jeremiah gives away his secrets for free. the top technologist at s.a.p. places his bets on tablet computers. and the big internet poker controversy explained. our ben paar and joseph menn of "the financial times" this week on "press here." good morning, i'm scott mcgrew. one of the things about silicon valley is our propensity to give away so much for free. >> reporter: want an operating system for the new tablet you've

designed? google will give you android software for free. think bigger. need to run a giant server farm? facebook will give you the designs for its own servers that will save you millions in power costs all for free, even if you're one of their competitors. >> ready? let's go. >> reporter: analyst jeremiah owyang can and does charge companies thousands of dollars to tell them what he thinks, but he, too, has adopted the free model, offering much of what he does for anyone to download. disrupting one of the few traditional conservative industries left in silicon valley. jeremiah is partner at altimeter group, recently techno babble rated him the top analyst in the world. it's his second appearance on "press here." joined by joe menn of "the financial times" and ben parr of

mashables. if you give away that research for free, how do you make any money? >> you want to show people how much you know and the type of information that you have. and then they know they have to come back to you for more information and insights. >> now, do you give them half the information and then say for the rest of the analysis about your company, you know, click here? >> we give as much as the data as we can to help them make decisions. there's always customization required. you have to know specific markets. you just can't fit all that in, or it's unreadable. >> do you go to a company -- or do you do a report about a company and then say look, i've got this? i will give you this much of it? >> no. i don't practice that. i think that's a form of hijacking, really. you want to show the market how you can help them make decisions in their business. you know, this is a trend. every single industry has been disrupted by social media. media, finance, tech companies. so this is just coming to the industry analyst perspective. >> talking about disruption, what is the biggest change

you've seen in the analyst industry? >> yes. the business decision-makers, the customers of analysts can talk to each other directly and page decisions on wikipedia or focus or linkedin. and that's a disruption because you don't need that middle man anywhere. so my whole philosophy is go to where that disruption is already happening and try to facilitate and lead it. >> you said that the people who are buying your reports can work together? >> that's right. >> why would a competitor work with another competitor? >> well, they're not necessarily competitors but maybe coke and toyota or different types of industry are all trying to make decisions on how do we use the latest technologies? and they can talk to each other now. >> now that there is social media, there is a certain -- if you'll forgive me, mashable to the coke and the toyota. ten years ago, 20 years ago, coke and toyota wouldn't talk to each other about anything. one makes cars, one makes sugary water. now those companies can work

together in the most interesting ways on facebook, for instance. >> and they're all struggling with the same disruptions from these new technologies like social or mobile or location. and they're all trying to figure out, oh, silicon valley's producing 50 companies that provide the same services. which one do we turn to? which one do we use? so they absolutely have to talk to each other. >> what is the big technology trend that they should be looking for? maybe one that nobody's really talking about? >> the main thing we found from our research is companies are trying to figure out how to integrate social into their websites. the big mistake they're making is they're linking away to facebook and twitter. they're giving mark zuckerberg all his traffic, but they're not recouping it back. you have to figure out how to integrate that back in. >> are you saying talk to coca-cola.com? you should have a coca-cola facebook page but drive them back to coca-cola.com? >> it's about using them in tandem. >> how do you use them in tandem

other than just linked to each other? >> some companies like microsoft is aggregating the discussions from facebook or twitter right back onto the actual web pages. so you can see what people are saying right on the corporate web page. that's how you're starting to see that integrate. >> what about most people that are watching probably don't -- aren't the ceos of toyota or ford. what should the small business owner be doing? >> for them, they have a lot less resources, but there are free tools you can use such as discuss that can pull in conversations and use that on their own website. >> when that person googles discuss -- he's a small business owner. he says oh, the analyst said it's d-i-s -- >> q-u-s. silicon valley spelling. just get rid of important letters. so there's a lot of free tools in facebook and linkedin. these are all tools small businesses should be using as well. >> can you talk about

professional media, mainstream media and strategies? we've got "new york times" putting up a pay wall, trends where people are having to reevaluate how they're making money. and the web is a frenemy. >> they're still struggling because we saw the initial reports of the traffic from "new york times" after the pay wall went down. i'm sure that's going to be some early rations. we'll have to see. when you look at any web page, you see that integration of social right on there. you see articles from ben, mashable, next to any traditional article or that tweets about that piece. so that's an opportunity for big media to aggravate their voices of the consumers and those that are reading because that's free content. the challenge, though, they haven't figured out is how do you monetize information when it distributes to the network? that's the big thing here. that's what i'm trying to focus on. >> maybe one big question, then, is the pay wall the right method? do you think that is the future of news? do you think it's going to be something else?

>> i think we're going to see multiple revenue streams working, and you can turn those nozzles on and off as you need to. pay wall is one, advertising is distributed, there's all different ways you can get marginal revenues. >> i discovered on "the new york times," eventually it came up no, that's all you can do this month. if you google the headline -- >> shh. >> i'm sorry, i forgot we had a print reporter around the table. i'm about to pay for "new york times" only because it's such a pain. at some point itunes became so easy -- i have a friend who stopped downloading illegal music because he discovered that it was easier to pay 99 cents for pure music that was virus free and easy to manage. same idea. >> it is. but what you just said is called the pain wall, make it difficult.

>> think that's fairly accurate. >> the thing they're doing is the metered model where you get a certain number for free. does that seem more reasonable than some of the early efforts? lots of different newspapers have been trying different things for a while. "new york times" said we'll charge you for the columnists. and that didn't really work. does the metered model make inherent sense here? >> that's one of the ways. i really want to see a company use the distributed method. it spreads in influence and everybody thinks about "the financial times." there was an innovative piece done by the guardian uk where they worked with mashery and encouraged the community to use content. the only catch was you had to take the advertising partner with that content. let's break for commercial real quick and we'll be back with jeremiah right here on

there are times i think we should put our discussion during the commercial break on the web so that you can continue on because we're just talking about interesting things. we were talking about subscriptions on apple ipad, the daily, for instance. how's that working out, and what's your impression of it? >> i think the models we're starting to see is hardware continues to become a commodity. so maybe the new business model, and i want to hear from the gentlemen, is to give away the hardware but put the media content on there. >> kindle's not give away, but it's getting there. ipod has a lot of technology in it yet. >> but the subscription war with apple seems to be really heating up. i mean, you've got big media companies that were very excited to get on the ipad. they're saying wait a minute, we don't get to talk to our customers anymore? and we have to give you 30%? >> and we don't find anything out about our subscribers.

where do you think that's going to wind up? >> i still think it's in a lot of flux. we're seeing a lot of free content. i mean, that's the big change here. news right now is about who can be there fast? who can be there first? that's a big challenge because the blogs are moving so fast. >> but most of the ipad content is pretty. it's not just -- there's really nice writing. there's panoramic photos. cool looking stuff. >> yeah, like the flip board content is taking all that free conte content. >> is the ipad the future of computing? >> i don't think it's a very good output device. it's hard to create push content back out. >> apple late last week ran into the trouble of this news item that somehow they were collecting data about where you are. i saw, i think it was thursday

morning on "today" show, cbs "morning news," and apple had no response. should apple have some sort of social media strategy in place? they have one spokesperson. >> they have one spokesperson, but they actually do have a social media strategist, one who's monitoring and managing these things. so apple's strategy in social media is to get other people to talk about them. and they do feed bloggers information. we know this for a fact and we do brief them and give them information so they talk about the market for themselves. but a lot of people say apple's not very social, but they have embedded social such as paying into their own products. >> well, it's not worked out to do much. >> they were talking about apple, whether or not it's tracking people. >> i think this story's getting ahead of them. i'm sorry to interrupt. but where i think they're underestimating the person in -- i'm from des moines, so the person from des moines who has an iphone who says what, now? apple's tracking me? what do you say, appear?

and then apple doesn't respond. >> but it's part of an entire trend of much more information is being generated. you just imagine how much information you're putting on a facebook profile. what does that do to privacy? >> privacy has been dead for some time. we just haven't buried it because the information that we're all sharing can be pulled through apis. so even third-party twitter clients can see your messages because part of that's open. that's a major concern. there's the application called color.com which some of us have been using. and it's an innovative prompt, but it listens to what's being said and matches it with others in wav files. ilg it's listening to and it's a photo-taking app and combines your photos with my photos.

is that a fair summary of it? >> technical terms, it's trying to figure out an implicit social graph. figure out who are your friends based on when have you taken pictures, and have you taken pictures with them in the same room. >> trying to figure out exactly what it is. we just know it has some cool technology behind it. >> yoe, tjoe, last question. >> you said privacy is dead. it keeps getting progressively more dead. yet there's attempts to resurrect it apparently because congress is, for the first time in years, privacy, consumer bill of rights and the white house has said that this such a thing is needed. does that have a real shot at passing? can something be done here? >> technology emerges, consumer follows and then businesses and brands come in and government is way behind that. really we have to look at consumers. consumers, in our research, say they care about privacy, but they rarely turn on those features.

>> thank you very kindly. up next on "press here," we'll continue the talk with s.a.p.'s chief information officer. "press here" will be right back.

welcome back. if you're a huge software company, you have to decide not only which tablet to give your employees, the ipad or something else, but what tablet to program for. what will your customers use? s.a.p.'s top technology officer was in town recently. i sat down with him in this pretaped interview. oliver busman is chief information officer at german software giant s.a.p. he's purchased more than 3,000 apple ipads for his work force. thanks for being with us this morning. >> thank you for having me. >> late last week we saw the introduction of the playbook from research in motion. you've also got the galaxy tab

and the zune. clearly tablets are hot. i want to ask a two-part question. first is what will your employees use going forward now that there are so many choices? and secondly, what will s.a.p. be programming for for other employees to work on? >> i think we were one of the first users of tablet pcs, the ipad in may last year, we teamed up with apple, and we have almost over 4,000 devices already there. and our goal is to be device agnostic because the speed of innovation in a tablet area is super. i think there are almost 100 tablets out there. >> there are 100 tablets out there, but there's one that everyone's buying. now, i realize some of those have not been on there. and i understand the idea is a software developer, agnostic. >> agnostic. >> but why? surely there are some. >> because at the end, we have over 100,000 customers. at the end, the customer is

driving in the end our software selection and device selection. we see a critical mass already on the ipad devices. and the same also on the r.i.m. playbook. what we see, definitely we will support three or four devices internally, that means the ipad. we're working already to get the r.i.m. playbook ready. and then also the galaxy tab also. then also hopefully in the summertime also the hp. so in the end, we think there may not only be one device in our corporation, the combination. >> i realize you have to be delicate about some of this, but did i just hear you saying that in the end at least s.a.p. is expecting four tablets to survive? >> at least. at least. maybe more. the windows 7 device. i think we see these players that we definitely will support

going forward. >> is there an advantage to the playbook? let's talk about the playbook because it's so new. built-in security advantage. i use blackberry. my company uses blackberry. the united states of america government uses blackberry because of its security. this must be at least a temptation to say that that's the one that business will use going forward. >> i think, you know, secure in enabling those devices because most of them, you know, the ipad is a consumer device. so the first step is to bring them in from a security perspective. and r.i.m. has an advantage because you can program your infrastructure. we have over 20,000 blackberrys that we can utilize to get connected. >> you have 20,000 blackberrys just within your corporation alone. >> in our corporation. >> right. >> so we can easily hook up the r.i.m. playbook accessing the e-mail calendar functionality. another big part which we don't

see with the android is the flash support. we have a lot of flash-rich applications. es spepecially in the business we can utilize and put on the r.i.m. playbook. >> one of them is through whimsy. let's give this a shot. do you think the other tablets, clearly there is a whimsy to the programming of the apple ipad. people create the darnedest things. do you think there's going to be that whimsicalness to a playbook from research in motion? >> i think, you know, the usage will be defined by the combination of the device, what kind of functionality is on there and also the available application content. at the end, we will see users are attracted to the seven-inch device and have it supported. this will drive many the corporation maybe other user groups. >> s.a.p. has software on the ipad now. what can i as a factory manager

or as an executive get out of my s.a.p. software on an ipad that i wasn't getting out of my laptop? what changes are happening? >> i think the big difference is you're always online. and being number one is a move by business intelligence. access to your corporate informati information. we managed our entire opportunity management over 650,000 opportunities on the ipad. so it means our organization can see where is the business. >> are you saying it's a frequency thing. they interact with the data more often. >> the so-called memory technology. you can process a huge amount of data realtime. it has data, that you can move

entire customization. and it takes maybe half a day that makes this accessible. you need the accessibility. >> and is s.a.p. fleet-footed enough for this? >> yes. >> it's a old company, a big company. >> i think there's a big change going on right now because with the new management team over the last year, we see the level of innovation in the mobile area. the company side. it was in the east bay and platform, driving the whole mobile business. and we are one of the people and connecting this information through our legacy system. i think that's the big ving. >> we'll leave it there.

oliver busman.

we're back with joe mann of "the financial times," ben parr of mashable. ben, you were at the obama event at facebook a couple days ago. what did you think? >> it felt a lot like it was the beginning of his next re-election campaign. he didn't talk that much about technology with mark zuckerberg who interviewed him. it was really just about the economy and health care, all the kind of things. is this really that he realizes facebook is the way to reach out a lot of younger voters. >> zuckerberg admitted that he was nervous. but i thought that he did, for 26 or 27, a very good job interviewing the president of the united states. they were softball questions. they were set up to, what do you think about the economy? is the deficit bad sort of thing? but i thought he did a good job. >> absolutely. it was the first time -- second time i've ever seen him wear a suit coat and a tie. >> were you invited to that dinner where he wore the previous one? >> i wish i had been. >> okay. just checking. the one thing i would have

changed, and it's hard to be critical of a company hosting the president of the united states, because the president has not agreed to be on the show yet, is when dig did interviews, they'd have this voting as to what you should ask the guy. and they came up with crazy votes. i thought that was the interesting thing was that you got nutty, nutty questions that were actually kind of interesting. and we didn't see that at facebook. >> i wonder if that was facebook's decision or the administration's decision. >> it was the safe decision, that's for sure. joe, you would have been writing about poker. i know poker fairly -- actually, not that well. i know poker to some degree. i don't understand the controversy about what's going on on the internet. first of all, it's illegal, right? >> depends who you ask. the justice department would have you believe that it's illegal. there are a bunch of poker players that say it's not. you can spend hours digging down into the weeds of the wording of

the law. but i think most experts would agree that online poker in the united states is illegal. >> if i am playing for money, is there a dodge, or is it pretty much sights where you are? >> there are a number of amusing dodges. many would say they've been very creative. party poker, in 2006, when it came more clearly legal, it was advertising on tv and driving people to partypoker.net or dotorg. if you happened to accidentally go to partypoker.com, suddenly you were paying for money. >> where do we go from here? >> this is the biggest crackdown since 2006. >> why now? >> i reported the grand jury has been looking at these companies for more than a year. that's when it first came into

public view. they've been sort of angry for a while. and what the 2006 law did was make illegal -- if you're in the gambling business, to accept transactions for that purpose. so that drove away most of the biggest remaining payment processors, that have already been gone, but those sorts of folks and so people had to get really creative and move money to this account, that account and finally into your poker playing account. and what they did now was finally get around to saying oh, we've actually got you pretty red-handed with what is apparently bank fraud. so we're going to go after you on that. >> so if i'm somebody watching this at home or a spouse of somebody watching this at home, is it illegal, or should i be playing online poker? >> is the individual in trouble? >> yeah. >> some would say that the individual is breaking the law. they're not going to arrest any individual players. and just a few days ago, they made it clear that the individual players already had money locked up in these accounts when the websites went

down or were seized by the fbi. they'll be able to get their money back. so there are millions of people that were pretty concerned that they had money, and i'll name them, it's absolute poker, full tilt poker and poker stars. the three largest sites serving the american public. they got shut down. people will be able to get their money out. those companies in some trouble. >> so know when to hold them and know when to fold them. that's our show. my thanks to my guests. we're back next week. i'm scott mcgrew. thanks for making us part of