tv Bloomberg West Bloomberg July 31, 2015 7:30pm-8:01pm EDT
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emily: uber may have lended microsoft as a backer. we look at the company's $50 billion valuation. ♪ emily: i'm emily chang and this is "bloomberg west." could apple be planning to roll out a new tv set boxtop in september? we look at the report that has tech blogs buzzing. $12 billion wiped off samsung's market cap in the last month. what the company could do to improve its smartphone business. expedia shares hit its highest value since it spun off. i sit down with the company's cfo to talk about competition
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from google and airbnb. all of that i had on "bloomberg west." first our lead -- microsoft is considering an investment in uber at a valuation of about $50 billion, but a final decision has not been made. microsoft declined to comment but uber recently bought a portion of microsoft's bing mapping unit from the software giant and they are integrating uber into cortana's voice control assistant, which means synced with an uber microsoft devices. dina bass is on the phone. with me in the studio is hunter walk, who will be my guest host for the show today. also, technalysis research founder bob o'donnell and crawford del prete. thank you for joining us. dina, i will start with you because the "wall street journal" is reporting this deal with microsoft is closed. you say a deal ain't done yet. what is really happening? dina: i was told definitively
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microsoft has not participated in a round, has not made an investment but rather they are considering an investment. there are discussions ongoing and evaluation would be about $50 billion. that is what i heard from a person who asked not to be identified because the deal is private. nothing has been announced publicly yet. that is my understanding. it is under discussion, not final. emily: if this happens, it would mean microsoft, google and amazon are invested in uber. hunter, i'm interested to hear from you about the relationship between uber and google, which has become more tense as they become more competitive. what about microsoft getting into the game? >> this is microsoft's transformation from a desktop company to a mobile company. they started to put startups in charge of outlook, exchange. trying to bring office outside
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of just the microsoft os into the apple environment. when you think about what people are doing with their phones that they could not do with their desktops, hailing a car, logitistics -- it's pretty compelling. bob: it's also part of microsoft moving into services. this is another kind of service that is being integrated that they are participating in. if they will be an investor, there is maybe some incentive for uber to be using other microsoft-based services. i think it is a reflection of this change in how they think about microsoft, what they do and the areas they think are important strategically. emily: in thinking about this, i'm reminded of facebook's valuation ahead of its ipo and its partnership with microsoft. crawford, what is your take? crawford: this is about information transformation.
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when you look at digital transformation of companies, it is about leveraging your information. if microsoft and help companies leverage their information, that is a win. i think uber is in a position to do that and microsoft can differentiate that. emily: hunter, what do you think about this $50 billion valuation? we have been talking about it and now it is confirmed. are they worth that? hunter: the valuation is almost secondary. we have seen these rounds of growth capital. you are pretty sure you will get at least that back if you are putting money in. uber is in a phase where you can imagine them doing anything. they have talked about experimenting in other adjacent markets. other companies that have invested in them -- they remind me most of amazon.
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they have an algorithm and they start moving into adjacencies. emily: that is interesting. bob: i agree on one hand. on one hand -- i look at uber and i'm like really? $50 billion? that seems like a business that could be upset relatively quickly by a number of different factors, be it political issues, licensing issues. emily: one person told me thought it could be a $500 billion. bob: to hunter's point, if they move into a lot of different areas we have not thought about and driving efficiencies in existing systems and they can figure out interesting ways other than hailing cars, who knows? emily: does it seem like this is a deal that will close? dina: it is pretty hard to say at this point. as everyone has been discussing, this seems a bit more into what
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microsoft's strategy is. it is a cloud, mobile company and software company. that is what they have shown so far in uber integration. they feel it is a value added service if their voice-enabled assistant can look at your calendar and say you have a meeting coming up in 20 minutes and it is only five minutes away but we know based on traffic it will take you 20 minutes to get there. do you want us to call uber for you? emily: certainly interesting to consider the potential. we will continue to follow this story. dina, hunter, bob, crawford, thank you. first i want to talk about expedia. shares surged after the reported strong second-quarter results. earlier today, the cfo made an exclusive interview and asked about competition with google.
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mark: our story with google is two-fold. on one side google is a huge , player. they are a dominant player in the search industry. we have one interest -- to make sure we get a fair shake at advertising placements, a fair shake in organic results. on the other side though, google has been a great customer acquisition channel for us both in the traditional search product, hotel price and product and potentially this new google , book product. it can be a great source of new customers, and to that extent we , have a great relationship. emily: he also told me expedia was not seeing or feeling much competition from airbnb. i asked if he was considering a partnership. mark: you will see us move into the vacation rental industry and we are certainly open to other partnerships. with respect to airbnb and competition, we are not seeing a huge amount of impact on our
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business. our room nights grew 35% year-over-year in this past quarter. we are looking at this as an adjacency, an opportunity. right now, we think we have a lot of runway in our core business. emily: the cfo of expedia. coming up, buzz on an update to apple tv. what does it say about the company's future streaming business? and these people are seeing color for the very first time. a story so cool we have to see it behind glasses that correct colorblindness. ♪
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♪ emily: apple may be releasing a new set-top box this september -- keyword "may." the report says the updated version will have better storage, improved operating system and will come with an app store an software development kit. it will supposedly work with siri. apple declined to comment, but what could it mean for the company's future in media? hunter walk is with me, my guest host. we also have idc crawford del prete via skype and our technalysis founder, bob o'donnell. crawford, i want to start with you. i have my own set-top box, but i
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have not felt the need for an upgrade. how much better could this new set-top box be and will it be an update to make people upgrade? crawford: i think it could get a lot better. there are apps that can be developed to make it more engaging. when you look at xfinity, they have enabled a voice enabled voice control, apps to get scores from one show -- or a game while you were watching another show. there is a lot of stuff apple could add to make it a more engaging experience and i think voices top on the list. emily: hunter, you work at youtube for many years and you were a writer, but how optimistic are you for apple to be a big player in the streaming business? hunter: ultimately, they have a shot to be significant, but it is because of the ios ecosystem .
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because we are ready have a remote control in our pocket or on our desk. if you look at the amazon bestseller list, the fire stick and google chrome cast have an number one and number two so apple is coming late to this party. they have called it a hobby but i think they need to turn it into something serious. emily: what do you think this signifies about a potential streaming service? which as far as we have heard it , has been pushed back and tv set has been shelved. bob: my guess is any tv service they offer is going to work on existing apple tv boxes. they will not wanted to just work with the newest devices, i think. what this does is it allows them to have more horsepower so they could run applications and do things like overlay content from one program to another program and do the kinds of things that i saw in smart tv demos 10 years
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ago that we still have not seen in a parking place -- in the marketplace. emily: i want to make a quick turn to samsung because $10 billion wiped off their market cap. they misjudged how many galaxy phones they were going to sell. crawford, samsung has lost its dominant position in china. apple and xiaomi are jockeying for the top spot. is samsung in jeopardy of losing its dominance? crawford: yeah, they are absolutely in jeopardy of losing it, but i will tell you the progress out of the company is significant. when you look at the two most recent products they brought out, they never have been better. yeah, they blew it on demand and in terms of forecasting demand but i would say that six months ago, what you are seeing in the results today represent that series of bad decisions that
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were made a year ago and i think they are now in an upswing and we could see a bottom here for samsung. bob: there are challenges for the smartphone market, period. it will challenge samsung and apple. emily: what about the upgrade cycle, is that speeding up? bob: i think that is one of the challenges they are facing. we are seeing on the high-end where samsung has focused a lot of their efforts, it will be very difficult. i think we are seeing the transformation of samsung as a company. it will be harder to make money on devices. they are looking more on the semiconductor and component side. there are better margins there. i think samsung may follow a similar type of method. emily: even tom brady is using it. hunter: tom brady saying he throughout his s6 and switch to an iphone and that is why he could not turn over data to the nfl may be the biggest loss of the week.
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emily: we will continue to watch a samsung. thank you so much for joining us, bob mcdonnell. crawford as well. hunter you are sticking with me. it is time for the latest in our latest series "bioengineering: the senses" -- the closer look into the frontiers of medical science. how to fix colorblindness. we meet the berkeley scientists behind the new pair of glasses that seems to solve the problem. ♪ >> is this all the same? >> yes, they are. >> all those colors across the street looked like the same color a few minutes ago. >> it is really amazing. emily: they are seeing real color for the very first time. colorblindness affects one in 200 women and as many as one in 12 men. that is 30 million people in the u.s. alone. now for $429, researchers say
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these glasses could make life more colorful for about 80% of colorblind people. >> somebody who has normal color vision, the blue, green and the red are separated. with people with color deficiency, the greens and red cones overlap too much. the glasses work by simply going in there and cutting out certain wavelengths of light. emily: the magic is in the lenses. modeled from substances called dyes. they cut out a small part of a light spectrum, mainly the wavelengths corresponding to yellow light while letting the rest of the light shine through. the effect is in the colors, like reds and greens jump apart from each other about making the difference between the colors more clear. >> people get kind of quiet -- i think it is simply they are getting a lot of information. those neuro mechanisms are finally firing. they are seeing things they have never seen before. >> when i first put the glasses
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on i can actually see a lot of , different flowers. it is just amazing. >> an immediate sense that something different, but minute one or two, once they figure out what colors are different -- it is extremely pronounced. >> this is an overwhelming list of colors to look at. supported by funding by the national institutes of health, they appraise just $1.5 million in funding. >> it has been a bit of a struggle he goes there is not a lot of venture capitalists that specialize in the optical field in particular. emily: nevertheless, the company is developing glasses and with prescription lenses and have a chance to break into the pediatrics market. beyond that, let us see what comes out of the research with contact lenses for the colorblind. i'm not colorblind but i am wearing the glasses now and all
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the colors look a lot more intense. i think this is a company worth checking out. that does it for our "bioengineering: the senses" series. stay with us for continued coverage of developments for biotech. coming up, where in the world is the fastest supercomputer? it is not the u.s. president obama means to change that. ♪
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u.s. is trying to gain an upper hand on china which currently has the fastest machine. intel is working on a system that can potentially run at 180 quadrillion per second. russia, india, and the eu are working on similar projects. with over 3 billion downloads, angry birds is topping the app charts. this week an official sequel was , officially released. we sat down with the creative director. >> most of the other games have been spinoffs or mashups. this is the first game that it is truly a sequel in its same universe and it is new gameplay. there is a lot of new stuff that justifies it is called "2." we are working with a whole new game engine. it is way more modern. the hardware is much better. we have 3-d.
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there is 2-d action from the side, but the graphics towards the screen -- it is much more immersive. the business has changed completely. if you want to be downloaded at all on the app store we have to , be free. that leaves room for both types of game. free to play games, freemium games, but for the casual gamer, angry birds is the way to go when it is free. everything can be accessed by everyone so you don't have to pay anything. emily: back now with my guest hunter walk. thank you for being here. i was reminded when you were coming to the show and it has been 2.5 years since you started your first venture capital firm. what has been the hardest surprise? hunter: how many of the entrepreneurs we see that i end up rooting for.
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we only make about 8-10 investments a year but a lot of people come in with great ideas with early traction and i'm trying to decide if it is the right fit, not if they are viable. emily: you have invested in many companies. how do prices look to you right now? hunter: 2013 was a real learning for us. valuations were going really up. by that time, things have stabilized. one trend we are seeing is that experienced entrepreneurs may be skipping the round and going straight to raising a large sum of money. we are not afraid to participate in those rounds, but we want to take a larger chunk of eight smaller round when somebody is getting started. emily: today, there is skepticism around certain companies, which is a hard thing to measure. but there has been rising skepticism over square, lyft -- airbnb on the other hand is very positive.
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what should we reading about those kinds of reports? it is difficult to put your finger on, but there are whispers that things are worse and then people say things publicly. hunter: we don't have access to that, all the get the judge on is the latest app release or your own personal experience. it is interesting but i don't think it tells the truth about what is going inside. emily: are you concerned about the overall environment? hunter: i'm not. some people say we are in a bubble, i think we are in a hot tub. it is getting a little bit warm. there are lots of small bubbles but they tend to pop frequently. emily: you have invested in some talent. unusualthat is a bit for a firm at stage, but we think that continuing to help our companies become not just great builders of products and businesses, but attractive places to hire the best engineers.
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emily: i have to ask you about twitter. what do you want to see happen at twitter? hunter: i want to see them grow. we talked about growth numbers -- is there content on twitter today that a billion people will enjoy talking about? and the answer is absolutely. emily: team jack or team bain? hunter: i think it is a full-time role, and jack might not be available at all time. police with adam, he started something that has existed before. -- at least with adam. emily: hunter walk, thank you for being here. it is great to have you back. before we go, it is silicon valley's version of the royal baby. mark zuckerberg and his wife are expecting a baby girl. zuckerberg also opened up about some personal details. they had three miscarriages
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mark: i'm mark halperin. john: i'm john heilemann. "with all due respect" to hillary clinton's summer friday document dump, thanks a lot, lady. ♪ john: happy national document dump friday. in our lineup -- money and insults. first, the trifecta of hillary clinton's disclosures are out this sizzling summer evening, the temperature in brooklyn is 89 degrees. health records, check. tax statements, check. since 2007, she says her family
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