emily: blackberry ceo john chen says the company is not for sale. he joins me to talk about the company's next act. i'm emily chang and this is "bloomberg west." coming up, snapchat turns head in the advertising agency. former paypal ceo will harris is here. what he sees in its future sever from ebay. and tech titans and rivals band together to form coding standards all machines can understand. blackberry's turnaround plan may be working.

sales fell 32% in the first quarter, but the big surprise is software revenue, jumping 153% to $137 million. the stock spiked on the news but fell, closing down 4%. here's the breakdown. that software number is more than double from a year ago. that's all part of john thain's plan to transition from a smartphone company to a software and services company. i spoke to him about his software success and whether blackberry will ever start -- stop making those crack berries. john: it is essentially doing quite steady. am i disappointed? i would love to see a good growth rate that it shows they have been very loyal.

feedback has been high. that means people like the phone. on that score, i am satisfied. on the score of growing, i am not entirely satisfied. i don't want to debate whether it is choppy or not, i think new design comes out, we will have a shot at building the business backed up. the most important thing right now is to make it profitable. emily: let's talk about the potential for blackberry to make an android phone. you say you will do it but only if it is secure. what sorts of steps have you taken toward this? what kinds of conversations are you having internally about whether this is the right step? john: when i first started at the company come about 18 months ago, it was important to know we

needed to build everything cross-platform. we studied our competitors and on the phone competition android was a big footprint. i think they have 83% of the handset market. we then put our software, our server software to make sure it could manage android devices. through that process, we learned quite a bit. it is still too early to tell whether we will make it secure or not. my answer to everyone pressing on this rumor reuters had put out, i don't want to speculate on rumors. but people ask me will you ever build one? i say if i can make it secure, i will, which is a true statement. we are looking at it, but i cannot say it is conclusive. emily: you also said today that you would consider the company only if it is doing well. what kinds of offers are you getting at the current price?

john: i'm not listening to any offers. emily: that's that. for more on his turnaround efforts, i want to ring in a senior tech analyst from ubs. what do you think of those comments about the android phone? guest: i'm indifferent to them getting into making android phones. we think they should get out of the devices is this over time. i prefer to see them evolve into a pure play software company. emily: i said that -- your as this would be less volatile, but he said he thinks there's a chance smartphones can be profitable for them. guest: my perspective is they have become a cross-platform management company, so they are managing google devices, apple devices, android devices, as well as blackberry devices.

devices are not an attractive part of the story. i would rather see them be a pure play software services company. i think it would make the company less volatile, so it's inherently a better business model. emily: let's talk about the software number. is it as good as it sounds? guest: this morning, we entitled the report "prove this skeptics wrong." i think it became apparent that a big chunk of that appears to be tied to a cross licensing set of agreements, one with cisco and one with another company. we estimate about $65 million to $70 million. john did say on the call that he felt the basis was up, so we're still waiting to touch base with the company. emily: do you think they can keep this up? guest: i think it would be a tough slog. what they did say is they are going to have additional licensing deals.

i think the number will be elevated this quarter. we think it comes down next quarter, but it has given the company some line of sight. emily: who are these companies still using blackberry? guest: some of them are health care companies, some of them are banks. i work at ubs and we still have a number of devices in our fleet. emily: if software is the new thing, who is the competition? guest: i think that remains to be seen. if i go back when they were eight cottage industry, all of these companies were acquired. today, the competition would be mobile iron, which is one of the pure play, standalone company, so you have these big enterprise titans they are going up against.

my perspective is if anyone is going to pull it off, it is john jen. one thing blackberry has going for them is a large installed base. if you get more fit into a management company across platforms, i think they have a shot at it. emily: thank you so much for joining us. we have some breaking news -- netflix reporting a seven for one stock split. the stock dividend will be payable on july 14. netflix returned 42% annually in the last five years. we will have more on the story as it develops. the name you need to know today is truffle pig. yes, truffle pig. it's the name of a new content marketing agency announced today. it brings together the world's largest ad agency and a social

media platform that boasts 2 billion video views a day. they will focus on brand sponsored social content and audience development. also announced today, a few updates from facebook -- they are refreshing the explorer section to focus on more live events in effort to compete with twitter and snapchat. they also previewed a number of ad formats. shares closed higher in today's trading. up next, i talked to the former paypal ceo about that company's future minus ebay. plus hillary clinton and bernie sanders are just a few of change.org's millions of users. how the platform could change the way people engage with politicians, next. ♪

emily: amazon is said to be the latest retailer to ban the confederate flag products from its online store after walmart sears and ebay said they would be pulling their merchandise. controversy over the flag has exploded after nine black worshipers were gunned down at a charleston south carolina church last week. now to ebay and paypal -- the impending split could happen any week now. dan shulman has said it could happen in the second half of this year. what are the challenges facing paypal as a standalone company? joining me to talk about that is

a former paypal ceo, bill harris. you are ceo before it was acquired by ebay. bill: back in the day was 15 years ago. emily: what advice do you have for dan shulman? bill: he has to maintain the company's relevance. it is a 15-year-old company now and many of the mechanisms he uses haven't changed that much in that intervening 15 years. emily: one of the things you said is that paypal is trying to be an alternative bank whereas apple, google and their wallet products are not. can you explain the significance question mark bill: apple, apple pay, google wallet, they are delivery mechanisms of a payment system such as a card to the merchants. paypal is essentially a

substitute for a card. paypal, ideally, would get into the ecosystem of apple pay and google wallet. in fact, they tried to do that. it was a big deal with apple pay and paypal and it all blew apart when paypal tried to do a simultaneous deal with samsung. emily: and the former head of paypal went on to facebook. can paypal succeed as a banking alternative? bill: it has so far. it's an alternative to using a credit card online. the question is can they go from online dominance, more than 100 million customers, and a huge reach. but they have struggled and so far failed to find the formula to move into mobile or retail. emily: and there's so much happening with apple wallet, google wallet, stripe on the backend. how does paypal succeed and how

well will paypal compete? bill: they are going to struggle because there's so much more momentum in the mobile and retail space from other players. and they are playing catch-up. they are spinning off now, which is a great thing and allows them to focus on this rapidly innovating field. but this is a long and complex process. it has been in the works for a while and it's really not going to see great results for six to 12 months. there are huge challenges. emily: how big do you think the company can be? work it cap? bill: i do want to forecast

that, but i think they're going to have real difficulty with growth. if you look at the innovation happening in the business, there are so many new entrants doing things in new and better ways, paypal has focused on acquisitions in order to get their innovations. emily: i want to talk to you about personal capital. you focus on personal finance and just launched a new retirement calculator. i wonder how retirement planning has changed with tech tools? bill: it has changed dramatically. so few people feel prepared -- we just did a harris poll and the majority of people in this country do not feel prepared for retirement. only 14%, even know how much they need to retire. it has traditionally been a cumbersome and difficult to assess.

what technology is allowing us to do is make the process simple and easy. emily: and yet there has been a lack of innovation in the financial industry to adapt new technology. bill: it is a slow-moving industry. it should be a rapid innovator in the technology space. but it just hasn't been. what you are seeing over the past two years is a real spurt in technology bringing technology to financial questions. we just launched on monday our own retirement planner and it works so much better. it grabs all your important information electronically and feeds that into a planning tool that allows you to have accurate and sophisticated projections, but do it in minutes. emily: bill harris, former ceo of paypal, thank you so much for joining me. change.org just hit 100 million users. users in 196 countries have launched one million campaigns with 38 million users signing or starting a winning petition. the company's ceo says there's a lot of room for companies to use tech to feel civic engagement.

tashard fuel -- fuel civic engagement. guest: if you look at the money that has been spent on venture capital on commerce or communications, it's tens of billions of dollars. the amount of money to address the big issues with our politics is may be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. we hope they will try different ways to engage the system. emily: he said residential -- presidential candidates are using the platform to connect with voters. coming up, we talk coding. i'm sitting down with a panel of experts to talk about the languages they are excited about. and the drone helicopter hybrid started as a kickstart a campaign and was developed by malloy aeronautics. the hover bike will be used for transport and surveillance. ♪

emily: it is time now for the daily byte -- today's number is $1 billion. that could be the size of an uber investment by a chinese fund manager according to the "wall street journal." the company is set to buy bonds from uber that could be converted into shares of the company. this firm made a name for itself as an early backer of $.10, but it's also an investor in uber's biggest chinese rival which currently dominates there. this could be big for the ceo of

company who is named as china's number one growth priority right now. software containers -- they may not be something consumers need to worry about, but the software world is celebrating. this rather technical product that wraps up code and ships it to other machines has just been standardized. it reads like a who's who of the tech world -- google, amazon red hat, ibm -- they've all agreed to use the same system. how big a deal is it? i'm joined by the ibm president for technology and the women who code ceo. and we have paul in new york -- you wrote the 38,000 word article in business week about code that is still reverberating. how significant do you think this is? that there is finally some standardization when it comes to code. guest: it is very significant.

it allows you to slick computers up. this is really good and will make a more solid simple set of tools for cloud computing for distributing apps across millions of computers. emily: what's interesting and you are seeing -- is you are seeing computers come together -- you are seeing competitors get together on this. guest: this is all about productivity and how fast builders can build old applications and manage them. as we are doing that, cloud comes, moving things from azure to the mix to google to amazon -- it becomes a business decision. this is a lot more how people can innovate faster, package it up, put it out and iterate on that process over and over again.

emily: do we need more standards like this? guest: it definitely helps because we need more engineers in general. if you can create more standards, you will have people move into the industry faster. emily: currently the way it works, a lot of companies write in different languages. how do they share information? guest: one is around the container piece, it's a switch from where we were before where i.t. shots stated what languages you can use. it is up to the development team to decide. emily: what do different languages do? c++ is supposed to be better for games and python for big data and analytics. how do you decide what language to use when you are starting a company? guest: as rob pointed out, it's

a decision you want to make based on the requirements. if you need something very fast -- c++ is a given because it allows you to have granular control. python is lovely for building servers. what is great about the way the standard can move forward is hopefully those choices, you can make them without as many external pressures. if python is the right tool, you can write a service to the server, deliver it in one of these containers and people never need to know how it is running. emily: why are there so many different languages? guest: they fit for needs and people are going to want to work in a different language depending on what they are doing and what their preference is. emily: what's interesting is this language that powers a lot of things like traffic lights and hospitals and airports, yet

the future of this language is very much under threat because engineers don't want to learn it. what do you think the future of cobo is? guest: it's not necessarily going away. it still runs a lot of systems. i like to learn a little about it every now and in because i feel it keeps my career save. there are always jobs for cobol programmers. any language that is understood and you have a good community working with you, it's not that bad. there was a point in the 80's and 90's were a became the evil language. on this side of the thing, it's still here and you kind of have to give it credit just for hanging around. emily: and this was a language invented by grace hopper in 1969. is it better to maintain the

beast even though it is outdated? guest: i think to paul's point,cobol does transactions and does them very well. it runs many different languages today. where we are going with part of this is if you are going to be an engineer in the future, you have to understand multi-languages. i like to learn any language every year because i like to see what problems they are solving. cobol is not hard to learn. you should be able to pick it up and understand it. emily: engineers and developers, you hear that? learn cobol. check out that article you have some time. that does it for this edition of "bloomberg west." tomorrow, we have former apple ceo john scully. that's it today from san francisco. ♪

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♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: we begin this evening with the tragedy in charleston. nine people, including the reverend, were killed at a church on wednesday. hundreds gathered in charleston on sunday to commemorate the victims. south carolina prosecutors charged dylann roof with the crime. he is said to be motivated by racial hatred. several pictures emerged of him posing with the confederate fl