♪ emily: i am emily chang and this is the best of "bloomberg west." we bring you all of the best interviews from the week in tech. calling out oracle "desperation move." our exclusive interview with marc benioff. pokemon go has passed its fever pitch. how can they hold onto the game's massive global appeal? our exclusive interview with niantic ceo.

the european antitrust chief who put apple and google on watch explains accusations he is unfairly targeting u.s. companies. first, to our lead, our exclusive interview with marc benioff. salesforce has been one of the silicon valley's most inquisitive companies. a closed three and a half billion dollars worth of deals since february and brad stone sat down for a conversation with ceo marc benioff. touching on everything from larry ellison's "desperation move" to how he feels about missing out on linkedin. he began with the new platform rolling out in october. -- einstein ai platform rolling out in -- marc: it's already sold out. we have 200,000 people coming to san francisco. it will be extremely exciting and it is the biggest tech conference. we have u2 playing and we have einstein coming which is the brand-new intelligence platform which will give all of our customers the power of artificial intelligence, which is machine intelligence, machine

learning, deep learning inside salesforce applications. brad: i followed you long enough to know you do a good job every year of bringing in some crystallized themes. last are you talked about the internet of things. tell me why this year artificial intelligence is real and when will it happen and when can we expect it? lots of companies are talking about ai right now. marc: it's a huge movement in our industry. we bought a dozen ai companies over the last few years. that is including spending about $600 million for them. we have been able to take those employees and stitch them together into an incredible team. we are delivering this amazing new platform based on that technology which includes some the best ai capabilities i've

ever seen. brad: what is your pitch? they've got google and amazon and ibm and lots of companies talking about different kinds of technology companies. how do you convince them to come? marc: we are the largest tech company here in san francisco. and we are one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world. the fastest-growing of the top 10 software companies and we are committed to something else. we are committed to improving the state of the world. we believe this is a platform for change. they love our 1-1-1 model. we give them 1% of equity, profit, time to give back. we focus on our public schools which is critical here in san francisco and oakland. as well as children's hospitals and our homeless and that is important and they want to give back and be able to build great products. a lot of companies haven't made that shift yet. fortunately salesforce has. we are far more attractive to onto the north. -- entrepreneurs. brad: you talk about that commitment.

you have made $4 million in acquisitions. why has salesforce been so acquisitive? marc: we only by a company when two things happen. it has to be a great company with great entrepreneurs and great technology. and the price has to be right. coming into this year, i did not think we would buy any companies at all. it wasn't part of our plan. a series of thing started to happen which opened the door. the biggest thing that happened everyone knows we got a phone call that demand where had been -- had an offer from another software company and were we going to be part of the process. we said, yes, we love those guys. we love that e-commerce cloud. this is an amazing a product its use by some of our customers already. companies like louis vuitton, adidas, even under armour a huge demand where customers saw the ability for sales force to come together, it gave us the ability to sell online.

you can go to adidas.com and see demandware in action. they're going to sell more than a billion dollars this year on that platform. that's amazing. the technology is incredible. we knew that was the right for us. brad: i want to talk of a deal you did not do, linkedin. you look at it and microsoft acquired the company. going back would you do anything differently? marc: it goes in the category of you can't win them all. i would do everything differently. in our industry that is especially true when you're going up against microsoft who has all the power and all the money and all the resources and has that monopolistic control. you are at a disadvantage, but we gave it our best shot. we did not win and we wish them the best. brad: does it make microsoft a more formidable competitor. this morning there was news that they won an account, i think it was hp incorporated which is the printer division of hewitt packard.

is microsoft plus linkedin a more serious threat to salesforce? marc: i don't think so. it's the fastest-growing software company in the top 10. it is faster growing than even microsoft and the other thing that is exciting is we are number one in crm. the vast majority of deals we do win. we are not going to win them all. we win the most and that's the most important thing for salesforce. brad: i want to bring up oracle. they acquired -- what does that deal to oracle? are they a stronger competitor now? marc: i don't really think so. oracle is making a desperation move to boost their cloud revenue. larry owns half of netsuite and he basically said i want that and now he will be able to boost his cloud revenue and make is $10 billion goal. brad: you are friends with larry ellison. when you say things like desperation move on live tv -- tbd you get a call or a text later in the day? marc: i do.

my relationship with larry ellison is far more eternal and enduring. i view it -- and he does as well because he taught me this. brad: he doesn't pull his punches either. marc: i will tell you how i look at it. business is a lot like tennis. you get on the court with your friends, you play as hard as you can, you get upset, you get off the court and go have lunch and have a glass of wine and remember how much you love them. i love larry ellison. he is a great mentor to me and a great friend and probably there is no one in the industry who has done more for me than larry ellison. i am very grateful to him. brad: salesforce has had tremendous sales trajectory. in the latest quarter results there was some softness. how much of that was seasonal? how much of it do you still see? marc: the last quarter was amazing. you saw in the top and bottom line we beat and raised for the year.

what's amazing for us in the second quarter is two things happened to us. one was brexit which took the zero about 150 and down into the mid-100 20's and that give us the celebration of our european revenue. it gave us $150 million in foreign headwind for the year and we also some softness in the u.s. at the very end of the quarter. specifically only in the united states and those two things combined gave us a quarter that was not optimal for us. >> were there any execution issues? i think there were execution issues. i hope i fixed it. we will see. the thing about software and running a software company, you go for six or seven quarters and there's always something that seems to happen and you need to fix it and repair it. for salesforce, we have grown

the company dramatically. we have almost 25,000 employees now. when we get in and we see may be there was a small execution issue in the second quarter, we can get in there and really work on repairing that and making the company stronger than ever. that is absolutely our goal. emily: that was marc benioff speaking to brad stone. at tech crunch disrupt in san francisco. coming up, self driving cars are officially on the street from uber. we hail a ride to find out what it's like kind the we'll of the pittsburgh pilot. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: uber's fleet of self driving cars has -- have officially hit the streets. customers can hail a self driving car with a few square miles of downtown pittsburgh.

complete with a human driver, just in case. max spent the day testing out the service. here is his report from pittsburgh. ♪ max: we are here in pittsburgh for uber's self driving car launch. i am opening the app and here we go. there is a pinwheel thing on top that is a lidar sensor. that's the most important sensor. it's mapping the road and telling the car where to go. there are dozens of these sensors, 20 cameras, radar. and lasers. we have these safety drivers joining us. the idea is to get people to understand what it's like without somebody behind the wheel. ♪ we are in the uber. i'm going to press this giant green button in the ipad that says let's ride and there is a weird colorful psychedelic map that is showing all of the stuff going on around us. the driver is hovering with his hands over the wheel but not touching the wheel. or just barely touching the

wheel and here we are. we are stopped at a stop sign. there are cars going by. you can see them on the screen. i am going to take the driver's seat and basically experience what it will be like to be a safety driver. this is eerie. it really feels like the car has a mind of its own. it's weird. you are fighting the tendency to grab the wheel. i have had my hands grazing the wheel. they are ready to go, but otherwise, i've done literally nothing. i am just sitting here and enjoying the ride. emily: max is with us now from new york to tell us more about his experience in pittsburgh. was it mostly a smooth ride it? max: it was very smooth and almost boring.

i hesitate to say boring, but there was one instance where a car pulled out a little bit and the driverless car expertly edged around it. that was the most exciting thing. emily: tell us about how many cars and what neighborhoods and when they will be expanding to other cities. max: uber has been pretty cagey about the scope, but here is what we know. maybe a dozen or two dozen cars right now in pittsburgh. there were 14 when i was at the office on monday. there were a handful of neighborhoods, mostly downtown pittsburgh. although they are expanding and while uber has not acknowledged it, i do think we will start to see driverless cars in other cities. maybe not with uber branding but they have an office in san francisco as well is one in palo alto where they are doing this research. i do not think it would be a huge leap to imagine that. i would not be surprised if they start going into a handful of other countries with early

experiments. emily: are these your typical freelance contractor drivers or are these experts from carnegie mellon? max: these are experts. in large part. uber has something like 500 engineers at pittsburgh -- it is called the atc and many of them are hired from carnegie gallon -- carnegie mellon. they are not phd's, but these are people with a great deal of training. although i was allowed to sit in the safety driver seat. it was in a relatively controlled conditions. there was an employee sitting right next to me with his hand on this red button in the car that you can press to get rid of the computer control in case something were to have happened. emily: do they own these cars in pittsburgh?

do they intend to own all the cars in the fleet in the future? max: they bought them from a ford dealership. these are hacked ford fusions. they went to -- one of the employees told me a very confused ford dealer in pennsylvania and purchased a them. it's not entirely clear long-term. they are being tightlipped about it. i think partly because they don't totally know. what the ceo told me two months ago is that they see themselves as providing a driver, whether it's a human driver or a computer driver. that is the core of it. my sense is they would rather not own giant fleets of cars, but they would be willing to it that comes to that. basically they want to be providing rides at the lowest cost possible. they will figure it out from there. emily: we did speak with sebastian thrun.

often known as the father of self driving cars who invented one of the very first and went on to run google's self driving car unit for a while and we asked him about the pilot. >> i am excited about this. i think it's nice to have a -- wise to have a safety driver just in case. i am longing for the day were -- where you can get rid of the safety driver in a kumble -- car will come straight to you and pick you up. max: who isn't? emily: what are the safety drivers go away? max: it is complicated. there is a series of questions, one of them is a regulatory question, when do we as a society decide for ok with it. it's also technological. what they have said to me is what experts in this field will say it's not there yet. while we were operating on city streets, they were ready to take over if anything went wrong. i think in the sort of shorter term, we may start to see some true driverless cars in narrower circumstances.

maybe on a specific set of the piece of the highway that they have mapped very carefully or on a very tightly cordoned off city. emily: that was max chaska and. coming up, our interview with margaret vestiger on the case against apple. you can now listen on the bloomberg radio app. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: apple's 14 and a half billion dollar tax problem is back in the spotlight. this week, francine leconte asked her to explain why the -- francine lacqua sat down with a one-on-one and asked her to explain why the specific is specific to apples' relationship

with ireland and that the ireland corporate tax rate in example -- margarethe: they can set their member level of taxation. in other states it is 20% or 22% or 18%. that is completely on their own. what they cannot do is to give selected advantages to specific companies. that tilts the playing field and makes it unfair competition. emily: alex webb joined us in san francisco with more context. alex: i think the next step is the appeals process. apple and ireland have said they plan to appeal against the decision. that will decide how much will really be paid to the irs tax authorities. emily: you have folks in ireland saying it's not fair to be looking at unfair practices, but not to retroactively be changing tax practices. alex: this is the thing that has a lot of tax lawyers wary about the entire scenario now. they come there and think they have arranged a particular regime or decision and all of a sudden there is not so high and dry and there is stuff going back a decade.

that is raising question marks about the willingness of american companies to invest in the region. emily: the apple case is just one of the eu competition commissioner's many investigations. amazon could face a similar ruling on the tax arrangement with luxembourg. other u.s. internet giants are under scrutiny for their dominance in search, megamergers, consumer data collection. alphabet is fighting three antitrust probes. those were addressed as well in the interview. take a liste >> we have a number of google cases. actually three by now because in europe you are more than welcome to be successful. we will afford you all the way. if you start to misuse your dominant position to present -- prevent others from having the same type of success then we get concerned. that's the example of the google case. we think google is misusing its dominant position to promote

itself and stay where they are and not to allow for others to compete with them in a fair way. >> what about over -- uber? >> uber is in between things. looking at it with my colleague and transportation and single bash and my colleague responsible for single markets through it on the one hand side it is great innovation. on the other hand, there are issues comparing with traditional transportation, taxis, that kind of thing and if taxes are being paid. >> you are also looking at the facebook merger and will look at linkedin and microsoft. our -- are social platforms a

concern? margrethe: our concern is only if competition is being closed down. that is the important point. i think one of the things the german authorities are looking at is in that gray zone between competition and privacy. because facebook is so dominant, you do not know when your football team is having their training session. you can look on they's book. it's a very dominant position. has this been used to minimize your rights when it comes to privacy? i think it will be very interesting for everyone to follow and get the results of this inquiry because this is a gray zone and the germans are looking for both german eyes and european eyes so it will be valuable for everyone. francine: you are looking for more cases? in data protection and privacy. >> i think data is one of the more important things because that is the new line of

business. it is a more traditional business. going into more data heavy ways of working goes into the kind of industry and any sort of traditional industry will be more data prone. we will launch a public consultation about our merger thresholds this autumn in order to ask experts and opinions. if we get the right merger on board because both knowledge and data is another kind of asset and currency than just the turnover of a company. i think that is very important in order for us to be able to secure that there is competition post merger in some of the new industries. francine: one of the criticisms from the u.s. is you are targeting u.s. companies. will you also target european companies? margrethe: we are finding those selective advantages where they are. if you look at the scheme we thought to be illegally and

stated last year, half of those who have the benefits were european multinationals. you find both. we target no one. we have an obligation for equal treatment, no matter your nationality, your size, your kind of ownership you should compete in merit. emily: that was eu competition commissioner speaking to francine lacqua. still with me is alex who covers apple. they did cover a lot of ground. i want to focus in on google specifically. google has multiple challenges facing them in europe. they are not happy about it. alex: google's businesses aggregating content. you go to google to look up a news story and it shows you a news results. you go to youtube to find a video, it will give you those

results. the problem is a lot of the way a lot of songs sneak into google youtube results for example and there is no sort of commission paid to the office and that, as far as the european commission is concerned isn't fair. i am sure there are things you looked up and says you cannot find a song initially because it says for rights reasons it cannot be here and you look deeper and it is on the second or third page. there is stuff always sneaking in. they are proposing a law that the parliament would have to vote on which would mean google have to police every single video to check if there is content which contravenes rights rules. they are saying this is completely unfeasible. emily: that was alex webb. still ahead niantic ceo will discuss pokemon go's epic release and the plans to level up the app. plus, twitch is branching out

and the ceo tells us why social eating could be the next big thing. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: welcome back to the best of "bloomberg west." i am emily chang. nintendo shares popped after the announcement that mario is coming to the iphone and pokemon go is coming to the apple watch. we saw nintendo shares spike and plunge since the release of the game in july. nintendo partnered with the developer of pokemon go, niantic labs and it is them who get the credit for creating this gaming

phenomenon. we caught up with the ceo and asked what it's like to be behind the scenes as the game has taken off. two great success and great controversy. take a listen. jack: my engineering team, they have born the brunt of this. it was a case where people were in the office at their workstation 24/7 for weeks. really for the hall to months of july and august it was really intense and people monitoring things around the clock all weekend long on the weekend and just continually working with our colleagues at google cloud on the backend to get infrastructure in place as the number of users went up and we launched in different countries. we had a couple of outages. there was some hacking. there were various things that kept us on our toes, but mainly, it was one wave of social after another. we launched in brazil after a few weeks in the olympics. that was a whole another wave. people are really happy that people are using their product. our team is. we are glad that things are calming down a little bit and we can return to more sane levels of work. emily: there have been reports of a slump in usage.

after the initial surge as well as an -- in app purchases. our users -- our user still growing? are purchasers growing? have they plateaued? john: we have gotten past that initial global explosion that we are kind of back to normal in terms of that massive group of people that came in. some of those people left the game a ton of them stayed in the game and now we are acquiring users at a normal pace. we are back to a normal level of activity and growth. it is an immensely popular game around the world. people continue to spend in the game. we are excited that as a foundation to build our business on and look at other projects in the future. to look at augmented reality more broadly and have this as an early success with niantic gives us a lot of flexibility going forward that we did not necessarily anticipate. particularly since augmented reality has so much promise we are excited to invest in that area and explore that over the next several years on the success of pokemon go and other titles we will launch in the future.

emily: you have collected a lot of data about users. how do you plan to use the data and monetize that data as you look at next steps? john: we are respectful of our users and what data is collected in terms of what it provides about users themselves is pretty limited. you sign up for the account and there is an e-mail address associated with it. that is really what we have access to in terms of user identity and we don't sell that or provide that to other people. there is also data entered as people play the game. that is a way we look as a way to ensure the integrity of the game and to improve the game itself. it's not something we provide to other people. or sell to third parties for example. it's a sensitive issue.

we are very respectful of their privacy and data. emily: some privacy advocates are lobbying the ftc. and saying why does the game need more information than user location. why do you need more data than where i am? what is your answer to that? john: the data that is provided through the game is the data associated with the user playing it. as you're moving around with your phone, the data that's necessary to know where you are where you are taking action so we know if there is pokemon nearby and if you capture it or not and we will know when you are interacting with a pokestop or a gymnasium and that is all facilitating gameplay. emily: it's coming to the apple watch. how much traffic you expect? john: we are excited to be working with apple. they are a great technology company and we have a strong

relationship with google already. google is a shareholder in our company. i am thrilled to be working with apple. they are doing amazing stuff with the phone and with the watch. i'm excited about the next generation watch. i think they got a lot of things right with that. the independent gps functionality and waterproofing and faster processor and wider screen. i am really excited and i can't wait to get mine. for us, i think it's a great development. we want to allow you to go outside and play with your friends and not necessarily have to look at your phone all the time. the watch is a great technology platform for that. you can interact with your watch and keep your attention on the people around you and the place you are. i'm excited about the partnership. and really excited about working with that new technology. emily: that was niantic ceo. now to twitch.

the streaming service that amazon bought for nearly $1 billion is ranching out. -- branching out. over the summer they broadcast live streams of the democratic and republican convention and amazon began streaming pilots of original tv shows on the service. we caught up to talk about how the pilot testing is going up. we have found that debuting new video on twitch, new on-demand series on twitch is a great way to get engagement and interactivity, but a burst of attention and new viewers you might not otherwise reach. the twitch audience is always interested in picking up new stuff and it was a great pilot. emily: this is something that netflix can't do. do you see more integration between amazon studios and twitch in a future? emmitt: we've been trying to figure out how we can get -- promote videos and get twitch content into -- influencers into amazon content.

i think we will definitely do more in the future, we are still very much in the testing and experimentation phase. emily: there is a big integration between amazon and twitch coming. what more can you tell us? how will this work? emmitt: one of our big announcement so i cannot reveal too much. we've been trying to figure out with amazon how to create something that drives value for twitch streamers, for our creators. that's who we focus on. for the whole community while also being a great thing for amazon and i think we have finally figured out an amazing integration point it's going to let us do that. i look forward to all the speculation of what that might be. for the next couple of weeks. emily: you've been streaming the political conventions. you have been streaming art classes for example and we talked about the pilots. will you be going in any of these directions? emmitt: we have discovered that

even though twitch is a community for gamers, gamers don't just like games. they like all kinds of stuff. we've seen great responses to the dnc and rnc content. good responses to the creative content and we are launching today a programming channel that will have live people doing -- programming computers. doing new computer programming and i think that will be exciting as well. we have just that in a great response from the community and i think we will continue to do a lot more of that. emily: social eating seems to be the hot new thing, really big and south korea where people are broadcasting themselves eating. how big is this going to become? emmitt: social eating as you said is huge in after -- south korea and it's one of those trends where i don't frankly understand it and i am not a social eating viewer. i remember starting twitch and

me being interested in watching gaming and a lot of people saying, watching people play games on the internet, who wants to do that? and so i am cautious of writing anything off. just because i do not like it doesn't mean there will not be a group of people for whom this isn't going to be exciting. emily: rooftop solar has surged 1000%. it will barely growing all next year. we'll hear from the ceo about sizzling solar rooftop resolution. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: a status check on the health of the rooftop solar industry. some investors see this space right for a people. the price of electricity has dropped and the price of solar panels are dramatically less

than the used to be. tempting customers to buy their own rather than enter into long lease agreements with the largest providers. we caught up with the ceo of sun run. along with our bloomberg editor at large corey johnson. she gave us her perspective on why she believes the solar leasing model will be alive and well for some time to come. lynn: consumers want this. the value proposition is strong and they continue to adopt it. i want to correct one of the opening comments to say that if you look at the key two numbers the griffin -- growth rate is 30% year-over-year and we have penetrated only 1% of the market and that is a $400 trillion electricity market and that growth rate can sustain for a very long time. emily: the question may be, consumers want this, but how do they want it? do they want to take a loan to finance it? do they want to enter into a leasing agreement? lynn: i think for the long-term, the leasing will stay the most popular and it overwhelmingly is today. it is about 60 plus percent of the market and there are two reasons why i believe that will be the case. the first one is because we

incentivize this through the tax code. when you are a business owner you can realize more tax benefits. it adds complexity for homeowners who do not want to wait for the tax credit. i think for that reason people will choose the least because there is more value over time and i think the second trend people are missing is that we come in a couple years, will not just be selling solar. we will be controlling the energy management in the home. there will be storage, electric vehicles and that will be a complex relationship. that will be managed by a service provider who will be helping the home to find went to consume, when to export back to the grid. cory: you have some competitors who have had some really hard times. solar city has cut their forecast by 24%. you have cut it just a little. you are in the same market. what's the difference there?

i don't want you to critique your competitors. what is the fundamental difference where you are seeing a minor slowdown and they are seen a major slowdown? lynn: if you look at the market overall, 30% can sustain for the long -- for a long time. we are in the same market. when you have these huge transformation i there is a lot of capital that comes into the market and for a while when the market can be rewarding growth at all costs you may make decisions that are not long-term sustainable. when the market gets a little tougher you may want to focus on profitability or sustainability. and that is a healthy correction. that's what my company has always done. that has better differentiation from the beginning is we have been focused on customer value, let's have a sustainable, long-term business. that is why i think we are separating ourselves from the pack here. if you look at our forecast for the back half of the year, we lowered guidance a tiny bit. in our direct business we will still be delivering 60% growth.

emily: you said profitability has been your focus. since we are here, elon musk is shaking things up. what do you think of tesla buying solar city and how is that changing the industry for you? lynn: i think it's a good move for sun run. first because awareness is our issue. this is a product that saves consumers money and brings clean industry. it's a product consumers want, but they don't know about it yet. to have a strong brand and have someone else spending money on it and articulating our by you to the regulators is a valuable for us. i think they will also push the innovation in terms of how do we become a bigger piece of the home? how do we electrify transportation? i think that lifts the entire industry. emily: you actually have a package where you are offering the panels with the home battery. is that the power wall battery and are you only doing this with

tesla? tell us more about that. lynn: one of the challenges with renewable energy in the past, people have said what happens when net metering ends? what happens when the sun isn't shining? storage is getting so cheap that we are able -- right now in hawaii we can install pv plus power. we are not exporting that power. we are storing it up in the battery and that home is cheaper then the utility with zero upfront expense. cory: you can't do that in a lot of states because it is regulated. he cannot do it in california. lynn: we would not do it in california because it would not be a strong value proposition. just this morning we installed power on the painted ladies and we also installed a battery backup on the home. cory: you mentioned regulators. news today that the senate committee sent a letter to your company and others looking at the evaluation you put on these things and the tax break to get as a result. how do you determine the value. -- with solar powers coming --

solar panels coming down -- how do you determine the long-term value? what is the process for that? how has that changed over time? lynn: we determine the value. we put a discount rate on that and then we value it. cory: to the consumer or to you as a company? lynn: to the company. we look at the cost to install and you do a blend between the two. i think the good news is i can -- this tax cut it -- tax credit program is successful. it's created tons of jobs and clean energy. we have saved $100 million on electric bills for our customers. the government looks into that, i think that's a good thing for them to do.

we are confident we valued that correctly. emily: when it comes to home batteries are you working with tesla or other companies? lynn: we are working with tesla and other companies and there is a ton of innovation happening. we expect the cost of that product will come down 50%. that will open up increasing markets. it will de-risked our company from a regulatory outcome. emily: paint a picture for me in 10 years. the energy market because things are changing so fast in the external market and a lot of things you can't control like policies and utilities going out there and saying that people who aren't getting solar are paying for it. how do you see the industry being different in a decade? lynn: if you go to boardrooms across utilities across the u.s. today, 99% of people are in strategic agreement that the world is moving toward solar and distributed. that is new. a few years ago people would've been fighting it. now they are believers. getting back to the earlier question about market

penetration, i was with the president of southern california edison recently. we were on a panel together and he said we fully expect in the next decade we will have one million solar homes in southern california edison. they have 175 today, that is a 6x growth he is planning and expects. i think you're going to see a dramatic shift toward rooftop solar. one of the things we should be optimistic about is we need to move to clean energy. this is the way we can get it to ramp quickly. we can build it in a day. emily: that was the ceo of sun run. and bloomberg editor at large cory johnson. still ahead, facebook messenger expands their capability. our conversation with the head of facebook messaging products. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: facebook is seeing serious growth in its messaging service. facebook messenger now has over a billion users and over 300 million users using the audio and video calling features. all of this as the company rolls out a platform with better tools for bots and businesses including easier ways to pay and check out. this week we sat down with david marcus, the vice president of messaging products and asked about messenger's expansion of ai, bots, and more. david: the way we think about this is you have news feed, which is great. you can target the right demographic end-users. then you have messenger, which we think is great. what we are trying to build is more bridges between those two services that share the same identity space. with this new release, you can actually do multiple things. one is you can of course have

automated exchanges or humored -- human powered exchanges inside of a thread. now transactional capabilities, we have a new web view that you can use to render the right ui at the right time because a lot of the times ui is better than conversational interfaces especially when you are trying to complete a transaction. we are bringing it all together. we think we are going to have really good experiences. emily: it is your vision that we use sms a lot less or amazon a lot less, and use messenger. david: you will probably continue to use amazon. there are so many sellers out there and merchants and businesses out there that don't have the benefits of sitting on the home screen of your phone with a credential that is already stored with your identity to unlock with a single fingerprint. for all of the other players out there, it is hard to go from in 10 to completion and intent to creation within their mobile app. what we are seeing right now, in france, there is match.com that

has a brand there and they have created a full dating experience within messenger and they are seeing a 2x conversion as opposed to diverting people to a mobile app for mobile website. in india, there is another bot that takes care of bill payments and different things in one place. they have 10x conversion as a pair to redirect people to the mobile website. emily: the reality is people still use sms for messaging. how do you see the balance tipping? david: it's not true anymore. in developed markets and i think in markets where messenger is really an app that people use a lot to message like the u.s. and canada and central europe, what we are seeing is gradually more and more people are using messenger and they use texting less and less. just because now they can find almost everyone they want to talk to on messenger and they do not need to find -- need a phone number to find them.

a name is enough. you have all of these great capabilities. like live video calling and with instant video you can start streaming with all the other person responding. you have more and more capabilities on messenger that makes it more differentiated and better to communicate one-on-one and also in groups and with businesses and services. emily: you are doing more e-commerce. are we at the point where you are taking a cut of the revenue? is facebook making money? david: facebook is making money. they are selling more ads that take to messenger and as of today we are rolling out the new apt format on news feed that an nap -- enables advertisers to buy and add that in one tap will get you in a thread with the business on messenger. we are creating more demand on newsfeed. gradually as we build the ecosystem we will have more

supply on messenger. right now we are focusing on creating the ecosystem. emily: will you take a cut of e-commerce transaction? david: that is not the goal. facebook's businesses advertising. -- if we can help businesses grow that is more by you for everyone. emily: you have new ways for developers to share box. do you have a about this turn into a spam-y experience? david: we have clear rules. what you are supposed to do and not do if you are a business on the platform. we have great control for people to block or mute conversations they don't want to get notified from. we feel good about that. emily: will there be a bot store? why isn't there one yet? david: i do not want to call it a box store because what we want is fluid conversations between people and businesses. when we add more discovery services inside messenger to

enable brands to get their experience and service to the right user. probably at some point. right now we feel we have the greatest service on earth to get discovery. that is the newsfeed and we're going to leverage that great product to bring people to the experience. emily: that was david marcus. head of facebook messenger. that does it for this edition of the best of "bloomberg west." we will bring you all the latest in tech throughout the week. be sure to tune in on thursday when we hear from linkedin ceo jeff weiner following microsoft's acquisition of the company. tune in at 6:00 eastern. we will see you then. this is bloomberg. ♪

terre: we asked some of the best minds in the world from business, government, the arts, academia, what are the most urgent problems facing humanity, and how do we resolve them? the result is big problems, big thinkers. >> what is the number one major problem facing mankind? >> i think is the lack of education. >> politics. >> there is a balance of green spirit.