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tv   Boom Bust  RT  August 11, 2014 11:29pm-12:01am EDT

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live. live live. live live. stop rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want to live. your friends post a photo from of the tray should you can't. call it different. the boss repeats the same old joke of course you like. your ex-girlfriend stupid's tear jerking poetry. nor if.
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we post only what really matters to you to your face but you speak. there i marinate it this is boom bust and these are some of the stories that we're tracking for you today. we're talking tech on today's show and first up facebook is getting into the t.v. ad buying business we'll tell you all about it coming right up then how are the winners and the co-founder of the stock twits down with me to discuss all things technology in particular what's going on with pre i.p.o. tech companies lately and you definitely don't want to miss what he has to say about subject and with the boom bust the line off to vegas after the show today for the black had twenty fourteen conference we thought it appropriate to bring you the final part of our interview with mr bruce schneier now bruce tells us his thoughts on n.s.a. reform embedded computing systems and open s.s.l.
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time now to get to it. our lead story today on this tech centric episode of boom bust facebook now facebook is getting into the television ad buying business and it's going to be amazing i mean amazing. for advertisers that is according to facebook now facebook executives argue that by using this massive analytics they can help advertisers reach exactly the right audience and measure exactly the impact that their ads have they can do this by attracting the searches social connections and histories of their one point three billion users worldwide now while television remains the
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dominant vehicle for advertisers trying to reach a mass audience facebook claims that it can get your product in front of the eyes of would be buyers far better than traditional t.v. ads now mind you they've never done this before and most people don't watch t.v. on facebook so they think they can do this i don't know but ten years ago when facebook began selling ads marketers doubted the value of this type of product placement and facebook has been conned that in some of those doubts basically all of those doubts ever since and while facebook made one point five billion in profits last year on one point seven billion in revenue today the social media giant is seen the benefit of promoting its t.v. qualities especially given that marketers spend upwards of two hundred billion dollars a year on this particular medium now according to an article published in the new york times this past week quote a few years ago the company was telling brands to increase the number of people following their pages now which says fans are largely irrelevant until late last
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year it was promoting the power of ads and such in which people's likes and comments about the brand were turned into endorsements sent to their friends mind you know they got sued for this civil action lawsuit so they went away from that but anyway back to the quote facebook's which appears again now embarrassed about its ability to pinpoint potential customers on their cell phones so if you've had a hard time keeping up with how would watch is the best way to promote your product on facebook you are not alone facebook has changed its pitch so many times that marketing execs are now quite weary and as they should be i've said it before and i will say it again facebook does not care about you coffee out empty or.
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howard lindzon is the co-founder of the finance oriented social media company stock twits as well as a serious and i mean serious angel investor and early stage tech start ups now i want to get his read on what's going on in the technology space right now particularly with pre i.p.o. companies i first asked him about some of the concerns surrounding valuations among startups and new tech companies here's what he had to say. on the valuations are your thing and discerning for that the revenue floating is not just because of the social world dollar but you know new york times had a piece about facebook and they killed it for the fish oil company. at one example or you know whether there's money starting to flow in the pockets and if you think about all the t.v. money that could end up on social you have the revenue beat which is just generally good compared to ninety ninety nine when you know the revenues and everybody was
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you know well. you know there were no mobile phone and there were no social. so so i think this pocket of silliness continues you know some sharp by their own along the way but you know if you look at priceline for example it's an internet company and every talked about price on both really they've made a great acquisition in booking dot com it's basically a travel through an online travel agency which you know the largest global travel agency show a lot of these companies just have solid solid business suit behind them and valuation wise though they're stretched and hard to swallow with interest rates remaining low and with revenue growth. there. is so much money on the low end so there are so many start ups you continue to have accusations of such are so it's just one of those. environments and it's really hard to predict you know how does the. hour and we've talked
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a lot about uber on the show because it's emblematic of both the promise and the risk in the tech space now it's currently in over one hundred cities and it just made a move into the target rich business travel market that's all good and what not but it's its latest funding round valued the company at eighteen billion dollars why are pretty i.p.o.'s i.p.o. companies like google are getting such a rich valuation that's my question. yeah i wish i wish i could tell you an exact answer as a car just crashes a door. the key here for over is it's global you know when a.o.l. came out in ninety six ninety four with yahoo you know yahoo became big in japan but i mean as a global global franchise this just didn't happen in the ninety's then you had the bear market in the crash and you had another boom you had the real estate crash in
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this mobile social and local boom barons are global right away whether it's through acquisitions or just through execution right invented. tap to you know excess inventory and i think the market's giving them the larger valuation because they are such a big leader like you said they're in one hundred cities they're probably in thirty countries and the margins are so good in the opportunity because of their execution to date and the amount of money they have from google is such a bad although they'll be competitors in a lot an inch players in this business you know is on its way to being a one hundred year company a lot of companies a lot of entrepreneurs say they're building hundred companies. there are certain companies that are going to be one hundred years from the facebook twitter. air b.n. b. now raising half a billion a nuber raising the kind of money they can use or for companies that have business models and brands that are going to be one hundred years and if you look to change
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a one hundred years ago and said you know jane jane is going to be one hundred year brand you still made money if you got the fact that it was going to be one hundred year brand and i think you know mutual funds and hedge funds are thinking like that and so they're holding their nose are not thinking about today's price because these are hundred year companies. howard a big part of the job of your find its name is social leverage is helping get companies to series a round so what do companies need to do to get that far and to get beyond series a financing to additional rounds and ultimately i.p.o. or acquisition. great question it's number one thing we think about is we're not large enough to make sure our companies are going to get acquired right away we're not big enough capital and users to make magic happen so our goal is to find companies and management in opportunities that will appeal we think with you know
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half a million to a million dollars to investors further along in the life cycle so that's that's our job as angel and micro v.c. whatever we're going to call it our job is to spot jockeys and industries and companies that we think can get to the next round at least that doesn't make a fun what makes it fun there are ours and that's why you know the best guys out there have the best are ours and they raised the most money but how you build a brand in the angel investing business is to make sure your companies get to the next level otherwise you have no shot show it's a number one thing we think about and that comes from picking you know being able to understand markets and understand trend right now i believe the tech industry where our fund is focused a lot is in this matter. trends so you know i rather fish where the fish are and try and find companies that are going to find interesting in six months to two years and that's kind of how you play the game a lot of it is just understanding how markets work. howard we spoke to dave the
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neuron dr recently and he's the founder and c.e.o. of some zero and he was also one of the founders of connect you which sued facebook with the winklevoss twins but you know it's a finance and focused tech startup and he sees finance is the next big thing for tech startups so do you think the financial technology investment space is on the verge of something big and is your fund investing heavily in that space at all. you have been saying this since i started stock to watch star wall street in two thousand and six when the you tube generation and we were purchased by c.b.s. i left c.b.s. before my contract and to start stock twits in october two thousand and eight which was probably the dumbest time people would think to start a financial. community and we really been growing faster in the last year flash forward five years we have a great c.e.o. that we brought over from bloomberg and c. and b. c. person so you have this amazing to the core functions here to to give this amazing
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shift from wall street finally what they call themselves refugees they have to prove how little attack and common sense wall street has that they're calling themselves refugees and they're the wealthiest refugees of all time but you have this convergence. boom you have this convergence of the walls coming down because of twitter and facebook so everybody is sharing stuff you have snap chat which is basically how wall street worked forever which is sending messages privately you have people leaving bloomberg people leaving c. and b. c. people leaving the newspapers to help start financial journalism you have the stock twits community you have all this money flowing out of wall street into other areas at the same time as. banks have shrunk and there's less competition amongst banks you have these the thirty thousand now families globally that have one hundred million dollars or more they can't possibly be serviced at that growth by the existing banks that remains you're going have all these services focused on these
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families i know we complain about the one percent but this one percent going to need services and they need services more than most people and they're willing to pay more money which means higher margins which attracts more and more entrepreneurs and better entrepreneurs. that was hedge fund manager and tech blogger howard wins. time now for a quick break but stick around because when i return we're bringing you the third and final part of our interview with noted cryptologist bruce schneier and in today's big deal our chief political correspondent sam sachs is sitting down with me to talk about everything from burgers to concur to ash and if we promise it's tech and finance related and remember you can see all segments featured in today's show on you tube it you tube dot com slash boom bust our teeth and on it really was a clue dot com slash boom dosh but now before we go here a look at some earth closing numbers up the bell.
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it was a. very hard to take a. look. at that back with that hurt right there no. please.
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please. please. the. welcome back now boom bust is hitting the road this week and me and my trusty segment producer bianca sheeny are heading to may get yes vegas after the show today to cover the black hat hacker conference now one of the main topics of
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conversation at this premier cryptology event is going to be the fundamentally broken security of the u.s.b. drive we learned last week that the security problems with u.s.b. devices run deeper than we ever thought in fact the risks are built into the core of how these little sticks operate and if you've ever casually accepted a u.s.b. that was in any other device then your very own your system's probably been compromised pretty scary stuff and that's because malware which can be installed on any u.s.b. resides not the flash memory storage of the device but in the actual equipment that controls its basic functions and an attacker can remain hidden from your machine long after the memory stick is removed and the contents deleted it's very very scary stuff and will be looking into it along with many other encryption security and hacking issues all later this week.
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now speaking of cyber security i want to share with you a bit more from my wide ranging discussion that i recently had with cryptologist bruce schneier now it seems appropriate as the black hat twenty fourteen conference the most well known technology security conference in the world like i mentioned is celebrating its seventeenth year in las vegas right now so bruce and i talked about embedded computing systems open s.s.l. and his theory on n.s.a. reform take a look. well they're already in refrigerators the new things that are putting them on the internet this is the internet of things as computers get cheaper it becomes cost effective put them everywhere in our major appliances or our small appliances and tags on our clothing in our sensors you know we have nests thermostats right computers in the internet in our in our building control systems and over the next five ten years i think you're going to see computers drop in price to the point
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where they will be everywhere now that's going to be extraordinary the things we can do will be amazing a lot of people have written about that but yes there are now risks there are the pedestrian risks that your refrigerator can become part of a bot that or a virus can take over your clothing and there are going to be surveillance risks where you are thermostats on the internet it's probably hackable and somebody can get that data of course why they want that data we don't know and maybe that's been i could be a lot of very personal data that's going to be in this internet of things or the tags on my clothing right will will know where i am will know what i'm doing just like my phone does so there's a lot of danger of of surveillance of data collection of control but there's extraordinary amount of possibility. yes and power and good things that come out of this but like everything else we're doing business benefits and there's costs that's really really incredible that your clothing can track you but can you
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explain in women terms what the open as as a flaw was and why it was so devastating and what the implications are for security and open source software. you know heartbleed was a really interesting vulnerability it was a very scary vulnerability because the nationally we didn't know how it worked and what it can do it turned out to be more benign they would initially thought but the the main problem was open s.s.l. was used in so many different products and services this vulnerability is potentially devastating and it was complicated to fix normal vulnerabilities you fix by installing a patch this film ability had a three or four step process to regain security you had a patch your systems regenerate keys you had to do multiple things and that made it very dangerous it wasn't an open source piece of software be a lot of people believe that open source was magically more secure it turns out
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that's not true or it's software that secure is software that's been analyzed open source software has the potential of being analyzed by anybody because the source code is available but what happened with open s.s.l. is really a tragedy of the commons everyone thought someone else was reviewing the software so nobody actually bothered. it is very doubtful we have a lot of data that this vulnerability was discovered by any intelligence agency around the world whether it's us or china or russia or u.k. or any of that sort of the big guys and exploited it probably was exploited during the weeks after it was discovered before everyone patched their systems you know i think all intel's range these do that and you know right now we've recovered security but it really was a wake up call to people who thought that open source meant magically secure it doesn't. we have the potential to make open source more secure but we have to analyze the software and we're trying to do that media the heartbleed vulnerability
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because the open source community do stablished these projects to review open source software a lot of very big companies are using this they should help with the analysis and they are doing that so hopefully we're going to do better next time but hartley really was an exception it was a big deal and a little lot of all abilities that happened that aren't as a big deal this one was a big one. now nobel prize economist joseph stiglitz noted recently about it is trust more than money that makes the world go round so what can we do to restore trust in the system now that the n.s.a. spying scandal has cost us so much trust. we really know how to deal with the fact that we have to give powers lots of ways to invade our privacy invade our systems and we get that through transparency oversight and accountability right so we need to know what's being done what the n.s.a. is doing we need more transparency both the n.s.a.
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and other governments probably not going to get that with other governments or the governments and russia and china are not going to be transparent to the same degree we need oversight you know in the u.s. i want more oversight by congress by regulatory bodies over both government and corporate surveillance and i want to count ability you know when young someone's had a cat held accountable those three things in general or how we're going to restore trust and that the mistrust comes from the fact that we don't know what's going on . that was it noted cryptologist bruce schneier time now for today's big deal. big deal time and i'm joined by the wonderful and wanted only. on the show good to
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have you here sam is artie is a political commentator and he's paid for edward harris and he's on lucky guy and we're discussing tech tech and more tech in fact we're covering everything from tesla if you can believe it madame kim cardassian and it is tech related now first up fast food sales now while all the other fast food joints slumped in q one in q two of this year mcdonald's is still projected to be the top dog of this bunch and with americans writing mcdonald's as the more fast food restaurant there seems to be plenty of room for a replacement so sam what's going on here well it looks like these sort of fast food hamburger joints are falling by the wayside i think we have some earnings from two thousand and thirteen you can see the top five fast food joints and you can windies in burger king those sort of low cost burger joints they're in fourth and fifth now if you look at the projection of sales for twenty twenty they drop out of it which has people wondering if americans are kind of fed up with the fast food burger i don't think that's happening i think
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a lot of americans can't even afford fast food burgers anymore they can't afford to get a job if they can even have the opportunity to get a job at mcdonald's any more in what you see is you see kind of more expensive fast food restaurants moving in that are promising more gore may foods. so now you have some wealthier consumers who would have thought about getting food before now jumping out of the market today but as for mcdonald's how they're number one and are still projected to remain number one. despite all of these these try. these burger joints are having i think that's explained by mcdonald donald's isn't a fast food started more it's more of a it's an institution in america global institution it's everywhere it's like the d.m.v. i mean. you go there for a driver's license and this is. people just assume this will just go to and i'm going to say i don't agree with that view i think donald is delicious and yes it's terrible for you it's very tasty but what's interesting about you being that. if
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they want you they can but anyway interesting thing about that as well we had a burger king in the bottom and they were recently taken over by paulo based you know hedge fund and they know a lot about the fast food and i know radio is it's on its heels now has one private equity firm but burger king you know they're have this new really young management style apparently it's not working out but there was a there was big problems with burger king that you know pretty well. there you go the ads last and now they're not but anyway we turn now to electric cars some good news for tesla love tesla not being played by them either the company had a fear of revenue jump in the second quarter so is tesla the real deal and can they shake up the american auto industry in god i hope so i don't awesome i love you i. spend many sleepless nights scared to death about climate change i think we've already passed it or very close to passing a tipping point in which you will be able to stave off some of the worst effects of
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climate change twenty percent of our greenhouse emissions come from transportation so if we can get more electric cars out there we can maybe save the earth. also tesla's experimented with this new take on patents they've come out and said that they're not going to enforce their patents against any one of people are going to use tesla times for good faith they're going to let them use that doesn't mean there's not selfish motives there don't want to crowdsource building up the infrastructure needed to create this massive electric car market. but you know kind of working to reverse climate change as well as. away from this this. this is what drives industry right now we have to move on real quickly here but now there's one topic that i've never thought that we'd be discussing here on buskin car dash and so how is her smartphone now making hundreds of millions of dollars how sound how this is just bonkers to me i know what it is maybe this is more about climate issues in society so for. future like an exclusive look at her is that why
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it's making so much money. you know i'm sure it in short know when you you know it's really amazing i have to say in terms of business for not having a massively large scale so but who am i to say that maybe there is a do but to make this much money it's bringing in two hundred million a year a year can you risk your current year's new album before everybody else is that how it's making so much money. so you do not hear the north. possibly be because people are controlling. buying expensive grosses in the digital world that they can buy in the real world instead right now. that it's heartbreaking sam great having you as always and what a happy day to all of you out there that's all for now but we love hearing from you please check out our facebook page facebook dot com slash boom bust our t. and please tweet us at sam sachs from all of us here and thank you for watching we'll see you next time.
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technology innovation and all the developments from around russia. the future. but i suspect. the didn't do its job did you know the price is the only industry specifically mentioned in the constitution and. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy trek albus. role. in fact the single biggest threat facing our nation today is the corporate takeover of our government and across several we've been hijacked trying handful of transnational corporations that will profit by destroying what our founding fathers one school my job market and on this show we reveal the big picture of what's
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actually going on in the world if we go beyond identifying the problem to try to fix rational debate and a real discussion that critical issues facing america have october ready to join the movement then welcome they could. put it under bush all marginalized and the bank of new knowledge face i think you know about. the pleasure to have you with us here on t.v. today i'm researcher.
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are you like me to want your comedy news with some t what's your comedy news to be a bare fisted no holds barred fight to the dad. the truth vampire pointing into the necks of the corporate elite and billionaire freaks while they're going. out well that's what you get with my new show projected tonight. i don't. like. what.
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breaking news. in the u.s. state of missouri. violence over the police killing of an unarmed teenager. a convoy of humanitarian aid from russia. pulling the plug on a syrian refugee.

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