>> you've been watching booktv, 48 hours of book programming beginning saturday morning at 8 eastern through monday morning at 8 eastern. nonfiction books all weekend, every weekend right here on c-span2. >> coming up next, "the communicators" continues its series from the consumer electronics show in las vegas on developments in consumer technology and related policy issues. then we'll bring you two state of the state addresses by midwestern governors. the first by republican iowa governor terry branstad followed by pat quinn, democratic governor of illinois. and later, aol co-founder steve case is among the panelists at a live discussion examining ways to spur economic growth and job creation. >> host: and welcome to las vegas. the consumer electronics show is held every year at the las vegas convention center. "the communicators" is on site

here doing interviews, looking at the most recent technology and talking with policymakers. up next, we interviewed the chairman of the board of mercedes benz about some of the technology used in their cars. dieter zetsche is the chairman of daimler which is the parent company of mercedes benz, and he joins "the communicators" here at the consumer electronics show in las vegas. what's the technology that you're introducing? >> guest: well, the show here, the lawsuitest of connective -- the latest of connectivity of in the car. we have with on one hand the future direction we will take with so-called -- [inaudible] that show how you can interact with your car, all the different aspects of connectivity, the social network, navigation, all

kinds in this regard. on the other hand, we have stuff which is available right now, behind me will come with -- [inaudible] which already starting now will offer our mercedes customers here in the united states a combination of many services between, again, navigation, all kinds of communication information as well as accident emergency support all in one package and all coming with the car. >> host: so, doctor, if somebody had a new mercedes, would they be able to surf the internet, make a phone call, turn on their lights at home, etc., that type of thing? >> guest: absolutely. you can surf the internet. what is special for us is that we connect to the private

internet connection for downloads or whatever you want to do because it is access for you and everybody to your car. you can prepare your route at home and download it to your car for a special trip you are planning beyond your normal navigation capabilities. but, again, you have the safety as well that when something goes wrong, you have an accident, immediately the emergency call goes out -- [inaudible] >> host: here in the united states there's been some movement to prevent people from talking on their cell phones or etc. while driving. how does that effect the technology that mercedes has -- >> guest: that's of utmost importance. i guess that mercedes is known for safety and for the responsibility we're taking for our customers, and we have to be concerned about driver distraction. that's why when the car's standing, you have full, unlimited access to the internet, while when you're

driving you only get to our mercedes-based server. these connections which are responsibly acceptable while driving and in a server which was prepared by us and, again, allows you to focus on the traffic and have one or two icons show up and not a whole multitude -- [inaudible] ghs dr. zetsche, we talked earlier today with the president of ericsson out of sweden, and one of the things he was talking about was technology that would allow a car to communicate with the car behind it such as if you put on your brakes, it would tell the car behind it. is that in our future? >> guest: well, that's more or less in our present. we are, um, starting these kinds of systems, we are just now having a major test field in germany with about 200 cars which are totally

interconnected, and it's not just driving, it's talking with the car behind you, especially talking with the car in front of you which can warn you of ice or whatever, unsafe conditions you would approach and prevent you from going without the respective preparations into the situation. this allows you much better navigation system where traffic jams are not, information are provided by police or radio stations always five minutes after you're stuck, but directly by the flow of the traffic which trades the information and online. you're always up-to-date on where to go and what route to take. so these are not things for five or ten years to come, but for this year, next year to come. >> host: now, your background is as an engineer. how involved do you get in the formation of some of these technologies? >> guest: even though i'm by education electronic engineer, i do know that these, my kids know

much more about these things than i do. therefore, as far as the organization is concerned, it's extremely modern. these things are not top-down driven through your company, but you create an environment where your tech kids which you have many in your company, we have many in our company with 270,000 employees, that they get enabled to drive this process to make sure we are ahead and not behind in the competition. >> host: do you have to develop different standards for different nations? >> guest: um, we have specifically the system -- we have michael mann in europe to some extent because some service providers are different, or perhaps lack a point in europe typically behind the u.s. directionally, we want world costs which are as similar as possible, so to some extent it's

not -- [inaudible] >> host: dieter zetsche, what about voice commands? i know mercedes for the last several years has had voice commands. >> guest: we have calling that electronic, and we introduced that in '96. so before google existed or facebook existed. it was not perfect at that time. today it's much better, it's adjusting to accents, it's able to understand southern american slang, and these other portabilities for interacting with your car which are intuitive and normal, in the past you had some words, key words you had to use. we have more and more where you can use your normal language to interact with your vehicle, and that's another development trend we have to follow or lead better. >> host: if someone were to buy a mercedes today, would the changes in technology, would

their technical features be out of date by next year? >> guest: well, that's where we have to change and be have to change as well. we have to have the same protocols where we can communicate with these devices, and we want to provide services which are similar and known to our customers. but other than that we have to allow the development of a much faster speed of these consumer electronic devices to be accepted by our vehicles and just buy new software releases which go against our specific mercedes servers. you get update today the next level of technology on a frequent basis. >> host: does technology within the car itself, especially the communications technology we're talking about, does that drive car sales? >> guest: um, it's more and more one important feature customers are looking for. there are a few customers who

buy vehicles exclusively because of safety or exclusively because of it look. it's combination, and within this combination this kind of technology becomes more and more important. >> host: dieter zetsche, what's the importance of being at the consumer electronics show as opposed to the auto show? >> guest: well, i think just the combination of the digital world with the automotive world is creating tremendous amount of new opportunities, and you only can understand these opportunities and ultimately realize them as true features for your customers when you are at the cutting edge of technology, and that's what is provided here. that's why we have our research department in palo alto for 16 years, to be at the very early cradle of these new ideas, patents, participating, and that's why i do believe that we are able to lead the automotive

world among our peers into new, tremendous opportunities for our customers. >> host: do you work with partners such as google or etc. ? >> guest: we have, for instance, already two years ago with our cooperation with apple we had specific interaction with the iphone where we could access the code of the iphone. we have, um, just these days a new strategic agreement with google where we get some exclusive developments made up together. so as we are so much deep involved in technology doing basic research ourself, not just relying on suppliers, we are an attractive partner to these tech companies to understand where the direction we'll be going. >> host: and finally, dr. zetsche, looking ten years down the road give us an idea, if you would, of what we may see.

>> guest: actually, our vision of accident-free driving will become reality within this time frame. based on that, we can provide even more access to the worldwide web because driver distraction is not that critical anymore because the car can take care of itself, basically. so in both directions you will be on the one hand well protected in your car against any hazard, and at the same time totally connected as you are more and more used in your lifestyle in other places in the car anyway. >> host: what's the best part about your job? >> guest: well, that it keel deals with cars and we're having a lot of fun driving extremely fascinating cars as part of my job. >> host: do you get to test drive them? >> guest: i do. every year typically, and i'm in our styling dome part of the time of of the year as i'm deeply involved in the

development of these vehicles. >> host: dieter zetsche is the chairman of daimler which is the parent company of mercedes benz. we're at the consumer electronics show in las vegas. and that have an interview we conducted with dieter zetsche who is the chairman of the board of mercedes benz. we also talked with jon bucci who is senior vice president of technology for toyota. here's that interview. and now joining us on "the communicators" is jon bucci who is toyota's vice president for advanced technology. mr. bucci, what are you doing at the consumer electronics show? >> guest: well, we're following our year one anniversary of launching an all-new mobile technology we call in tune, and in tune is the ability to take offboard content, web-based, and deliver it to the customer's cell phone. the customer then downloads an application, goes into the vehicle, pairs the cell phone with the in-vehicle hardware or

display unit, and voila, it opens up several applications or apps that the consumer can then interact with safely in the vehicle using voice, steering wheel control or remote touch. and they open various or applications like bing for local search, pandora for internet radio, movie tickets.com and open table. and the most important thing is we do it in a safe manner fitting of a moving vehicle. >> host: well, start there. tell us about the safety features because there's a movement now by the ntsb to prevent cell phones from being used in cars, and here you're talking about essentially surfing the internet while driving. >> guest: well, for us it's a cure rated environment meaning we take a hand in designing the look and feel, what they call the hmi, the human/machine interface. so it's not quite surfing the internet. we actually design the content, font size, the depth of the menu, how far you can go into

the application before you are actually locked out or task time. so we measure all those things carefully so that it's fitting of, again, the moving vehicle environment. we're very, very cautious and concerned and appreciate the aspect of safety. >> host: mr. bucci, how available is in tune? is it in all your cars now? is it standard, or is it optional for all cars? >> guest: we just launched august of last year. it's available in the prius v, the camry, the tacoma and the forerunner, but it's brand new. >> host: are you using a cloud-based system? >> guest: we are. all of the internet searches that we do, those applications i just mentioned are, essentially, in the cloud. and we use natural language voice recognition to harness the ability to get the data to the vehicle and converse normally. >> host: how long did that take to develop the voice technology? >> guest: we've been interacting with a company called voicebox to develop our in-vehicle conversational language voice

for it's about three years now, and it's taken even longer for them to get it to a maturity where it's right for the in-vehicle environment. >> host: are you finding that consumers expect technology in cars such as you're describing here? >> guest: they absolutely do. the consumer wants to interact with their own content on their own personal device the way they do normally, and it's a balancing act between being able to conduct all of your business with your handheld device versus what's safe. customers are expecting this. soon it'll be one of the top three purchase reasons for buying a new car. things like quality, ride comfort, performance, even fuel economy will begin to take sort of a price of entry measure. >> host: mr. bucci, when it comes to the phone systems in toyotas, do you incorporate blue tooth, or do you use another system? >> guest: we do, it's blue tooth. in fact, the whole purpose of in tune is pairing or linking the handset with the vehicle head unit using the blue tooth technology, so that's an important standard for us.

>> host: what's the price line on an in tune product? >> guest: so in tune comes standard with vehicles enabled with the awd toe equipment that comes with that particular model, so it's standard with particular models, and it's in the price of the car. >> host: is working with some of these technology companies that you work with like you mentioned voicebox and blue tooth, is it much like working with a tire manufacturer to get the right tires? i mean, it's another supplier to the toyota product? >> guest: it's all about collaboration. in fact, there are two other suppliers we work with, a company called uie and tgt, but they're smaller tech firms and software experts who help provide the secret sauce for entune, and without that collaboration, we couldn't really be where we are today s so it's really important for a company like toyota to reach out and embrace the tech community. it's their core competency.

ours is transportation. >> host: do you have different standards for different countries? >> guest: well, i can speak for the u.s., and our standards are what our customers demand. so we want to deliver what their demand is and work within the confines of driver distraction guidelines and the safety measures we have to fit here. there have been interests of some of our affiliates to, perhaps, export entune, so i'm finish it's raised my interest level to potentially license. >> host: when it comes to connectivity in cars, is the u.s. ahead, behind, about the same as europe or asia, etc. >> guest: my sense is we're ahead, you know? we were maybe at parity with asia for a while, but i think we've catapulted ahead now. i think in europe it's a little bit different. in europe they're more concerned about the emergency call which could be legislated, and i think we have a little bit more latitude here in europe because of the different countries, cultures and languages some of the connectivity challenges that

we have here are exacerbated in europe. >> host: now, as vp of toyota, is that a u.s. vp? >> guest: it is. >> host: okay. you're based in los angeles which often starts trends. >> guest: correct. >> host: and did the fact that this is all developing, all this technology is now developing, is that, did it help to be in southern california? >> guest: i think it did. although the partners we've engaged in or with are from seattle, central california, our engineering arm is in ann arbor, michigan, our parent company's in japan, so it's really sort of a mash up of talent. >> host: what's your background? >> guest: my background, actually, is in marketing and advertising, and i took a fork in the road and had an opportunity to work on the toyota.com web site when it was in its infancy, and that's how i got into technology. so i'm not an engineer, but i've learned enough, i know enough acronyms now to be dangerous. >> host: when did toyota.com get

developed? >> guest: so it was about 1992 is when we launched. >> host: and how many people visited the site in 1992, do you know? compared to today? >> guest: we had very infantile metrics at the time, it was difficult to gauge. but we went from 10,000, let's say, to, you know, two million within a couple years. >> host: jon bucci, looking ahead, what kind of products advancements will we see in car technology in the next five, ten years? >> guest: i can talk about the connected vehicle which is really our sweet spot, and what that's all about is our new ev, rav-ev that's coming out and our prius plug-in. we have all new means of connecting with those vehicles to provide means of controlling them like starting a charge or stopping a charge when you're not in the vehicle using handset. we're also launching the new lexus inform application suite which is just like entune but with facebook places and down the road we have some more

surprises coming, so i think it's really all about how this is integrated in the vehicle and how the customer can interact in a safe manner. that's the sweet spot, i think. >> host: is it, can a driver post on facebook while driving? >> guest: so in our application it's facebook check-in meaning if you've arrived somewhere, you can hit a soft key on the nav system and tell, post to your wall or tag to your friends where you are. so it's almost like a safety thing in a way. so i know that my young daughter would, i'd like her to use that so i know where she's checking in. >> host: and, jon bucci, what about the issue of privacy and tracking of cars, is that something you've incorporated into your technology? >> guest: well, we don't track the vehicles. we have a service provider that in our safety connect product that can locate a stolen vehicle and recover it, but the only way that that can be executed is if a police report is filed because of the reasons of privacy. so we respect customers'

privacy, and we're very, very cautious about our data security. in fact, we have a third party firm right now looking at our entire architecture to identify any links that may be of any concern. so customer privacy and data security is absolutely paramount for us. >> host: "the communicators" is at the consumer electronics show in las vegas 2012. we've been talking with jon bucci, vice president for advanced technology for toyota. and now joining us in las vegas at the consumer electronics show is someone who's been on "the communicators" in our washington, d.c. studio, but gautham nagesh of the hill newspaper, what have you seen at this show that's caught your eye? >> guest: well, i think the biggest thing at the show this year is really 3-d television. right now, in fact, they're staging a boxing match for the benefit of the crowd in 3-d that's being broadcast on espn, and really every television vendor here is showing some version of a tv that with or without glasses gives you a 3-d

image, and it's clear it's not the same one you went to when you were a teenager in the movie theater. this is really vivid. >> host: is it faddish? >> guest: you know, a fair question. i think it may be a little bit. people want to bring it back, but the technology right now is very advanced compare today what we've seen in the past. >> host: will it be advanced enough that people do not have to wear glasses and can see it anywhere in their living room? >> guest: sony is showing a t where it has 3-d without the glasses. um, most of the vendors are not, though, so i think that right now it's still something where you're going to need the glasses or some sort of device. >> host: what's the cost point of this at, in 2012? >> guest: um, i can't say across all manufacturers, but you're definitely seeing it come down to where plasma tvs were a couple years ago. so not cheap, but definitely less than before. >> host: what else has caught your attention? >> guest: well, there's a lot of stuff here about tablets. a lot of manufacturers are

jumping into smaller size tablets. they really want to get some competition going for apple, and there's room for entry at, perhaps, a lower price point or a smaller size. >> host: now, gautham nagesh, you told me earlier you had attended a session with fcc chair julius genachowski. what did you hear from him? >> guest: well, the chairman unsurprisingly is primarily concerned with spectrum which is a huge concern here. he really emphasized that they're trying to get this done and that he wants the unlicensed spectrum as part of any package which right now is not include inside the bill the house committee passed. so he really emphasized that unlicensed spectrum is crucial because it gives people who don't pay for spectrum the opportunity to develop new technologies like garage door openers or wi-fi, and we've seen some reus dance from roadway -- resistance from republicans on that. >> host: why? >> guest: we have to reclaim frit the auctioners -- we shouldn't give it away for free

once we've paid this money for it. with that being said, there's unlicensed wi-fi right now, and the fcc opened up some more when they did the digital tv transition. there's a lot of hope for that. >> host: but, again, why are the republicans and the chairman is in support of more unlicensed spectrum s that correct? >> guest: yes. the chairman wants more unlicensed spectrum. republicans feel that giving away the spectrum which, essentially, is unlicensed use would be counterproductive given the state of the national deficit when it could be sold for a fairly significant amount of money to wireless companies. >> host: what percentage of the spectrum is currently unlicensed? >> guest: i couldn't give you an exact percentage, but it's very small compared to the overall amount of spectrum. >> host: and is there a shortage of unlicensed spectrum? >> guest: not a shortage, but the spectrum that's unlicensed right now is considered the lowest quality, it's really got a limited range. you know from wi-fi networks

if you have thick walls, there's a lot of interference. some of the spectrum they're trying to free up is much lower frequency, so it can travel over greater distances and through barriers. >> host: when you're walking around here at the consumer electronics show, what's the message that a lot of these manufacturers and developers are trying to get to policymakers? >> guest: well, i think the number one message is that things are going well in the technology space, i think, especially when you're exposed to the broader economy. it's hard to find the sort of optimism that you see here. i think, though, spectrum wireless use is really the demand here because the first three days of this conference, very few people were able to use their cell phones. while that's, obviously, an issue of the crowds here in vegas, it's also an indication of the state of our wireless networks in our country. so the spectrum crunch appears to be very real, and people want something done about it. >> host: okay. one more piece of technology that you're looking forward to seeing here at the consumer

electronics show. >> guest: well, i've heard a lot of things about some of these new game consoles. play playstation's showing a handheld device. a friend of mine got a preview, that's supposed to be amazing. so there's a lot of gaming breakthroughs that are really interesting. >> host: i've noticed that google and facebook are not represented here, nor is apple. >> guest: apple traditionally doesn't come here. you do see some of the larger technology giants, they don't come here. a lot of vendors here are part of that facebook/google ecosystem where the producing products built on those platforms, but those companies have enough clout that they like to do product center events, and they can get everyone to come to them. >> host: gautham nagesh of the hill here at the consumer electronics show. and our "communicators" series from the consumer electronics show in las vegas continues next week. to watch this and past "communicators" online, go to

c-span.org/communicators. >> coming up, two state of the state addresses. we'll go to the midwest to hear from iowa's republican governor terry branstad followed by pat quinn, democratic governor of illinois. then house gop leaders, including majority leader eric cantor, are among the participants in a live discussion exploring how innovation can improve economic growth and job creation. and later, a forum on israel's future in the middle east including the latest developments considering the threat posed by iran. also today on the c-span networks, remarks by president and ceo of the federal reserve bank of dallas. he'll give his economic outlook and talk about the challenges and limitations of monetary policy in a world of global competition. hosted by the institute of international finance, the forum begins live at 12:30 p.m. eastern over on c-span3.

for more or resources in the presidential race, use c-span's campaign 2012 web site to watch videos of the candidates on the campaign trail, see what the candidates have said on issues important to you, and read the latest from candidates, political reporters and people like you from social media sites at c-span.org/campaign 2012. now, iowa's governor terry branstad speaks to his general assembly on the condition of the state. he talks about his budget, the state of the economy, job creation and the importance of education in developing job skills for the future. from des moines, this 30-minute event is courtesy of iowa public television. [applause] >> thank you.

thank you. [applause] >> madam lieutenant governor, mr. president, mr. speaker, leaders, justices and judges, legislators, elected officials, distinguished guests, family, friends and fellow iowans: today it is my honor to stand before you and deliver this, my 17th state of the state address, in this great chamber. and while 17 doesn't sound like such a big number to me, my wife, chris, would say