tv Press Here NBC December 13, 2015 9:00am-9:31am PST
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and mike kray this week on "press: here." >> good morning, i'm scott mcgrew. my first guess this morning is a fellow named bob hammond. now, bob is, no kidding, one of the best bridge players in the world, but that's not why he's here. bob has also made more money off half-court basketball contests than anyone in the world. now, i know you're wondering how does a 77 man hold that record, and i am going to explain that to you, but first let's take a look at one of those contests. >> one shot. one car. a bmwi-3. let's hear it. come on for jason. here it is. one shot. brand new beamer. does he get it? yes. oh, yes. yes. yes. he gets a bmw i-3, jason from san jose. >> these are just the sorts of
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things that make everybody but bob hammond stand up and cheer because bob and his company sca promotions which pays for the car or free pizza or in one case a million dollars worth of furniture. bob hammond is ceo of sca promotions joined by mike cray and lura mondaro of "usa today." so you are the guy who pays for the car when the kid sinks the basket? >> sometimes it's not a kid. >> how often do you lose, that everyone else -- when somebody wins, how often do you whose? >> several hundred times a year. >> really? okay. that means obviously that you're winning, that somebody is failing to sink the basket. it can be the put or the rubber duck contest. you do all these things, right? >> we do them all. >> it's phenomenal.
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what's a profit? how many guys have to miss a basket in order for you to make money in order for you to pay out that basket? >> it depends on the shot but it could be as many as 100 that have to miss. >> and those odds are in your favor i'm guessing. >> well, we hope so. going forward it's always difficult to tell. >> we are all looking at this fun stuff, everybody is cheering and they are all happy. if there was a camera on you at this point would it be the exact opposite? >> it's the chronicle of depression. >> or is it a loss leader? maybe you are happy that there will be more. >> the losses we really can't make up for them on volume. >> what's the worst paying or the worst sort of decision you've made saying, you know, there's no way that guy is going to hit that golf put, you know, whatever? >> well, we don't know specifically who is going to be shooting at us. >> yeah. >> the worst examples would be something like a triple crown bonus where we're in the business of rooting against some
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horse that happens to have won both the kentucky derby and preakness. >> why would you take that bet in the first place? >> that's a question for my psychiatrist. >> so there are situations in which -- have you ever looked back and said to yourself, i wish we haven't done that one? >> well, my general rule on this is forget about the past, you can't change it, you can learn from it. >> that's a fair answer. >> the one i was surprised about, when i was reading about you, was serena williams, she won the first two of the four and you bet against her. i thought that was a pretty risky bet. >> it was marginal. >> it was a slows one. >> we got lucky, serena got unlucky. that does have a tendency to happen. but usually our best contests
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are things that look easy, but, in fact, are difficult to accomplish. >> give me an example of that. >> well, the triple crown, for example. >> yeah. >> you have a three-year-old horse and winning three races in five weeks is quite challenging. the belmont is a longer course, they usually attract some good european horses who are used to running long distances and in practice it's tougher than it appears, except when something like american pharoah comes along and -- >> messes everything up. >> -- it becomes a walk in the park. >> what's the appetite for this? are they trying to get different kind of watchers to get engaged? >> well, the problem of the world in general, or one of the problems of the world in general, is it's very tough to get attention to any message. >> and this is why -- wasn't there a pizza hut if the mere
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satellite hits a target in the ocean, you were on the hook for pizza for all of america or some -- i can't remember exactly what it was. >> it actually was taco bell. >> taco bell. >> and it was the mere space -- >> we are still talk being it today, this was, what, 20 years ago. >> it was a long time ago and it was a platform in the pacific and we judged it fairly unlikely that the -- >> i would think it's fairly unlikely. >> it was. >> and the beauty for taco bell is how much would something like that cost if i'm taco bell? >> well, it costs a very low percentage. >> a couple hundred thousand? >> not even that. >> whatever it is, for me at taco bell i can announce this contest that says everybody in america or whatever it happened to be gets a taco with almost no downside because you're going to cover it if it happens and it's not going to happen anyway. >> well, usually it doesn't happen. >> you had to give away a million dollars worth of furniture once, right?
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>> we've done it on numerous occasions. >> but now this is stuff -- but you're using software to really compute the odds of these things, right? you're not just going willy-nilly on this stuff. >> no, he is, mike, he is going willy-nilly. tell him. >> we do a lot of guessing. >> you do, which is astounding because that means you are calculating this thing in your head largely, right? you've educating guests, right? >> well, we use -- we do more computation than you might -- we usage analogy, we try to estimate things but it's being able to make a decision. >> is it something you can demonstrate to me, okay, i want to give i way $100,000 if someone with a blind fold puts from 20 feet? >> well, it would probably be like clear than you might think, that would be a bad contest for us. >> so i would have to pay a lot
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to you for you to ensure that one? >> not a lot, but more than you might think you would have to. >> i think the obvious is why aren't you playing poker. you are the best bridge player in the world or one of them, right? >> well, i have been highly rated at one time or another. >> you are one of the best bridge players in the world and you have this incredible understanding of how odds work and you obviously have an appetite for risk. you would make a great poker player, wouldn't you? >> well, the deal is if you sit down at a table and you look around and don't see any pigeons, you're it. and i felt i might have been that position. >> are you somewhere between a math genius and bookie? >> well, let's put it this way, my career at ucla would not suggest that i'm any sort of a math genius. >> what is your take on sort of the gambling in sports thing, daily fantasy sports? do you think it's gambling, do you think it's skill? >> it's very definitely a game
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of skill. >> it should continue to flourish, you think this is -- the regulators are wrong? >> skill games usually anything like picking football games or fantasy sports, in reality there's a lot of skill that goes into it. f it weren't a skilled game you wouldn't be -- you don't do fantasy sports, but you wouldn't be in this business if it weren't skill. this is skill that's got you where you are today. >> well, my skill, that's a questionable matter. >> you are making a profit, you have a skill. >> we have a skill at estimating things or luck. you can't ever tell, but if it's purely computational it's probably skill. if we're taking guesses, for instance, many years ago we took a risk against ryan michg a nonhitter. it seemed every other night we were going into the seventh
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inning. >> that's exactly the case for gambling, right, when it's not a case of skill and it's luck or chance. >> well, the -- the chance is do you estimate correctlier. >> bob, i want to ask one last question. have you ever said, no, we are not going to let that guy compete? are there ringers in your business? >> there are ringers in every business. >> and you know who they are? >> well, normally we exclude professional players or people who are competed in the sport in recent times. >> to circle back with a couple seconds left, the one -- was it the nolan ryan, what was the one where you said, we should never have done that? >> well, that would have been lance armstrong, but we won't go into that one. >> there was quite the lawsuit and as i recall you won in the end. >> well, sort of. >> sort of. that's not bad. bob hamman runs one of the most interesting businesses i think i have ever heard of, sca promotions out of dallas, tes.
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under your tree. the chinese company vtec says it has no estimates on how much financial damage was done after hackers got into its system and were able to see not just children's personal information but maybe even their photographs. toys are just one way many hackers and scammers will try to get you. adam levin is a former director of new jersey's division of consumer affairs, he is founder of credit.com and wrote about the vulnerabilities of internet-enabled toys and other devices in his new book "swiped." he says even the most sophisticated silicon valley person can get scammed or speed on or phished. >> thanks for inviting me. >> we are not going to talk about what i think you talk about often which is change your password often. my audience gets that, but you say my audience, which are sometimes security engineers, can also be fooled.
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what are the smart people being fooled by? >> well, first of all, you have to start with the preface that we're living in a new paradigm and in the new paradigm, when you contemplate the possibility that over 1 billion think dr. evil, billion files have actually been exposed to people who should have had no access to them whatsoever. >> it's a problem. >> a lot of the data is being sold in the black markets, it is inevitable that each one of us is going to become the victim of some form of identity theft. >> i say no. i get that call from the fireman's fund or whatever, i know i will walk the check down to the fire department myself. i can't be fooled. but of course i can. what -- what are smart people being fooled by? >> they're being fooled by all sorts of things. you have ran some ware that appears on your computer because you clicked on the wrong link. we all have day jobs and high tech people have long day jobs,
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you get tired, distracted, you may be looking at your screen anything about something else, you click on the wrong link, for example, and then there's malware on your computer or you are taken to a site that looks perfect. >> yes. >> because the folks who do this stuff are really, really good at what they do, they get better, they're persistent, they're sophisticated, they're creative people. >> we saw the vtech clip with barbie, now all the stories are coming up it was an insecure site. >> barbie is a did different company but vtech. >> how do you know that going in that this might be an insecure site if you are a parent. >> obviously there is the htps and all the things we learn about the lock and you are run your mouse over the url and see if there's anything that looks strange about it, but you have so many things. for instance, you have malware tising, ads are served up and appear on your screen, you may not even do anything and all of
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a sudden there will be malware on your computer or they had an incident not too long ago of a very well known popular website where people would go to and there would be a page that would come up and after you saw the quote or ad you could -- it's always click to skip this ad and once you clicked on that there was actually malware on that. >> several reporters got fooled, remember, there was a bloomberg -- it was a fake boom blerg -- >> right. >> where somebody had done bloomberg dot some country code dot-com where if you didn't look carefully at the url you were fooled into thinking it was an actual news story and it wasn't. >> i'm curious, we're going to get to ces, it is expected to have a lot of connected everything, especially connected cars. do you see, you know, maybe some big showcase hacks of, say, a car or something else in the physical world that's being a catalyst for anything this year, maybe it's for more pressure
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from the government or security firms to sell their wears? >> no, i think that first of all now that we're living in the internet of things environment and now as brian -- kevin asked and said the sensor net which is coming which will ultimately bring us to the equivalent of "minority report," the movie, all of these devices are sending back all of this information to manufacturers and a lot of these devices can be hacked. something as crazy as a baby monitor, flinging wildly back and forth with somebody hurling ep a at that time at a child -- >> which by the way actually happened. >> it absolutely happened. the fact you get you will these devices and don't think about the fact they all have default passwords and these default passwords can be found on a lot of websites. go not manual and put in a long and strong password, try to make it not a dumb factor but you need to do that to factor authentication. we have to go more and more to think about the fact that the
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situates government a couple of months back went through what they call the 30 day cyber sprint. the fact it was a couple months ago as opposed to years ago, the fact that they could breach the office of personnel management, over 20 million social security numbers, 19 million files with the most intimate details of people's lives, 5 million sets of fingerprints. how do you get around that one as an example? >> they have hacked a car, too. is this like the equivalent -- a burglar could get into your house if they really wanted to. are you saying the same thing online, if they really want to get you they can really get you, you are a goner? >> i think the other thing you have to reflect upon is social networking. everybody seems to think when they get on social networking sites they are invincible and they have this desperate need, this unwrenchable thirst to tell everyone everything about them. for instance, if you are going to tell people where you are you're also telling people where you're not. and it doesn't have to be -- you
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could say it's really a smart person -- how does a smart people -- >> even smart engineers will say, look, i'm in nepal. look at me, i'm climbing the mountain. >> and the issue is maybe it's their kids, kids are using the computer, don't think about it and suddenly they realize somebody clicked on the wrong link, somebody that came to visit the house, a friend or neighbor, they click on the wrong link. cars we're certainly seen there were vulnerabilities with cars. there are the state sponsored hackers, the hackers that do it for the money, there are the hackers that do it because it's a cause, i give you ashley madison which a lot of people don't want to be given. >> i've never heard of this. >> there you go. >> you will have to explain it later. fourth one? >> and then the fourth one are the i do it because i can. the only issue is are you going to be in the cross hairs of any one of those four different kind of hackers and what is it worth to them? >> adam levin is the author of "swiped" what identity thieves do and how to stop them.
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welcome back to "press: here." i don't think any of my viewers think a unicorn is some mythical horse with one horn. we all know unicorns are real and they are companies worth a billion dollars or morepy9qp on paper. san francisco and to a lesser degree silicon valley have a lot of unicorns, some make money, don't don't at all, some have mon public, some might not survive long enough to go public, at that point they
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become uni corps, i didn't coin that word and neither did dave elkington. he is ceo of inside sales which it self is a unicorn. congratulations. >> i beg to differ. >> you are worth more than a build in inside sales. >> let's call it a stallion, maybe, four legs, no horn. >> no stick in your head. >> and who was it, it was -- it was sales force that put you over the top, right? >> sales force and microsoft together. which is unusual. >> they saw your presentation at dream force, loved it to death and invested in you. >> that's right. >> you are one of these unicorns. which is the unicorn, give me names, that's in trouble, you say uni corps. >> i think it's a bigger story than some companies in trouble. some are great. lasting went public it's over 30% at its opening day. what's the difference between
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elasine and the other guys? the story behind this is there is a change of value happening in the market. if you take the top 25 legacy big tech companies, hp, i about. m, cisco, et cetera, et cetera, we're seeing every quarter their value -- by the way, the sum of those over a trillion dollars of market capital yet every quarter we're seeing that m do coming down pretty dramatically. that value is not disappearing, it's finding a home in a company like elasine or a company like ours is displacing that kind of value and bringing value to the market. what we're seeing is some of these have the ability to be disciplined, they are generating profits, generating value for customers and other are being valued off of clicks on a websites or visitors, that's the trouble. >> what we hear is that -- and there has been several reports that say a unicorn with a multi-billion dollar valuation has its valuation reduced by some of the private market investors like a mutual nund
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like fidelity and so that is a worry sign, right, but it may be because these investors have been too generous in the first place. so have you witnessed that in your own investor rounds and would you say no to an offer for money if you thought the -- >> so i did, by the way, because that creates trouble for an entrepreneur and for a company like ours, that actually puts an expectation that you then have to try and -- you have to try and meet. so it definitely happened. i think there was a bubble, i don't think the bubble popped, i think it's deflating, i think it's very slow, there's so much energy put into these things and so much money put into these i think it's going to take a while to see that ex-consider. the i way you knew there was a publ public markets were traded tevin to ten times forward revenue, private markets, particularly light stage private markets were trading 20, 25 times that forward revenue number. to see a discrepancy of a late
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stage company at 200% higher or 100% higher than a public company doesn't make sense. >> back in the bubble days it was the profits. there is no profits. >> the first bubble days. we may be in the second bubble days. >> whatever bubble with err in now. now it's the revenue. i just researched this. the top ten unicorns have $150 billion in funding, total revenue $5 billion. i don't know what that percentage is, but what does that tell you about where we're at right now? >> it's got to be a bubble. >> it does sound crazy. there definitely is some hyper valuations happening here and maybe a little bit of aggressive price negotiations. >> it's good marketing. >> fabulous. >> it's great marketing. i'm sitting here, it's great marketing, but there is a risk. again, a couple of risks, one, if you set that expectation and then you see a down rounded ipo, let's say you value -- we know these companies, they value it, 3, 4, $5 billion and go become u. public at $2 billion or $1.5
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billion. then you are in a bit of hole and you have to demonstrate to public markets that you can actually run a public company. i mean, there's actually a few companies who i think are doing a particularly good job though the markets don't see them. >> name them. >> box, they are not the darling but i think they're interesting. a week or two ago they met expectations in their burn but they actually beat and corrected in revenue. the markets actually punished them and it's because the these annuity businesses, these sass recurring revenue businesses. even though you say it's $5 billion in revenue valued at -- 150. >> something like that. what they don't see is companies like ours at inside sales we have anywhere from one to five-year contracts with our customers so they're annuity businesses. is it a million dollars or is that $5 million? they have real contracted value. >> let me ask you for a moment about you are based out of provo, utah.
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is there a struggle gets engineers. i know provo has a great school, you can get good engineers, but the great engineers are in silicon valley i think most people believe. can you get good engineers to come to provo, utah or are you home growing them. >> utah there is a tech boom happening there and a bunch of unicorns. >> utah has always been ahead with tech as well. >> that's some of its magic. back in the '80s you had novell and word perfect. >> you started from a good spot. >> there's three or four generations of these companies. what you actually found was the venture community in utah wasn't very developed, lots of entrepreneurs, play books that came up into silicon valley utah and lots of wealth created and these start ups happened. we are in this third or fourth generation of startups, amazing entrepreneurs, great businesses, profitable in many cases, boot strapped for two, three, ten years and have an infusion of capital in the last five years and what you're seeing is a huge
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to "comunidad del valle." i'm damian trujillo, and today, mariachi alma de mexico, plus latinos who developed a new app called quesee on your "comunidad del valle." male announcer: nbc bay area presents "comunidad del valle" with damian trujillo. damian: we begin today with the important topic of latinos and healthcare. with me here on "comunidad del valle" with kaiser permanente are dr. juan guerra and dr. bellinda magallanes. welcome to the show. now, we're here because, i mean, when the affordable care act came into effect, i mean, this brought a huge influx of new latino patients. talk about maybe about that aspect, and maybe some challenges that that poses to the medical staff. juan guerra: sure, with the beginnings of the affordable care act, the newly insured have been composed anywhere up to 40% by latinos.
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