oliver: welcome to bloomberg businessweek. we're coming to you from new york. striking fear into the hearts of french politicians. and what post-it notes is doing and the market. finally, what's been the most extensive mistake for the u.s. military. the editore are with in chief of bloomberg businessweek. so many stories this week. we want to look at technology. tints can be crucial in stroke

recovery, but not everybody has access to them. >> of these stints are around $8,000,p, which is not a huge amount of money. when you have a stroke, the speed with which you can alleviate that pressure, that bleeding, on the bahrain is crucial to recovery. this article talks about how the toection of these stints is take the clock out, but they are not common here there are not care only about 115 stroke centers throughout the u.s., and paramedics are usually the first responders to make a decision and decide if it is a minor stroke and whether they take them to a hospital or if it is a more major stroke, they take them to one of these specialist centers. if you do not go to a specialist center, you're more likely to get a drug. it is showing that the stints are more effective and lead to

better recovery than the drugs. ,ven with our aging population we do not have enough of these stroke specific centers to be able to get the stint recovery treatment out as quickly as people need. oliver: there is an interesting of americans do not know the implications of this publication in france and what it has on those elections. tell us about it. >> this is a fascinating story. one reason is because it has proven to be such a huge effect in this presidential election, which has been super topsy-turvy . the favorites moving down and public scandals uncovered. making a sudden

surge. the other thing that is fascinating for our industry is the truly print publication. it still makes about wi-fi million dollars from a print publication to it dates back to 1915, has a long tradition. it is similar to a u.k. spy magazine which traffics in tidbits about the elite. this elections i go france, they are the one who first uncovered philly on -- fillon paying his wife and information about the polling at the time, and they have really gone in and taken down power. they say they're there to serve nor the left nor the right. was something written about the f-35 program. chileans of dollars, and there are questions about

it. megan: this is a great piece exposing inefficiencies in the process. this is one that has gone iterations.any the issue when designing these large aircraft carriers, whether it is the f-35 or even air force one, if so many people want different demands for the there aree forget basically four service divisions in the u.s., and each of them want to different capabilities for this plane. i cannot believe it when i read like ais plane can land hovercraft, can essentially come down like a helicopter. it can land on the battlefield or on a ship in the middle of the indian ocean. but the technical requirements and each level of service coming in and demanding different things drove the price up so much that it are along the contract, complicated it, and no one can make a decision. now it is at a point where what you designed seven years ago

does not work in the kind of warfare we are seeing now. oliver: a lot of cool details on the tech, and there are sort of economic implications. the f-35 is him was perpetually in focus because it is the single largest procurement by the pentagon ever. it is an expenditure that, once you fold in the upkeep of the planes into the future, it will approach and possibly exceed $1 trillion. any time there's that much money floating around, there will be attention to the program. again, because president trump has been focusing on it, talking about it a lot, first down playing it and insulting it, and then in his fashion, declaring that now that he is involved it is a fantastic jet. we looked at whether it is a fantastic fighter jet and discovered it has some performance problems. carol: tell me about those problems and about the costs and how long this has been going on. paul: the contract began with a

competition between boeing and lockheed in the late 19 90's. in 2001, lockheed was declared the winner and was able to build the f-35. the idea was that it was a three and one bargain. one common ploy naked between to be suitable for the air force, marine corps, and the navy -- that could plane between to be suitable for the air force, marine corps, and the navy. so there was going to be a massive replacement of cold war era planes. the original plan was for more than 2400 of these to be built for author of the services that fly fighter jets here it almost 2000's, is an the plan that large and with that terms of in it in money, it ran into problems. the degree of what the designers call commonality among the three variants of the planes turned

out to be something approaching 25% as opposed to 70% or 80%, which was the original plan. so the scale of the plan went out the window pretty quickly. costs again to overrun their targets by the billions of dollars, and delays set in, now amounting to something like seven years. oliver: so it was a let's build one model that can't be used in three different parts of the military, but they ended up making three different planes? basically it. oliver: so that change the price. what did it bring the total cost to? where is it right now? originally, the program for the feldman and i go is a should and something like $200 billion. the program would cost something like $200 billion -- $200 million per now it is about $80 billion. thatiggest cost and figure

taxpayers should want to pay attention to in the coming years is how much it will cost to sustain the plane, to actually keep it in shape to my keep it well maintained and fly in, and that amount could easily exceed $600 billion over time. oliver: next, who is really to blame for sluggish u.s. car plans, and h&m is chasing its shoppers' parents. this is bloomberg businessweek. ♪

oliver: welcome to bloomberg businessweek. industries -- how changing consumer tastes is affecting u.s. car plans. reporter in our dietrich. >> it is always a supply and demand issue in the industry. it takes years to build the factories, and they try to produce hundreds of thousands of vehicles all the same.

they have to project those years out, and consumer case can swing dramatically from month to month or year to year. so sales of past the peak, and all of the decline has come from cars. midsized cars like the toyota camry or the honda accord. compact cars that are now kind of large for compacts. civics, corollas, ford focuses. those cars are not selling like they have been. they have been displaced by suv's. it has the market a little out of whack. oliver: i like the lead and how it goes straight to numbers. ford fusion, down 37%. malibu, down 36%. 39%.ous down give as a perspective on the number spirit that is the sedan market. >> right, mainstream cars. malibu and fusion are midsized sedans, same as a camry or accord. the prius is a little smaller

but has a large interior. for the handful of truly green what isrs, it provides often used as a family car. so these are mainstream family sedans. the're being replaced by crossovers like the honda crv or ford escape. smaller than a big truck kind of like ansomething more old station wagon used to be. oliver: if you are donald trump or you are looking at the industry as an analyst, what does it tell you when that demand shifts? hey, demand is there for vehicles but different types of vehicles -- what does it mean for american manufacturing, which was a talking point of the trump administration? are they coming from summer isles or are they american-made? are they coming from

somewhere else or are they american-made? whether this is a softening and apply to know -- we have had record sales the last two years in the united states, an unprecedented streak of sales growth. now it looks like we're kind of over the top. will it be a traditional cyclical contracts and where sales will fall from 17.5 million the last two years down to 13 million before recovering again, or will it be around 17 million for another three years or so? a lot of the folks in the industry are feeling confident that things will stay where they are on a volume basis, maybe even to some of those profits where we have seen warnings from ford and the like about how much tougher the competition is getting. so maybe the volume stays high, which is good for workers, but the profitability shrinks, which is less good for investors. all of her prop the numbers, that is basically the demand side.

the supply side, how does that factor into this in terms of whether or not the supply is there, whether or not to meet that fall you that manufactures need, new plans, new people? : it will not keep growing up to 20 million a year or something, so people are putting the brakes on manufacturing plants. expansion plans that have been announced are kind of going forward. they are executing, but nobody is really adding new plans to build a $1 billion plant. in the company section, h&m made a name for itself in teen fashion, and now it is going for a slightly more mature audience. we talked to reporter robert williams. robert: the only company bigger by sales would be inditex. h&m is the big fashion brand

that became known over the past few decades for being able to fairly quickly copy runway trends and sell them in their version. cheaper but they have also been known as a value retailer with a very low price point, where a lot of young consumers go to shop. below: there is one read our building, a great place to go to grab a quick shirt if you are in need -- there is one right below our building. but they found what is popular, made it accessible, particularly to mostly younger people. but as you point out, that is changing now. there: yeah, now developing some other brands that have a more premium positioning. a slightly more expensive brand to attract somewhat older customers, people with a bit more purchasing power. that can be interesting for h&m. the value space has a lot of competition in it. oliver: these new stores, the

new products it will be moving into, this will be under a different branch, not necessarily the h&m that you see. this is a different company. how does it break down? robert: i would say that most people probably will not be able to tell that the secondary brands owned by h&m that they already have are part of h&m. i think most people are not aware of this in terms of consumers. this new one certainly not either. this will be a store, and new ande that is called arkit, it will have a higher priced positioning with clothing for men, women, and children, kind of symbol, essential clothing, versus fashion and trends. they will also sell some other brands like home goods and shoe brands. means "sheet of paper" in swedish, which speaks

to the essential nature of the clothing. theseing about retail and companies, like michael cors, for example, luxury and high-end, as they expand to a broader markets, the sort of lose that appeal. is the opposite the case here? it is not sound like h&m has to worry about that because they are starting on the other end of the spectrum. robert: i don't think so peer groups thing that premium niche brands, as well as lifestyle brands, those that offer the total package for certain aesthetic, so everything some but he is interested in the outdoors needs are everything a young family and the city that likes things that are clean and minimalist, which may be the target of this new one, arkit. that is the space where i think you have a lot more power to create something new. to hack your how way out of a full-time job. a lot more, coming up. ♪

welcome back to bloomberg businessweek. you can catch as on the radio on channel 119, sirius xm. new york, boston, washington, and in the bay area, and in london and asia. in the technology section, some of the country's top coders found a way to avoid the nine to five. athon does not mean hacking are breaking into someone's email. hacking means to the zoning together out of existing pieces to create something new. so hackathon is like a marathon building session, which lasts from 24 to 48 hours.

oliver: so not all hacking is bad. there is white hat and black hat . these are engineers build and projects a doing it as a sort of tournament here till is where these events began. >> any place with a large area, like an auditorium or any type anyplaceence hall, with screaming fast wi-fi and bathrooms are fair game. oliver: and a steady supply of doritos and red bull. you are talking about how it has essentially become sort of a replacement for full-time jobs. tell us the crux of the story, which is who is going to these hackathons and how they are making money. >> that is true. would not saye, i it is super widespread, but there have been a dozen or more people that have been able to full-time living

out of this, supplementing the start of dreams or supplementing contract work. typically what will happen is they will go online or they will hear from friends that a hackathon is occurring, and based on how close it is to them, whether they have to pay for airfare or not, they will get together teams and bring their sleeping bags -- usually in other toothbrushes -- and then their laptops and their phones, a town of power cords, and they will show up and start rights, butbragging to your point, for prizes, which can get pretty big. oliver: are these students currently enrolled who want to make money on the side or are we talking about engineers that have graduated and this is their sort of full-time gig? who are the purchase of its for the group you were watching? -- who were the participants? >> there are academic hackathons, and it is called major league hacking, so think

of it like varsity sports for programmers. i think there was 170 of them scheduled for 2017, calendar year. so that happens at universities all around the united states and even the world. 170 of them in north america alone for 2017. and their is more in addition to that. -- and there is more an addition to that. those are typically for bragging rights and also to look at recruiters. at large tech companies like uber, google, microsoft, ibm, and the like, they go to these andathons to watch the up rising talent and also to promote their technology. there is another type were really large prizes are at stake. salesforce famously through one back in 2014 with a $1 million

first prize. they discontinue that because they really did not get out of wanted tothon with a do but others have continued, like hasbro, procter & gamble, the $5 millionh prize over a three-year period. oliver: taser wants to change its name and what it is known for. we talked to reporter karen wise. karen: everybody knows taser for the stun gun. oliver: don't tase me, bro. >karen: that is exactly right. they have been trying to come up with a second revenue stream that can match that of the stun gun, and they finally hit their stride with police body cameras, -- with the in

public demand for police body cameras, and they were one of the first comedy to have a viable product that could be rolled out and such a scale. taser has a division called axon that makes police body cameras and the associated cloud computing software type of stuff needed to manage the digital footage that people have. thecally, that has been fastest-growing part of the company, and they see it as a way to expand. they announced this plan -- or they have officially already change the company name from taser to axon. they changed their ticker, and other see the future of the company. they say they're definitely still committed to the taser, the weapon, but i really see a lot of their growth potential coming from the body cameras. and then all of this digital management of evidence and digital life of a police officer. oliver: this is very interesting

to buy feel like there are a few instances of a company whose is a fairly ubiquitous idea, the taser, and a joke about it, but that is kind of what they are known for. what was it along the way that made them realize they had to change? i have been watching this stock jumped after the ferguson shooting a they started talking about police body cameras. where is the impetus for the change coming from? karen: interesting, "don't got them into this line. there were a lot of lawsuits and injuries from people that were tased. they were facing a lot of scrutiny regardless of the developed what was called a taser cam, a little camera that plopped onto the taser itself and activated when the gun was activated, but it only capture the moments when they were tasing someone.

it was essentially a highlight reel of people getting tased, which is not what they were looking for. he wanted to capture what let-up twin incident and what happens during and after it. so they started developing a standalone body camera for that. clunkyst one was super few big components to it. it took a while to get to what side, and they have a body camera that mounts on the chest and one that mounts on glasses. that is trying to protect themselves and their customers from lawsuits, what first got them into the body camera line, but then they were kind of just finally getting the product into good shape right when ferguson happened in all this greater scrutiny on policing nationwide exploded. good timing for them. oliver: next, the state of north

carolina says no thanks. in a high-stakes market for ankle bracelets. this is bloomberg businessweek. ♪ so you're having a party?

how nice. i'll be right there. and the butchery begins. what am i gonna wear? this party is super fancy. let's go. i'm ready. are you my uber? [ horn honks ] hold on. don't wait for watchathon week to return. [ doorbell rings ] who's that?

show me netflix. sign up for netflix on x1 today and keep watching all year long. all of her popular welcome back. it's still ahead, north carolina is eyeing $100 million in savings. and then 3m decides what is at stake in the market for ankle monitors. finally, the senate investigation into potential ties between the white house and russia. all of that ahead. oliver: we are back with megan murphy to talk about some must reads. let's go to the market section. this goes along with this topic you guys have been exploring, which is active versus passive

investing, specifically about one treasurer taking a more passive approach to a pension fund. megan: he is taking an active approach to making his management passive of the state, i think. this is an interesting character, the treasurer of north carolina. we have great images of him on his harley davidson. his view is, look, we are being ripped off by these heavy fees we paid for active management funds. we want to take that number down to a maximum of $100 million. we want to shift our management to passive management. we think it is a better strategy. this is not -- we have talked about this. it is not a shift that is new. we have warren buffett as one of the champions of this shift. it is something we have seen in pension funds, whether it is calpers or other retirements shifting this way. and this is just a microcosm of a larger shift in the fund management industry. carol: not always so easy,

right? there are long-term contracts that have locked them in. megan: he argued that they are a most favored nation and that this is a bad move. and that they have them an alternative investments with higher returns, long-term contracts that are difficult to unwind to get the assets out. i do think that when we look at this trend, and we see the markets doing what they are doing, continuing to be pretty good, talking about whether we will see the end of this bull market, more than eight years and counting. but this debate about what you are actually paying for. it is something that roils the huge funds we know about. it is also on a state by state and municipality by municipality argument now. oliver: we always talk about a macro, top-down conversation about active versus passive. this is a very intricate look at what it means to make the switch. let's talk about a story in the future section. company specific. 3m, and iing about

think the role that will surprise a lot of people, the industry for ankle bracelets. megan: this is a company that we know about four scratch tape. it is a company we know about as innovation and engineering wonders. they pioneered the concept of giving employees time off to think about new things. breakthrough things. one of the markets they moved into in the middle part of this decade was security monitoring. ankle bracelets that inmates are wearing. this obviously is a growing market as prisons try to move the population out. we all know that there is a shortage of prison cells. the issue is that, for 3m the , technology they were using simply did not synch up, particularly in the state of massachusetts where they had a large contractor supply of these. it came down to something that was very pedestrian. model, whichr 2g

was not compatible with some providers. also with a 3g system. so offenders would not be registered on the network. when they were not registered, alerts would be sent out they were in violation. they cannot be found on the network. many times, law enforcement would be so inundated, it led to even more confusion, more arrest warrants. people being put behind bars because of this wrong technology. carol: we caught up with lauren etter with more. lauren: the company is a very vast, multinational industrial company. most people know about the post-it notes and scotch tape. they make several industrial products and all kinds of industries, from oil and gas mining to medical devices. one of the industries they have gotten into is the safety and security business. , they havethat

recently, over the past six and a half years, been involved in the electronic monitoring device business, which is essentially the ankle monitors used to monitor prisoners, parolees, people on probation that type of , thing. oliver: as it turns out, maybe they are not as good at making and maintaining ankle bracelets as they are making post-it notes. jokes aside there is a serious , consequence when these do not work. lauren: well, that is right. i think it has been an uphill battle for them. this is definitely a business that is maybe a little bit far afield from their core competency. so it has been a little bit of a struggle. the technology has evolved over the years. they may be did not adopt the newest technology at the quickest pace, which has put them in a couple of difficult situations.

carol: let's take a step back. it is a huge business. i think you talk about it being a $6 billion business. take a step back. 3m worked to fix the situation, if you will. take us back to clinton, massachusetts, where they were overwhelmed for years with problems with these bracelets. it is kind of staggering. unfortunately, it seems to have led to people out on parole, maybe alerts going off when they should not have, and being put back in prison. lauren: that is right. this is kind of the pinnacle of the problem may have experienced. right after they acquired the business, the technology they had was an older technology. it was designed and really only compatible on certain cellular networks. so the way the device works is it essentially collects satellite signals for gps and stores the data and sends it to the offender monitoring center via the cellular network.

in this case, it was an clinton, massachusetts. it is almost like placing a phone call to transmit the data. at the time, 3m's device really only was functional or compatible with the at&t network and the t-mobile network. the problem was there were rapid upgrades in the cellular network systems. they were upgrading to 3g. that is when the 3m product was only 2g. also, the 3m product was not compatible with verizon, which was rapidly becoming one of the largest, if not the largest, service provider in the state of massachusetts. what happened was these offenders were wearing that ankle monitors, and they were not able to connect over the cellular network often times. or they were not able to obtain a gps satellite signal. when that would happen it would

, generate an alert that would be sent to the monitoring center. well, the alerts were not necessarily due to the fact the offender was doing something wrong, violating terms of their parole. or they were trying to mask the cellular network. so what happened was, as the center in the state of massachusetts were trying to figure out how to handle this, a lot of people ended up being arrested. they would issue arrest warrants because the authorities could not figure out if it was a technical glitch related to the networks not functioning properly or if it was because the offender was trying to do something that required them to be in violation of their parole. oliver: there has got to be some serious legal investigation happening here. i know that in your story, you mentioned some of the lawyers representing offenders who have been subject to a return to jail or a parole violation because of this technical glitch.

what is happening on the legal battle? lauren: well, really, it is on a case by case basis at this time. you need to keep in mind who the audience is. a lot of the people, they are criminals. these are not the most savory bunch of people. of them havea lot committed serious crimes, including murder, including sex offenses. so they are not the most sympathetic crowd. they often don't have the resources to follow through on these types of things. there are several people who have looked into lawsuits or challenged the accuracy of the monitor in court though. honestly, there have not been a lot of victories. i think it is too soon to say how this is going to evolve.

definitely, there are criminal defense attorneys who have had dozens of these cases and have represented people. primarily, they just try to get them off rather than trying to , challenge the accuracy of the device. they have just been trying to challenge the accuracy of the device saying my guy does not , deserve to be in violation of parole. he should not have spent the night in jail. i think that is where it is at. oliver: up next, the complex and multipronged investigation into the trump administration's ties with russia. this is bloomberg businessweek. ♪

oliver: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i am oliver renick. in the politics and policy section, the senate's investigation into russia's interference in the election has

the main act. we spoke to matt phillips. matt: here is what we know -- in the intelligence community, by january, order of the obama administration, concluded russia did attempt to interfere with our election, and it did so to benefit president trump. now we haveb of -- two congressional investigations ongoing, senate and house, it is the job -- and the fbi, too, that we know very little about, actually -- it is the job of these investigators to answer the question whether there is any evidence that suggests trump associates, either affiliated with the campaign or the administration, had anything to do with, had any knowledge of, these facts laid out by the intelligence community that, yes, russia willfully interfered with our election. the real dynamite will be whether they find any evidence that ties this directly back to the president.

but there are a lot of questions that exist beneath that about whether any of his associates, whether it was the campaign or the administration, had any knowledge of or had any dealings with these russian hacks. oliver: i think part of the general confusion in the public, trying to suss out what is happening here, is, as you mentioned, these parallel investigations that are happening. one in congress and the other in the fbi. what doing all about the differences between the two? matt: we have two congressional investigations, both armed with subpoena power. it gives authority for a public hearing. we have the house and the senate. the house as devolved into something that has lost a lot of credibility because of committee chairman devin nunes, who was a member of the trump transition and has been trying to, it seems, pull this investigation away from the questions about

russia and trump associates and into the realm of looking at the allegations trump made about president obama will wiretapping -- president obama wiretapping him. he is trying to pull this into that direction, having to do with unmasking perhaps done by -- carol: so it is unusual for the head of the committee to go to the white house and briefed the president and not numbers of the committee? matt: it raises all kinds of questions about who he is serving. is he serving as a member of congress, is elected by his constituents, or is he serving executives? it is the premise of the separation of powers. carol: this makes the senate committee investigation that much more important. matt: that is the main act. the two chairman, the chairman is richard burr, of north carolina. the democratic cochairman is mark warner. they have what seems to be a pretty good relationship. they have been out front, saying we want to be as transparent as possible.

thoughts that this was going to wrap up of my summer or so but those thoughts are long gone. this is going to take months and months. we are not going to have any report before the end of the year, if that what is interesting is their ability to access this raw intelligence that exists inside the cia is very limited. every day, the senate investigators -- we have about seven staffers at work for this committee that, by our reporting , suggests everyday they're going to the cia, going to a secure room, and going through binders, very thick binders of what is probably some of the most secret information that exists within the intelligence community. a lot of this intelligence is probably transcripts intercepted by the nsa. they can bring no electronic devices into this room. no recorders, cameras, phones, anything like that. they are literally going through , by hand, hard documents, reading them. this takes months. they are negotiating with the cia to try to get a computer put into the room. that is the level of low-tech

analysis the senate is having to rely on. oliver: that is really cool, because you guys have a story that goes with this that talks about the details of the investigation. those folks that are in that room pouring over binders and folders, what are they looking for? how do they know when they find it? matt: well, those are questions i do not have answers to. right now, they are probably trying to wrap their heads around what the intelligence says. some of this is raw intelligence that is actually intercepted transcripts of phone calls. and some of it is analysis. they are trying to get their heads around the totality of it. what they are probably also looking for, in a very low-tech way, are these incidental names popping up. people who are associated with trump who happen to be on the phone with, say targets of the

, surveillance, which typically were russian agents. oliver: up next, the sometimes gray area between lenders and loan sharks. plus, the designer behind the next thermostat had some big ideas for cameras. this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

oliver: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." you can also catch us on the radio, channel 119 sirius xm. in new york. in the bay area, london, and asia. newomics editor reads the book, "loan sharks."

>> loansharking is charging high interest rates on loans. the author, professor at manhattan college, looks at, in the united states from after the civil war on up through the depression, and he calls this the birth of predatory lending. this time taking us from the industrialization of america to the great depression. oliver: to what degree does that get mixed in with a capacity for risk-taking? because you are going to want a higher interest rate if you are going to take on more risk. >> yeah, that gets to my take on the book, which i feel like the author does not quite nail it. maybe because i look at economics, i look at supply and demand to be the key determinants of price. of course, and interest-rate is a price, price of money. i try to think, what is causing the rates to be this high on loans? demand, of course, and

the borrowers, who are in some cases desperate, and there is the supply from lenders who may or may not have enough money to supply. why would rates be high? you can think of two reasons. there is not enough money around, which is usually not the case. we see banks lending. the other is the person who is borrowing is a risky prospect. is maybe kind of impaired in some way so they are not able to get a better deal. maybe they are an alcoholic. that was a huge problem that he writes about. the link between loansharking and alcoholism. or maybe there is a new immigrant that doesn't speak the does not know what the terms mean. carol: i want to take you back to the birth of predatory lending. he writes about this. american moved west, the settlers preceded the banks. there were no organized banks out west of the ohio, all the way out to california.

people got money wherever they could. supplyarks spring up to loans where conventional banks would not lend or had not yet gotten to. oliver: i guess that begs the question, you have lenders and sharks. but there is a gray area in between. in the book, how does he assess at what point you become a shark? >> one problem that abetted the loan sharks is states set a ceiling on lending rates, 6% or 7%. remember you have to take , inflation into account. if you had a fairly high inflation rate, 6% or 7% is especially for a loan with the carrying costs, and the processing was expensive. it was not high enough for the standard lenders to make any money, so they kind of left the

field open. the loan sharks were the only ones supplying money. one of the innovations came around 1907, a foundation that still exists today. shortly after that, they came up with a uniform small lending law which tried to deal with that. it said, states, we are not going to tell you to abolish these laws you have on the books. but give sort of a waiver in certain cases that would allow the rate to go up as high as 40%, which is pretty high. it was enough so the conventional, established lenders with good lending practices -- know your customer loss in that kind of stuff -- they were able to supply the market. ace out the loan sharks who were charging hundreds of percent. oliver: also, a superstar tech designer was inspired by

smartphones when he designed a camera. >> the company we are talking about is called light. you may never have heard of them, but what they are trying to do is revolutionize the way we think about sophisticated camera technology. as you know, most of us use our phones. those are kind of limiting if you actually care about photography in terms of zooming or low light. what light had to do was to figure out how to take the dslr and put it into more of a smartphone or smart tablet format. oliver: they're a very interesting people involved it we will get to that, but i think the concept is really interesting. essentially what happened, we took photos in a certain way with cameras. point and shoot. and the advent of the smartphone came along. is this about the pendulum -- we swung to where people were taking photos with their phones. now it is swinging back to the

middle somewhere? >> i think that is the way they are hoping people will interpret this. if you think about our ability to share digital imagery, there is something like 1.3 trillion digital images produced recently. that is like a four-fold increase in the last five years. most of the images, as you know from your instagram feed, are pretty bad. oliver: it depends on who you follow. >> depends on who you follow. if you care about photography, the idea they had is we can do better. the problem is the packaging. if you think about a dslr camera compared to your phone, you have to drop it over your shoulder. you have these additional lenses and a bag. what they are trying to figure out to do is, how do we eliminate that? oliver: interesting, disrupting -- destructive technology the disruptive technology. these guys, let's talk about who they are.

they are swinging the pendulum the other way. who is in charge of this company? it is a breakdown between engineering and design. >> they are guys in their 50's. photo enthusiasts. he said, we have a great idea, how are we going to make this thing into a product people want to buy? kind of a big question. they recruited a guy, he is an industrial designer, probably best known for doing the nest thermostat in 2011. he has worked on a lot of other projects, including the latter stage gopro cameras. they said, ok, here is a box of parts and an idea, figure out how to package it. oliver: what is his background? you mentioned nest. is that where he built a name? >> if you know nest, he is very much the person associated with that product. he designed gopro cameras, mp3 players. nest was his breakthrough.

he has a small team working in silicon valley. oliver: "bloomberg businessweek" is available on newsstands and also online. more bloomberg television starts right now. ♪

caroline: i am caroline hyde. this is "best of bloomberg all ofogy." we bring you our top interviews from this week in tech. president trump met with ceos on his infrastructure plan. how tech could be playing a bigger role. toshiba warns about its futures on the heels of a earnings announcement. we will discuss if the company can recover. 23 and me clears a