googler promises success, happiness, and world peace. we'll hold him to it. why pinterest won't help you pay the bills. plus, the iphone5. our reporters, john schwartz and rich of bloomberg this week on "press: here." good morning, everyone, i'm scott mcgrewe. my parents both have iphones and when they call me to ask me a question how they do something on their phones, i ask them, how do you think you do it? and the answer is usually correct. the true revolution of the iphone is how intuitive it is.

>> today we're going to introduce iphone5. >> and that intuition is just getting better and better. iphones can now sense you're at the airport and automatically display your electronic boarding pass. square will soon roll out technology to tell a starbuck s barista you've arrived at the store. this is an app called bump. bump your phones together and you can transfer contact information, incredibly intuitive. the same company also makes photo sharing app flock. friends who take pictures together, share those pictures with each other automatically. dave is ceo and a graduate of princeton stanford. he left to create bump, an app that is downloaded faster than

once every second. joined by john schwartz and rich of bloomberg. it strikes me. i think it strikes everyone. we went from the motorola to the iphone intuitive. i think we've sort of entered this post-intuitive world where i'm not even telling my iphone or what have you that i'm at the airport. it knows. it's got it taken care of. >> truly like a real smartphone. >> smarter than me, in many ways. >> absolutely. if you even go back a step, we started with computers with punch cards, punch holes in a piece of paper, put it in a computer, it would do something. then the keyboard, then the mouse where you could, like, move your hand and it would move something on the screen. you actually touch the content you want to interact with. with bump, we took another step

forward and said do you even have to touch the screen, can you do something intuitive than that, and flock, can the phone know what you want to do before you do and do these things for you on your behalf. >> is there a point where you want to share content, so you'll press this icon, drag this, or was the idea we're going to do that thing immediate? >> we started with a problem. the problem was it's a real pain to interact with somebody in person. >> a lot of people want my phone number. >> a lot of people think it's a pain to interact with me. >> we would do this dance. i'd say my phone number, you'd call me, ask how to spell your last name. this is the year 2008. we had amazing computers in our hands, so we're still doing that. that's where we started with bump. the physical interaction was the

simplest way to solve the problem. >> one thing that's interesting to me, jack dorsey mentions this serendipity, happen to be in the same room with somebody who has a bunch of friends you do. is that the same notion you're after, chance meetings or making sure things aren't as chance all the time? >> i would say in this world of making apps intuitive, there's two classes. one is serendipity. can you provide something new to people they never knew they wanted before. what we're trying to do is solve real problems people have and make it easy for you. with flock, people have been sharing photographs they've been taking with their friends for decades, almost 100 years, probably. we're trying to make that easy, so you don't have to do anything. >> on the flip side, there's something called the urgency of now. >> exactly. >> what comes after bump after

sharing information and sharing photographs, is sharing payments the next thing? is it money? where do you go from here? >> the way that we think about it is we use this phrase i stole, can you reduce your interaction or product to its ir reducible state. so with flock, we thought we want to share photos with people. what is the least amount of work to do but still be in control and flock nailed that. payments, square is doing a great job. what is the smallest amount of interaction i can have with the merchant where i can get my ice cream and leave. >> starbucks will know you've arrived in the starbucks. i think it's extraordinary. that's amazing. >> target's trying to do the same thing. a lot of retailers want to know when you're there, before you're there, and what you're buying. what can they do for you without having to ask you. >> the irony is, particularly

bump. you see the two phones come together and it slides across from one phone to the other. those phones aren't transmitting anything to each other. behind the scenes, there's this huge amount of location data, servers, exchanges going on. the intuitiveness doesn't mean it's less work for the app developer. >> far more work. we focus on the user experience first and build whatever technology we have to do to make that user experience great. so yeah, when you bump your phones together, signals go up to our servers either in dallas or somewhere in europe, we do processing, send the signal back to the phones, the phones tell us what they want to share. so it's a very complicated process, but the experience is you bump the phones together and boom, you're done. >> is that patented? >> yeah. >> i'm sure the process is patented, but literally the move of let's do this? >> can't really do that. >> that's what i was asking. the more we get intuitive is say

pinched zoom or bumped to share. >> apple/samsung suit. >> more intuitive things get, either they are going to be unpatentable or dumb pat. that's what you do to do whatever it is you do. >> can i ask you a weird question? >> yeah. >> can you do an unintentional bump? >> no, you can't. we've made it so you have to open the app in order to bump. you're safe. >> just wondering about serendipity. >> we get that question dozens of times. >> both people have to have the app. >> bump is very intentional. >> i don't have the app. >> that's the viralness. >> that was one of the arguments, it was forcing people to meet people and a creepy element. i think they are working on that, but it was a little bit forced. >> have you ever had somebody

break their phone? >> i've never witnessed it. >> you have. >> when you have 100 million downloads, lots of things happen. we've had bowls of guacamole. there's also three marriages that resulted in bump. that's cool. that counteracts the times people drop their phones. >> we'll leave it there. the ceo and founder of bump. up next, businesses for millions into social networking, but does it pay off? the secret data showing what works and what doesn't when "press: here" continues.

zbhnchts welcome back to "press: here." department store owner once said half the money i spend on advertising is wasted, i just don't know which have. if he were around today, he might have said the same about social media.

there's no question there is money to be made from social media. a toy store can tweet out a sale or give a discount to facebook users to drive traffic, but experts on toys are not experts on social media. businesses are left wondering what works, what doesn't, and how do you measure it? i mean shaun knows, he's the ceo of new york city's giraffe. joined by john schwartz and rich. there are people and companies pouring millions into social media and goes back to the original problem, they haven't got the metric to figure out if this is going to work or not. >> that's correct. it's a big problem. >> it's a huge problem. i don't think we've seen businesses do that recently where that kind of summon chasing so many uncertain sort of things. >> you're right. it's part of trying to compete

with basically amazon. every retailer on earth is trying to figure out what am i supposed to do online, how do i become successful, how do i not give up my entire business to amazon or e-bay? they are all trying to figure out the best channel to reach consumers. fortunately for silicon valley, there's another company, facebook, google, pinterest. >> the pinterest got my attention. your data said it did not pay off. it's not driving traffic, but not driving buying traffic. >> that's correct. there's a lot of reasons for it. certainly not their fault. they are hugely possible and a lot of people are interacting with them and a lot of sites are getting free visits from pinterest, so that's great. the stores are trying to figure out how do i communicate with that visitor that comes from

pinterest. we're seeing it's well behind things like facebook and twitter. >> my perception is that what i've heard in the field is that small business have more success through facebook than larger ones. there's been a series of large companies that went away, gm among others. i'm wondering so perhaps facebook's move to mobile, does that help them instead with the small and larger business and what can they do to change their -- what people think about them? >> sure. that's a great question, and it's not an easy one. what people are finding is people go on facebook to basically get updates on what they are doing, what their friends are up to. they don't go on facebook and say how do i buy something. for better or worse, we've been trained as consumers to go to amazon and say start the product search or sometimes go to google. what everyone else is trying to win is that war.

how do i convince my users to start with my application to buy something. >> have the actual transaction start on facebook. >> or just the search. today we're trained if you want to buy a tv, you'll either get one on google or amazon. facebook needs to convince people the best way to buy a television is to ask friends on facebook. >> what's to keep amazon from going social itself? >> nothing at all. the question is how much data does someone like facebook allow amazon to have access to. if you were using gmail, you could upload your contacts to facebook and facebook would invite everyone to join, but facebook didn't give any of that data back to google, which is why that application doesn't exist anymore. similarly, amazon may allow to give data but may not share it back. >> how are you following 90

million buyers and knowing what it is they are doing on facebook and executing their purchases? >> great question. what we've done is go to merchants and say can we help you understand what's working and not working on your site and eventually solve the problems for you. example of that is abandoned shopping carts. they lose $300 million a month in abandoned shopping carts. >> people who click and never put their credit card number in. >> they've clicked, added to the shopping basket, and for whatever reason, they didn't complete the transaction. imagine how much money they spent on online marketing to get people to the site and almost complete the transaction. most hmerchants do nothing to solve that. press one button, we'll automate it for you. >> $900 million gives you enough of an understanding of what the general population would do. >> absolutely. it's a great start.

we don't have the same data advantage that facebook or google have. >> it's big enough. >> it's a big amount of data. >> pretty clear what the first steps would be in you wanted to build a social presence, what are some of the unexpected ways a merchant can build a social presence? >> what is a social presence mean? does it mean i create a fan page or company page on facebook? you can do that, but is anybody going to interact with you? a lot of companies have tried that, including gm. companies that have millions of followers on facebook, but what the data suggests is nobody buys based on your posting on facebook. it's a great way to put up wallpaper, but doesn't drive transactions. it goes back to deeply understanding your customers and what they want to achieve. and how does social play a role in that? if you buy a product like a new crib because you're a new parent. how can facebook help you

understand how to do that well and how does that social data they've shared about purchasing the crib give them information? >> that's where you're determining a crib got bought and we should do this with that data? >> absolutely. what should we do with the data and what clues can we give to the retailer or merchant for that data. it's hard for a merchant to keep track of millions of orders per month. >> what's the most effective social media platform, is there a certain brand or product that's more effective than others? >> here's a great example of someone who's done social well, nike. nike made the decision we want to interact with our consumers every day. they could do that for some degree on twitter or facebook, but they said why don't we create an app called nike plus. they can dun lode software, buy a piece of equipment, and every day you're sending information back to nike.

they understand how they use their products and get to communicate with you every day. >> you're thinking of it as a feature, not as something that's where you're the consumer. >> exactly. the consumer gets value from sharing that social data with the company. that value exchange is not as great on facebook and twitter. >> i got to stop you there. thank you for being with us this morning. >> thank you. up next, one of these men in this picture will be my guest after the break. stick around to see which one when "press: here" continues.

welcome back to "press: here." google once measured thousands of users' reaction to 40 different shades of blue to figure out which blue was best for its website. instead of giving employees one day a week to work on their

projects, he gave them 20%, which is exactly the same thing. google likes numbers, which makes him an unusual googler. he wants to know how his fellow employees feel. his class, teaching google engineers how to find their emotional center, one of the most popular at the google plex. the seven-week class is now a book. ming is a google fellow, specifically, his title is a google jolly good fellow who nobody can deny. thank you for being with us this morning. i was looking at your new book, and i often -- i do read these books, but i look at the blurbs to begin with. ancient meditative practice and the blurb is from his holeyness the dalai lama. >> yes. >> has the dalai lama done a book blurb before?

the dalai lama is your book blurb. >> how you know it's a good book. jimmy carter and dalai lama cannot be wrong at the same time. >> you've written a book, you've written a book. >> dalai lama never returned my phone calls. >> google measures and they perfect. how do you get them to talk about being centering themselves and feeling? >> right, right. i chose the engineers. >> easily, easily. >> the reason is because i figured if i could get to the engineers, i could get to everybody. the engineers are the lowest common denominator. so how do you get the engineers? two things, first has to make sense to engineers. a second has to be evidence based. has to be science behind

everything i say. let me give you an example. an example is an ability to calm the mind, a place that's calm and clear. that's highly trainable. >> and measurable. you can get bio feedback. >> just bring attention to the breath and bring it back. the reason it works is that everything you do dumbbell, strengthen it more. it's strengthening the muscles of attention. do this a lot, your attention becomes very powerful and you can master the mind. that's how you get the mind of calmness and clarity. so there's a system and logic behind it and there's a science. >> why does google want its engineers to be touchy feely, for lack of a better term? why is that important for them?

>> actually, we cannot be touchy feely for engineers. if they are, fluffy. so we have to be self centered. and to make them self centered is this core inside yourself is not coming to talk about your feelings, it's about training of emotionalless feelings. examples, the ability to be calm in crisis, the ability to hinder triggers. the ability to influence with empathy. all those skills are highly trainable. >> do you speak to newspapers? >> yeah. >> usa today could use some of this empathy? >> is there empirical evidence this makes google a better place? >> so from the individual feedback i get, it does. so, for example -- >> that's anecdotal and engineers have been trained to

ignore the anecdotal, they want quantifiab quantifiable. >> it's based on a cause of effectiveness. >> you got a 4.75. >> class for myself, i get 4.95. >> that's not too shabby. >> yeah. other quantititive, psychological measures, so measurement of quantitative measure of empathy, stress, so on. every measure improved over seven weeks. >> that's for individuals. i guess what i'm asking is collectively, is there a collective benefit to google. can you show google is a more effective place, better place to work or makes better product because of what you're doing? >> not yet.

the reason not yet because i figure to do that well, there has to be a controlled experiment. i'm an engineer. i cannot do it and see what happens. do the control group, experimental group, and create a situation, for example, you get a group in and then google sales, so there's a common variable. and then six months after the course, see the same numbers. >> you have or have not done this? >> have not done yet. it's very big. it's a very major undertaking. >> need something quantifiable. >> quantitative feedback at a individual level, i could not have got this promotion because of this class, or even better, this class changed my life. >> ming, we have a minute left and i want to get to something here. that is this tradition to

google, you're famous, you show up at google, you have to go see ming. we have photos of some people that are recognizable. we have barack obama here, jimmy carter -- not jimmy carter, the bill clinton. you've met the dalai lama, of course. there's muhammad ali. and the queen of jordan. all right. everyone stops by your office and makes sure this is done. >> yes. >> why? just because everyone else before did? >> besides my good looks, you mien? >> other than that, obviously. >> it's a tradition. when al gore visited google, that was in 2001, i asked for a picture to impress my mom. then after al gore, jimmy carter came to visit and because he was a former president, it was kept

a secret. however, i noticed that we have police cars hiding under the trees around the google parking lot. and then i noticed in the building there are big men with black suits, dark glasses, and ear pieces. so somebody important is in the building, right, and they won't talk. i waited in the lobby in case somebody really important showed up and it was jimmy carter. took two pictures. i was in the office and it becomes a tradition. >> ming, thank you for being with us. your book is "search inside yourself." thank you for being with us this morning. we'll be back in just a minute. >> thank you.

that's our show for this week. we are not on the air next week so we can make room for a guy named bubba and tiger as they face a small white ball in the ryder cup.

i'm scott mcgrew. thank you for making us part of your sunday.