 billion specifically. there is an analyst for suntrust who dared to put a number on what this new facebook ad network could mean in terms of revenue for facebook. this is a long-term, more of an exercise experiment type of forecast. he is suggesting by 2017,

reaching out to these developers, trying to get new ad money by having facebook or with those players could generate $3 billion of annual revenue for facebook. pretty big number. >> i wonder where these announcements today leave twitter. we were having the discussion with the ceo about growing the user story and the revenue story. where does this leave twitter? >> twitter did a smart thing buying mopub. i think if facebook can make $3 billion extra with the new mobile ad platform, i think twitter is also positioned to make a lot of money with their own mobile ad platform. the difference, again, is facebook has a more targetable capability because they know everything about all their users, whether they are going onto apps anonymously or not. again, facebook is more aggressively pioneering new technology than twitter. the other question to the twitter ceo is what are they

doing buying oculus? they don't have the luxury to do that. they are just trying to prove they are with the $20 billion, or whatever it is today. >> facebook was showing off oculus today. what did people think of seeing it in action? >> people thought it was cool. it is cool. facebook will do some moon shots, probably. seems like they are. google definitely will. it sounded like dick costolo said no moon shots that twitter, just focusing on the core. >> you tried oculus? >> i did. i thought it was extremely cool. i have never used it before, which i was embarrassed to admit, and it really is extraordinarily immersive. it's way down the road that it will make a difference for facebook, but it is cool. >> david kirkpatrick, jon erlichman, thank you all for watching this edition of "bloomberg west." we will see you tomorrow. ♪

>> in today's uncertain ec