tv Best of Bloomberg Technology Bloomberg October 1, 2017 4:00am-5:00am EDT
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♪ emily: i am emily chang, and this is the best of "bloomberg technology." coming up, apple has hit a production snag on the iphone x. while amazon rolled out revamped versions of the echo. we will see how two tech giants stack up on hardware. plus, ellen pao discussed why she wrote her new book and what changes she would propose to combat online harassment. gopro unveils its most powerful
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camera yet? could this be the key to the company's turnaround? we will hear from the ceo. first, to our lead. apple is already facing production delays for the top-of-the-line iphone x. the delays come to two problems with the 3-d sensor manufacturing process. reports say makers of the components using facial recognition are struggling to reach adequate production levels. bloomberg's alex webb gave us the details. alex: what we know from the report yesterday, there were problems with the three sensors. that is causing delays. "the wall street journal" cued off that. they dug into it more. the sensor which projects the infrared interface which maps your face for the apple 3-d facial recognition system that apple has. we don't know the extent to which how many phones are on the shelves. emily: to what extent do we know how all of these things are going to impact supply?
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alex: going back to the start of september when apple unveiled the phones. the iphone 8 and the iphone x, as far as i know, they staggered the releases. the iphone 8 is already on shelves, and you can go out and buy one right now. there is a six-week window until the iphone x, because we knew there were some problems with the screen. apple said those delays were taken into account when they made their projections. the current quarter, the one that ends on the 30th. we don't know to what extent the 3-d sensor delays were taken into account when they said the release date would be november 3 . if it was, investors don't have anything to worry about. on this front at least. if they did, they might be in short supply come that day, and they will not able to meet demand. that might be a cause for concern.
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emily: could this be or give us some answer as to why the release was staggered with the iphone 8 last week and the iphone x is not out until november? alex: it could be one of the factors. there are only a handful making these oled, organic light-emitting diode, displays , which give the sharper display for the iphone x. there had been some problems getting the 3-d sensor systems working. we were not aware of the extent of the issue. we are looking to see what the case is. the problem seems to be in the module makers. you have all of these different components that are pieced together to make the three sensor package itself. the sticking point seems to be there. the delivery of those components, they are doing ok. it's the module assembly, those, and south korea, and the
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japanese company which is owned by foxconn, those seem to be the basis of the issue. emily: tim cook was the supply chain genius. he probably knows more than anyone at apple. at this point, they've been working on the phone for months is not years. why wouldn't they be able to stockpile some of these components? alex: it speaks to the fact that people have been worrying for a while about the extent to which they are able to deliver blockbuster advances in smartphones anymore. apple is really trying to push the envelope and get the technology available. the iphone is the bestselling smart phone in the world. samsung sells more but there are a bunch of different models. because it is the best-selling in the world, and they are trying to do this cutting-edge technology, a lot of these companies are not yet at the stage where they can deliver all of the components necessary. on some of the conference calls over the past couple of months, they have had a big capital
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expenditure as they tried to ramp up production and meet apple's demand. clearly, that has not been a success as anticipated. emily: all of this is coming at the same time that the iphone 8 is out, and people are complaining about features not working. what do you make of that? how could that impact sales? alex: there is always a little bit of that. the launch of any product, there are teething problems. usually, most of it is solvable with a software patch. we had the watch last week that had some connectivity issues. there have been some problems of crackling audio. i literally got my iphone 8, so we will have to see if that is the case. apple has said they will be able to remedy it with a software fix. i would not worry much about those things. as an investor, at any rate, it is the supply rate which is a much greater concern.
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emily: amazon has found its hardware calling with the amazon echo. the tech giant held an event in seattle to unveil a number of new products including alexa accessories. the product revamp shows the tech giant will not back down to the likes of apple or google. gurmanerg tech's" mark joined the event and joins us from seattle. mark: this is amazon stepping up to the plate and heralding itself as a major consumer technology player. it is no longer just apple and google. amazon is saying they are here now and they stepped up their smart home game. they have several new echo speakers are in. emily: mark, you review these products, how does this stack up to google home and what apple is planning to unveil in december? mark: google has their home speaker.
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it's the center of their smart home world. apple has their home pod speaker coming out in december. that will become the center hub of their smart home world. around those products, have other devices, apple has the apple tv and the iphone. google has the pixel phone and their tv products. and other operating system, android. what amazon is saying is we are going to make the smart home our category. we are going to take over every part of the home. not only do they have a smaller mid-tier speaker, but they have a new and a speaker that allows you to connect to appliances in the network. they have a new fire tv product and a new echo spot. that really stole the show. it is $130, half-circle device. it will have a 2.5-inch screen. it is like an apple watch screen.
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you can get video calls from it and watch video and listen to music. read lyrics, get contacts, learn about your day, your calendar, your weather. amazon is coming out with smart home devices and speakers for all parts of your life. you alluded to the bmw partnership. amazon is trying to stick alexa wherever you are. emily: do you think we will see more partnerships in the future? with other carmakers, for example? mark: this is the third one. they announced partnerships with volkswagen and ford at the beginning of the year. we have not seen many new models with the alexa functions as of yet. bmw was on stage at the event today. at the seattle office you see behind me. they talked about how some of the new cars will come out in the middle of the year with alexa. it is interesting -- will someone buy a new car just because it has alexa support in it? i don't think it's going to drive sales or new purchase intent for consumers on the car side. but it certainly is a big win for amazon, being able to get
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somebody in their home driving home, they can just say, alexa , whatever, and they can buy it through their car. it's a big win for amazon. emily: in using amazon alexa, it certainly has the cool factor. but alexa still gets confused sometimes. it seems the voice recognition has a long way to go. did amazon address any of that today? mark: we saw a lot of new functionality on the developer side. they introduced a lot of first-party products. in terms of functionality, they are relying on third parties. there is new deep integration with other devices, like lights and thermostats that you have in your home. there are new ways to integrate your life, there are new echo buttons that have games that connect your home speaker to alexa. there is ways to go in this
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voice space. there is a lot of ai stuff they are working on. there is a presentation that is going on now. i am missing that, but it is worth it, totally worth talking to you. [laughter] emily: they are teaming up to develop self driving cars. the automaker and the ride hailing a service announced they will share data to develop a system needed to design affordable driverless automobiles and get them onto local networks. and eventually get them onto lyft networks. this move comes as ford's rival bought a stake in lyft last year. those two companies are still considering other options to expand ridesharing. coming up, ellen pao opens up about her public fight against sexism in silicon valley. we will hear about life after the court case. this is bloomberg. ♪
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founder james dyson said tuesday that the company is investing $1.3 billion to develop the car, plus batteries to power it. dyson said his electric car would be "radically different from those being designed by other carmakers, including tesla." ellen pao continues to make headlines. it is been five years since her trial became one of the most prominent cases of its kind in silicon valley. while she may have lost the suit she helped start the conversation of a gender inequality. she has written a book about her experience called "reset: my fight for inclusion and lasting change. " i talked to her about rehashing things now. take a listen. ellen: so many women and men came up to me and told me how much my story had inspired them, and how much it gave them comfort in the experiences they had. how they connected it with them. i wanted to give them all the facts, give them the whole story
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, and see if i can help other people through writing the book. over time, give the inspiring ending to what was a terrible experience, that you can get through all of this and continue and have a career and move forward and also try to change tech and the business world. emily: you wrote in an op-ed that though a lot has not changed, the one thing is people now acknowledge sexism in the industry. do you think the outcome would be different today? ellen: i do not know if we would be here if we had not filed suit, so it is hard to say. we have changed the conversation. no longer are women forced to defend themselves, so it's much easier for people to say i've been harassed or discriminated against. people believe it. if it hadn't been for the women who came after me and shared their stories, would we be where we are today?
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i think someone now has a better shot. emily: we have seen so many allegations, a rash of stories sexual harassment stories in venture capital, uber, has any of this surprised you? or are you just not surprised at all? ellen: most people familiar with the highest level of tech and venture capital have heard the stories. i think what has been surprising is so many people now have come forward. it started with a bunch of women who came forward in the last few years and with susan fowler coming out with such a detailed and specific blog post and being her being accepted and not being taken down, that has opened the door for more people to come forward and changed the conversation. uber's travis kalanick has resigned. what went wrong at uber?
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ellen: early on -- i don't know the details. what happens in companies, you get this culture and you want to be hard-driving, and you want to push and break the rules. that ends up not being limited to the business side. it goes into your interaction with employees and your peers and the people who report to you. you don't think the rules apply, and you do whatever you want. that ends up breaking down into legal areas. emily: what responsibility do vc's have? i don't know what it is. letting theb =-- bros or bro culture run wild. ellen: i think they have a huge responsibility. the investors have a responsibility for letting the venture capitalist run wild. the problem is, you have got the fox guarding the hen house. you have people who don't have clean hands who are trying to manage people and tell them you're not supposed to do these things when they are doing them themselves.
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as a board member, you have a huge responsibility to the employees of the company and the other shareholders to make sure the company is operating within the bounds of the law and is building a culture that will help it be successful and that is diverse and inclusive, that because we know that has better financial results. emily: you go into detail about the boys club environment, not what you experience at kleiner perkins, and not just sexist jokes but racist jokes as well. if the culture is that broken, can it be fixed? ellen: i don't know if the bigger companies and the older funds can be fixed. i know in working through project include and capital teams, there are ceo's, founders that are committed to diversity and inclusion, and they want to build companies that include everyone. that are tied to the community and the customer, and they're going to build the best product.
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i have a lot of hope. the next that generation of companies that are successful will have this inclusivity across all of their activities. i don't know about the ones that have been around for a while and talk about lowering the bar, as you have heard. finding that next white, male nerd. how do you change that attitude? emily: you're referencing a comment that mike morris from sequoia made to me a few years ago. venture capital firms like sequoia, they have one of woman partner now. do you think these male-dominated firms, are they actually going to be surpassed if they have the best returns and the best reputations? ellen: i know a lot of women and people of color who will not go meet with them because they don't think they will be treated fairly. if you look at the language, i
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"i am lowering the bar to bring in people from different groups," they don't think women or other groups are equal to the men they typically invest in. how do you work for somebody like that and let them invest in you and expect to get the same out, as other people? or as you would get with a different investor who actually believes you are capable and is as likely to succeed as other people? emily: that was ellen pao. we will have more from our conversation with ellen later in the show. coming up, facebook is making a larger push to attack advertisers as it is broadening its media coverage as president, trump calls out the company for fake news. we break down the new media landscape. china has a new warning for whatsapp. we will discuss the status of the messaging service and what that means for facebook's inroad s into the country. this is bloomberg. ♪
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emily: facebook says it has had success fighting fake news. they launched an effort to combat fake news with new things. while the right wing alternative for germany made historic gains in the election, they said in a blog post that these "actions did not eliminate misinformation entirely in the the election, it did make it harder to spread." the level of false news was low. sticking with facebook, president trump is taking aim at the social network, saying they were always anti-trump. the networks were also anti-trump. the tweet comes after facebook reveals will turn over the 3000 political ads that were bought with russian money in the presidential campaign.
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how will it affect facebook's push to attract advertisers as it broadens content offerings? >> facebook is making an aggressive push to take away advertising dollars from tv networks. they just launched facebook watch, and there are a lot of online publishers that are producing content for that. that is where this is big push, a $70 billion market for television advertising. facebook wants a piece of it. google wants a piece of it. the tv networks, they have the lions share of that. there is a shift to digital. emily: are they concerned about the news and the russian issue? advertisers? gerry: absolutely. advertisers are extremely conservative. they are concerned about their brand.
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being next to something that is controversial. youtube had a problem with that earlier this year. advertisers are very concerned about their content showing up alongside fake news as well. emily: allen, what is your take? allen: i am hopeful facebook is successful in shaking some of that money out of television. that is the model we are building a group nine, creating content for these platforms, in advance of the money showing up and knowing that consumer attention has shifted there. add dollars always lags consumers. over the next three years, you will see money start to move more and more from tv into where people are spending time, which is mobile specifically. emily: facebook and google are gobbling up that time, how much is left over for companies like you?
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ben: when you look at how tv has traditionally been bought, advertisers are buying from the cable networks. in digital, you are buying from the plot forms are other than media brands. that is problematic as a media brand. a shift is happening now and it will take a long time, as facebook and google, snapchat and twitter as well, are looking at that $70 billion in tv and wanting to get it, they have to place more value on premium content because that is so important to advertisers. in meeting that, they need to share some of that pie. that is what facebook has done with the launch of watch. they're starting to pay creators for content. they are doing more to share advertising. it is still early. also the competition between these platforms is important. when youtube was the only show in town, publishers have no leverage. now with multiple platforms sort of competing for premium content, it is a good time to be a premium content creator. there will be a huge business, although it will take time.
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emily: you guys have a show called "the comeback kid." it doing very well out here. ben: we have 24 shows. emily: what engagement are you seeing? ben: "comeback kid" is the number one show on facebook watch so far. we're seeing over 20 million views per episode, over 20 million minutes of viewing per episode. you can all that up to almost anything in linear tv. an enormous scale. all of our shows are not the number one show on the platform, but collectively, in less than three weeks we have had over a hundred million views, half a million followers to the shows. if the linear network tv version of a tivo subscriber to a program, we are building engagement and are pleased with the early results. this will shake out over an an extended period of time. emily: gerry, do you think the
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traditional networks will embrace facebook watch? or is it a wait and see? gerry: i think it's wait-and-see. you talked about trump and media companies colluding, my conversation with media companies is collusion is the farthest thing. there is frustration with facebook in terms of the ask mediaill companies to produce content for our latest initiative, and there is some frustration they are not getting the financial terms they hoped for. it seems like facebook has made an effort to reach out to the journalism community and the media community, to try and really meet their needs. facebook is starting to come around. the idea that they are colluding together is actually kind of funny when you consider there is real tension there. coming up, twitter is experimenting with its biggest product change yet -- expanding the character limits on tweets. we will examine why. this may be key to getting more
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emily: welcome back to "best of bloomberg technology." i'm emily chang. in a bid to expand its user base, twitter is testing a big product change having to do with its famous 140 character limit. in a statement, the company explained, "we want everyone around the world to express easily express themselves on twitter, so we are going to try a longer limit, 280 characters." for reaction we spoke with selina wang and david kirkpatrick. selina: with a small percentage of users globally, they can use up to 280 characters. that is twice as much as the current characters allowed. this is a big deal.
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a lot of heavy twitter users see the 140 character limit as the defining characteristic of the platform. i have been monitoring twitter closely. there is a lot of backlash, a lot of emotional response to the change. people saying this may have an impact on the brevity, the concise nature of the platform. at the same time, twitter faces this problem where they simply are not growing users. by making it easier to send tweets or you don't to think about condensing into 140 characters, they are hoping more people come back to the platform day after day. emily: david, this idea has long been bandied about. another way to look at it, though, is 140 more characters for president trump. david: yes, well, i think of marc andreessen creating the tweet storm, because you didn't have enough space to say
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something in detail, so i think it's a good move. virtue in concision. the real insiders who think they helped create twitter are going to be disappointed. if they want to be a mass service and grow considerably beyond where they are today, they have to keep making it easier to use. this is a step in that direction. emily: selina, remind us about user growth and ad revenue. both are slowing. selina: they are having trouble gaining advertising revenue off of monthly active users that are stagnant. that is a huge red flag to investors. they are hoping an uptick which shows that is a long-term, sustainable path for the company going forward. you made a good point earlier -- this is going to allow donald trump to now have twice as much room to get his tweets. donald trump has been a boost to twitter usage, but not enough to move that mau number up, even after the election. emily: i wonder what doubling the number of characters will really do. is it really that significant of a change, david? david: i know there are many times when i find it is not enough space. for me -- double that space
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would be enough to say something in english. but it is still enough to have a real sentence or two. i think it's a good move. i really do think it will make it easier. emily: what else does twitter need to do? is this a silver bullet? david: i think so many of us have been flummoxed trying to figure out what twitter should do. it is the weirdest situation. the best-known company, the best-known product that can't really seem to become a commercial success in a big way. it is clearly not going to go away. there have been many companies that have been said to be interested in buying it. disney, salesforce. among others. i think it's possible something like that could make sense. it is almost like a global or national treasure. we cannot let it go away. the president's use is emblematic of the fact that pretty much every political leader uses it to make a public statement. it is critical in a crisis like a hurricane or a flood. we have got to somehow -- maybe
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they should start charging. i don't know. emily: the people who love twitter do love twitter, selina. what do we know about how long the test will last? and when the company might make an actual decision on whether this is permanent? selina: we don't know all the details yet. i expect it will last several weeks. if the initial results go well, they will probably roll it out to other users. when i spoke to the company, they are doing this based on previous research they had found. an interesting detail about this test is it is excluding certain languages, including japanese and chinese. those are languages where they found that you can express a lot more in fewer characters. they have this interesting data point. almost 10% of tweets in english reach the maximum, but only .4% in japanese reach that point. they are seeing that. certainly wages are much easier languages- certain
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are much easier to tweet at. they are hoping that it will be the same thing in english. emily: bloomberg's selina wang and david kirkpatrick. a new warning from china's government to facebook's whatsapp messaging service. the cyberspace administration of china says the service should act to stop the spread of the illegal information and take proactive measures to intercept information regarding terror. whatsapp service was interrupted in china. bloomberg's i asia correspondent stephen engle joined us from hong kong. stephen: often times when you are reading the different rules and regulation on the great firewall of china is about speculation. is my service blocked, slow? what is happening? is it in the crosshairs by regulators? now we actually have got a statement from the cyberspace administration in response to questions posed by bloomberg news. they came back saying whatsapp needs to act to stop the spread
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of "illegal information" in china on the whatsapp platform and must take proactive measures. basically to do what they are already requiring tencent's wechat to do. that is a domestic company. whatsapp is the last remaining service by facebook that is available in china. we have been having intermittent outages. in july, users reported -- including myself -- i cannot could not upload photos or videos when i was in china in july. sunday and monday night's outage, including the text messaging part of the service. all of a sudden on tuesday, the service came back on. this is a clear warning from the authorities they are watching , and perhaps they have found a way to get around the end-to-end encryption that whatsapp has employed. fined china recently tencent. could fines be on the way for whatsapp or facebook?
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stephen: yes, they could obviously fine them. the cyberspace administration is cracking down on baidu, weibo, on tencent and others because they have just in the last week or two levy heavy fines for various violations, including the alleged spread of propaganda and terrorism material. they are really cracking down ahead of the party congress that starts in three weeks from now. the big question is, are these temporary measures that they had before the political powwows, or is it lasting enforcement that would go on for years? emily: meantime, are there other messaging services benefiting from this disruption in china? stephen: there is wechat, the big one. nearly one billion users by tenc ent. that is the dominant ecosystem. there are several versions of waibo.
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-- weibo. alibaba has a few of these various messaging apps. they use one for traders to communicate. shanda has momo. which started as a dating out. -- app. there is telegram as well. , which came from the russians. a lot of the bitcoin groups went over to telegram when wechat groups were being cracked down on about talking about strategies to getting money to overseas wallets. wechat is the dominant one domestically. emily: do we expect more disruptions as we get close to this big communist party meeting? stephen: my one-word answer would be yes. emily: that was bloomberg's stephen engle from hong kong. instagram has rolled out some new changes to combat harassment. they will give users the option to limit those that can comment on photos to only people they follow. instagram is also expanding its offensive comment filter to four
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emily: toshiba has signed an agreement to sell its flash. the price tag -- $18 billion. among the firms in the consortium, apple and dell. now to my conversation with ellen pao. after she lost her historic gender discrimination case, she became interim ceo of reddit where she made controversial moves to crack down on hate.
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eight months in, she was forced to resign. i asked her what happened. ellen: a lot of change had to happen. yishan came in a couple of years before i did and tried to transform the company. it was a small startup with mostly white men, started by two white men. the culture was very strong of exclusion. yishan brought in different people. all the women kept getting pushed out. i ended up joining and in 2013 and worked with yishan to make change together. this is a group that did not want mobile. very conservative, very locked into the product as it was. we were trying to bring it into reach more people, have more conversations. i think the change was really hard on the community. it was hard on the employees. it took a lot of effort to get to where we got at the end of that. emily: you made an effort to cut
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down on hate. you banned several of the most hateful subreddits. there is some evidence to show it actually worked. the study came out that they had significantly cut down on hate. do you think that online harassment would be such a problem if more women had been involved in designing the system in the first place? helen: i think it more women of color, and especially underrepresented women of color were involved in higher levels, it would be completely different. the people who get harassed the most and understand how the systems work and see all the ways it gets distorted into ultimately presenting a certain view and having that dominate the conversation, and if you can't come at it from that minority, small group perspective, it is hard to see everything that is going on. emily: how would twitter or reddit be different?
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ellen: people would have invested more in tools. there would be different rules. people would have invested more in tools. community management. they would take on the content faster and banned more people in a more consistent way. it is hard when you don't put enough resources, because the problems scale with the user base. if you are not putting in the framework and not putting in the tools, it gets out of hand quickly. emily: how much hope do you have for twitter? 10 years in, can they get their harassment problem under control? ellen: i know they are trying, and they have made incremental improvements, but i do believe it is going to take a lot of work to get rid of all the harassment and make sure everybody feels comfortable participating in the platform. i think they should ban donald trump. i think that is a huge problem, that he has behavior that is very counter to the terms of service, yet he continues to be given a huge platform to dominate and to encourage more of the same bad behavior.
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emily: you think twitter should ban donald trump? ellen: i am one of many people who believe that. it is not just me and with good reason. emily: what is the reason? ellen: he is harassing people. he threatens people on the platform, and then he uses his influence to get people to harass other people on the platform. emily: what about people that say free speech? ellen: it is such a red herring. there are many reasons why people say free speech. it is an easy thing. then you can say whatever you platform.e we saw on reddit when you allow free speech, it is the people dominant on the platform who can bully everyone else off. everybody limits some speech on the platform. you ban spam, you ban certain types of harassment. so people are not having free complete free speech on the platform already. this is just driving the rules to protect people from getting harassed off the platform.
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so you can have as many voices a possible. the purpose of free speech is to allow everyone to be able to have a voice, to have these conversations, and if one group is pushing everybody else off, you can have this free speech platform, but there are not many voices or opinions being represented. emily: senator hannah beth jackson is planning to introduce a bill. it would explicitly prohibit harassment in the venture capital industry. what is your take on the bell, bill, or howthe optimistic are you that legislation can solve this problem? ellen: i am hopeful. everything else has not solved it so far. i think the shaming is helping a little bit. people coming out and saying this is not acceptable. you cannot go into an airplane and experience what i'm have experienced, which is people talking about sex, porn,
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that is not acceptable anymore. you know that and you should change your behavior. it is not changing quite yet. we need something else to help. everything i think will help, but i don't think that will be the one that prevents it. these people do think they are above the law. they do not think the law applies to them, so we need to keep pushing and telling the stories. the most impactful thing is always women telling their stories. emily: you mentioned the porn-obsessed ceo. we saw that in your book. you do not mention his name. his name did come up in the trial. what else did you leave out? i'm sure there is a lot you did not put in there. ellen: i wanted the book to be as fair as possible. with the ceo, i don't know him that well. maybe he had an off day. maybe he was goaded into doing something by ted, i just don't know. i didn't want to have this one incident, this one experience for five hours, be the way i portrayed him to the whole public. i think i tried to be fair.
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i tried to keep people's families out of it. i have tried to -- i had a friend who was like "no collateral damage." you have people who are the protagonists and the main people i interacted with and who held me back and holding other people back. those are the people who i wanted to focus on. emily: coming up, gopro got a big boost last month. anticipation for the hero6. now we get a good look at the device and hear from the ceo nick whitman. if you like bloomberg news, check us out on the bloomberg radio app and on sirius xm. this is bloomberg. ♪
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emily: gopro is calling their new hero6 camera they most powerful and best ever released by the company. it boosted third-quarter guidance and could be the key to the camera maker's turnaround. selina wang spoke with ceo nick woodman. nick: gopro has to keep coming up with new products that excite consumers. i think we did that today with hero6 black and fusion. hero6 black is far and away the most capable and easy to use gopro we have ever made.
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fusion pushes gopro into a totally new market, with 360 spherical cameras. we think this will play an important role in the future of how people capture and share themselves. fusion is the first new product. we also made important advancements with karma, which now has a follow me function. and a cool new feature that allows karma to film above it , which is unique. i think we are showing gopro is continuing to innovate and continuing to excite consumers. spherical karma and are new additions to the product line. how else will we see it evolve beyond the traditional action cameras? nick: a big part of gopro's future is we now see a gopro as an untethered lens for your phone. what we mean is a gopro now automatically copies any new photos and videos you capture over to your phone. the gopro app creates a video for you. so when you use a gopro, it is
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like using a separate, untethered lens that offloads all its footage to your phone. really a gopro is the ultimate capture complement to a phone. as we think of ourselves in that way and think about new types of types ofd new untethered lenses, we think we can radically expand our market. selena: smartphones are getting better and durable and waterproof. what is your pitch to those consumers who say we don't need another camera? my smartphone is good enough. nick: well, i think that a phone is a phenomenal camera. it is often in your pocket. it is right there reactively when you want to film somebody or something else happening. but there is a lot of activities where you don't want to pull out your phone. you want to be more in the moment. you also don't want to film somebody else. you want to film yourself. gopro, with its untethered lense strategy, we think we can make
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lenses that complement somebody's use of a phone, that would not require them to pull the phone out or even have the phone on them. selina: the hero6 is using a custom-designed processor for the first time. why decide to go this route, and what types of challenges are there with making this yourself? nick: designing and developing a processor with a partner as we did, there is always risk involved. but there was also a risk that when you are reliant on others' innovation and ingenuity that they put into their own work and into their own processors. we found what we want to do with hero6 black we could do with any -- we could not do that with any other processor on the market. we had to develop our own. it allowed us to hit cost targets for the product. if we had been able to do this with somebody else, hero6 would have been more expensive to the consumer.
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that would not have been good. we were able to deliver hero6 at a lower price point and hit performance levels that would have otherwise been impossible. taking our destiny into our own hands from a technology standpoint. selena: last year was pretty challenging from a technical standpoint. there were product delays. what have you learned from those experiences to make sure the rollout of this year's products is seamless? nick: we are doing fewer things better. in previous years, we had other businesses we were running, like our media business. we had many programs going on and products consumers never saw, that were more targeted towards professionals. we cut all of that and focused gopro on what it does best and what our vision and mission is, is to help people capture and share their lives so they can celebrate the moment in a way they just can't with any other camera. selina: being a hardware company is difficult. in a public market. gopro shares have fallen dramatically since the ipo. what are investors missing?
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nick: i think investors are missing that we are growing again. the previous comp of 2016, people think unit sales are way down, volumes are higher. what they need to look at is that volumes of our premium products $299 and above are growing. we are selling more of the products that matter and the products that have better margin for gopro and make us more profit. gopro is healthy and growing. i think investors are starting to take notice. selina: let's talk about drones. many analysts say dgi has superior features and price points. how much of a revenue driver do you see drones becoming for gopro? nick: we are really excited about drones. karma is doing well. it's a phenomenal accessory for the gopro community. it is very versatile with a detachable gimbal, how it attaches to the karma grip. our customers have spoken. they really like that flexibility, that versatility. karma continues to get better.
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today we announced follow me features and a lookup feature that allows karma to film what is above it, which is unique to drones. we will continue to innovate and advance our drone offering into what comes after karma. emily: that was gopro ceo nick woodman. that does it for "best of bloomberg technology." we will bring you the latest in tech throughout the week. tune in each day. 5:00 p.m. in new york, 2:00 p.m. in san francisco. remember, all episodes of "bloomberg technology" are live streaming on twitter. check us out at bloomberg tech tv weekdays. that is all for now. this is bloomberg. ♪
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