it's looking to partner up with a credit card issuer or a branded credit card investigative journalist. logon to give us the details plus netflix may face a over their dueling documentaries about the failed fire festival conservative commentator. has all the trash and joins us on the scandal and later the search for new uses for his ongoing is there an opening in the travel industry. friend or sat down with the co-founder. in hong kong to talk about the possibilities all of that directly ahead but first we had some headline let's go. soon video communications and their first day of trading at sixty two dollars seventy two percent value the company at just under sixteen billion dollars the c.e.o. and founder of zoom who was denied a u.s. visa eight times succeeded on the nine and is now silicon valley's newest

billionaire he still retains twenty percent of the company with a stake worth two point nine billion projected to grow eight percent year over year through two thousand and twenty six as ren is focused on doubling down on growth he says he is excited about the prospect of developing smart features that would provide meeting participants with automated summaries wall street investors were excited about this i.p.o. as this is a rare unicorn that was actually profitable however like cisco and microsoft and google zune may revert back to being cash flow negative it will be a difficult adjustment for a zoom in the public market now as investors have much shorter attention span and their time lines of the than those of the private markets. pinterest also i.p.o. yesterday not to be out shadowed by zoom ending the day at twenty four forty twenty eight percent the market despite a healthy appetite for these tech startups despite live stumble earlier this year we will now see how zoom and pinterest hold up. after this three day weekend as

they set the stage for a slate of upcoming i.p.o.'s later this year air b.n. b. is a highly anticipated i.p.o. but after their latest acquisition of hotel tonight it may take some time to digest and sort through the transition without the public glare other names on the deck include robin hood post mates and flak. then mel a mobile payment network owned by pay pal is now branching out to offer its users credit cards this is their latest move in an attempt to turn profit and lose consumer engagement then now has been selected synchrony financial as a credit card issuer and is hoping to launch the card this year despite the most impressive active user base and growth it is still struggling to monetize the company saw a nineteen billion dollars in payment volume in the last quarter and for the full year twenty twenty eighteen process sixty two billion dollars in payments growing seventy nine percent year over year that model is on track to reach one hundred million dollars in pavement volume by the end of twenty nineteen the app has an

annual revenue of more than two hundred million dollars but still ended the year with operating losses of three hundred ninety four million management is focused on breaking even within the next few quarters to do that then not has increased fees for transactions that used to be free on top of the anticipated credit card joining us to dig into this is investigative journalist ben swan welcome. kristie how are you ok so credit has had been around for ever so this isn't really a new concept at all and i'm not doing anything end of a debt and i don't see any value added with this credit card what do you make of this yeah yeah i think you're absolutely right even though which is supposed to be the next generation in terms of the payment app and financial app is actually use in an old form of you know financial going backwards as it seems to try to do this credit card and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense look at they have a user base of about twenty seven million people that's what's expected in twenty

nineteen the problem is trying to convert those people into now credit card users of your of the credit card simply because they also use the app doesn't seem like a business strategy that makes any kind of sense why would i as a user be excited about using the credit card just because i use their payment app and one technology has absolutely nothing to do with the other meanwhile you have banks like wells fargo that are competing directly within though by launching their own services like cell if you're familiar with that which essentially does the very same thing it's a lot easier for a big company like that to compete with bimbo than for even though to turn around and try to compete with these master card american express so i just don't think the move makes a lot of sense yeah what the vet my credit card the only benefit so far is that you're saving a three percent fee you normally would be paying if you're using mastercard rbs at the event now but this is really a very small part compared to what the other cards offer as that's i don't think that's going to be enough incentive to get consumers to switch. yeah i think that's absolutely correct me if you look if you look at what other credit cards offer i

mean there are so many different and it's a battle right it's a constant battle between who's giving you more stuff more cash back bonuses more airline miles more restaurant perks right so there is this this is very very intense fight over what it looks like to draw credit card customers and if anybody out there and christiane know if you've had this experience lately but if you get a credit card you get swamped every day after that with like does a credit card offers from everybody and their brother say here use our credit card and we're offering this we're offering this it's a lot better than not having the three percent cash back you know fee that's attached to it it's it almost seems like an arrogant move for even though because it's ivo we're cool with millennial is they're going to want our card because we're cool well guess what apple's also launching a credit card right now and if you're going to have a credit card based on brand icon alone it will make a lot more sense for millennialist to attach themselves to apple where they're already using their technology they may actually get perks associated with that and

of course the perks of sociate and possibly with apple original content as they move in to concentration so that's a bigger competitor i think and more of a draw for people to move away from mastercard and visa that then most would be found by my attempt at something like this last year when they launched that debit card be a chef financial how did that one mark out. well i think a lot of people are questioning whether or not it's even worked out at all because obviously it attaches the debit card feature essentially to those so that you can access it but look the other thing that's happened within though is you mentioned a minute ago they are already charging now for things they weren't charging for before i think that's a problem for their brand the other thing they've done is they've updated their terms of service just in the last week to two weeks that essentially says that they can go after people who have a negative balance on their vin the account and sin that over to essentially debt

collectors which didn't used to be in their terms of service and so you know pay powers the parent company that owns the know and i think some of these steps actually are going to be a bigger problem for venlo than just say well you're not as exciting because you need new features i think you're actually disenfranchising people who use your services right now who say i don't want you referencing me out in sydney my information out to debt collectors i'd rather just delete your out altogether i think that's what we're going to end up saying yeah things like them are actually going back on their original intention when they have before and they try to reduce the amount of swipe fees and now they're actually going to be the ones. very unfortunate to their current user base and that's to give journalists and swan thank you so much for your time thanks christine. there is an interesting media sale in the us to report today as the national enquirer has sold four hundred million dollars to the heir of a husband group the c.e.o. of american media incorporated david packer announced this planned sale of the

inquirer as well as other and my holdings including two other tabloids the globe and the washington examiner the am i properties will be sold to the hudson new c.e.o. james cohen who is also the son of hudson founder hudson news operates a chain of magazine stands and as a subsidiary of the hudson group the housing group in turn is owned by different a.g. of switzerland and i was being sold under duress after the revelations of the role of am i and mr packer in helping the us president donald trump suppress stories regarding a legit extramarital affairs. you probably recall the two thousand and seventeen failed luxury music event known as fire festival it was billed as the top of the line music extravaganza held in the bahamas but concert goers who paid a premium for luxury accommodations along with the music actually received much less in adequate accommodations and bad weather forced cancellations of most of the

festivals leading to losses and a six year jail sentence to for fire c.e.o. and event organizer billy mcfarlane in two thousand and eighteen dueling documentaries about the volcano were released in january one from netflix and the other by hulu now both of them find themselves caught up in the latest legal battle involving the scandal hit a fellow sin is conservative commentator steve malzberg hi steve. great to be here thank you great to havea thank sacré how are these tears streaming giants like then who are involved in this whole mess well it seems that there's more than two million dollars in payments at issue here and there's a federal trustee who is handling the whole bankruptcy procedure of fire festival one of the outstanding issues is how much money did netflix and hulu pay to believe macfarlane for his cooperation in these two documentaries that you mention now apparently there was

a lot of behind the scenes footage from the festival and the attorney for the trustee overseeing the chapter seven bankruptcy he wants all the records related to those payments he says there's no existing records that they were aware of so you can't tell where the video came from or if it belonged to the debtors the state so they've issued subpoenas to netflix for their records on fire the greatest part of that never happened and who is documentary called fire fraud now to add to the intrigue the director of the netflix film accused of paying make farland for an interview which was in their documentary billboard says that the rep for the firm says all monies paid to macfarlane for the interview in the footage went to a fund for those who lost money on the festival itself. let's talk more about this trustee gregory messer who's overseeing this entire fire bankruptcy he's looking to recoup money back by the creditors so in addition to these two screaming giants he's also looking at sort of subpoenas to the influencers who helped to promote

this event who's on his radar. well you've got since january there have been multiple subpoenas seeking about thirteen and a half million dollars in wire transfers and a billboard says that's half of the twenty six million they're trying to recover for the creditors of the festival the netflix in the hulu subpoenas are pending the other requests include tracking down money transfers which some of them reportedly want to stuff all of that a half million dollars there a similar amount to vivid seats and get this two hundred seventy five thousand dollars transferred to mcfarland's mother that was late in two thousand and sixteen so all in all we're talking about two point one million dollars in payments to nine individuals and companies so this is you could hear from over my description here is a mess absolutely i think there are also like twenty four other instagram and. management industries also on that list as well. for getting on its. netflix has also

come under a lot of scrutiny for the documentary agreement itself cracked. yet we talked about who are being taken to task for their alleged paying of a for an interview with mcfarlane billboard says netflix is under fire for the way that they covered the role of an advertising company named jerry media who happens to be an executive producer of the documentary which they also promoted on social media after it the documentary was released e-mails surface where the c.e.o. of the company is saying he had a say in the final cut of the film netflix is only the director had the final cut that why is this relevant it raises the issue of did jerry media pressure netflix to minimize their relationship with mcfarlane and the jerry media c.e.o. later admitted that mcfarlane was offered his own financial deal to participate in the netflix deal even though it didn't wind up happening so lot of intrigue it's going to take a lot of subpoenas and finding out in gathering of information to solve this one

isn't going to be an interesting story to follow conservative commentator steve malzberg thank you so much for your time my pleasure. time now for a quick break but hang here because when we return the search for new years is up the currency is ongoing is there an opening in the travel industry artie's branch of morris sat down with dot com co-founder of one of taro in hong kong to talk about the possibility markets are closed today for good friday but we'll be right back. montes how they don't have to have an international memorial towards twenty nine see the now open for entries the media professionals are eligible whether you're a freelance journalist work through terms of media or part of a global news conference to participate in sunday's show published works and video will reach much go toward don't altie don't call them to know.

when they say assets on their books or if they're referring to bonds with a price of one hundred cents on the dollar but don't have a sale value in the market greater than maybe one penny on the dollar so again that's the portrait dorian gray economy all these quote assets on the central bank balance sheets if you add them all up i think the central banks and have something like fifty to fifty five trillion dollars of what they call assets that might be worth mcdonald's hamburger when he ends up dead no collateral value that's what they're worthless that's a fact like. this

drug where her cocaine is where four bucks with the under fifty it's the everybody use cocaine. cocaine you can smoke it to so. we're. very. this is about a fifteen dollar bill. this one. you can see these drugs in any city any. more. want to get it. and make money. it's for the.

welcome back venezuela has found at least one method to blunt the effects of u.s. economic sanctions according to a report from reuters the wire service review documents they say rips records sales from oil of venezuela's state oil company p.t. b.s.a. to his russian counterpart rose at discounted prices the reported sales to rose now would be partially effective as a means of selling oil and obtaining desperately needed a foreign exchange while venezuela is ravaged by u.s. sanctions those sanctions have worsened the oil rich nations decades poured on mastic production and recurrent inflation problems that are typical and petro states reuters reports that the sales from p.t.s. a to rose now are the product of discussions between caracas and moscow that began in january and that an indian company reliance industries is party to the transactions.

cryptocurrency companies are taking big steps to bridge the digital world with the physical world while the. joria cut the users now are still traders a big portion of the population want to spearhead adoption to currency to be used for goods and services you have the hoarders and you have the spenders while it is still difficult to spend big going and other all coins on everyday purchases there are a few companies who accept crypto as forms of payment overstock dot com a giant internet retailer selling everything from furniture to electronics was the first to embrace crypto currency and accept a wide range of quine such as bitcoin at their e m like calling dash and others so like subway sandwich shop locations also they came first except that klein and microsoft a new leg the giant online electronics retailers soon followed. traval formally known as concierge launched and twenty seventeen and uses block train technology to

offer the travel industry cost efficiencies the platform partners with hotel providers and aggregators giving users access to more than five hundred sixty five thousand properties across two hundred and ten countries they accept a number of does as forms of payment including because rep paul like wine and most recently they parted up with tron to accept t.r.x. branch of boris sat down with trawlers co-founder taro during hong kong watching week. we feel that the sense allies version of the book in the comics be the allowing people to book hotels online paying with the currency most of the mail you could say currencies as well as a token and where there's a credit card you palos so on so you have you have your own token that you get you use on your website as well so basically he's a native token ultraviolet dot com works as incentivization reward system for

users to use the platform whether you play with because when you going to book a hotel every time you book we use the native token as a loyalty make any sense to reward you for using that platform. if you refer a friend always if you get rewards and we use those rewards in the native token at all times we currently have over eighty thousand this nations around the world. five hundred sixty thousand hotels covering two hundred ten countries so we currently believe the books in travel platform and so why does a block change travel. platform like work better than say booking dot com so we go to major advantages one is obviously the pricing model the way we work is by integrating different trouble pollen is so we work with the global distribution systems and we use in house. always find the best available prize for under specific destination at a specific time. these counts concurred see all the portals like

a book and that's all most media around fifteen percent at the moment with some people that book hotels will come up saying wait i'll save up to fade the stand in the hotel booking because we've basically given the middleman so that you know commissions that the likes of fix p.d.l. book in the car charging hotel owners we're not charging that so basically you pain prize that goes directly to the property owner so are your profits coming from the commissions on say the actual crypto the use of the crypto to a business model is based on two verticals one is obviously the uses of outspoken but we also add the ten percent minimum markup on our bookings that is still allows us to offer prices a lot cheaper than other o.t.'s online travel agencies because they are marking up their prices up to twenty five percent so instead of out in those big markets we still have the very small mark up at ten percent it's allows us to make some money but it's still offer a very competitive pricing and how does the black cherry employ into this so you

are how does. the block chain of work to. to make the travel booking situation better yes it's a basically is two things one is we use the smart contacts for the actual booking process so when you book a hotel and two we use token incentivise economy so what we're doing is incentivizing the user to participate in the platform in different ways one way is always in making a book in another way is referring to frane another way is taking some of the names of aviate tokens so that they get explicitly scouts released to the main components one is the smart contacts to run the platform and to use the same space and making the sim that allows us to reward the usage of nato gives one of the problems that we see in the industry when it comes to loyalty programs and we see in these we have. miles. hotel booking it's not real when it comes to

yes you become. you know a genius member booking dot com or you go like hundreds or thousands of miles by has no real money of value behind it which com you get aviate tokens we took in exchange for money and go myself a cup of coffee or i'm going to lunch buy yourself a jacket it's actual real money with a real value that you can convert rather than just you know so if your customers are using like a traditional crypto because the volatility in the market cause a problem. the moment you make a reservation should serve all of the car and you will buy this book prize at that time so we can only allow over forty k.m.'s cryptocurrency from becoming cost of rebuilding it calling and so on. if you want to book a hotel room and there was a room is one hundred dollars and the moment you pay is when you actually pay one hundred dollars will be calling on syria more whatever delays and how many users you guys have so we go over twenty thousand active users at the moment we

finish the month of favorite with close to two hundred hotel nice books we've grown an average of two x. month a month. really significant fraction of any sort of other company we were featured this morning and. we kind of resurvey was talking about. see ultra ripple was talking about the valar there's a lot of hype in the search business one thing that we're doing. not only improving the whole book in experience within the travel ecosystem we also developing technology for the hotel industry we develop an infrastructure you know roadmap we develop in reservation systems review systems you know. revenue management systems there's a number of you know software that we're going to develop for the actual hotel in the safe so that we can kind of free to. from the control of the monopole is like a book in the comics b.b. and so on but this one main thing and it's like we're really pushing for

cryptocurrency adoption and we see projects like traval of the car those that can actually you know drive people to use crypto which is the one thing that we need we need to bring mass adoption to the industry what a better why would anyone to be able to go to a hotel booking website and be able to pay to book their hotel not only enjoy a much better prize with the bigger the scam because we kill in the middle men allow in into book which because it's theory or whatever they go off and use that gift and what impediment settlements are you seeing implementing block change in this particular way for us the biggest point when the bell up in the platform was the scale ability think about the number of you know transactions that you have to do when it comes to you know booking one hundred hundreds of hotels a day obviously we are not way we're growing very fast we should develop on linear block chain reaction is you know has over a thousand transactions per second was one of the fastest what changed and now

we're looking at building our own look change so we can have you know further scale ability over time for us is speed as well as reliability and security obviously was that the two main. you know pain points that we had twenty five i did beginning that process because it is a very nice a lot of people think of you know the centralized up locations for you know the medical industry for trouble for supply chain to be on is half of in a dream in because block chain is not ready for fully the centralized platform that can scale to a level of allowing you know hundreds of thousands of franchises a day or even enough thousands of die you know there's a long way to go we are getting there that's what provider uses a hybrid model has some block chain components but also have some centralized components to make sure that we can offer the extra level of security and extra level of usability you x. . you know allowing this instructions on the whole process to run you know fast enough for you says. video game pioneer and attend those saw

a surge in their stock price friday after trying to base ten cent received approval to sell because the company's switched gaming console in china the stock gained more than sixteen percent at one point in the day but was trading up fourteen percent by the end of the day in tokyo regulators in the province approve the sale of the gaming console as well as again new super mario brothers you docs to be released in china following the news shares on the ten are selling at their highest point since october of last year while the partnership between a ten cent has a mustard buzzing they will still need approval from more regulators in the country sale of the consul in china is not expected immediately and they will still have to have each individual game approved by regulators before they'll be available to the public. that's it by this time you can catch a boom bust on direct t.v. channels three twenty one dish network tell it to eighty or streaming twenty four seven on pluto t.v. the free t.v. at one thirty two you. are as always has about you tube dot com boom bust r t c n

x time. my body told me that i belong with a boy. my thoughts my mind was. along with the girls. still be of any. sort of what. i was born a male had a sex change when i was thirty years old. i've now been living as a woman for twenty eight years and i fully recurrent this. problem should have gone away from by now but they are. so these surgeries are nothing more than plastic surgery i've had several female to male friends and you look at it and you just go

oh god you paid for that it's horrible nobody can change genders it's impossible it is delusional it's a mental illness. this is now one of my bone and flesh of my flesh she shall be called woman she was taken out from a. facebook and google started with a great idea and great ideals unfortunately it was also a very dark side. they are constructing a profile of you and that profile is real it's detailed and it never goes away turns out that google is manipulating your opinions from the very first character

that you type into the search bar it will always favor one dog food over another one comparative shopping service over another and one candidate over another they can suppress certain types of results diced on what they think you should be seeing if they have this kind of power then democracy is an illusion the free and fair election doesn't exist the more growth we give them the sooner we are all. right.

back in the united states. meddling in twenty sixteen. presidential hopefuls. head to head for the democrats nomination driving through the party. on facebook shuts the door on the right wing in britain branding some dangerous individuals and organizations coming up to get reaction to the. decision . facebook does have responsibility this stuff does make a difference and i completely agree with kids. about keeping evil people off social media.