when we want to understand a technology, we go right to the person who invented it. john on the future of broadband. plus, jen tomatt howard and polina. this week on ""press:here." >> i'm scott mcgrew. i want to be upfront with you. i did not research this week as thoroughly as i could have. we are going to talk about the sudden rise in bus travel. new bus lines that connect, for instance, san francisco with los angeles using new state of the art buses with wi-fi and in some cases tickets cost just $1, and

i should have tried it out. i should have taken a bus eight hours from here to l.a. i did not get on the bus, gus, but i hear they're very nice. paulina wants me and you and everyone else to give the bus a try. she created an online travel booking service called wanderu. think of as expedia for the greyhound set. you book tickets for buses and trains. joined by tom from gigaome. you took the bus from boston to austin. >> i did, yes. >> stopping all along the way. >> yeah. so we turned it actually into a six-day road trip which is what a lot of people in our generation do. >> yeah. >> because we're less likely to own cars. so we didn't just do a bus all the way through. we did multiple different buses. stopped in nashville, in alabama, and two nights in new orleans, so it was actually a

lot of fun, stayed at hotels, took buses there. >> and tom and i want to clarify when you say our generation, you mean you and michal. tom and i, our generation, the bus is not something that you take. if you look historically and when i was a little kid we used to take the bus to grandmother's house and it was soldiers and nuns and not very nice people. there was a time there and i thought we were still in it in which the bus was just not something that regular people took because airlines are so cheap. >> well, so that idea is what many people think, but i grew up with buses in that generation. >> i say regular people as if that's -- but it's a certain -- >> the public transportation is making a comeback in general. i mean, it's not just buses. when it comes to buses you're not just talking about what you did this huge long road trip.

it's intercity buses. >> exactly. so what's interesting is a decade ago it's what you thought. buses were actually a dying industry, and each year there would be less and less ridership and the type of people who would travel by bus would be people who couldn't afford other forms of transportation or people that were older and had time on their hands to kind of travel the country. but about seven years ago new types of bus services came into the marketplace, and companies like mega bus launched with double decker buses and offered plugs and wi-fi and what do plugs and wi-fi attract in they attract the people that grew up on the internet, staying connected, connected with people all over the world that they've never met, and so there's a huge value proposition for this young generation to get on a bus and stay connected for their trip. at the same time that generation is less likely to own cars. they're more willing to take public transportation. there's a generational gap, right? so the generation before this, right, having a car was a sense of accomplishment, the type of car you drive, just having a

car. for, you know, the millennial demographic, it's the coolest new electronics that you have and it's -- the reason why lift and ubrex are is successful is because people don't want to drive. >> this gives you an audience. to be clear you run a travel site, not the bus company itself, but it gives you the audience to buy these bus tickets. what stops the bus company from just selling the tickets themselves? i'm sure they do already. but just from cutting you out of the deal already? >> before we came in, bus companies were selling the tickets themselves, but if you look at kind of bus travel versus air travel, right, so there's a handful of airlines that serve domestic markets in the u.s. there are hundreds of bus companies. the ability to quickly and easily plan your trip. we do routing. we're able to reach destinations you can't reach with just one company. >> why wouldn't you factor in like -- include also trains and everything else -- >> oh, we do. >> you can take a subway and a

bus and everything. >> we're a point to point travel. you can type in point of interest city. we find the closest bus station to you which is really important for people that, you know, might live outside of a major city and don't know what the closest station is or travelers that are trying to get to -- going cross country and don't know where to stop. so we find -- you can type in any address, city, point of interest. we find the closest bus station to you. we integrate transit to get you to and from the station and we also route providers together if you need to take more than one bus. the other thing is major markets, for instance, if you look at d.c. to new york, one of the most popular travel points, you have ten different reputable brands. i'm not talking about the shady carriers that get shut down. reputable brands that serve that route. as a millennial, i want instant gratification. i want to be able to book a trip at the click of a button. i don't want to have to go to ten different websites to see what time the bus is leaving. the other thing that's interesting about bus travel is tickets are booked last minute. 80% of all tickets are booked

within three days of travel and it gets -- if you look at a heat map, the last three hours before that bus departs is when most people book. so we're talking people -- i just got an e-mail someone needed help because they're trying to find a bus to get to their wedding tomorrow. >> a bus? >> you would think they would plan for -- ahead. >> are there private buss? >> these are private bus services. companies like mega bus, greyhound -- >> people still take greyhound? >> what's interesting is when this transformation started happening, greyhound transformed itself. >> it had been in bankruptcy. at one point. and has since been able to turn the corner, right? >> it's funny you mention that. so on our board of directors was the former ceo of greyhound who is absolutely amazing and knows everything about the bus industry. he helped get greyhound out of bankruptcy when it was there. he led the turnaround and he's since left there and greyhound is doing a lot of innovation.

they have gotten a fleet of new buses with plugs and wi-fi. >> what else can you do really? >> you can get them there quickly because of security. by the time you go from san francisco to l.a. through the airports, you can get there by bus almost just as fast. tom, i have to shut you down because we have to get somebody on a bus, they're going to their wedding. also we have some other guests we need to get to, but paulina -- i have been practicing this. >> yes. >> fantastic. of wanderu, an interesting subject. we never had anybody talk quite the same way. i appreciate you being here. up next, the future of dsl from the guy who invented it when "press:here" continues.

welcome back to "press:here." a company called century link

just announced a one gigabit per second home internet. that's ten times faster than the best selling internet service comcast can offer. comcast owns this tv station. it's 25 times faster than anything you can get on a phone line, specifically dsl. dsl was the first relatively inexpensive way of getting broadband internet. the 1i6rsimple copper wire that carries your home line brought in the data and it's beginning to show its age. john cioffi is not showing his age, despite the fact he was dsl's father. he was inducted into the internet hall of fame. he's the resip yept of the alexander bell medal he's a marconi fellow as well. he teaches at standford and is familiar to a lot of young engineers. as someone who helped create dsl, is there a future for phone line internet? we're talking about these such simple copper wires going into people's homes. is there a future in dsl?

>> well, there is a future. it's been going for about 20 years. there are 500 million paying customers for dsl globally and about 1.3 billion phone lines, and they have tremendous bandwidth and as fiber is used a little bit more incrementally, the phone lines get shorter, and you'd be surprised, you can get gig ga bits per second of information on the newer dsls that are starting to come out and be used. whether it's century link or other providers, that combination of copper, fiber, and wi-fi will allow us to have gigabytes without running a fiber to everyone's wristwatch. >> which is the better technology? you read about how there are so many people who are still unconnected. which is the best technology for doing that or is it all mobile? is it all mobile broadband? >> if you're looking at rural, typically it's wireless systems

that are best to connect the underprivileged if you will and you see a lot of that globally. >> even in urban and suburban areas the cost of digging. sidewalks and roads to lay new fiber or copper or whatever is prohibitive, right? the wireless solution seems like a really attractive option even in those areas. >> right. my company, assia, we're the experts really worldwide. we manage about 80 million interconnections around the world, and that is the theme, doing it cost-effectively. if you use the existing copper wherever it's present, use fiber prudently, and whatever wireless spectrum is available, you can come up with combinations, that's what our software and what our services do, that give a much better, more economical use than trying to run fiber to close to everyone and the closer you get the nmore expensive it gets to the last segment and you can't run it to everyone's body or wristwatch. >> you teach at stanford and i was reading some of the classes and not understanding much

beyond the title, but are you finding kids at stanford or schools or that you could hire at your company that are very interested in this particular part of technology? it seems to me that some of the easy money has come in these -- in apps and the ubers and they're interesting sexy companies, but it was the silicon part of silicon valley that really made us who we are. >> well, i haven't taught in six year. i'm emeritus so i have been with the company, but, yes, i am getting a lot of input from companies who want to hire the types of students i used to produce at stanford, so i may have to go back. >> you taught a whole generation at stanford. that's why i'm asking. >> a couple thousand students went through my classes over the years in the graduate program at stanford, but there is a need for these types of technology. >> there's a need. are they there? >> there's not as many available, and we could do better to generate them because there's a need that's not being met by the various industries who do want to hire these types

of people. but huge use of internet and getting higher quality, eliminating the sticky problems you see with video or the audio doesn't sound right or the file takes too long to download. that's why i started the company. we'd hire everyone we could get with that knowledge to help us. so driving interest in it is important. what we'd like to do also is get the consumer more involved. we have sold these products to phone companies to help them use their systems better. but the consumer ultimately has the power and they need to get what they're paying for. we have an app called cloud check. you can go to cloudcheck.net and get it for free and it starts to analyze your connection. is it netflix at fault, verizon, your wi-fi system? >> you bring up an interesting system. the netflix streaming problem we've been talking about for a long time. that's been a huge point of contention between netflix and verizon. are you slowing down my video? are you slowing down my video? it goes back and forth. how can you really say

definitively which company is at fault for a consumer? >> neither one of them can say it but with the technologies we have, the expertise we have, we can do that, and we can do it in a neutral and impartial way and it starts with the consumer and, of course, what are they connecting to. types of speed tests that you want to take have to be to the application servers. so a lot of the services that measure speed on the internet today are pretty much useless in terms of the reading you get. cloud check fixes that problem and once you're bought into this, you have this free app, and we start diagnosing, and that gives us opportunities to start to optimize. >> who is at fault? >> it depends on the customer. neither one actually knows. each situation is different, and so you can't make a blanket statement. you have to actually analyze it and it will vary with time for each connection. >> do you think you can actually get the consumer interested in getting involved in this way and checking on their own and -- >> i'd like them to get involved.

there's a thumbs down, thumbs up indication. just a simple thing like that, are you happy or are you not and we try to help them. and that's how they're going to get better connectivity. calling the help center and so forth often leads to a frustration if you study this area. >> comcast. >> or whomever. >> i'm sorry. >> any of the service providers, call centers unnecessarily often have a bad reputation so getting the consumer to take control, get what you're paying for. it's not that hard and our cloud check is one of the things that can kind of help you very easily take some first steps and then we can help you beyond that to try to get better service. >> john, with the net neutrality argument, could we engineer our way out of that. could you, the engineers make things so fast that the discussion of a fast lane, a slow lane, slowing things down, et cetera, would become irrelevant? i ask that because there was a time in which you went to buy a

computer and you said i'm going to spend the extra 100 bucks on a faster computer. nobody cares about that anymore. computers run so fast it almost doesn't matter in a home use anyway. i'm sure there are corporate uses where it matters. could you engineer something where the internet is moving so quickly we no longer care? >> you are seeing increasing use of software in the network software definition of networks is a hot topic. and to the extent that doesn't become dominated by any one group whether it's the service providers, the at&ts, comcasts, and verizons or the googles and facebooks -- >> we could trust all those companies, i'm sure. >> to some degree that's why we're in the middle of neutral with our cloud check app to try to look at it, but it is possible with that software definition to get good quality to everyone so that when they're watching a video or when they're doing something else or using the internet, that that quality is consistently there and they get what they pay for. >> john cioffi we appreciate you

developing dsl and we appreciate you being here this morning. >> thank you very much. coming up next on "press:here," a man with $1 billion to spend on security. definition to get good quality coming up next on

welcome back to "press:here." when target lost 40 million credit card numbers to hackers, we called it a bebackcle. bloomberg business said it was epic and sony, no kidding, optioned the movie rights. it was big, 40 million. we're not even sure what to make of the latest news that russian hackers have stole an billion user name and passwords. a billion records. as it happens, matthew howard, a partner at norwest venture partners is looking to spend a billion dollars on security startups. he serves on nine boards of directors in various silicon valley companies. i say a billion dollars. i believe it's actually $1.2 billion, isn't it?

>> correct. >> okay. so i have rounded down. $200 million. >> we hope to create a lot of jobs. >> and it's a lot of money. what are you most interested in? obviously security is a huge topic, but it's a broad topic. what will you want to spend your money on? >> first of all, it's not surprising what's happening right now. we're under a relentless attack, and i don't see anything stopping it. these cyber criminals in many cases have skills well beyond some of the customers out there and entities, so we're very interested in mobile security. we are very much a borderless community. we're in software as a service security, and as well as cloud security, and particularly we're trying to find the needle in the haystack right now. we funded a company trying to find the needle in the haystack. >> you sit on that board as well. >> yes. >> what do they do that you said we need to give this company some money? >> if you look at our companies,

we're trying to focus on how do we enable people in this kind of new world to do cloud computing, mobile, and in particular right now there are so many alarms going off right now in the enterprise that people have information overload. that's where exit beam comes into play. >> how much of your portfolio companies are working on defending companies against cyber criminals like you say and how many of them are working on things that -- for products for people who are worried about spying or government security kind of types of situations? >> i think right now it took a generation to convince everybody to wear seat belts, and i think right now it's going to take a generation to educate the consumer and the enterprise right now to have more awareness of best practices. your cell phone has a password on it. how many people use password protection. biometri biometrics. a lot more awareness right now.

one of the companies we have tries to help with creating more awareness in the enterprise. >> do you think that target is really going to bring about this kind of sea change? this is an example where you have ceo change after the debacle and i don't know if we've seen that before. so do you think it's going to go a long way -- >> cyber crime pays. i have seen as high as $1 trillion economic impact to cyber crime. i know it sounds horny but pink floud, grab the cash with both hands and make a stash. these guys are making a lot of money. >> titanic added more lifeboats to the cruise boat industry. is target sort -- where everybody says let's just not be titanic? >> i think people like target and other institutions don't get enough credit. you know, computer security spending last year was $66 billion. it's grown four times faster than overall i.t. spending. so these companies are really trying really hard, but these

cyber criminals, these are computer scientists. this is no longer your social misfit. we had the stereotype of what hackers used to be, very professional. they have computer science backgrounds. it's relentless right now. >> can you find the startup that gets us past the user name password thing. you have my user name, my password. i use that across the internet. we need to get past that, right? how are we going to do that? >> there are a lot of companies out there. one of our companies do single sign on. the tools are out there but it's like forcing somebody to wear their seat belt. it took a while and unfortunately i think there will have to be some more damage before it becomes automatic but people are taking this seriously. your cell phone has a password keeper on it, a screen protector. your laptop. how many people are using it? i think the younger generation, the consumer is going to become more self-aware. >> there's also i feel like a lot of confusion now because you guys can probably relate to this. i get pitches constantly from

new security companies and you're on the board of nine companies. i mean, there's a lot out there. >> the vested interest in the security community is creating security threats? >> yeah. it's hard to sift through and at some point which ones are going to bubble to the top? there are a few that have gone public recently. >> two companies have gone public. the key is the bad guys are moving very quickly and the rate of innovation is immense. everything is moving so quickly and unfortunately under this great recession we've been under, a lot of the new technology is coming from startups. >> and enterprise needs to pay attention, too. there was a bloomberg business week article that said fire eye was in target. target was being protected by fire eye at the time of the hack, but that target executives had ignored to some degree some 69 warnings. you have got to convince enterprise not only do you need this product but once it's in, you have to use it properly and pay attention.

>> could anything have protected target from what happened? >> you know, i think that the cyber criminals are using such overwhelming odds. i think target used really best effort to do it. i think -- if they're really open for business and they're very organized, very sophisticated and these are computer scientists. so i think it's a cat and mouse game but keep in mind, information security spending is huge. cooper pricewaterhouse, half of all organizations have a dedicated chief information security officer. it's a very serious business. i don't believe anybody was negligent. i think the cyber criminals are serious folks. >> touched on it earlier but nsa. you were with cisco very early. there have been discussions that the nsa is looking at cisco routers before they're shipped overseas and it happens to other companies as well. does that make you upset or is that just our response to what's

going on to countries that are doing things to us? >> i don't know what's fact and fiction out there. but i think the most important thing, it's creating more awareness. it goes back to the seat belt analogy and i think -- >> well, can your companies that you're funding protect me from the nsa? >> i think that right now the -- the answer is yes. there's enough tombs ools out t that can give you awareness. you have to turn these things on and there isn't any one magic bullet. tough use multiple protections. >> what do you make of the apple move into enterprise? they teamed up with ibm. it was only recently at nbc we were allowed to use apple products, we could use blackberry because of the security. apple moving into the enterprise space means that apple has to have some very, very secure products. >> and i think they do an excellent job. they take security very seriously, but i think it illustrates we're a mobile first generation. we've gone from mainframe to client server to web and now

we've got a new paradigm in computing, and many cases the technology inside a mobile phone surpasses a pc right now. it's very sophisticated. this shows the enterprise is moving very quickly in adopting mobile. >> all right. matt howard has a $1.2 billion to spend. >> we're open for business. >> have fun with it. >> norwest venture partners. any entrepreneurs watching can hit you up for that. matt howard, thank you for being with us. "press:here" will be back in just a minute.

traes our show for this week. my thanks to my guests. this first guest wanderu with an "ru" at the end if you'd like to try the bus and i just might. i'm scott mcgrew. thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.

. we begin today with the annual north fair oaks festival right around the corner here in redwood city with me on "comunidad del valle" the festival director, katherine matseeo. welcome to the show. >> thank you for having me. >> this is a big event and we have video from your website that you were able to share with us. this says it all. this is a family friendly event, but you're talking about giving access to some of the services