emily: linkedin shares climbing higher in extended trading. way higher. we will look at the media giant optimistic forecasts and claims that it cracked china. ♪ emily: i'm emily chang and this is "bloomberg west." coming up, electronic arts gets a boost for online players, but wall street is not impressed. plus, t-mobile's plan to overtake sprint. i sit down with the company's ceo, braxton carter. and why, nader and indiegogo are here.

-- combinator and indiegogo are here. investors are loving linkedin right now, saying the full-year revenue will be higher than analysts estimate. also linkedin said second-quarter sales jumped 33% and it has reached 380 million users. 10 million of those users are in china. jeff weiner, the ceo saying this is the second largest market for new sign ups behind the united states. joining me now is neil and also paul sweeney from bloomberg intelligence who covers linkedin. and we have steve from mountain view. i want to start with neil, though. what do you think of the significance of these china numbers? facebook and twitter are blocked, but has linkedin cracked the china market? guest: they are one of the few u.s. internet companies that can actually operate in china.

last quarter they had about 6 million users. now they have 10 million users -- they are growing rapidly. there's a huge opportunity for linkedin to expand its market by being able to operate in china. emily: paul, what are the numbers standing out to you? one of the things we are looking closely at his mobile. -- is mobile. what do you think the highlights are here? paul: this was an interesting quarter. i think most investors were hoping for a know nothing can of quarter -- no surprises after the astonishing disappointment last quarter where they brought guidance down. here, they put up a good quarter and then they take guidance backup for the full year so -- back up for the full year, so kind of a roller coaster for shareholders but a much better turnaround led by mobile and led by their talent solutions business. looks like a solid quarter across the board. it looks like some of the changes they have made, maybe they have more confidence with

lynda.com taking those numbers up after bringing them down. emily: steve, as somebody who worked at linkedin, what is standing out? linkedin has obviously been making the transition to a more mobile company -- more than 50% of visitors coming from mobile devices. what stands out to you? steve: i think one of the interesting things is last quarter, they announced a few organizational challenges they were going through. one of the missed stories and what their growth experience has been is we are talking about a company that was more hundred people all and is today around 8000. that is enormous growth and enormous challenge for any group to go through. they are not talking about organizational problems anymore, they are talking about the fact that the moves that these made are paying off. they just undertook the biggest acquisition in the history of

the company in terms of value. i think they've got their mojo back. that's what i'm starting to feel with the earnings. emily: neil aren't there still questions about how lynda.com will integrated into this company? why did this acquisition makes sense act o'neill: -- make sense? neil: hopefully we will get more color on the call but this is an online education company and we think they could be using them to become the training provider for its 38,000 plus companies and clients, so that could be a real big opportunity for linkedin down the road. emily: what do you make of these down the road opportunities? linkedin has been a company in transition. paul: this is an interesting quarter -- not only for linkedin, but for a lot of the social media companies. we had some good numbers and disappointing numbers out of others. what investors are hearing a lot about is, like mark zuckerberg said, trust us.

have patience. we are investing for the long-term growth of this business. i think most investors in the social media companies are comfortable with that let's invest now strategy. that seems to be something that has worked for most of these companies, including linkedin, so i think management here will get the benefit of the doubt. emily: it's funny, even though linkedin and companies like facebook are very different, they get locked into the same boat sometime -- the same boat. i wonder how significant the china news is given that facebook, twitter can't expand in china, but linkedin can. how big an opportunity is that? >> knowing how many professional numbers there could be coming there could be over 150 million professionals there. they're only hitting around 10 million now. i think the upside is huge. i also think it's got to be very scary for linkedin because they can just pull the plug at any

time. i think they're proceeding very carefully. i think they are interested in what dramatic upside can be. but you can't say you are a global professional network until you have one of the largest segments of professionals in the world joining you in mass. i think with a got now is the bilingual executives in china -- what they have now is the bilingual executives in china and the professionals who are part of the multinationals joining in greater numbers and now we will see if they will be able to join in and if there is a monetization opportunity. it is an encouraging sign. emily: of course, there are chinese equivalents of linkedin based in china, but we will certainly try to see how the china strategy evolves. thank you so much for joining us. neil, you are sticking with me talking about ea, coming up. now to t-mobile with shares rising, closing up almost 5% after reporting strong user growth in the second quarter. the so-called un-carrier added a

total of 2.1 million customers bringing the total count to 59 million. to put that in perspective sprint currently has 57 million while verizon and at&t have over 100 million customers. i spoke to t-mobile's cfo braxton carter today and asked about the competition. braxton carter: we thought we were bigger than sprint. every other measure -- rough ability, market cap -- we have been larger than sprint for a significant period of time. emily: i also asked about the merger potential between t-mobile. braxton carter: we are always looking at innovators in this industry and how we can enhance shareholder value and look at things through a strategic lens. emily: braxton carter there, t-mobile cfo. coming up, madden is the gift

that keeps on giving for ea, but can these sports titles continue to power the gaming giant? we will discuss, plus how stephen hawking communicates. we take a look at how technology has helped the famous physicist's speech rate. ♪

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emily: a status update on facebook's internet.org. the company sharing technical be tales about its land for -- plan for connecting rural areas to the internet. the plan involves using -- involves lifting internet beaming drones to an altitude of 50,000 feet. something mark zuckerberg at -- told me late last year. mark: there are a lot of people who do not live within range of a network. drones are one way to do it and microwave communication is another. those are going to be some of the solutions for providing cost effective conductivity for people where there are no cell phone towers and infrastructure like that. emily: the drones will have a wingspan of a boeing 747 and will fly in three months, transmitting information using lasers. now, the cyber security leader

reporting a record revenue in its second-quarter and raising its revenue out. billings increased 57%, but the stock is still lower in extended trading after it was announced that michael sheridan will be leaving the company. now to ea -- the gaming giant. electronic arts out with a big beat for the first quarter but the stock is down in after-hours on a muted forecast. neil is still in the studio with me. what is going on here? i know there are some issues with digital. neil: digital came in strong, but the packaged goods site came in better than expected. the big question is on the guidance. it came in just shy of what consensus is expecting. this company is typically conservative, so that is why the y are trading down a little bit. the big focus is on star wars. emily: which is interesting, because it is all about star wars. you would expect better guidance.

neil: right. i think this company is being a little more conservative. they have been conservative in the past. we are expecting star wars to do 14 million or 15 million units. we think that could be a big game for them. emily: how big is "star wars" compared to the big ea hits? madden, fee for? -- fifa? >> we think this could be big if not bigger. we think they can do 12 million to 15 million units in the december quarter alone. fifa and madden are in the low million units. emily: how is ea doing with its rivals like activision and social side players like lou and zynga question -- zynga? guest: they have been driving >> they have been doing well compared to the social players. they have been driving more margin expansion in the stock has been doing well because of that. emily: so it is all about star

wars. neil, thank you so much for joining us. it is time now for our latest bloomberg west series -- bioengineering: the census. looking at the technology on the frontier of medical science. today, we're looking at the technology behind stephen hawking and how it is helping him communicate. dr. hawking: medicine has not been able to cure me, so i allow -- i rely on technology to help me communicate and live. emily: the system stephen hawking relies on has recently gotten an upgrade. tasks that used to take three or four minutes now take around 10 seconds. intel has been working with hawking for decades and the latest upgrade was over two years in the making. >> we completely changed the way he is interfacing with these

aspects of the system. to have them not rely on the mouse. based on whatever he happens to be doing, we will surface the the most logical things you might want to do. emily: that applies to his text to speech system. the software runs productive -- predictive text apps on smartphones and has doubled his speech rate. it considers what he was last writing, whether there were any errors, and tries to predict which character you might use next. to do that, the swiftkey program has to learn how he writes and speaks by analyzing dozens of his documents. >> it shows that a given body of text -- professor hawking would only enter 15% or 20% of those characters and the rest would be inferred. emily: here's the crazy part. everything stephen hawking does on his computer is triggered by

one muscle in his cheek. an infrared sensor detects when his cheek muscle moves up, just the way our smartphones condense when they are close to the face. future versions of this technology to take a bigger range of movement into account. >> he can say yes and no by moving his eyebrows. one of the things we have been working on is using a camera system to detect these different movements. now he can do things by saying no rather than having to manipulate the whole screen to get to a backspace, for example. emily: intel is even trying to develop brain control interfaces for people who can't move any muscle at all. that won't necessarily happen to stephen hawking, but with a market forecast estimated at $55 billion in 2015, they represent the next fleet for assisted technology. still to come, how khan academy

plans to help education. we will hear from the founder next. and we talked to why combination about its amazon partnership and how much money the launch will really save for startups. and we are leaving you with some photos from apples snapchat account, giving them a look inside their radio station. ♪

emily: now to our daily life -- one number that tells a whole lot. today's bite is 26 million. that is the number of students

who belong to the khan academy -- a nonprofit education academy, up from just 15 million students five months ago. i spoke to the voice behind most of the academy's youtube videos. i asked him about his agent to -- his vision to reinvent education. guest: even today, the return on investment, unless he majored in a lucrative field, is a little bit suspect. if you extrapolate growth intuition 10 or 20 years, you have young children -- you -- emily: oh yeah, we started planning for their education. guest: would it be like half $1 million to send them to college? that's not feasible. -- half $1 million to send them to college? that is not feasible. emily: one of his main argument is that everyone can be smarter if they set their minds to it. i asked him if that means anyone can be mark zuckerberg?

guest: mark zuckerberg shifted -- if he shifted his life a year forward or year back, he may not have started facebook. you don't know what the path would have been. there are people who push themselves to grow and learn new things, but they also had a lot of opportunity, they were in the right places at the right time and a little dose of luck never hurts. i think mark zuckerberg would have been successful in anything he did. i don't think everybody can be mark zuckerberg, but i think there are a lot of people who could be mark zuckerberg who right now think that they can't. emily: the founder of con academy. -- khan academy. we have that full interview tonight on "studio 1.0" right here on bloomberg television. yes, i did that before i cut my hair. amazon is expanding its retail universe with a new service that will give startup coming through accelerators like why combination or or raising funds

on sites like indiegogo. it is called launchpad and amazon says it has 25 vc firms backing it, including andreessen horowitz, which bloomberg has invested in. joining me right now are my two -- joining me here in the studio is the indiegogo ceo as well as michael down in mountain view. how valuable is it to be a part of the amazon ecosystem? this is a win for you especially since kickstarter is not part of this. >> the goal is much funding and exposure as possible. the companies founded on india gogo -- on indiegogo are looking for as much exposure as possible. we have the in demand program where you can keep eating funds on our site. amazon is part of that, getting the extensive reach. emily: michael, your company works with so many startups --

could you give me specifics on how much money this could save a small company when it comes to distribution and warehousing and not having to hire certain people? michael: when we distribute with a physical store, oftentimes that store can take anywhere from 40% and 60%. when operating with amazon, it allows the start up to be a lot more flexible and instantly get worldwide distribution and a lot of margins. moving commerce online is extremely helpful. emily: how much of a commission is amazon taking? >> i don't know the exact prices they're taking as part of their deals with the actual companies, but what amazon wants is to be closer to the startups. startups are hot, especially the hardware ones. what happened in software and apps 10 years ago is happening in hardware and manufacturing. you want to get as early as possible into hoots with these companies. amazon does not want to lose

these companies. with indiegogo, you're getting connected right away. i think it's a win for everybody. emily: how hard is it to sell on amazon if you are not part of something like this? michael: that's a good question. i think there's a huge advantage to joining this type of program and i think amazon is going to try to open its hands and welcome a lot of different startups. to be honest, i think amazon is an extremely powerful platform for pushing out these companies. these companies are trading the -- creating the hardware of the future. this is what customers want, so amazon is making an amazing move here. emily: on one hand amazon is trying to get closer to startups. on the other hand, amazon has been sued by small businesses who say amazon is trying to them out of business. do you have any concerns about that? guest: it's a constant balancing act of how to work with the big guys, and you have to also know what's good for your own company. a lot of companies see a lot of

benefits. connecting with amazon after having a great campaign on indiegogo can help propel it forward, which is why they call it launchpad. emily: you guys were working with startups at some of the earliest levels. michael, i am curious to hear what you think about the environment right now. sam robbins said we are in a mega-bubble, but that will pass. what are you seeing when it comes to valuations? investors are telling me it is expensive. michael: i think valuations are high right now. i think the difference is these companies have revenue. if you look at why commentator, they are figuring out their business models -- their business model is very hard. it's not a question of can they make money, it is can they tweak things to make it a big

business. i don't think we can look to the past and say this is just another remembrance of 2001. i think tech companies are legitimate and creating real products and real revenues now. emily: slava what do you think about valuation? slava: i think you have to take it company by company. public companies are funded well, pride and think there is a lot of money chasing less good deals. here we have seen something like a canary, a smart security device. they have already raised $30 million or $40 million. it's because they have huge sales. i think a lot of this is happening off of revenue, and i think it is quite interesting, but the valuations are high because there are not enough good deals for the money that it is chasing. emily: thank you both. that does it for this edition of "bloomberg west." tonight don't miss my conversation with founder of ka

hn academy, 7:30 eastern and pacific. ♪

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