Good afternoon. It's a totally wonderful, great pleasure for me to be introducing Sarah to you. Sarah, well, there have been two students in my time at Berkman who became co-teachers with me. The first was Jonathan, the second is Sarah. Sarah was my research assistant back a ways when teaching Internet and society, just at the time when we were conceptualizing the idea of Socratic dialogic structure as a foundation to be scaled as a way of building democratic values into the net. And Sarah undertook to teach Internet and society with me. At the same time she was doing this, she was also studying with Catherine McKinnon in what as far as I could tell from all I could absorb from Sarah about what that was about was a wonderful class in which Sarah opened up new avenues of radical feminism and I listened and felt that she taught me and then saw her teach my students. If there's anyone that I would like to see back in our midst as a change agent, it is Sarah. So she speaks to you today about the Internet of Garbage, abuse, it's abuse. But she comes out of an understanding of it that isn't limited to the net. It's just expressed on the net and her attention is how to draw it back. So with great pleasure, I introduce to you Sarah Jung. Thank you Charlie and thank you everyone for having me here. Thank you and thank you for having me here. Is that good? Alright, so Roadmap, I'll first do a little bit of background about the topic and then a bit about myself and then I will be talking about the theory of garbage. So really brief background, online harassment exists. It actually exists. It ranges from mean tweets to people calling the police and getting them to send a SWAT team to your house. Not every instance of online harassment rises to a level of interpersonal violence that requires state intervention, but sometimes it does. Nonetheless, it exists in this big mixed up bucket of all kinds of things and it's very staggering, it's very pervasive, it's a huge problem on the Internet. And furthermore, it's gendered. The US National Violence Against Women Survey says that 60% of cyber stalking victims are women, but the National Center for Victims of Crime say that's more like 70%. Working to halt online abuse, looked at 3,000 reports of cyber harassment between 2000 and 2011 and found that 72.5% were female. The Bureau of Justice Statistics says 74% of individuals stalked. Online or offline are female. The NYPD Computer Investigation and Technology Unit, the majority of their cyber harassment victims are female. And I think this sort of, I think this great study in 2006 from the University of Maryland really illustrates what exactly is going on here. Researchers put silent bots, like these are just completely silent user accounts on IRC and some of them have very female gendered names, others have male gendered names, sort of like Alice and Bob. The bots with the female names received about 25 times more malicious private messages than the ones with the male names. These were silent, they weren't saying anything, they were just sitting there, they were just on the Internet. I'm going to be talking a lot about gender today but that has a lot to do with the studies that are available as well as the activist sort of focus on this issue. You see a lot of the policy recommendations and a lot of the discourse focused around gender but it's really important to know that this problem is exacerbated on every single axis of social oppression. I would particularly like to see more focus on how it affects race because there is a huge problem there and the studies are largely silent as to it.  I think that this is a huge problem with our society and it's worth looking into and something I say at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society for a good reason. This inequality in participation on the Internet has a measurable cost to society. 91% of Wikipedia editors are male and surprise, it's harder to find articles about women on Wikipedia than it is articles about men. There is a measurable impact on what happens when women are harassed and silenced, when they feel as though they're online and in a culture of toxicity that excludes them. So like I said earlier, harassment is a really big bucket. You have, I think, everyone, every woman almost experiences this constant low level buzz of harassment. It's not that big of a deal but it's kind of really annoying, right? It happens, it's every day or close to every day, it's just sort of there. Why are these people bugging me? It might not be very violent, it might not be very upsetting, but it's there. And then you have the targeted campaigns and these are the things that make the news. This is like Anita Sarkeesian having to cancel a talk because of a bomb threat. This is South by Southwest cancelling two panels because of threats. This is Gamergate, which by the way is actually an example of domestic violence rather than anonymous strangers taking someone down. It's an instance in which an ex-partner decided to go after a woman very violently. And that's something that we shouldn't forget. We like to focus on stranger danger, we like to focus on scary anonymous people, but really the scariest people among us are the people we know. So here's some tweets at Caroline Crietta Perez who was a female journalist in Britain who wanted to put Jane Austen on British currency.   And two people were actually jailed over this eventually. Here are some comments posted on Anita Sarkeesian's videos.  Fun aside, she completely forgot to mention that every guy in video games has these stereotypes too. Do you see us parading about it? About it? No honey, it's a video game.  Yeah, I can't wait for the day we get to play Ugly Feminist Hand Planet the game. That would sell millions of units. As you can see, not all of this is, you know, straight up, I guess, crass. Or not all of these are threats. But it's not nice to be reading this day in and day out. I'm not saying you should get imprisoned for not being nice to people on the internet, but this is a bit much. There's a lot going on here. So compare this to sort of, like I was basically looking at a screen grab, right? Like I took these from a screen grab, so this is like one comment after another after another. I wasn't like going out of my way to find the nasty ones. So here's one to sort of balance out as a palate cleanser. I am okay with this and I believe everyone is too. Case dismissed. All right, great. That was the most positive thing I could find on that screen grab. So these things were happening actually. They were just getting started while I was still at Harvard. The discourse was shifting. I had come to HLS in a time when the frame was still very focused around free speech, good, oppressive governments, bad. We must protect the internet from these threats of interference, of censorship. And suddenly the discourse was changing. And we were increasingly seeing these examples of women getting basically threatened off the internet. And this wasn't new, but suddenly there was more and more attention to it. And I think that has in large part, it's because of Twitter. It's because Twitter is open and it's because we can see it happen in real time ourselves. It is no longer a subjective experience. It is open, objective and available to the public for everyone to see. And it's horrifying. And the discourse started out as this is free speech versus women. And this was pretty upsetting to me. I was coming from a place where I believed in a free and open internet. I did not think that many of the proposed regulations coming out of these episodes were good. I didn't like the idea of people getting sent to prison over tweets, even though I looked at the tweets and they were very upsetting to me. And as Charlie mentioned, I was here, I was working with Charlie on the internet and society class. I was also at the Journal of Law and Gender. I was very involved in feminist issues and activism. And I felt like I was being told that my position was inconsistent because it's free speech versus women. Pick one side.  So the more I thought about it though, there's a thing in First Amendment jurisprudence known as the Heckler's veto, actually. And the Heckler's veto is sort of this problem where if you yell at someone enough, it causes an issue where, oh, okay, I guess it's now legal to shut down the speech because people are, it's just upsetting everyone way too much. It's like causing, it's fighting words now because it's causing people to fight against it. Or now that it's causing all of this violence to erupt, then we're going to have to shut all the stuff down. And that's how I viewed harassment. Harassment was a Heckler's veto. It wasn't the case that harassment was the speech that was under threat. It was the speech of women that was under threat because women were the ones who were being told to leave these social platforms, who were leaving these platforms, who were ceasing to speak, who were being silenced. And when we're talking about free speech for women, I mean, we're just talking about free speech. Obviously, this is all well and good. And you may say this is little more than a cute rhetorical trick to justify the suppression of speech. And I assure you that it is not. I have learned many cute rhetorical tricks from this institution where many of the masters of cute rhetorical tricks reside. But there's actually more to this and I am going to explain. It goes back to the history of the internet and some largely today overlooked facts about internet infrastructure. This is what I call the theory of garbage. The theory of garbage is very simple. The internet is mostly garbage. There's more to that. So when I'm talking about garbage, I'm talking about things like spam. I'm talking about things like malware. And I want to include harassment. These are just things that we have come to accept aren't great. And there is certainly a contingent and I have to qualify before I even begin going into this. Look, spam is speech. Malware is speech, like code is speech. Harassment is speech. Nonetheless, this all belongs in a bucket where we know that something has to be done about it. It doesn't mean we have to put people in prison. It doesn't mean everything has to be deleted. But there's an issue here. These things make the internet unusable. And I started thinking about this actually because I was having dinner with these older attorneys who had been working with internet law for a long time. And they're like, oh man, remember when people were really upset about server side filtering? Spam filter. I'm like, that's before my time. Like what happened there? They basically spun out the story that I thought was incredible. I will leave out names.  These are the kinds of people who make the ACLU look like a bunch of Europeans. So these are people working in the tech industry who are really, really like nothing should be censored on the internet. And when it came to spam, however, they were just like burn it with fire. Rain nuclear bombs on spammers. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to the internet. And how dare you tell me that spam filters might be bad. So spam comes, of course, from the Monty Python sketch where two people are trying to talk and these Vikings keep interrupting with spam, spam, spam. Gloria spam, spamity spam. And you see it probably get its name according to Finn Brunton from this IRC trick people would do where if like just for, you know, fun, they would type in spam, then hit enter and then hit the up arrow, which just repeats the message, up arrow, enter, up arrow, enter, up arrow, enter. And so the entire chat room would flood with spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, making it impossible to talk. And so you get this name and eventually you're starting to get a lot of unwanted messages through various systems. So this exists even before email is really email. This exists before the web is quite the web. This exists on Usenet. This exists on things like CTSS at MIT in 1971. It's just unwanted mailings. And obviously this is a very subjective definition, right? Keep in mind this is very subjective and keep that in mind as we go on to talk about harassment, which is obviously a very subjective definition as well. And eventually people create anti-spam technology. They create filters. They start out with very naive filters, regular expression filters, which are just, you know, oh, well, let's just filter out every single email that says Viagra, which by the way there was a woman in Italy named Olivia Gridina and all of her emails disappeared into a black hole for like a few months because of this. And so the regular expression is not great. And around early 2000s the EFF put out this position paper on spam filtering and like any good position paper in a time of great outrage and controversy. You can sort of read what the controversy actually is because they're carefully navigating around it. Like the language is pretty incredible.  And, you know, moveon.org, that's political speech. That's speech. A lot of the moveon.org emails that we're getting lost in the spam filters were actually like action alerts. Like you have to call your congressman now. We have like one hour to call your congressman about this bill. And if that gets even delayed for a bit in a spam filter, that's political speech being silenced. That has actual implications on our democracy. And what the EFF was recommending at that time was, look, server side spam filters. So spam filters on the side of the mail servers where the people themselves don't have control over how to tweak the spam filter or whatever. Those are problematic. Those are bad.  Client side spam filters, good. Nowadays, we all use Gmail. And that's that server side, although it takes into account our own preferences. So it's kind of client side kind of server side. So that distinction is now largely defunct. But the issue is still live. So spam is speech. It's always been speech. Actually, so Finn Brunton says that the first instance of spam was in 1971 on the compatible time sharing service at MIT, which was this network. And this one engineer, or I guess he was assisted men, got access to the entire mail, like to the entire list of people. And he was like, all right, I think I really need to send this message out to everyone. It was an anti-war message. He wanted to tell people that it was their moral obligation to oppose the Vietnam War. He was mailing out to a bunch of people who were taking DOD funds at the time. So he was really good. He was like, this isn't an irrelevant audience. This is a very relevant audience. We need to take a moral principle stand. And so the very first spam message is there is no way to peace. Peace is the way. And then you see a few decades later, sort of as people are discussing can spam and other anti-spam regulations, you have the spammers themselves going spamming speech. It's what America was built on. Small business owners have a right to direct marketing. But eventually can spam passes and spam actually ends up becoming largely the enterprise of criminal groups in Russia. It's kind of an odd twist, but most of the spam that we're getting over the internet now is basically run by the mafia because sort of the small business owners who have a right to direct marketing decided not to do this anymore because it was illegal. And so now we have what we have now is, you know, the Viagra emails, they're like barely readable. They're sent by bots. There are bot nuts. There are computers that are controlled by viruses that are their cycles are getting eaten up by sending out all of these mass mailings. And it's kind of a terrible situation.  In 2013, there was a Gartner report that said that 69% of all email is spam. And this was a huge reduction, like a few years earlier, been 89%. And they were like, yeah, no, this great reduction doesn't have anything to do with anti-spam technology. This is actually the spammers are moving on to the social networks because that's where people are. That's the right market. I mean, I'm sure some of it has to do with anti-spam technology, but it's actually quite dire. The email security market is estimated to be about $7 billion. American firms and consumers experience $20 billion of loss annually because of spam. And what's really sad about this is spammers actually only gross about $200 million total for this $20 billion loss. It's not great. Spam is actually really bad for the internet. The internet is at least 69% garbage. I can tell you that with some accuracy.  Things are still getting caught in there. We don't think about spam filters that much anymore. We just don't think about spam as a problem anymore because we all use Gmail and Gmail anti-spam is pretty good. Now and then we'll get something in our spam folder that shouldn't have gone in there. And we're like, ah, this is the worst. I was supposed to reply to that last week and now something is wrong. But that happens very infrequently. We don't think about spam anymore. We think of spam as a solved problem. But it's not. It's not at all. It's an ongoing free speech issue.  And right now you have this thing actually where Gmail is filtering out mail coming from self-hosted servers at this point. They did a tweak recently. So that's a huge problem too because now it's basically privileging people who are using services like Gmail over people who are trying to keep the web decentralized to run their own self-hosted servers because various political stances or they just have a lot of free time on their hands. But that's important. This is an issue that this is about the decentralization of the web, turning into the centralization of the web. This is about Google having rather undue control over people's communications to each other. And spam definitions in the end are quite subjective. It's even though we have a sense of what it is, just like we have a sense of what harassment is.   In the end, harassment is very subjectively defined and spam is also subjectively defined.  We don't want to be filtering or blocking or deleting things that another person argues that's actually good. But look, we still have a municipal waste system. We have to function as a society by taking out some of the garbage. We can upcycle some stuff, we can recycle some stuff and some stuff just shouldn't be thrown away. But in order for things to function, we have to make sure that email isn't visibly 69 percent spam, even if it actually is 69 percent spam. So I go through this history because harassment is spam. When you're looking at the constant low buzz, the targeted campaigns, these news articles about, oh, she received a flood of tweets and then they will even say how many tweets per hour she was receiving. What you're looking at is a targeted personal distributed denial of service. And in fact, the common sort of advice in these situations is just turn off your phone for a while, get off the internet. It's basically social media no longer functions for you. You no longer have this avenue of communication. Your machines have been in a way compromised by too much information because people are screaming at you too much. And this is something that clicked for me when I heard this interview with Mickey Kendall. I mean, this is something that had been brewing in my head for a bit. But I think that she says this pretty greatly. She receives a lot of abuse.  And one day she and some other friends decided to switch out their Twitter avatars to white men. And what they saw was that the abuse that they were receiving was suddenly diminished. Like the same, in some cases the same people were interacting with them, but suddenly those interactions were like, oh, they were reasonable. They actually want to talk about the issues instead of just being jerks. And she said, one of the things that's really nice is not waking up to see 62 comments calling me everything but a child of God. These are people who are getting spammed. And they're getting spammed strategically. This is anti-speech. Online harassment is strategic. Spamming, flaming, DDoS, anti-spam, moderation, anti-DDoS. These are struggles over the form, manifestation, and social norms of the internet itself.   And they're using these tools to hash that out. And for misogynists, women are garbage. And they have to be driven off the internet because they don't belong there, no more than the spammed us. So what we're looking at is that anti-spam technology, the code around it, is political. It's not neutral in the slightest. When it comes down to it, the first page of Google search results can only have so many things, right? So even if you're not blocking everything, you're kind of like some of that stuff is getting lost. When you're looking at Facebook algorithms and how they get sorted, some of those communications are getting lost and some of them are getting promoted. When you look at Twitter blocks and how they work, and I bet this is something that a lot of people didn't think about, or a fair number of people did think about a few years ago, but they changed how blocks worked and they made it so that people could still follow you. And interact with you even after you blocked them. And before you couldn't do that. And there was this huge outcry because this would exacerbate online abuse. And this is interesting because that's just a tweak to the code, right? This is just a user interface thing. Changes to user interface are not neutral. They will hurt some people and help some people. Sometimes they're very, very political. And actually you sort of see this use of code on the rise right now to deal with harassment. You have, and it's rising in parallel almost with the history of anti-spam. So you have regular expression filtering, which by the way is still terrible, right? So I actually have a friend who uses a client so that Gamergate never appears in her timeline. But because people never type out Gamergate, she had to also censor GG, which means that if I type out something like arg, that also gets censored and she never receives it. So that's the early side. And then we also have client-side blocking mechanisms. We have things like Block Together, which is a subscriberable block list service. We have things like GG Auto Blocker, which automatically calculates whether someone is likely to be a member of Gamergate and then puts them on a block list so that you can subscribe to that block list and block that person. You have the block bot. You have these basically very early, almost vigilante forms of filtering. And these actually resemble closely how spam filtering worked in the really early days before email became hugely centralized under Google. So this is, I think, a really promising place to go towards. And where we are right now in the policy discussions is not so much infrastructure and code. It's actually deletion censorship and imprisonment in some cases. And one way to think about this is that code is frequently an anti-hoc solution. You're setting up the conditions under which people speak to each other. You are trying to prevent harassment before it happens by making better user interface decisions, by making sure that your algorithms don't privilege one group over another or just making it so that people have options when they're getting harassed. Deletion is post-hoc. After something happens, you hide it. You sweep it under the blanket. And unfortunately, deletion is, there's a lot of focus on deletion. And it's filtered not just into the policy debates but into the legal debates. Like when we think of legal solutions to the Internet of Garbage, we think in terms of deletion. And I think that as a scholar of copyright law, I think that this has a lot to do with the very privileged place that copyright law has in our society. Copyright law is the easiest way to get something deleted on the Internet. It's the easiest way to fight back against someone on the Internet because copyright law is overpowered. It's not at all a balanced law. And we are looking right now at this new problem at, well, not quite new, but a very different problem, a problem that we haven't quite thought of in the terms that we're thinking about now. We're looking at it through the lens that the RIAA has created. We're thinking about notice. We're thinking about takedown. We're thinking about going finding people. We're thinking about subpoenaing ISPs. And this isn't useful. And I'm going to run through a very unusual Ninth Circuit case to explain why this isn't very useful, otherwise known as how to break copyright law. So Garcia v. Google in the Ninth Circuit. This is Cindy Garcia. She was recruited to be in this movie called The Desert Warrior. And it was about, as far as she knew, it was a perfectly nice film. It had something to do with the Prophet Muhammad, but it's a fine film. Later she found out that her parts had all been dubbed over and that it had been released as the innocence of Muslims. This did not go well for Cindy Garcia. So, of course, her name got put out there. Her personal information got put out there. There was a fatwa on her. These are some of the things that were said to her. And these were read out loud in oral arguments in the en banc hearing. So there was an initial decision. And then that was appealed back up again to the Ninth Circuit. So there's Garcia 1 and then this is Garcia 2. So this is quoting from the hearing at Garcia 2.   Stop the film.  Hey you bitch, why you make the movie Innocence of Muslim? Delete this movie. Otherwise I am the Mafia Don.   Never let you live it freely, sore and painful. Wait for my reply. And this was interesting. So counsel was reading these quotes into the record at this hearing. And it was strange because this is a copyright case. And actually almost everyone who was there, they were copyright lawyers. They were really interested in sort of the weird copyright angle including myself. And immediately they were like, why is she reading these threats out loud? Like what does this have to do with anything? And in fact the judges agreed immediately you get sort of an interruption that you never want to hear if you are arguing a case in front of the Ninth Circuit. Counsel, how do these threats go to the preliminary injunction standard? So yeah, so Garcia was a very problematic case. So in Garcia 1 you got a judgment in favor of Cindy, Cindy Ligarcia. And basically the Ninth Circuit ruled, yeah, she actually does have a copyright in her performance in Innocence of Muslims. Now Lindsay Lohan does not have a copyright in Mean Girls. Leo DiCaprio does not have a copyright in Titanic. Like that's not how copyright law works. You act in a movie and then you get paid and then someone else owns the copyright on the movie. And usually there's like a series of very complicated contracts to govern this. But it's largely assumed that even if you are making like a home video without any contracts whatsoever the actors are not the ones who have the copyright in this work. And so this decision basically broke copyright law. It broke the fixation requirement. It created a new form of authorship. It created a new subject matter for copyright. It messed around with the definition of performance in the statute. It had a really weird effect on the movie industry potentially. Like one of the questions I was asked during oral argument was could any person who appeared in the battle scenes of Lord of the Rings claim rights in the work, feasible. It broke section 512 which is the notice and takedown section of the DMCA. And it also broke CDA section 230 which would have basically otherwise immunized Google from Civil Suits. And so this is interesting. Like all of these things happen because basically two out of three judges felt really sorry for Garcia. Like this is a really bizarre and unusual decision. It has no place in law. It is one of the most bizarre things that I have ever read actually. And all for what? It was to take this movie off of YouTube. And what would that have done? Like we think in these terms of deletion and it gets us nowhere because deletion isn't victory. It's not liberation. It's not freedom from fear. It's just deletion. And you see this actually in like a rather unfortunately callous comment by one of the judges in the en banc hearing. Is there anyone in the world who doesn't know your client is associated with this video? Oh maybe in a cave someplace. And those are the people we worry about. But we weren't able to give Garcia any real measure of safety through this. And it means that this focus on deletion is not that productive. And obviously I did spend a fair bit of time talking about filtering but I was talking about filtering from the perspective of how can women be on social media and beyond social media without getting driven off of social media immediately. It's not deletion is a tool. It's not the end goal. Deletion is a tool to give people space on the internet. And I say deletion but really I would prefer to use the word filtering because you know people can yell at me all they want. I just don't want to have to hear it. And so I think that a more productive direction is for us to shift away from these post hoc reactive measures and look at things like a compassionate user interface. So an interface that understands that these things happen and like maybe you know after the fifth time you type something furiously at someone the interface says hey are you sure you want to send that message? Something that just checks you. Not necessarily something that silences you. Something that checks you. Restorative justice I think is also a very promising frontier. So Riot Games is a games company that publishes League of Legends which is known for quite a lot of harassment. Just really uncouth behavior between players. And they recently instituted a series of internal reforms. It's an ongoing experiment to try and make things a little more civil inside the game. And actually so they set up this thing called the tribunal system where the players would actually get judged by basically a jury of their peers. Like when they got flagged with a report they would get put through the tribunal system and most of the time and the tribunal system is checked by the way by the staff. So the staff will almost access I guess an appellate court or a judge in this case. And the tribunal will say like no your behavior was out of line or no it's okay that that report was no good. And the players who are being judged by other players often it turns out they didn't realize that their behavior was wrong or it was unacceptable to the community and they will apologize. They will even voluntarily put themselves in restricted chat mode which means that they only get a certain number of chats and so they now have to choose between talking to their teammates or trash talking. So it puts their focus back on the game, it regulates their behavior and this is something that they opt into. And I think that this kind of thing is really important and very promising and something that I do want to caution you is that it doesn't necessarily mean that all people who are harassers are just like somehow misguided or they're just immature children who need to learn better. It could be that these are all just incurable sociopaths but that doesn't matter they're trying to do better anyways because now that the eyes of society are on them they want to change. They do not want to be perceived as someone worthy of censure. And so what I've done here in laying out the theory of garbage is actually not that interesting. I've basically applied Larry Lessig to online harassment. So there's Larry Lessig's Four Forces. You've got market, law, norms, architecture. And so on the law side you have things like the DMCA, cyberbullying laws, revenge porn laws and actually social media policies. So these are not laws per se but they are becoming the new law. What Facebook decides is acceptable on their platform. That is an extra legal determination but it's one that looks much more like a legal determination than anything else. You have norms. That's just moderation. Just telling people, hey that's not okay. That's the tribunal system. It's people coming in going why would you say that? This is not the place for something like that. These are the things that keep people in check. These are the things that make people feel as though just yelling at someone is not allowed even if no one has expressly said that to them maybe. And then there's architecture. That's interface design. It's algorithmic self-help like these blocking tools. This is the code. This is the code that is never neutral. And this is where I'm hoping we get some respite from the barrage of online abuse if we can just design the architecture of the internet in a compassionate, egalitarian way we can get some place. We can get some place much better from here. And if anyone figures out the market angle to this just let me know because I never did. So when we're looking at online harassment we can learn from the history of spam and it's just spam speech. Spam is also garbage. And so we carry on. We can move forward from there. We don't have to stop it but what about my free speech? The conversation cannot end there. Speech is important but we have work to do anyways. So in conclusion, the internet is mostly garbage. Garbage is a speech issue but we still take out the garbage. Code is never neutral. We should have thoughtful design for the marketplace of ideas and that will make us a better future. Thank you. So we have about 15 or 20 minutes for questions. Sarah, I love it right up until the end. And then at the end I lose it. It's like somehow you're going to try and create a norm on the open net. But it doesn't work that way. When we try and do it in a real world you find that you have to start with an affinity group like this group in this room is we are a group. Now if we were going to talk about something and do it in a way that was not mutually insulting that broke up and gets to be gamergate we could approach that problem. And in fact when we've tried to do this we have used our internet question tool to do it by starting for example on the gender issue. Starting in a group like this mix male and female by anonymously feeding into the question tool what your fears would be about actually talking with opposite numbers about delicate issues of diversity. And then anonymously feed in what your hopes would be if you could do that. And then structuring a discussion that's got a real issue to talk about and setting people to talk. And lo and behold with the aspirational view and the fears people are considerate as they approach it and can do well with it. But if you try to do that on the open net you just get creamed. So my question is as you're trying to use architecture if you're going to limit yourself to the architecture of the open net I don't think you've got a winner. But if you can somehow combine the architecture of real world environments with real world affinity groups and then scale to the net now you could establish some kind of structure. So I think that the open net is actually just not as open as we often say it is in our rhetoric. It's enclaves. It's enclaves of people. It's clusters of communities. It looks more like a cluster of grapes than it does a globe.  I think a really hard problem is when those worlds crossover in what is known as a forum raid where people from one of these worlds goes into the other and just disregards the norms there. And I think that's a really hard problem. But beyond that I think that there is absolutely a way to set norms on the internet. Without ever seeing people face to face. People make friends on the internet and then they never see them in real life ever again. They do this. They form these communities. They are truly people on the internet. They are truly citizens and residents of the net and of the web. And they speak to each other. They form norms and they form societies. And I think this is absolutely possible. There are a lot of hard problems here. But when you speak to people who do community moderation, for instance, you can really hear them talking about a craft of setting a level of discourse of this emotional care labor here where you can make people comport themselves in a way that's better or worse. You can make things worse very easily. And it's much harder to keep things civil and useful and also to keep people ongoing and then also to encourage people to speak, but also to get that one person who speaks way too much to pipe down a little bit. This is work. And I think it's entirely possible to do it just on the internet. I guess this is a related question. About 20 years ago, Cass Sunstein wrote a book called Republic.com. He was concerned not just with harassment, but in fact extremist speech. And he talked about how the internet made possible ideological echo chambers that seemed to encourage this kind of extremist speech.  I understand everything's the same if you ignore all the differences. But I'm not sure, I think for Sunstein free speech aside, there was a kind of communications disorder that this isolation created. And when you look at it from that point of view, the remedies are like what you've just mentioned, but also it gets you away a little bit from this question of whether you have to take sides between free speech and harassment because that's not really what you're talking about. So do you have no faith in the ability to address communications disorders this way? Well, so it is a bit of an infrastructure problem. You have communications disorders when you're talking about things like storm front. Storm front is storm front.  But then you're looking at things like, for instance, Enclave's created on Facebook, which is a neutral platform. And because of the way, say, algorithms work or the way people are able to find each other on Facebook, you have a communications disorder there. And in that case, it does sort of become a bit of an infrastructural problem in that people create these echo chambers through the infrastructure that's supposed to be neutral. I'm not entirely sure that this means that people should be hit with like a daily dose of something that goes against their political beliefs. But yeah, there's like some of it's related, some of it's not. And one more thing is that when I say harassment belongs in this big bucket, I do mean that in the same sense that spam belongs there because when it comes down to it's spam is not, it's a meaningless word. Like we do know what spam is, but when it comes down to it's spam is just an unwanted mailing and that means nothing. I'm probably one of the newer people to this space, but I gathered from your presentation that there seems to be a shift from punishing content to regulating users. And I was wondering if the heckler's voice is a direct analog to that and also if inherent in the market is kind of an aversion to regulating users and a preference to punishing content like with the Twitter. So I think it's, especially in the U.S. it's a lot easier to go after the content and that has a lot to do with the way copyright law has structured the web. Basically there are avenues to pursue content and people at companies who are supposed to deal with these requests so there's a bureaucracy in place for that. And in the U.S. we're really leery of the idea of actually going after the users. Not so much in other countries. This was a pretty U.S. centric presentation I'm afraid. The concerns are very different in other countries and of course free speech is a very U.S. centric topic especially when you're talking about it in the U.S. so I'd have to say that that totally differs where you are. Hi. Fascinating talk. And as the son of a man who used to build sewage treatment plants I appreciate the trash and garbage framework because there's always trash to take out. I'm also somebody who sort of lived the spam wars and I'll install the server side filter when you pry my cold dead hens from the server side. And what a lot of that was and I eventually did install server side filters for a university in the area without them having to pry my cold dead fingers because to sort of use your frame here what we were doing was victim blaming.  You just need to delete that. You need to just not read that. And it's exactly the same sort of thing people are saying to women about harassment well just don't pay attention, turn over phone, whatever. Out of spam came a $7 billion email security industry so I think you actually do have your market solution there. You just need to find a way of turning this into a profit opportunity for somebody. And I actually mean that seriously in the sense that I mean why isn't the scene, I mean to ask the question why isn't the scene a commercial opportunity for the various platforms to do this to find a way to actually make money and is that just because women's experiences are completely devalued? I mean it might be that. It might be that women earn $0.70 to a dollar. It may also be that I mean this was a snide thing that I said in my book but if harassment seems like a very feminine problem then spam seems like a very masculine one.  So it's a problem that is very in your face when you're a man and harassment is not so much in your face when you're a woman and I mean guess who buys shares in the email security market and who actually works in the email security market and all of that labor capital from top to bottom it's all men. So I don't know, there's structural issues there that go way beyond the scope of this talk. Just going to bounce back on your remark about this presentation being very US-centric from my point of view with a European law background I'm fascinated by the power that the world's free speech and censorship have in the US and in particular how we all agree that there's something wrong with hate speech and all this garbage on the internet but we absolutely refuse to touch speech and we even have to break copyright in order to solve these problems and we always do it in roundabout ways instead of trying to address the actual problem that's with here. Maybe two examples that go in this direction when you have some stakeholders that try to get their responsibility when it comes to speech they just say that it's censorship as if it was an argument enough itself. You can look at Google when they try to implement the right to be forgotten. They just say, oh it's censorship as if it was the entirety of the debate. Also when we were talking about the negotiation of the ITR in the ITU most of the issues were just about not internet regulation but more about telecommunications but then the free speech, free internet issues sort of rose up because the US didn't want to move on some of the other positions but everything got swept up into free speech issues and nothing got discussed in the end. Do you think we can perhaps move towards a clearer discussion of free speech issues will we have to avoid the elephant in the room for a long time? So I think that this is just sort of a big difference between how Europeans and how North Americans maybe because Canadians to some extent do subscribe to but not quite so let's just say Americans this is just a big difference between how Americans and Europeans approach approach the issue this is just I think that to people outside the US our fixation on free speech appears to be a sort of collective insanity that said I subscribed to the collective insanity I think it's great I think free speech is great I am not sure if this is just sort of one of those intractable things or if because when it comes down to it right there's some things that are just closer to being inherent goods than you know other things right like we talk about equality we talk about freedom in general and to some people actually maybe equality is not that good and why do we care about it so much but it's but to other people it's not even quite worth the debate like that's like something that is maybe best left to you know first year philosophy classes I think like I've given some thought to this I'm not really sure where I come out on it I think that in other countries outside of Europe and outside of America those perspectives I find very interesting as well because you have but you have like a very different threat model there especially under oppressive regimes so I think that it's largely a circumstance of how you perceive your own government and your own society and in the states like our fixation with free speech says something very interesting about our society but that's neither here nor there there's a traditional liberal response that the way to deal with bad speech is to general out with better speech why doesn't that work here because it just turns into a shouting match and you can't it's I framed this as a usability issue I don't think it worked before the internet either like I mean so I do in practice I do engage in counter-speech and I think counter-speech is good it's a tactic it's certainly a tactic but it can't be the only tactic like it's one tool in this toolbox there is a big toolbox and I don't think that counter-speech was ever just the answer because when it comes down to it you can only hear so many decibels right and you can only see so many messages at a time like we've always been in a place where not everyone gets to speak and this is a problem that I think or rather everyone gets to speak but not everyone gets to be heard this is just something that we don't talk about enough I think Hi, so you mentioned this idea of the architecture and the design of the internet and as a female user of the internet and developer I feel like psychologically I've had to lend myself to a certain way of thinking in order to participate in the design of the infrastructure and I wonder if you think that you know in a world where a lot of this architecture is designed by men if maybe equal representation in the technology sector may be a possible solution to designing interfaces or just uses of the internet in a way that adheres to female psychology I also study cities and it's quite similar and there's a number of studies that explore how the urban environment, the built environment is also a product of sort of like sexual and psychology and that you know the representation, more representation of women in the design sector creates environments that women feel like they can participate in more so I'm curious as to your comments on that 100% more female engineers more female CEOs more female venture capitalists more women on boards of directors it goes all the way to the top it's from the top to the bottom everything is implicitly organized around how men see the world and not just men, how white men see the world and this is a problem this is why so many things suck and this should absolutely be addressed and it should be addressed for more reasons than just like we're not able to expand this market out because it turns out this product doesn't understand a user base beyond white men who are not exactly a majority in the world it's but that's the start you know like eventually you're going to tap out your tiny minority user base and you're going to have to work on a national level on a global level you're going to have to reach out to everyone because inclusivity isn't just a social good it's financially productive Hello I'm Matt and so I was just curious what you thought about the role that a 230 and safe harbor immunity has played and I know you said you didn't really think about like a market solution but if we repealed 230 and then Twitter was like under threat of litigation for inflicting what they are upon the world I mean that would certainly shift market dynamics if we repealed 230 the internet as it exists would no longer exist so let's not do that 230 good people who hate 230, stupid it's like you know there's some issues with 230 I think and like reasonable minds it's not going to be on whether very narrow exceptions to 230 are warranted but 230 as a whole is good So I think we have time for one more question here Oh no it's not going to be a very good question I'm sorry I'll try it anyway so thank you for a very thought provoking talk you I think make the case for a multifaceted approach in some respects trying to address the behavior underlying it so in the case of the tribunals at riot games improving architecture improving user side filters you also seem to go out of your way to take deletion off the table is that what you intend to do to take what you say deletion is not the solution of course by itself it's not the solution I think there are arguments that deletion should be more rapid should be easier recognizing there are costs in that I don't care for that I think there's too much of a focus on deletion obviously like some things got to go you know it's I don't think that there is a point in providing for instance client side filters for child porn I don't think we should do that deletion is in many instances the answer it is actually the answer I do think however that we we tend to focus too much on deletion and that the law especially is very much a blunt tool in this and the law focuses on deletion and imprisonment and sanctions and when we move away from the law and this is this is one of those things where you know that when engineers are faced with a hard problem they put up their hands and say well that's for the law to decide and when lawyers are faced with hard problems they put up their hands and say well that's for the the tech industry to decide and yeah I'm doing a bit of this where I'm saying like I think that it's much more agile to work with the architecture and to look for a vast solutions to this problem rather than to go after it with this blunt tool


Okay, welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. The topic is Mar-Tech Emerging Cloud Scale Experience. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. Talk about their value proposition in their company and all the good stuff that's going on. I'm your host, John Furrier. And today we're excited to be joined by Anjana Malawa who's the co-founder and head of AI at BlueShift. Great to have you on here to talk about the BlueShift Intelligent Customer Engagement Made Simple. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you, John, thank you for having me. So last time we did our intro video, we put it out on the web, got great feedback. One of the things that we talked about which is resonating out there in the viral Twitter sphere and the thought leadership circles is this concept that you mentioned called 10X Marketer. You know, that idea that you have a solution that can provide a 10X value, kind of a riff on the 10X engineer in the DevOps cloud world. What does it mean and how does someone get there? Yeah, fantastic. I think that's a great way to start our discussion. I think a lot of organizations, especially as of this current economic environment are looking to say, I have limited resources, limited budgets. How do I actually achieve digital and customer engagement that helps move the needle for my key metrics, whether it's average revenue per user, lifetime value of the user, and frequent interactions. Above all, the more frequently a brand is able to interact with their customers, the better they understand them, the better they can actually engage them. And that usually leads to long-term good outcomes for both customer on the brand and the organizations. So the way I see 10X Marketer is that you need to have tools that give you that speed and agility without hindering your ability to activate any of the campaigns or experience that you want to create. And I kind of see the roadblocks, usually for many organizations, is that kind of threefold. One is your data silos. Usually data that is on your sites does not talk to your app data, does not talk to your social data, does not talk to your CRM data and so forth. How do I break those silos? The second is channel silos, right? Which is I actually have customers who are only engaging on email or some are on email and mobile apps, some are on email and mobile apps and maybe the OTT TV in a Roku or one of the connected TV experiences or maybe in the future in other Web3 environments. How do I actually break those channel silos so that I get a comprehensive view of the customer? And my marketing team can engage with all of them in respect to the channel. So break the channel silos. And the last but that's kind of like, what I call like some of the little talked about is I call the inside silo, which is that not only do you need to have the data but you also have to have a common language to share and talk about within your organizations, what are we learning from our customers? What do we translate our learning and insight on this common data kind of platform or fabric into an action? And that requires the shared language of, how do I actually know my customers and what do I do with them? I call it the inside silo as well. I think a lot of times organizations do get into this habit, like each one speaks their own language but they don't actually are talking the common language of what did we actually know about the real customer at that? Yeah, and I think that's a great conversation because there's two, when you hear 10X marketer or 10X conversations, it implies a couple of things. One is you're breaking in old way and bringing in something new and the new is a force multiplier in this case, 10X marketer, but this is the cloud scale. So marketing executives, chiefs of staffs of CMOs and their staffs, they want to get the scale. So marketing at scale is now the table stakes. Now budget constraints are there as well. So you're starting to see, okay, I need to do more with less. Now the big question comes up is ROI, right? So I want to have AI, I want to have all these force multipliers. What do I got to do with the old? How do I handle that? How do I bring the new in and operationalize it? And if that's the case, I'm making a change. So I have to ask you, what's your view on the ROI of AI marketing? Because this is a key component because you got scale factor here. You got a force multiplier opportunity. How do you get that ROI on the table? Right. I think that's a, as you rightly said, it's table stakes and I think the ROI of AI marketing starts with one very key simple premise that, today some of the tools allow you to do things one at a time. So I can actually say, can I run this campaign today? And you can kind of scramble your team, hustle your way, get everybody involved and run that campaign. And then tomorrow it's like, hey, I looked at the results, can I do this again? And they're like, we just hustle for all of us to get that done. How do I do it tomorrow? How do I do it next week? How do I do it for every single week for the rest of the year? That's where I think the AI marketing is essentially taking your insight, taking your creativity and kind of creating a platform or a tool that allows you to run this every single day. And that's agility at scale. That is not only a scale of the customer base, but scale across time. And that AI based automation is the key ROI piece for a lot of AI marketing practitioners. So Forrester, for example, did a comprehensive total economic impact study with our customers. And what they found out was actually the 781% ROI that they reported in that particular report is based on three key factors. One is being able to do experiences that are intelligent at scale day in and day out. So do your targeting, do your recommendations, not just one day, but do it every single day, right? And don't hold back yourself on being able to do that. And they got to get that return. They got to get the sales too. This is the numbers. That's right. They actually have real dollars, real numbers attached to it. They have a calculator. You can actually go in, plug your own numbers and get what you might expect from your existing customer base. The second is that, once you have a unified platform like ours, you're, you know, the 10x marketer that we're talking about is actually able to do more. It's sometimes actually, you know, it's kind of counterintuitive to think that a smaller team does more, but in reality, what we have seen that is the case when you actually have the right tools, the smaller teams actually achieve more. And that's the, you know, redundant operations, you know, conflicting insights that go away into something more coherent and comprehensive. That's the second insight that they've found. And the third is, you know, just having reporting and all of the things in one place means that you can amplify it. You can amplify it across your paid media channels. You can amplify it across your promotions programs and other partnerships that you're running. You know, that's the key thing about platforms that people don't understand is that you have a platform and it enables a lot of value, in this case force multiplier value. It enables more value than you pay for it. But the key is, it enables customers to do things without a line of code, meaning it's a platform. They're innovating on top of it. And that's, I think, where the ROI comes in. And this kind of leads me to where the next question is, I wanted to ask you is, you know, not to throw a wet blanket on the mark tech industry, but I got to think of when I hear marketing automation, I kind of think old. I think old inadequate antiquated technologies, I think email blasting and just some boring stuff that just gets siloed or bespoke from something else. Are marketing automation tools equal, created equal? Does something like what you guys are doing with Smart Hub change that? And can you talk about that? Cause that's the, it's not going to go away. It's just another level that's going to be abstracted away under the coverage. Yeah, great question. Certainly, email marketing has been practiced for two or three decades now and in some form or another. I think we went from essentially what people call list-based marketing. I have a list, let me keep blasting the same message to everybody, you know? And then hopefully something will come out of it. A little bit more saying, you know, then they can, okay, and maybe now I have CRM database, right? And can I do database marketing?  And that's all they think we'll get the, you know, customer excited about it because you called them by name, which is certainly helpful, but not enough. I think now I think what we call like, you know, kind of what the new age that we live in is that we call it graph-based marketing.  So then this interaction graph that's happening across millions of customers, across thousands of content, articles, videos, shows, products, items, and that graph actually has much richer knowledge of what the customer wants than the first names or list based ones. So I think the next evolution of marketing automation, even though the industry has been there a while, there is a step change in what can actually be done at scale and which is that taking that interaction graph and making that, you know, you know, a part of the experience for the customer. And that's what we enable. That's why we do think of that as a big step change from how people are being practicing list-based marketing. And within that, you know, they, you know, certainly there is a radiation of curve as to how people approach AI marketing and they kind of are in a different spectrum. Some people are still at list-based marketing, some people are database marketing, and hopefully we'll move them to this new interaction graph-based marketing. Yeah, and I think the context is key. I like how you bring up the graph angle on this because the graph databases kind of imply there's a lot of different optionality around what's happened contextually, both over time and currently, and it adds to it, makes it smarter. It's not just siloed, it's just one dimensional. It feels like it's got a lot there. This is clearly, I'm a big fan of it. I think this is the way to go. As you get more personalization, you get more data. Graph database makes a lot of sense. So I have to ask you, this is a really cutting edge value proposition. Who are the primary buyers and users in an organization that you guys are working with? Yeah, great question. So we typically have CMO organizations approaching us with this problem. And they usually talk to their CIO organizations, their counterparts. The CIOs have been, the chief information officers have been investing in data fabrics, data lakes, data warehouses for the better part of last decade or two and have some very cutting edge technology that goes into organizing all this data. But that doesn't still solve the problem of how do I take this data and make a meaningful, relevant, authentic experience for the customer. That's the CMO or problem. And CMO orgs are now challenged with creating product level experience with every interaction. And that's where we're coming. So the CMO orgs are the buyers of our smart hub CDP platform. And we're looking for consolidating hundreds of tools that they had in the past and making that one or two channel marketer is actually the 10x marketer that we talk about. And you need the right tool on top of your data lakes and data warehouses to be able to do that. So CMO orgs are the real drivers of using this technology. You know, I think that also plays the ROI equation or an ROI and having that unified platform. Great, great call out there. I got to ask you the question here because this comes up a lot. And when I hear you talking, I think, okay, a lot of great stuff you guys have there. But if I'm a company, you know, I want to make my core competencies mine, right? I don't really want to outsource or, you know, buy something that's going to be core to my business. But at the same time as market shifts, the business changes and sometimes people don't even know what business they're in at the end of the day. And as it gets more complicated too, by the way. So the question comes up with companies and I can see this clearly. Do I buy it? Do I build it when it comes to AI? Because that's a core competency. Wait a minute, AI.  That's not really AI, but it feels like AI. But I'm a company. I want to buy it or build it. That's a choice. What do you see there? Because you guys have a very comprehensive platform. It's hard to replicate, imitate, inimitable. So what's your customers doing with Despective Buy and Build? And where do they get the core competency? What do they get to have as a core competency? Fantastic. I think certainly AI as it applies to the organization level. I've seen this at my previous organization that I was part of, which is, and there will be product and financial applications that are using AI for the service of that organization. So we do see depending upon the size of the organization having in-house AI and data science teams, they are focused on these long-term problems that they are doing as part of their product itself. They, adjacent to that, the CMO organization gets some resources, but not certainly a lot. I think the CMO organization is usually kind of challenged with the task, but not given the 100 people data science and engineering team to be able to go solve that. So what we see among our customer base is that they need a agile platform to do most of the thing that they need to do on a day-to-day basis, but augmented with whatever in-house data science they have. So we are an extensible platform. What we have seen is that half of our customers use us solely for the AI needs. The other half certainly uses both AI modules that we provide and actually augmented with things that they've already built. And we do not have kind of a fight in that ring, but we do acknowledge and we do kind of provide the right hooks for getting the data out of our system and bringing their AI back into our system. And we think at the end of the day, if you want agility for the CMO, or there should not be any barriers. It's like they're in the data business and that's the focus. So I think what I hear you saying is that with your technology and platform, you're enabling them to be in the data business as fast as possible. That's right. Versus algorithm business, which they could add to over time. Certainly they could add to. And I think the bulk of competencies for the CMO are on the creative side. And certainly, kind of wrangling with data pipelines day in and day out and wondering what actually happened to a pipeline in the middle of the night is not probably what they would want to focus on. Not their core competency. I got that yet. You can do all the heavy lifting. I love that. I got to ask you on the blue shift side on customer experience, consumption. How can someone experience the product before buying? Is there a trial POC? What's the scale and scope of operationalizing and getting the blue shift value proposition in-house? Yeah, great. So we actually recently released a fantastic way to experience our product. So if you go to our website, there's only one call to action saying explore blue shift. Right. And if you click on that, without asking anything other than your business email address, you're shown the full product. You're given a guided tour of all the possibilities. So you can actually experience what your marketing team would be doing in the product. And we called it Project Rover. We launched it like very recently. And we're seeing fantastic reception to that. I think a lot of times, as you said, there is that the question mark of like, I have a marketing team that is already doing X, Y, Z. Now you're asking me to implement blue shift. How would they actually experience the product? And now they can go in and experience the product. It's a great way to kind of get the gist of the product in 10 clicks, much more than going through any number of videos or articles, right? I think people really want to say, let me do those 10 clicks. And I know what impression that I can get from the platform. So we do think that's a great way to experience the product. And it's easily available from the main website. And the value proposition isn't always a straight line. And you got that technology. And I got to ask from your experience with the customers that you're talking to, prospects and customers, where do you see yourself winning deals on customer engagement made simple? Because the word customer engagement has been around for a while and it's become, I won't say cliche, but you know, there's been different generational evolutions of technology that made that possible. Obviously we're living in an era of high velocity, omni-channel, a lot of data, the graph databases you mentioned are in there, big part of it. Where are you winning deals? Where are customers' pain points where you are solving that specifically? Yeah, great question. So the organizations that come to us usually have, one of the dimensions of either they have offering complexity, which is what catalog of content or videos or items do they offer to the customers. And the data complexity on the other side is to what is the scale of customer base that I usually target. And that problem has not gone away. I think customer engagement, even though it has been around for a while, the problem of engaging those customers at scale hasn't gone away. And it only is getting harder and harder. And organizations that have, especially on what we call the business to consumer side where that's kind of the bulk of what marketing organizations in B2C segments are doing is, I have tens to millions of customers and how do I engage them day in and day out? And I think that if at all that problem is only getting harder because the consumer preferences keep shifting all the time. And where's your sweet spot for your customer? What size can you just share? Kind of the target organization. Is it medium to enterprise, large B2C, B2BC? What's the focus area? Yeah, great question. So we have seen startups that are in Silicon Valley that are on the kind of, I have now a half a million monthly active users, now how do I actually engage them to customers and clients like Lending Tree and PayPal and Discovery and BBC who have been in the business for multiple decades, have tens of millions of customers that they're engaging with. So that's kind of our sweet spot. We are certainly not maybe for kind of a small shop with maybe 100 plus customers. But as you reach the scale of tens of tons of customers, you kind of start seeing this problem and then you start to look out for solutions that are beyond especially list-based marketing and email glass. So as the scale, you can dial up and down but you have to have some enough scale to kind of get the data pattern if I can connect the dots there. I would probably say you're looking at 100,000 or more monthly active customer base and then you're trying to ramp up your own growth based on what you're learning and to engage those customers. Yeah, it's like a bulldoze. You need the heavy equipment. Great, great, great conversation. For the last minute we have here, Man, you give a plug for the company. What's going on? What are you guys doing? What's new? Give some success stories, your latest latest achievements. Take a minute to give a plug for the company. Yeah, great. We've been recognized by Deloitte as the fastest growth startup two years in a row and continuing to be on that streak. We have released turn-cree integrations with AWS partners and Snowflake partners and Data Lake partners that allow kind of implementing BlueShift a much, much, much streamlined experience with bi-directional integrations. We have now 100 plus data, data connectors and data integrations in our system and that takes care of many other needs. And now, I think organizations that have been budget constrained and are trying to achieve a lot with a small team or are actually going to look at these solutions and say, can I get there? And can I become that 10X marketing solution? 10X marketing organization. And as you have said, agility at scale is very, very hard to achieve. Being able to take your marketing team and achieve 10X requires the right platform and the right solution. We are ready for it. Yeah, every company's in the data business. That's the asset. You guys make that a sing for them. It's good stuff. Love the 10X, love the scale. Manny and Melville, thanks for coming on. Co-founder, head of AI at BlueShift. This is the AWS startup showcase season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. Thank you John.


What's going on everybody? Welcome to another semi-final preview. We're going through the next semi-final Nadal versus Federer. So we've gone through the Djokovic versus Batistra. Go check that video out if you haven't already and now we're going through Nadal versus Federer. Episode 40, if you're counting, they played 39 times before. This will be the 40th time they played and I don't think they've actually played in the semi-finals of Wimbledon before. They have played in the final three times. Federer leads the Wimbledon head-to-head 2-1 at the moment. So let's go through their road to this stage. We'll start with Rafa Nadal. So the road to the semi-finals, he won this tournament back in 2008 and also 2010 when he defeated Burdic. So he hasn't won this tournament for nine years. So a lot of people are probably thinking that Nadal probably won this in 2014 or 2015. He hasn't won it for almost 10 years so they've got to keep that into account. As you can see he won the first match pretty easily. He's only being in trouble once in this tournament and that was against Nick Kirios and I think maybe that was because of the animosity between the players. It wasn't really anything to do with the skill level. I think it was just more towards the anger it seems like Rafa has towards Nick Kirios at times. But Songa, he didn't come up to par. He was absolutely terrible in my opinion. When we saw him play Nadal, he did not come out to play at all. Then Nadal beat Sosa in the fourth round. No surprise there. Sosa is not really a grass court player. And then to my surprise, and to a lot of people's joy out there, because I picked Query to beat Nadal, Nadal ended up beating Query really easily. First set was tough though. I mean that first set could have gone either way. Query come back from 5-4 down. If he got to the tie break maybe things would have been a little different. But as soon as Nadal won that first set, he was off and that was it. Nadal dominated and he was in beast mode ever since. In my opinion, Nadal's been playing at semi-final level since the second round.  It's crazy. He's lucky that Sosa ended up getting through because there was some crazy opponents he could have played in the fourth round and quarter-finals. Luckily he didn't have to play them. But I think in previous years, Nadal hasn't really kick-started his grass court season until the quarter-final stage. But this time, maybe to his benefit, it's actually, he's had to play his best tennis at the second round. So that might be something we can look forward to in the Federer match. Let's go see what Federer is up to and what he's been doing in this tournament. His last win, he's obviously won this eight times before. His last time he won it was 2017. He defeated Marin Chilich in the final, so only a couple of years ago. First round, lost the first set of the tournament, which was a massive shock for a lot of us. Then he came back and won pretty easily after that against a young South African Lloyd Harris. Then he beat Clark in the second round straight sets. He beat Puy in the third round but it wasn't very convincing. A lot of errors. Wasn't playing very well but he got through. Luckily Puy was playing a little bit worse. Then the Baratini match wiped him off the court. Fastest ever fourth round men's match ever in a Grand Slam. 74 minutes. Federer absolutely annihilated one of the best grass court players of the season. So that was pretty pretty dominant there from Federer. And then the quarter-final against Nishikori. Nishikori won the first set. Played super aggressive. Kind of played like Djokovic a bit. So that was interesting to see. But then after that Nishikori forgot how to play and Federer ended up winning the match. Could have easily gone five sets. Nishikori started to regain his form towards the end of the fourth but it was too late because Federer broke and then won the match. We actually watched that on this channel. It was very interesting and it was really fun to watch. So make sure that you do come along to the live shows. And now he plays against Nadal in the semi-final so the second Grand Slam in a row which is so much fun for us. Let's go through their head to head because they've got a massive history. They played 39 times before. This is number 40. Huge rivalry. One of the best in tennis. As you can see last time they played Roland Garros 2019. Only what two months ago. Nadal won that one straight sets. No surprise because Nadal was the king of clay. Federer hadn't played on clay for four years. So it was pretty obvious that that was going to happen. But then interestingly enough Federer actually won their five previous meetings before that Roland Garros meeting. They're all on hard court but still Federer had a 5-0 momentum in the last five matches until Nadal broke that. So is that going to be a factor? The fact that Nadal got the confidence back. He knows how he can beat Federer again. Maybe that might play a play a bit of a factor into this match and give Nadal a bit of extra confidence that he's beaten Federer in the last couple of months even though it's on grass and not clay. As you can see last time they played which was Roland Garros Nadal won six out of 16 break points. So Federer can't give Nadal that opportunity. He can't give Nadal 16 break points because Nadal is too good to not take at least six to ten of those. So if Federer is going to win this he's going to have to make sure he doesn't give away break points and Nadal is going to have to convert break points like he did at Roland Garros. Last time they played on the clay at Roland Garros Federer only won 39% a second serve point. So Nadal was attacking the second serve and he was winning a lot of points on the second serve. Federer is going to have to serve well if he is to beat Nadal and Nadal is going to have to take the opportunity like he did at Roland Garros to beat the second serve of Federer when he gets a chance. Last round against Query Nadal hit 44 winners and 12 unforced errors that is ridiculous that is ridiculous 12 unforced errors in three sets and he hit 44 winners in three sets that is craziness. Great hitting from Nadal absolutely beast mode from him and then the last round Federer hit 55 winners in four sets but he hit 32 unforced errors which is not a good sign if you are on the Federer bandwagon on this one so got to make sure that Federer doesn't hit those 32 unforced errors he's got to hit less than 20 if he's any chance it's going to be tough though against Nadal. All right so I'm very reluctant to give a give a prediction here because the last time I gave her a prediction on Nadal match everyone got very angry so maybe to my maybe I shouldn't have picked the upset against Nadal but hey it's finished we're done we're on to the next one so this is what I think is going to happen I mean can we just get a five set match do we need we don't need to you know I don't care who wins I just want a five set match I want an epic match I want a 2008 Wimbledon final between Nadal Federer replay in 2019 is that is that too much to ask I think that's what we all want especially if you are a Federer and Nadal fan like I am I'm a fan of both players you can flip a coin as long as we get to the fifth set flip a coin I don't care who wins after that but my smart money and it mainly depends on the last round so like I said Federer struggled against Ishikori someone who he beats most of the time pretty convincingly and Nadal beat a big serving player who I thought he'd struggle against so you know a little bit of a shock from both sides on both of those matches so giving that into account like I said I hope it goes five sets I don't really mind who plays who wins because either way the winner of this is probably going to play Djokovic which again is going to be epic so five sets please be five sets but my prediction for this one is going to be Rafa Nadal he convinced me in the last quarter final that he is ridiculously good at at this level on this stage at this tournament right now so he hasn't won the tournament since 2010 like I said so maybe he can do it this year but he's going to have to beat Federer and then probably Djokovic in the final but like I said let's just get a five set match who cares who wins I know there's a lot of Nadal fans a lot of Federer fans out there you're going for your players I get that but for Tennis's sake let's just get a five set match put it in the books epic match last time they played on grass at Wimbledon in 2008 in the final that match was insane one of the best matches in history hopefully we get a replay of that that'd be so much fun to see I mean we are so lucky that we get to see these guys play against each other in the last parts of their career as well so it's not going to happen too many more times I don't think they're going to play each other so you know we'll have to wait and see but this could be one of the last times we've seen the Nadal Federer match up so we've got to take advantage of it and hopefully goes five sets now we are going to be watching this match as well as the Djokovic and Batistra a good match in the semi-finals on Friday so make sure you come along to those they're going to be a lot of fun hopefully we get two five set matches I mean let's be honest the the Wimbledon tournament this year has not been besides the upsets on day one and two the tournament's been pretty boring like it hasn't been very exciting the best players in the world have gone through easily they haven't been too many you know mistakes I mean Nadal Djokovic and Federer have not really played four set matches let alone a five set match yet so hopefully we can start as we get to the pointy end of the tournament start getting these epic matches that we want make sure you come along to the live shows they're on Friday don't forget to subscribe to the channel like the video and I'll see you guys in the live shows


Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. I am proud and honored to have on board members from the Blessing Chimanga Ensemble all the way from Zimbabwe and they have been great friends of the school. So in this lesson we are going to have an established keyboard player, music director, multi-instrumentalist, Elisha Zimbeva all the way from Zimbabwe teaching you a lot of very very important chord concepts you need to know. Do remember to stay tuned till the end of the video, you'll learn a lot. Also hit that subscribe button if you haven't already, the bell icon for regular notifications so that you stay tuned whenever we release a new lesson on our YouTube channel. Cheers and enjoy the lesson. Okay, thank you Jason. Hello everyone, my name is Elisha Zimbeva from Zimbabwe. I'm going to show you how we can use extension chords on different songs. So today we are going to use a song called What a Friend We Have in Jesus. So first of all I'm going to play it in a simple way using the chords C major, F major and G major. C major chord goes like this. This is the root position for C major, C, E, G and then F major, F, A, C and then G major, G, G, B and D. Alright, so here we go. Okay, so now we are going to add color and do the extension chords on this song, on this first part of the song. So on C major, we can start with like the first inversion or the second inversion.  Okay, let me just start from the top. And then we back to C with the first inversion. So instead of going to G, we can go to D minor 7th and then we go to G 3 10th. So from D minor 7th to G 3 10th, our left hand is playing G and then to G. And then right hand we have F, A, C and E and then this is D minor 7th and then G 3 10th. So let me just start from the top. And then after that, we go to G minor 7th again and then we go to C 13th over F sharp. And then we go to C sus over F. Okay, so that part. If you want, you can add the minor third on your left, something like this. So right now I just like play the melody with my right hand. Okay, so let me start again from the beginning. And we can add this D minor 7th chord. So let me just slowly. So this is C over E, E minor 7th into our G 3 10th. G minor 7th into our C 13th over F sharp. And then C sus over F, adding a flat 3. So I'll just play the whole thing from beginning up to the end. On the diminished chord, I used the E flat 7 diminished chord. So that's E flat F sharp, A and C. So it's a passing from F to C. It's a passing from F to C slash G. Something like this. And then so it's E flat F sharp, A and C. And then going to C over G. Okay, so already it's sounding gospel with all these chords. Okay, and then when I played the G minor 7th, we have G, B flat, D and F. With the on our right hand and then left hand playing G. And then C, C 13th, we have B flat, D, E and A over F sharp. And then C sus. C sus, we have C, D and G. Playing octave. And then we go back to our E flat diminished. And then this is just like a tenor. Like a fill in. So I have my C here. C on the left as well. And then I'm starting right hand starting on E, left hand starting on G. And then you have our C, holding our C's. Okay, so let me play again from the beginning. And then I can break it down more further. E minor 7th, then into F7. And then C over E. So you can add, after E, you can add this A before D minor 7th. If you want, you can even play D7th to sound more gospel. So G 13th, F, A, B and E on our right hand and left hand just playing G and D. Then G minor 7th, C 13th, C sus and then E flat diminished. Or here I'm just playing the melody using the major chords. But even the versions. You can even play it in like a swing form using this chords. Because it's gospel and jazz. So something like this. This is just how to close some songs. So you have your G diminished with E on your left and then D on your right with G and C. And then you go to C7th, E diminished 7th and then C over G. And then B, this is C sharp 13th to C 13th. So it's just like semitones. From C 7th to C 13th. C sharp 13th, C 13th. So I'll play it one more time. Thank you very much for watching. Please make sure to subscribe to our channel.