tv Press Here NBC February 2, 2014 9:00am-9:31am PST
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just when you thought the issue of google buses and the jeep riffication of san francisco was over, it wasn't. and meet the fellow who addresses videos on the internet like that ninja. with reporters martin giles of the economist and cap crunch's colleen taylor, this week on press here. >> good morning, i'm scott mcgrew. attorney mike good win once posited an idea that would essentially become known as god win's law, he says all arguments online eventually end up being about hitler. now, this sounds ridiculous, hit lander the holocaust were the
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worst thing to ever happen in human history and nothing, nothing can possibly be compared to it ever. well, as i am sure you have heard tom perkin who is the proud owner of the biggest yacht on planet earth and a venture capitalist managed to do it to be absolutely specific in a letter published in the "wall street journal", perkins compared the up rest over high-tech riches in san francisco, the attacks on google buses and whatnot to kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. he later said he regretted the reference. now, normally onings this kind of imbusiness cilic behavior but even his own company could not. kleiner perkins, of which he is the perkins part wrote "tom perkins not been involved in the company in years. we were shocked by his views expressed today in "the wall street journal" and do not agree." "washington post" columnist vivic west spreads the blame, not perkins alone, he writes, but ceos and venture capitalist and even regular employees who
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have lost touch. with us this morning along with his role at the newspaper, a fellow at stanford, distinguished scholar, emery, vice president of singularity university, "time" magazine says he is one of the most influential voices in tech, joined by martin giles of the ecomist and kill lean taylor of tech crunch. i'm trying to -- i think we can all sort of agree, instead of just asking you, we can all just jump in on this, it was a stupid move. >> absolutely. >> there's no discussing it, it was stupid and we can have that verdict and moved on. one of the points you're raising though is that in general, tech is sort of blind to all of this. >> there's so many blowouts these days about dumb things the tech industry has done, a lawsuit right now about collusion between major ceos on hiring. >> fix the price of salaries. >> of salariesalaries.
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a couple months ago, there was twitter blowing up with no board member on its boards. a man getting hammered for saying he can't find girls -- can't hire women -- find women companies because girls tonight -- teenagers don't -- women don't code. >> the same fella who said too many people don't speak english. something to that affect. knew what he meant by that i think that was unfair. >> silicon valley is going through blow jaup after blowup, few years ago, young people made it big and looking at them smiling, laughing, ha ha ha, look that the frat boy, mark zuckerberg shows up to his ipo address and it was all acceptable a few years ago. now, it no longer is so because the public is expecting a lot more from silicon valley. technology is everywhere. grandma uses it to connect with junior. everything we do is now technology based.
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it has become strategic, the public invests billions of dollars of their life savings in companies like twitter and facebook, they are expecting a dark behavior. using social media, the public is speaking up and becoming very uncomfortable for people like tom perkins. tom perkins was known as the king of silicon valley. even though kleiner perkins is disavoig their association with him, he was the guru and at one they would tout as being a visionary around a legend and so on. no longer can he get away with this behavior, no longer can the frat boys get away with this kind of behavior. this there is an uproar about sexism, ageism, elitism in silicon valley and this arrogance will not be tolerated anymore that is the good thing that happened. >> a very good prosecution of silicon valley. i'd like to sort of just play devil's advocate for a moment, because it's true sort of once upon a time it was geeks who became filthy rich, now it there is filthy rich geeks a problem around a lot of the issues you
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had. at the same time, how do we deal with this by taking out of the emotion, because it's become very heated and there are all these ignorant statements being made. at the same time, silicon valley and the technology come out of it is creating vast alps of wealth that wealth is trickling down to a certain extent, a lot of people coming into this -- into the valley with 100,000, 150,000 salaries, not just the billionaires like tom perkins. this is capitalism this is america, this is what it does, how do we manage this? i don't know quite why this tone deafness has become such an issue. what do you think is the issue sneer how do we deal with it intelligently? >> first of all, not the majority of silicon valley like this, not the workers, not even the managers, an elite group like perkins who believe they are gods and kings and kingma r kingmakers, get away with it uberwho disavowing responsibility for the fact that one of his drivers killed a
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child. you have this arrogance permiating the val labor day no longer acceptable. so the outcome of this lawsuit against the collusion will be that suddenly, the most senior power blockers, silicon valley are brought down to earth and held responsible for the actions. so there has to be a sense of corporate social responsible that creeps into the valley and the executives of silicon valley, the power brokers have to realize they are accountable to the public, abide by the same laws everyone else does, can't get away with this behavior anymore. >> what's one way you think people could become more aware? is there something that you would like to see every young frat boy founder do, something odd he like to see every engineer pr person in the space? so many people in the space are just so heads down and they are in their own bubble because they have to be that way to make their company successful, but that also leads to a bit of tone deafness. what do you think people should do? >> gender diversity this is one
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of the battles had with twitter ceo himself, why he went public with all-male board, all-male management team and investors and so on, it starts from the top. the board itself is a boys club. ceos do is bring their friends on board and then they have this group think. that has fixed. once the board is fixed, have women on it, minorities on it, have a diverse board. what happens is executive management team, because if the ceo started hiring all of his frat boy friends to be in senior roles in management, the women on the board would fire him, right? >> but i think what you're saying about diversity too is not just is it a gender diversity but a diversity of ideas, the kids coming to san francisco and tom perkins is not a kid, but we will set him aside for a minute, the guy who made a stupid comment on facebook about homeless as he was walking to --
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market street, he is such a naive, young kid, he hasn't been around the block on market street enough times or in life to do that i think that's what you're getting at it doesn't have to be an x-number of minorities and x-number of women as much as it needs to be we can't all have been roommates in the same university. >> right. right. it has to be representative of the american population of the users so twitter, example we are using here, its management is board, has to look to other people selling it to so they understand what they think. not saying affirmative action for the sake of affirmative action, but the health of the company, economic growth, talk what's best for the shareholders what has ton fixed? starts from the top, starts from the boards, goes down to the lowest levels so these kids, you can't expect more from them, but founded by women and minorities, suddenly become more sensitive, wouldn't start believing they could get away with it. >> martin go ahead. >> a good point silicon valley
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technology has been about individualism, the beautiful geek in the garage that does other things. the banking, the bank clash the last five years, more coordinated and concerted, didn't do a great job, nevertheless, banks came together, have associations, technology needs to get some kind of more organized approach to dealing with these issues? everyone has got their lobbyists in d.c. and silicon valley and san francisco, what do they need to do? >> my belief is just by having gender diversity, you fix that problem. a woman tom perkins would never have said the stupid things he did. i haven't met any woman who has a level of arrogance, inn sul larity, as dumb as he was, he doubled down in business week. >> he doubled down. >> said he regretted the comparison but then he doubled down. i look forward to the day in which there are so many women involved in tech management that we can find all the dumb thing
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these say. >> they say dumb things, my friend. >> look forward to the day we have equal access to talk about people that said dumb things. thank you. >> thank you, my friends. well, i have to admit, i don't use the word sexy much on this show or for that thank matter, ninja. i promise, i will use both words when "press here" continues.
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welcome back to "press here." the phrase dot com is branded into our national psych day, is used to describe a whole era in san francisco, the previous bubble back in the '90s. of course the tale of just about every internet address, though we tend to drop it these days, nobody says google.com there are other suffixes, called top level dough mains, you know those.
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the internet name i can is rolling out more, dot club and dot photo and dot democrat and dot solar and dot sexy and do the ventures and even dot ninja. the man in charge of the internet names not for a company organization but the whole internet is the president of global domains at the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers, or i can. and i don't know whether to ask you about dot ninja or dot sexy first. i need to ask you, on a fifth grade level, what is i can? are you the boss of the internet? >> no absolutely not. internet is very decentralized and i can itself actually is just a -- the -- working only on the dns, which is the domain name system and there are a lot of other organizations that contribute -- >> are you in charge of the names of the internet? >> yeah, so i can stands for
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internet corporation for assigned names and numbers. and we work on basically the names, the ip addresses, as well as the internet parameters. >> and who put you in charge? why is i can in charge of the names? >> i kansas was created about 13 years ago roughly when the address book of the internet started getting too big for a single person to manage it. and the department of commerce actually created i can and had the contract with i can to manage these systems. >> now in general, the more the merrier, with things like this. it makes sense that you would want to expand the possible domain names here, but i'm worried about companies that have trademarks, you know, a company like mcdonald's has had to spend a lot of money and time making sure they have mcdonalds.com, mcdonald's presence on facebook, twitter, these things. all of a sudden, on february 4th, there are going to be a lot of new places to stake their claim. how are you and i can dealing
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with that? >> so the economy, i have to say that i can is a model, so the community came around and developed a program and the ip owners were part of that community and they participated in the program. there are a lot of trademark protections in the program that allow the brand owners to have ways to protect their ip, so the trademark clearing house, where they can put their trademarks and from there, decide which new tlds they want to -- >> top level domains or the back-end, the dot com, dot ninjas. >> automatically so they don't have to track which one is coming out when and all of that they can just decide on a strategy and implement it. >> rather confusion, the more the merrier maybe, but we are pretty familiar with dot com, you know, dot okay, what they do and what they mean. all of a sudden, like hundreds of names coming out. as much as i would like to have martin giles.ninja next to me,
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i'm familiar with dot com, i'm familiar with dot okay. this is just confusing, isn't it? i know a lot of money at stake, i can makes, i can't remember, $185,000 or $200,000 for each registration, perhaps good money. suspect this just gonna make us all confused about what the internet is and does? >> let me put your mind at ease. i can is not the reason for doing this they are a non-profit organization. >> there are plenty of tech companies that are non-profit. >> the community came up with this $185,000 because of the cost of the program and there are very transparent, all of our costs are public, posted on the internet and you can go look at -- >> i'm going to interrupt here and say the $185,000 is when i can then allows a separate company to then distribute them. you don't have to pay $185,000 for martin giles.ninja. rather, could i buy the entire
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rights to distribute dot ninja, then piece them out at 5 bucks apiece. >> whatever company is taking over that and the real estate on the internet has the capability of managing it so that the restaurants, when they go buy their domain names, they are not left because the company doesn't have the financial means or not capable of running a piece of real estate on the internet. so, that's -- that's fee for the program. but it's very important to know that the internet is -- it's its infancy. the internet has been there for 20, 30 years, this is not a long time in the view of the world, and therefore, if you think about that, as you say, what's gonna happen in the future, there is a lot of people that are coming to the internet. one of the biggest advantages of the program is enabling the right of the dot to be in other scripts. there are a lot of users in the world that won't want to use the
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internet, today, they have to switch keyboards or complex for them to use latin to write the last -- the top level domain. with the new introduction of the idn, international domain name, now we have over 100 new domains written in chinese in arabic, in even languages that i haven't heard of. so -- >> right. in characters that we wouldn't be able to pronounce but other countries would say dot whatever and that would correspondent to their keyboard. >> yes. >> we have just a few minutes left, i really do want to ask this question, dot ninja? why dot ninja? >> we did -- i can does not get into the content or what name do you apply for. we set out a program and we had every -- all the applicants choose their names and apply for them. >> so the companies that will resell them i'd really like to resell dot ninja or dot sexy or dot photo or whatever? >> having a top-level domain name is no guarantee of success,
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so they have to go market these names and make them valid and make people associate their domain, their presence with these names, otherwise it won't work. >> we wish you the best of luck and if would you register marten giles.ninja right away before somebody sees this, i would very much appreciate it. up next, the future of the connected home is not wifi, when "press here" continues.
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welcome back to "press here." this is a light switch from a company called air cable. it is bluetooth-enabled, is turn it on and off with your smartphone. they make power outlets that do the same a number of bluetooth-enabled light bulbs on the market as well, w hotels announced it would start equipping the hotel rooms, a
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locked chain, with bluetooth. you can open the door with your phone. all of these products use a new flavor of bluetooth called bluetooth le or low energy. greg duffy is our expert on all things bluetooth, ceo of drop cam, yet another product that uses the bluetooth standard it will act as a hub. drop scam a web camera but a super-powered web camera at that, joined by martin giles of the economist and colleen taylor of tech crunch. i thought we fives the home networking standard. why shouldn't everything in my light switches and everything run on wifi? >> absolutely that is a great question. i think all consumers are asking because nobody knows what the connected home is in the mass market. wifi is ubiquitous. almost every hob has broadband has wifi now. definitely a place where products need to pay attention to. drop cam, for example, does high-quality streaming video and that's perfect use for wifi because it is high bandwidth, uses lots of bandwidth from the network, but there's this whole other class of desites ares that
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exist that need to be low power. and you know, your phone, for example, it will last for a few hour it is you're using it all day long and maybe a day at the most if you don't use it at all. that's cause it has wifi inside. bluetooth le, the new technology, completely unrelated to the bluetooth you know, low power, have devices that last for years on t >> one of these products i saw has aa batteries in the back and you screw it into the wall, my first question, well, come on, and said, no, no, no, looking the four years on aa batteries. >> that's right. >> so that low? >> it's just such a drastic change from wifi, names the other class of devices, many of the devices can be powered by a watch battery, like go into a coin cell battery and last for three or four years some you don't want to have to be charging all the connective devices around your home like do you your iphone. >> smoke alarm. >> we have things like things to do like sleeping or, you know, going to the t-ballgame for the kids, things like that charging all these things, we are never
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going to get anything done t is actually the hundreds of:of devices kecked around your home will talk bluetooth le and drop cam can serve as the hub for those, access the internet. bluetooth lself. an access protocol. >> you say the hub. everyone wants to be the hub, right, google just bought bout this company called nest with the smoke alarms and thermostat, be the hub for the home. who's in this game and who is gonna win it and is bluetooth le the thing that knit it is all together? >> we think that nest and google are going to be a key player in this area. drop cam was the first to bring bluetooth le. i think actually, there's another protocol called zigby that goes into a nest. we chose bluetooth le because it is going into all your smartphones already. all the receivers in smartphones, tablets, computers talk bluetooth le, not zigby or z wave. the consumer, what the technology is doesn't matter house, does it work for me and does it work with my phone? we kind of took this separate
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bet, we are going to talk to the same property come, all your existing products work. drop scam a powerful product, comp presses video, 1080 p, up to 1080 p on drop cam pro, what the hardware is capable of. doing this extra hub on the side is just an easy thing for us to do >> when you think about being surrounded in your home by all these smart objects, that sounds a little scary, especially in the wake of these nsa revelations that came out last year. what to do you sty people who are nervous about the idea of the connected home and what it means to their security? >> i'd say two things. first, the companies that are starting to take over the connected homes business, we can all remember, actually, our friends, geeky friends able to turn their lights on and off back in the '90s. >> using zigby. the standard. >> but something that only the uberelite kind of techie geek friends were able to do. yeah, they wanted to do it on the weekends.
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>> notice we instantly knew zigby. >> the rest of the view others what are these guys talking about? that's what -- there are two benefits for the companies that software companies are getting into the space, one is extreme ease of use and focus on consumer benefits versus technologies. we talk to customers, advertise products, never talk about the technologies but what you can do. number two, security, because software companies have about thinking about this since their infancy, right in the internet is all about security. you can't trust anybody or anything on the internet. the hardware companies on the space before, they built stuff in a way that is actually trusting the network, why there have been so many problems. drop cam, we actually -- we have company values that align us in a pretty interesting way with the customers, one, unlike many silicon valley companies we sell products, our users, customers very much unlike the facebooks and twitters and these guys, the users are the product, they are selling the users to the advertisers. >> i do think, martin, the
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answer to the idea of who's going to be the hub is important, because we had a fella on here a couple of weeks ago who was making drone operating systems. he wasn't building drones. he wasn't building drone parts. he was building the drone operating system. because the bill gates example of who's gonna run the software on the computer? who is the player or is there a player in the i don't want an app to turn on my light bulb, made by phillips and turn on my web cam made by you and to open my curtains made by curtain company, i want one thing. and if i can step in and be that one thing, then i'm the king of -- i'm bill gates of -- >> i own your home. >> i have a contrarian view point on that maybe, i think people right now do not need the single connected app, because there are aren't that many things that people want to do in the connected home. we have to focus on the two or three things people want to do this is home awareness, like home monitoring, energy
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management and lighting control. after you get past that, it really gets into niche markets, opening up another app for those folks is really into the big of a deal. the operating system here that you need to think about is ios and android. how do we make those work with all of your connected -- >> an app develop here is going to dominate this software, not an operating system. >> and what we want to do is make it so that the apps can work together and you can seamlessly switch between them, make that easier on those phones and tablets that you already have. another operating system is not gonna solve your problem. and the problem is that if one company tried to do it all, they would be mediocre at a lot of things instead of good at a few. >> greg duffy, tough stop you there, hopefully somebody is watching this and going to be the next bill gates, the app of the bluetooth-enabled zone. we will be back in just a minute.
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on a sunny sunday in washington, d.c., hockey is the focus as the washington capitals play host to the detroit red wings. capitals tied the game late in detroit on friday night but lost to the red wings in a shootout as detroit makes up an important two points. ovechkin leads the nhl with 38 goals on the year. that's 23 more than the next best washington capital, jimmy howard, 26 saves in regulation and overtime. and also stopped all seven in the shootout in the red wings
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