emily: i'm emily chang in san francisco and this is "bloomberg technology." next hour, thee debate over your data. amazon anda like google are expanding their information empires as they grow into our homes. toivision is planning dramatically slash costs after reporting fourth-quarter results that missed estimates and delivered a disappointing forecast. can they turn around amidst competition from fortnite?

russia is planning to sever itself from the global internet to prepare the country to deal with a digital attack that would leave it cut off. is this the future of global cyber defense? to the top story. president trump struck a conciliatory note on trial trade talks saying he would let -- on trying it trade talks -- on china trade talks saying he would let the march 1 deadline slide and could let it slide for a while if the two sides are doing a deal. there is no plans to meet xi jinping next month, but u.s. officials are in beijing for talks starting thursday. we have a reporter standing by with more. what did the president have to say? said he wasdent talking to reporters after a cabinet meeting and was asked trader the deadline for

dispute to be resolved between the u.s. and china was a hard one. it's a date we expect more terrorists to be levied against china. he said it's not a hard deadline. he's willing to fudge it a little bit if they are getting close to a deal. that's brand-new information. and midnight on march 1, there will be a next her hammer that goes down against china. it looks like the account -- the economy over there is slowing enough that the chinese official are concerned -- officials are concerned. it looks like he's willing to make some concessions in order to get that deal. emily: there are still no plans for the president to meet -- presidents to meet. how close are they to a deal? saleha: they can always pick up the phone and call each other and talk out the details, but the policymaking process so far a traditional one.

there's no documentation draft agreements going back and forth. paperwork to show they have concrete proposals, where one side is willing to make concessions yet. at the same time, we have donald trump hoping investors will u.s..ue to invest in the he is also having to contend with heading into an election cycle. he's hoping to get reelected. democratic candidates are raising their hand one by one to run against him. he wants to make sure rural america, who elected him, both for him again. and at the same time, farmers are seeing bankruptcies rise in large part due to the trade tariffs with china. emily: this is the second conciliatory note we have seen from the president in the last week. the other one was on a potential deal to avoid another government shutdown. why do you think the president seems to be in the mood to

compromise? saleha: i think he is heading into a period where this is 100% a trump economy. we will start seeing the data from the irs on how the tax cuts are panning out for the average american voter. what the otherng side, democratic candidates, would like to do with their own agenda should they be elected. he's trying to show the world he has boosted the u.s. economic growth and he can keep it going. at the same time, he has to contend with warnings of fromsions and fears coming a slowdown in china, or brexit. he's trying to prove his agenda is working. for us ineha mohsin washington. we will continue to follow developments in those talks as they commence later this week. as tech giants like amazon and

google were to place their smart speakers at the center of the interconnected home, both are expanding the amount of data they gather about us, the people who use the software to control these gadgets. it is stirring up more privacy concerns. joining us now is a startup that invests in next-generation internet companies. we also have met today who wrote day wrote a- matt piece on this. they're collecting more data about us. just yesterday, we covered amazon buying ero. how does that fit into the broader strategy? >> amazon sees an opportunity with the echo smart speaker and its doorbell purchase last year to be a force to be reckoned technologies, whether that it shopping with your voice, controlling gadgets,

televisions, thermostats. this wireless butchers they made yesterday is the next step in that evolution. emily: john, do you see more pros or cons with amazon and google living with us? , when youink in 2019 look at the tech landscape, you can see tech with all of the promise of doing good and changing society, and giving us wonderful tools to enable us to do things is also starting to encroach upon our lives. the idea of having an open channel for these tech companies into my home, and match will talk about some of the passive data collection taking place, it is not good. i don't think it's good for consumers, i don't think it's good for our country, or good for innovation. on one hand, when you put it that way, it's terrifying.

you wonder if consumers understand what is happening. talk to us about that passive data collection, and what these companies are collecting about us that we may not even realize. matt: in the last year or two, amazon and google started talking to the smart device maker partners about increasing the amount of data they transmit back to the central hole of the. what's both companies are trying to require now would mandate that any time a smart lightbulb is toggled, if you flip the switch, that the company gets a record of that. to improveo use this the user experience, to make these new features based on the knowledge of what is going on in your home. john: what's key is that it is not with the user doing anything. it's the smart speaker. matt: that's correct. it's not necessarily when you invoke alexa or the google assistance, it's any time the device status changes. how can consumers

protect themselves? on this technology, there is not a lot of granularity in user control. both amazon and google offer options to delete data that the accumulated, but in terms of stopping the devices from informing the companies in the first place, does not really a way to do that other than unplugging them. emily: what you think the social repercussions of this are, john? we have the short term, seen a few instances of weird hacks that have taken place where people hack into other people's smart homes and started people speaking to baby monitors or adjusting the thermostats. we see software upgrades go haywire and reset people's rozen pipes.and f

over time, when you see the entire home getting connected, the key is that these companies are trying to turn these devices into the central hub of passively collect all of the data for the home. if that hub gets hacked or the company is to use it for advertising data or other data, they are free to do that and you could see the entire home being under the request of a single technology provider. consumers are not understanding that is what they are buying in the first place. emily: what other companies -- are the company saying about this? i presume amazon would say unless you say alexa and you turn it on, it's not collecting this data about you. matt: on the contrary. they are. even if you don't invoke alexa. i talked to the amazon about this and they said they value

consumer privacy, which a lot of the tech companies say, and they do not use this for advertising, they say. your devicesith will not be used for advertising. google has not made a similar promise. i think r two important points. we saw this with facebook through the cambridge analytica issue. are they using it for third-party advertising data or using it to inform internal data sets? that is important. some of the companies are glossing over that. i think they are using the data for internal data sets, which gives them the ability to more finely grained target customers for a whole bunch of services. the second point, related to data, is that we have all of

these amazing services today. companies are giving us these for free, and what is important is

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isly: the 27-year-old female now running text latest unicorn. platformed at fashion based in singapore in 2014. she raised 220 $6 million from investors and the company has a valuation nearing $1 billion. running to discuss is rebecca greenfield covering diversity for bloomberg. companies are ran

just 2% funding from venture capitalists. how rare is a female founded unicorn? occurrence. rare there are a few companies that get the high valuation. to raise for someone money in silicon valley and that has to do with there are so many few pcs. vcs. emily: what does the lingo do and how does this compare to other offerings? womens like many of the founded tech companies. it's a fashion startup, in asia, so there's a lot of the female tech run companies based in asia. it's a fashion startup. progress weis the

are seeing worldwide when it comes to female entrepreneurs? and,umbers are so abysmal presumably, it will take time to move the needle, but are we seeing change? >> i think there is some change. i recently wrote a story talking how theyin tech about view sheryl sandberg and funding came up with one woman who had to raise money for her company in 2010. she said it was so impossible to raise money and she says nine years later, she is starting to money for another company she is founding and having a much easier time. as more female feces, more of an acceptance that women can run companies. still, the numbers are tiny. companies with all-female founding teams are getting funding. that's the figure.

your money is going to women who are on teams with men. progress,o visible but it's definitely slow. elizabeth is one of the more recently prominent female entrepreneurs who crashed and burned, spectacularly. there was a lot of optimism for her. do you think the fact that she did not succeed has hurt in entrepreneurship? was reportingy i on sheryl sandberg, the same question came up, is sheryl the negative press against sheryl sandberg hurting women? one woman i talked to said it is not good for women when other women fail. that is so unfortunate because there are so few of them, so when they fall, some people do,t say that is what women and i think that is the fear of

many women. i don't know how you measure that, but it's something women worry about. researchers have found this happens when there is a small amounts of minority of any kind. they tend to be a stand-in for better or for worse. emily: good to hear about the good stories of female founders paving the way for the rest. rebecca greenfield, thank you for bringing that one to us. coming up, google has said it is not getting into china right now , but some shareholders are not satisfied with that answer. we will discuss. later in the show, russia unplugs from the internet. could an alleged cybersecurity attack the crackdown? we will discuss. this is bloomberg. ♪

♪ emily: this is bloomberg technology global link where we join bloomberg daybreak: australia and bring you the latest global tech news. i'm emily chang with shery ahn and haidi stroud-watts in sydney. let's take a look at the global tech stories of the day. haidi? haidi: investment in turkish start of spell 46%, $59 million in 2018. down from the record high of $111 million the year before. the news comes from monitoring groups, that puts turkey in 20 first place among european countries. the u.k. holds the top spot with more than $8 billion of inflows. a key partner for tencent is

signaling more weakness in the chinese videogame market. chinese sales dropping by double digits. last quarter, the revenue fell 22%. the chinese gaming market is slowly recovering from last an on newvernment b titles, generating more than $30 billion in sales. alibaba co-founder who already owns a stake in the nba's brooklyn nets and has his sights set on a new startup sports league. the premier lacrosse league. he played lacrosse at yale university and says he is encouraged by the sport's growing popularity. those other top global tech stories we are watching. shery: thank you. back in december, the google ceo spoke to members of congress about his company planning a search engine in china. we have no plans

to launch in china. we don't have a search product there. our core mission is to provide users access to information and getting access to information is an important human right. we always try hard to drive that information. shery: that answer was not good enough for one shareholder. tit sent the company a letter saying "in light of the chinese government's surveillance practice, we are concerned a google search product could enable ongoing human rights violation. with that in mind, we are filing a shareholder resolution seeking a human rights impact assessment for a possible google search product in china." to discuss, we have gary who covers alphabet in new york. the project is back on the table. what does this mean? will be get a vote? gary: we will probably get a

vote, but it will not go anywhere. this investment firm has a small position in google. it is them raising this issue again and again. this is something that is not going to go away for google. the company has said we are not doing it -- you saw the clip from the ceo. the currenline is that they have no current plan, but that contradicts other plans that they could have launched this, but it was put on hold. emily: sundar pichai says they have no plans to launch in sign china. doingxactly is google with respect to china right now? gerritt: google obviously employees quite a few people in china. the android operating system is the most popular operating system for chinese smartphone users. chinese part phone users -- smartphone users use a ton of apps.

the company does have a stake in the country. what we're waiting for is google to say ok, we are putting this thing to bed. project dragonfly is not going to go forward. the company, although they say they have no plans, they have not said what a lot of the internal activists and external activists want and to say we are not going to build a search engine if it includes censorship. shery: how important with the china business beaver google? -- be for google? gerrit: it is definitely one of the most important markets. there is definitely a sense that google missed out on a lot of the growth that is happening there.you look at apple . a huge portion of their growth comes from china but that backfired. when the chinese economy contracted late last year. google has that presence when it comes to android, but not the core search business. emily: the google cofounder sarah j brent was one of the

chief proponents of google pulling out of china all those years ago. do we know where sergei brin and larry page stand on china? gerrit: may have been careful to stay on the background. i heard they have answered questions at internal meetings and google. t google. i think there is a sense they want to let the current official leadership of google take the lead on this one. it is true, they were the ones that were concerned about the company's presence, the influence the chinese government was going to have on google. at this point, they are not having any strong opinions. they still do have that controlling vote. if they wanted this proposal by azzad to pass, they could make it pass. shery: how does this play into google's other controversies like sexual misconduct by executives? can this continue to affect its

image? gerrit: it does. it stays on the news and more and more people read about google. as the narrative of the company best even though the underlying business seems to be going well, if this phase out on the news and there is continued criticism, it might make it more difficult for google to hire people. they may lose some of the top talent, thinking it is a company that is different from other companies that has values beyond continuing to make money. most google employees are not out on the streets waving signs, but it is something that google employees care about. emily: google employees were out on the streets waving signs around google's handling around sexual misconduct and there were some movement around this china issue. are employees organizing about this? gerrit: to be clear, there was huge turnout when it came to the specific walkout which was in

response to massive payouts to specific executive andy rubin weather came accusations of sexual harassment while he was in a position of power. when it comes to the china issue, there is a lot of people concerned about this. a lot of this engaging with the media, engaging with activist groups is coming from this core group of people at google that care about this and reaching out to their fellow employees and trying to keep the fire going, try to keep them organized. emily: gerrit, thank you for your great reporting on this issue. gerrit de vynck in new york. we have much more ahead. stick with us. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: facebook is teaming up with third-party back-checking

organizations ahead of several african elections. the social network will work with local groups in south africa, nigeria, kenya, cameroon and senegal to determine if content is false. this includes the company's whatsapp messaging service. parties andained candidates on security practices. russia is planning to disconnect from the internet. yes, that means the entire country. temporarily. legislators are creating moves to create a sovereign internet so traffic goes through mostly domestic portals. moscow says this is an attempt to test the country's cyber defenses. but, critics have a different endingaying this risks the kremlin extensive power to censor the west. joining me to discuss is the senior vice president for cybersecurity strategy, , a

fund that services more than half of fortune 500 companies. what does this mean? ryan: russia is looking at extremely aggressive options to control pretty much every piece of information that goes over the internet in this country. emily: would this look like china's internet? ryan: that seems to be the implication. they are testing their own version of the great firewall not only to censor things they have been centering, but have control over what communication channels are viable, preventing people from using facebook, etc. emily: what kind of firewall do they have in place? ryan: for many years, they have had many systems in their country's isp's. they could see pretty much everything that was going on. in recent years, they have developed capabilities to actually block things. through the legal system, they have started to ban things like storing russian people's data in other countries. just last month, they reached out to facebook and twitter and

said you are not storing russians' data in russia, you are violating law. emily: what are the actual mechanics of this? presumably, it can be done. ryan: it can be done in many countries do it. china is the most obvious example. in the middle east, that are many countries. for whatever reason. they may be censoring pornography, speech. setting up ways to get the isp's which are effectively the only way out of that country from internet perspective to block what they choose to block. emily: google and facebook operate in russia, they don't in china. what will this mean for them? ryan: it will be a challenge. i think back to a couple of years ago. telegram was blocked because it was using a domain -- the messaging service -- a domain service hosted on google to basically operate beyond these censorship restrictions. that was found out and google

actually adapted to what the russian government wanted, blocking this domain fronting activity. an unauthorized service could not be conducted in the country. i think this will have grave implications for any organization that does not want basically full russian control of the data across the services. emily: you raise an interesting point because we were just talking about google's exploratory plans in china and sundar pichai made the point they have different rules in different countries they abide by. china is the one we all know about. does google benmd to government demands elsewhere in the same way it might in china if it operated there? ryan: almost every company has to. we choose not to do business in russia and china because as a cybersecurity company, it would be

customers were we to comply with the laws in those countries. this has a really long history. the fight that at&t conducted against tapping phones decades ago, there is a lot of resemblance to a lot of these challenges going on now and with governments that are little more heavy-handed, those challenges look a lot different. emily: with the russians still potentially be able to meddle in other countries' elections if they were cut off in this way? emily: any good cyber attack is not states from your own ip server, anything that can retrace back to you. it is staged from another location entirely. emily: how does this fit into the bigger geopolitical issue at play right now? ryan: this is a fairly aggressive move. it is a very interesting thing for them to be able to test because it lets them know that one of the key tools that, say nato or the u.s. may choose to use against them can be blunted or tolerated by the russian infrastructure. that is a really interesting piece of knowledge that the west does not really have in this conflict. emily: what would this mean for users inside russia and what do

we know about how they feel about things like this? ryan: really good question. the long history of subversive speech in russia, ads that pop up, it is fairly fascinating but it is gradually being forked down into things the russians they can control. if russia really cared about facebook and twitter, they would not be pressuring them and -- the russian government would prefer everyone use because they could surveillance everything that is happening. emily: what are the biggest cyber threats you are looking at around the world right now? ryan: for most organizations, the biggest cyber threat will still be the theft of money. we sometimes forget this because it is a massive geopolitical issue and things like misinformation and election interference dominates the headlines, but that is still from a cybercrime perspective.

you have state actors like north korea, pretty much acting like a cyber criminal enterprise. the big scary things tend to be around either broad internet of things or critical infrastructure, like power grids, which we do know are being explored in adversarial and offenses by every government worth its salt. it's yet to be proven that the ukraine example, which is probably the closest thing we have seen to a real nightmare from a cybersecurity perspective is actually viable outside a very small country with one power grid. emily: fascinating. lots to watch. ryan kalember of proofpoint. great to have you back here. coming up, amazon's auto play. the tech giant is in talks to buy an electric car startup, partnering with general motors. we will bring you the latest details. canada's answer to tesla may not be what you expect.

we will take an all electric three-wheeler for a ride on the streets of vancouver. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: amazon and general motors in talks to invest in the electric pickup maker rivian, not buy, invest. this is according to sources that say the deal is expect it to value rivian between $1 billion and $2 billion. it would be a major boost for the company as it aims to be the first automaker with an electric pick up on the market. detroitus from th to discuss is david wells. what? david: yeah, you think about general motors, why would they do this? they already make pickup trucks.

they already have an electric vehicle. what is amazon doing it? here? general motors will come out with 20 ev's by 2023. most of those vehicles are going to be invested in the chinese market, so there probably was not an electric pickup truck in the future. rivian wants to have their truck ready by 2020. for gm, this is a way to probably -- without spending too much money, get a pickup truck they can get to market a lot faster. maybe get some engineering talent they would not have. amazon, this is a way to get cheap, clean, electric delivery trucks to them pretty quickly so they can use them to get packages all over the place. emily: last week, we covered amazon's investment in a self driving tech startup that is building software and hardware for different automakers. that said, we had the ceo of

rivian on the show last year. they would not even show us a picture of the car. it was very secretive, still in development. how much has rivian actually accomplished? david: may have shown a truck. they have a prototype. they have been talking about when they will have this thing ready which is 2020. they raised quite a bit of money. it is a legitimate startup. they have some real talent. they are outside detroit so they are hiring people who know how to make vehicles. i liken this as when general motors brought crews automation. gm already had a self driving car initiative going on. they were making vehicles that were trying to drive themselves, but they found in san francisco, they were strapping it on to other vehicles and moving the vehicles without drivers. this is a case where they found somebody who's got some talent and a program in the works and

they could accelerate their own development. emily: clearly, there are a lot of acquisitions or potential acquisitions, investment, competition happening in this space. what else are you watching? david: right now, we are hearing a lot of chatter about big car companies and big tech firms. most of the big car companies are trying to buy self driving car startups, or invest, battery startups. tesla bought into a company that makes super capacitors which allows the automotive batteries to be charged faster and go further. even tesla is buying into technology companies. taking a flyer on some small companies that might have some good science. in other cases, it is a way to get somebody's hardware. it is a pretty good marriage. you've got startups that are working solely on one project, and you have someone with deep pockets that can come along,

given the cash they need to get to the next level. in a case like gm an rivian, you are going to get a company that has a pickup truck, and proteau type. you not only get money from gm and amazon, you get maybe gm's manufacturing capabilities. once the truck is ready, you have the ready-made customer that wants to use the trucks to deliver. you already have maybe pre-sales. electricd a new empire. david welch, thank you so much for giving us contact. meantime, you have probably never seen a vehicle like the one we are going to show you next. but, it is a publicly traded canadian company has its way, it won't be long until you see a lot of them. ed reports from vancouver. ♪ ed: all electric like a tesla. priced like afford fiesta -- a ford fiesta. and one of the weirdest looking

vehicles with ever seen. introducing the solo. >> a clean energy electric vehicle for one person was an opportunity that was too great not to seize. ed: it costs $15,500 and being handled in vancouver. the company has 23,000 solo preorders. it will mass-produce an updated model in china. >> the vehicle concept was to have a vehicle that could be assembled quickly, efficiently in under three hours. ed: the solo has 100 miles of range and charges in three hours. it is designed with the specific group in mind. says 83% of north american commuters drive to work alone each day. the question is whether those commuters would be prepared to drive to work in something like this, that you could just fit in. the company's optimism is not

backed up by the numbers. >> seven out of 10 of what the consumers are buying is a truck at this point. the idea of a single seater limits you to a specific user. ed: there are areas bloomberg intelligence sees as more promising. looking at car sharing. and 7-eleven and dhl already testing for deliveries. >> you don't havneed two seats. ed: investors still need convincing. shares have fallen since last august. the ceo says the solo will be profitable. >> 25% growth profit is built into the design of the car and that is fine. ed: the company hopes to deliver 5000 china produced solos in 2019 and 20,000 in 2020. longer-term, production could be brought back on. general motors announced it was closing its offshore site. the ceo says the companies

interested in the site. they are eyeing more passengers for thes two-seater, but can it handle the challenge of billions of dollars worth of preorders? emily: our very own ed ludlow from vancouver. that does it for this edition of bloomberg technology. we are live streaming on twitter. ology andout @techn follow tictoc on twitter. this is bloomberg. ♪ i'm a veteran

and the army taught me a lot about commitment. which i apply to my life and my work. at comcast we're commited to delivering the best experience possible, by being on time everytime. and if we are ever late, we'll give you a automatic twenty dollar credit. my name is antonio and i'm a technician at comcast. we're working to make things simple, easy and awesome.

haidi: good morning. sydneydi stroud-watts in where australian markets have just opened. shery: good evening from new york. i'm shery ahn. sophie: i'm sophie kamaruddin in hong kong. welcome to daybreak asia. ♪ asia-pacific markets said to follow a strong u.s. session, optimism over trade. and president trump's new tariffs flexibility. the s&p 500 saw the biggest rise this month. financials and big tech. nissan