cory: uber books -- what good signal heavy losses for the car booking behemoth. i'm cory johnson in for emily chang and this is "bloomberg west." robot revolution is on. we will talk about the future of the machine economy. solar powered ambition -- a pilot seeking a record sector -- record setting journey. seems like it has been a long day -- it has.

why the internet is bracing for the dreaded leap second. and now to our lead -- something we've only been able to guess that -- the numbers behind uber. according to a timesheet, the right handling at generated 400 teen million dollars in revenue that showed a loss. the business grew at a faster than 300% clip. they operate in more than 300 cities worldwide and is raising money at a $50 billion valuation. joining us to talk about this is the one who broke the story and a partner at gf j. your story is light on numbers but a little bit means a whole lot. guest: uber is a $40 billion company raising a $50 billion round which we know little about because they don't have to disclose anything. what the revenue looks like, what the prophet looks like is

important to silicon valley. emily: -- cory: it doesn't even have a date as to when that might the. guest: the spokesperson says they are substantially old which would suggest they are from 2014. guest: the company is clearly on the minds of many drivers. it's one of the most rapidly growing areas of importance. one day, the drivers will be robots, but it is a fascinating story playing out country by country and metro by metro. cory: let's talk about the states in the united states where they are having regulatory difficulty. this company is so aggressive

and they are fighting problems in places like oregon, alaska -- i'm not even mentioning california where they are fighting with the definition of employee means. and then look at the world. that's a lot of problem. canada, spain, south korea -- take a deep breath. these guys are undeterred which makes for good stuff if you cover uber, but it's a fairly aggressive push. guest: it is an amazing story. they have all of these challenges and that means they are growing in so many places. they want to spend, spend spend. there was a great story in portland on how aggressive uber was. that's happening in every country. cory: they wrote the law to make

it legal. guest: uber has said no court has told them they need to shut down. being held by french authority -- that looks like that could get you in trouble. cory: when i was a portfolio manager -- i did a lot of math and i created a ghetto uber model. if you figure they have 2 million users and each user uses about once a week -- i know people who either use it many times a day or not at all and cost to ride, i'm just going with $20 which i think is about right. that would give about $2 billion and a means their cut is 406 million.

but there's a lot of assumptions and when you look at this, which of my numbers is most stupid? there are reports of uber saying they have 400,000 users in france already. but what do you think of these assumptions? guest: there are power users spending lots of money on uber so rides is probably more per year. more rides, lower cost in an urban setting. there's a lot of short hauls. cory: we were talking earlier about the way over his feeding markets financially. guest: four uber to be most successful, they need a quick pick up time for stop for drivers to be happy, they need a

lot of riders. sometimes uber will significantly discount or take a loss on each ride. with their carpool product, they will take a loss to generate traffic. guest: google very well may beat them at their own game. they could offer a free app called free ride and this could be interesting. they are on the fence as to whether they should offer it. get people used to it while they are human drivers and then flip them over to autonomous cars. cory: a little scoop there. steve is with us for the entire show. the bulk collection of the nsa path dragnet program and the passing of the usa freedom act -- congress debated whether the nsa should be able to go and scoop up things without a warrant.

a secret court right after the new law passed, the secret court gave the nsa authority to resume bulk collections and the government went right back in and started scooping the stuff up again. coming up to my tech giants like amazon and tesla rely on robots every day. so does my vacuum in my house. we will tell you how machines are losing business. and live from the caulk that of the solar impulse, the pilot attempting a record-breaking journey joins us from the air, next. ♪

cory: today, we kick off a special look at how robotics is changing business -- from painting cars to packing boxes, robots are making things more efficient, but they are not cheap. spending on robotics is expected to hit $20 billion this year. our robots really boosting bottom lines? my guest joins us now from boston. let me ask, are robots really helping? guest: robots are absolutely helping. the robot industry has been around 30 or 40 years, pretty focused on the car industry. there is a new class of robot and that is the class we are bringing to market. that is robots that are simple easy to use, inexpensive and

can do a broad set of manufacturing tasks. that is going to bring a much bigger robot market or set of applications to the robot market. steve: i think we're seeing a renaissance of robotics applications. one company is producing robots that can operate among people and address 90% of the needs that are not automated. they are doing the dangerous and high-speed tasks that we imagine them doing. people putting things in boxes all of those jobs that are repetitive, 90% of them -- cory: i think of the "i love lucy" scene with the conveyor belt. why was it only automotive for so long? scott: the technology has changed quite a bit. what we had before were essentially expensive and

inflexible machines. that was the state of the technology. there was a class of mainframes and what exists today is cheap sensors, cheap computation, widely available, to the, and the availability to make a software-driven robot. that is what we think robotics is all about. cory: it also seems the reprogrammability -- you can use the map for a lot of things. you can play a videogame and it doesn't take a lot of work for the user to go from one to the next. is that the key of the future? scott: that's a great point. the typical robot you see takes 200 hours to program. our robots take about two hours

and typical nonexperts can program and operate the robot. they are interacting side i side with the robot directly manipulating and training the robot. that means you can take the robot from one job to another and automate small production runs. you could also get into the small and medium business and there have no robots in small and medium manufacturing up until now. steve: when you say they are easily programmed my son reprograms the robot and you don't use a keyboard or code you just say the alarm goes here and you move it. you teach it impact on motion so that makes it incredibly easy

for any business to take it out of the box and make it work. i am curious where you see this up take around the world. where do you find most of the interest in this conduct? scott: it is in a lot of different markets. we have focused first on american manufacturing and we have lots of robots in plastics manufacturing, consumer goods, packaging and even some warehousing and packaging applications. we have lots of interest for the same sorts of vertical markets as well as some electronics manufacturing. the industry is user a few robot so far. cory: i want to talk about irobot. a company that came to market 10

years ago with the promise of revolutionizing robotics and bringing robotics into the home having enormous growth in lots of different sectors. they did $500 million in sales and is a little bit historically, but not a lot. most markets they have gone into, have failed to get anything of any size that it's still a vacuum cleaner company. now it's facing competition with the vacuum king dyson. what have the struggles of irobot taught us about the business? scott: i can't comment to specifically on irobot, though i would point out that not only have they revolutionize the vacuum cleaner they have revolutionized the disposal robot for military settings. that was an enormous market and we had ground wars going to

lessen you can learn as much of the new generation is software driven and sensor driven robot. you say you have a roomba. cory: my wife hates it. note to married guys -- not a great christmas present. honey, it's a robot. not just a vacuum cleaner for christmas. still a failure at christmas. my wife refuses to use it. it's just another vacuum cleaner. scott: once you stop calling it a robot and start calling it a vacuum cleaner, it is successful. it's the idea of it being something different it's a tool. we see the same thing in our

manufacturing customers. they start thinking about our baxter robot has some strange piece of automation and it part of the manufacturing team. they give them names and put their company t-shirt on it and put the school sign on it and it becomes part of the factory team and that is when you have adopted the robot as a coworker. cory: thank you. he's a real person, even though to us he's just a picture on a video screen. i'm going to turn to green tech right now. a solar powered plane right now is attempting to circle the globe, and it is making its longest, most dangerous leg of the journey. the pilot set all kinds of world records, including the longest distance loan by single pilot. he joins us now from the caught

pit of solar impulse to over the ocean. there is a 15 second delay, so i will tap dance for a moment. what is it like up there by solar power by yourself attempting this incredible record? i wonder how that feels. go ahead. [speaking french] cory: challenging my ninth grade french. if you could hear us, jump in

and that is no for our english-speaking audience what you are trying to do and what you think it is going to prove. it's a fairly amazing thing just to see him in real-time or with that slight delay trying to cross the pacific ocean right now. i don't know if we are going to get this audio to work. it's amazing we can get the video going. a millionaire heart did not have such a distraction. this guy is in the middle of the longest leg of this trip crossing the pacific ocean and this will be an incredible thing and another demonstration of the kind of thing you are investing in. steve: and another proof point that all vehicles will soon be

electric. the biggest challenges on weight and efficiency have been met. cory: thank you. very cool of you to join us in whatever way that just happened. coming up, the momentum behind her noble energy is building but is it enough to make a dent in the fight against climate change? the woman at the head of the climate summit will join us next. ♪

cory: time now for the daily byte -- 86,401. the number of seconds today. why does that matter? is one second longer than any

day of the year. no wonder i'm exhausted. scientists have added a so-called leap second to balance out the gradual slowing of the earth path rotation. the last one in 2012 crashed a lot of the internet. read it linkedin and foursquare were delayed for a while. experts are not expecting y2k style had asked. -- y2k style antics. five months from today, representatives of 186 countries will gather in paris to sign a global agreement on climate change. it might sound like a long shot especially achieving the fact that global temperatures should not rise above preindustrial levels. joining me now is the executive secretary.

my guess toes is still with us. what are you trying to achieve given how difficult it has been to achieve global climate change goals? how do you approach this to get done what you need to get in knowing how difficult it is across the world? guest: it is difficult and so is solar impulse. they are already showing investments in technology can do amazing things this by the fact that he couldn't hear us. but they are truly showing what technology can truly do. what we are trying to do is mary the advance of policy with the advance of technology and finance. all of those need to advance together to get us onto the pathway that seems rather impossible but it was impossible just two years ago to fly around the world with no fuel so when we unleash human

ingenuity, we can make the impossible very possible. cory: it sounds great, but you could pencil out the improvements in solar and imagine everyone is going to solar on the roof top in africa and everyone is going to have a 100 thousand dollars test what and our problems with the missions are going to be substantially reduced, but that would not be a realistic way to make goals -- how do you marry the possibility of technology with the reality of the slow option of technology? guest: they are walking hand in hand. even just last year, more than half of the new generation was already into renewables. you already have 10 times as many patents being filed for renewables as you do for traditional fossil fuels.

the international energy agency has released a report telling us that it's only 15 years from now. renewables will be the leading source. and just to look at solar, let alone wind and others, just solar has had an incredible price drop. and 80% price drop since 2008 and increasing in its efficiency. then, the incredible investments being done in storage because that is the weakness. what do you do with that excess energy when you are not using it? you have to be able to use it when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. the combination of the price coming down and battery development is a very powerful combination. cory: the executive secretary of the yuan framework on climate change as well as my host, steve jorgenson.

that's it for this edition of "number of west." see you tomorrow. ♪ .

>> i'm al hunt. john: i'm john heilemann. with all due respect to chris christie, you're wearing our name out. >> with all due respect. with all due respect. with all due respect. your opinions don't matter a lot. john: that was good. we need and wish list. first, welcome. bachelor number 14.