Coming up on DTNS, did Apple make a good move with Siri? The cyber attacks you should be worried about, and cyber gendarmes to the rescue. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, August 28th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City, Utah. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about metro lines, subway lines in Los Angeles of all places on Good Day Internet. We were also talking a little bit about Wi-Fi and night mode on the Mac. Get all kinds of cool content when you become a patron and get the full Good Day Internet experience at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start this show with a few tech things you should know. Nikkei reports it has sources who say Google is planning to move some production of the pixel from China to Vietnam. Reportedly a plant in Bac Ninh province that used to make products for Nokia is being converted to pixel production. The report also claims that Google aims to double production to 8 to 10 million smartphones by the end of 2019. Sources tell the Wall Street Journal that Team Telecom multi-agency paneled by the U.S. Justice Department is objecting to the almost complete 8,000-mile undersea Pacific light cable network connecting LA to Hong Kong. Team Telecom reportedly cited fear over possible threats posed by China to the U.S. national security. The project is backed by Google, Facebook, and private Chinese company Dr. Peng Telecom and Media Group. Team Telecom is said to question Dr. Peng's ties to the Chinese government amidst ongoing protests in Hong Kong. The undersea cable's temporary permit for construction expires in September. Telltale Games, which shut down last year, is maybe finding a new life after assets were purchased by LCG Entertainment. The new company will sell some of Telltale's back catalog and says they're going to work on new games and licenses based on Telltale properties like the Wolf Among Us, Batman, and Puzzle Agent. Previous Telltale licenses included Borderlands, Game of Thrones, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Minecraft. Those weren't announced. Telltale's previous plans to release a game based on Stranger Things are off. Netflix owns those rights, so maybe they'll come back up. Who knows? ZTE back in the U.S. market with the Axon 10, which starts at $550, a little less than the 600 euros that it costs in Europe, for a 6.47 inch, 2340 by 1080 ammo lead screen, minimal bezels, in-screen fingerprint sensor, triple rear cameras, and a pair of USB-C headphones and a USB to 3.5 millimeter adapter to make up for the fact that it doesn't have a headphone jack. The Axon 10 is designed to support GSM network, so AT&T and T-Mobile are good, CDMA networks like Verizon and Sprint can't really make use of it. Pre-orders start today direct from either ZTE or third-party retailers like B&H with shipments mid-September. All right, let's start with MIT Technology Reviews. Patrick Howell O'Neill posting a story yesterday titled, The Middle East is already a cyber war hotbed. Things just got worse. Now, sometimes I look at these titles and I get a little, you know, raise my eyebrow and say, well, that's overdoing it. This is one of those cases and I talked about this on my editor's desk that went out to the patrons this morning, where I don't think it is overdoing it. This is definitely worth you paying attention to. Security firms Dregos and Dell SecureWorks have both published reports on a group code named Hexane. The group has similarities to known Iranian groups and seems to align with Iran's political goals, but the reports do not conclude that Hexane is an Iranian back group. They can't tell, but it seems like they might be. Hexane emerged in 2018 and is using spearfishing against human resources and IT departments to gain access to a medium range potential for espionage. So we know they're trying to get into networks. It looks like they want to try to steal stuff. We don't know what else they want to do. It's unknown if the attacks aim to get at operational technology of oil and gas companies, which are the targets. So it could be that they want to go after SCADA systems and stuff like that, but we don't know that. There's a lot of stuff we don't know in these reports, but we do know that oil and gas companies in the Middle East are being targeted by this group and others. Disruptive attacks are rare, though they do happen. O'Neill notes the case of a 2012 attack on Saudi Arabia's Aramco and Qatar's Rosgos that used Shemun malware to delete files and cripple tens of thousands of computers. So Hexane might be after some sort of disruptive behavior like that. O'Neill points out there are many groups of such attackers in and around the Persian Gulf. They are attracted to the oil and gas industry there. And earlier this year, a group called Magnalium was discovered targeting U.S. government, financial and energy companies. The U.S. itself has called for attacks on Iranian weapons systems, as well as believed to be involved in the Stuxnet worm attacks on Iranian nuclear energy development. So this is not a, oh, there's an Iranian group targeting oil and gas industry. This is, there are multiple groups. Some of them look like they might be backed by Iran. There's also efforts that are backed by the United States and other nations. We've got a mess of different groups trying to attack oil and gas industry interest in the Middle East. And whatever you feel about the oil and gas industry, the way the world works right now, that is a major supply of energy for the world. And if one of these groups were to gain an upper hand and cause disruption, that could cause a widespread impact on your life worldwide and it could cause worse things, possibly a war. Today is the day I officially wish that I was in multinational security business when it comes to cybersecurity. Because I just feel like with every one of these stories, both the ones that are maybe a little bit out there and those that are a little closer to the bone like this one, just keep reminding me that there is a huge future for better security. And that means everywhere. And I think that's going to be a growth business within the tech sector for a while. It already has been. I mean, who are we kidding? But I feel like it's about to take on new life. You're starting to see parts of the country or parts of the world that they weren't known for cyber attacks. They weren't known so much as a place. We're a hotbed for this sort of thing. And we're running out of places like that. It's getting to the point where security is paramount across the board all the way down to what I have on my phone. So this is a good reminder of that. This is not a panic and run for the hills, folks. If you want to pay attention to the region of the world where the most significant cybersecurity issues are happening, don't look at the headlines. Look at the Middle East. Oh, look at this back in May. Remember May? May was this year. Elegram canceled its initial coin offering of cryptocurrency called Graham GRAM. However, if Telecom does not launch Graham by October 31st, it has to give up the $1.7 billion it raised in pre-sales of the coin. Now the New York Times reports Telegram plans to deliver the first batches of Graham coins in the next two months. Sources told the New York Times that Telegram will continue, sorry, will create a digital wallet for the Telegram users to store their Graham coins. So canceling an initial coin offering when you clearly have raised $1.7 billion from private investment investors, that's a legitimate reason to be like, we don't actually need an ICO right now. So the fact that if they miss a deadline of October 31st and all the private investors get their money back, they can still revert back to that ICO plan. It doesn't mean that Graham is dead in the water at that point. Well, I think that may be more difficult than it sounds because the pre-sale of $1.7 billion was like venture capital, right? The idea is I'll put some money in here because the stock I'm getting privately will become public stock and I'll be able to sell it for a lot of money, right? The idea here is not stock, it's coins.  So if telegrams- Right, without that valuation based on the investment, it's a harder sell to the public. And telegrams using that $1.7 billion to build the coin. So it's easier said than done to give it back too, I think. I mean, what I'd like is for, I apologize to the world for what I'm about to say. I hope that they back it with gold so that they'll be called golden grams. That's all I had to say there and I apologize. The rumors that this will be tied to gold are not true as far as we know. There will be no golden grams. Way better than my doing it for the gram joke that I made in our preparation show. Yeah, a lot of stories are comparing this to Libra. This is not comparable to Libra at all. This is an in-house currency. It's not tied to basket of currencies. It's not meant to be used widely outside of telegram. It's meant for telegram users to use it. And yeah, it's private like telegram is, but so are most cryptocurrencies. So that's not even unusual itself.  Well, assuming that telegram really, really, really wants to keep that $1.7 billion to build out a lot of infrastructure, and the fact that a source is telling the New York Times, yeah, the companies think that they'll meet that deadline. I'm sure it's in telegram's best interest to do so. Yeah, they don't want to give that money back. I think you're absolutely right about that. Let's talk about smart watches. Got a new one from Fitbit. Fitbit's new Versa 2 smart watch now includes an onboard microphone for that Amazon Assistant you might know and love. Yes, supports her. At 1.4 inches, the successor to the original Versa is 0.05 inches bigger. With not really a smaller bezel, it's quite a bit bigger, at least from the reviews. Although Fitbit also upgraded the screen from an LCD to an AMOLED for deeper blacks and brighter colors, easier to read outside. The Versa 2 also has a single physical button used to have three. Now includes an always-on display, so you can tell the time, even when the watch is asleep, nice. Spotify integration is now included. There's some new sleep insights. It has over five days of battery life, used to be over four. An upcoming smart wake function rounds out some nice new specs from the previous model. The Versa 2 order starts on September 15th. They start at $200, which is the same price as the original Versa. There's also a special edition bundle. You get two watch bands, and you also get 90 days of free Fitbit premium for $230. I would seriously consider this. When I've heard about the screen, these are the two big selling points. The screen and the use of Amazon's assistant support, those are huge for me, because that's kind of what I use my watch for now. That price is a lot lower than what it costs for me to get a new watch from Apple, an Apple Watch. I'm going to have some of the same integrations that I already use for texting and other things, notifications. I like the focus on fitness, and I really like Fitbit. They really actually kind of sold me with this. I thought they were going to come out of the gate with a much higher price for some of these features. To hear that it's still at $200, I would consider this. Maybe even this year, I'd consider it. It seems decent. Yeah. I think it's interesting. Fitbit's not the only company we've seen doing this. Peloton comes to mind as well. The new watch is better in every way as the same price as the old one.  That gives any company really a way to say, okay, hardware upgrades, yes. But now you've got this whole other subscription thing where we can lock you into getting money from you for a longer period of time that might be totally worthwhile for you, depending on your fitness goals. Fitbit premium has customized workouts, depending on what your goals are and more in-depth sleep analysis. And it seems like a pretty cool package if you want to make use of everything available. It does feel like wearables, at least the Versa 2s, have got to the point where the hardware isn't changing much. There's not something revolutionarily and new about the form factor, about the hardware, about the specs. It's all about the features. And we've gotten to that point with phones recently. Feels like we got there much faster with wearables. Maybe that's the nature of wearables, though. Maybe I'm reading too much into that. Well, I think wearables are, I mean, they're really just extensions of the iteration phones have been seeing over the last few years. And I think they got there quicker because we were already sort of there. So now it's about battery and length of battery life and features are dependent on phones more than they are on the watches these days. Like, I just think they got there quicker. But you're right. We're kind of in that space where we've gone as just about as far as we can with these things. But overall, now it's just like fancy looking designs, but not new functions, really. That's true. Well, it's kind of like when everyone, well, not everyone, many of us just sort of put down the digital cameras finally, and we're like, okay, the digital cameras are great in our phone. And it's an all in one thing. And wearables are kind of, it's kind of the opposite where it's like, there's something like the versus two where you're like, Oh, it's everything to watch. It's a fitness tracker. It's everything. But then you have just simple fitness trackers to that are less money and are more acting like feature phones where it's like, Okay, well, it does last, but I don't need it to do all of those things. You just have a lot of choice at this point. Yep. We'll see how it goes. Facebook announced Wednesday that starting in mid September, political advertisers will need to provide more information before their ads will run on the service. Commercial businesses, nonprofits and NGOs will have to number or sorry, provide their tax ID number. Government and military will have to have a domain name and an email address that ends in dot gov or m i l for military and political action committees and parties will have to give their federal election commission identification numbers. Seems like stuff they should have done in the first place. Anyway, as that run under this program will include an I button that can be clicked to verify who paid for the ad. Smaller ad buyers will have to submit name, address, email and phone number for their organization, which Facebook will verify without this information, ad buys will not be able to sorry, will not be able to use an organization's name. So as a user, you should look to see if that button or disclaimer is there with an organizational name exists. And if you have that, then you got to provide it if you want people to see your political ad. I again, I feel like this should have already happened. I don't know why just Well, because there you don't need to do this for advertising in other arenas. This is Facebook going the extra yard to say, you know what, we want 100% verify that, you know, you are who you say you are, and you can't have a disclaimer that says paid for by the Republicans who love dogs, unless you are literally registered as a political action committee of the Republicans who love dogs. If somebody submitted an ad that said, we make a widget and this widget will, you'll never have another back itch ever because our widget fixes that here's the ad for it. They want to have some kind of verification. No, no, they don't. I mean, maybe they want They should is what I'm saying. You, you don't advertisers don't want that they want to be able to just buy the ad and put whatever they want on and there's certain speech issues around that. Yeah, that's why I bought a terrible dog bed. Right. So, you know, the First Amendment plays in here, but political speech has different rules in the courts have ruled that you can be a little stricter with it. So they can put a few more breaks in the way. It's a complex issue. I'm sure what I said already is not technically true. And there's some political lawyer out there going, well, Tom, that's not exactly right because this is really complex stuff when it comes to the rules around politics. But the upshot of this is not Facebook finally deciding to figure out who's spending money on political ads. It's Facebook saying we want to make it clear who paid for the ads. And now we're going to get even more documentation about that.  But because we're all very busy, having something like what Facebook has built for a political ad when you're scrolling quickly and maybe doing a bunch of other things is really helpful. And if something is legitimate and doesn't have that, you go, well, why not? Because Facebook being the police, right? If I buy ad time and I say something that's not true, you don't sue the television company that I bought the ad time from you sue me and say you shouldn't have been saying that Facebook stepping in and going, you know what, we're just not going to wait for that to happen anymore. A French team of cyber gendarmes has destroyed a virus that infected more than 850,000 computers worldwide. Avast, the virus antivirus makers security company alerted France's C3N Center last spring of a possible private server that was sending a virus called Retadoupe to Windows machines in 100 countries, mainly in Central and South America. The virus created a botnet used to control computers without the owner's awareness. That's usually the way botnets work. The botnet would mine cryptocurrency Monero in most cases, conduct ransomware operations, even steal data from hospitals and patients in Israel. C3N chief Jean Dominique Nollay told France into radio the team located the command server and made a replica server that would render the virus inactive. Got some cooperation from the United States FBI to help block traffic and redirect virus activity to that replica server. This is a big botnet at 850,000, may not be the biggest effort, but it's a big one. So taking it down avoids a lot of harm that it could have done potentially. And it's a credit to France's C3N Center. We see these kind of botnets come down from time to time. But in the past, it's been Microsoft and the FBI shutting down dark bot in December 2015, or the FBI and the Spanish police cooperating for that huge botnet arrest in April 2017. A few other countries were involved in that as well. Of course, Marcus Hutchins, a.k.a. Malware Tech led an effort to stop WannaCry in August 2017 by registering a domain name. So this is not unprecedented, but it's really interesting to see more than the usual suspects involved in taking this down. It's not just a security company or the US FBI. Francis C3N showing some skills here. Do people who are part of a botnet ever get notified? This is such a weird side question. They often do. Yeah. Okay. So if I look at a computer that I've not kept up to date and is totally exposed and is a zombie in this botnet thing, I might get told? You might. It depends. It's different every time. And I don't know in this case if this server, they are leaving the server up for a while so that if someone turns on a Windows machine that hasn't been on for a while, that was infected, it'll be able to fix it. But yeah, I know you're, you're personalizing it and saying, wait a minute, could my machine have been part of this? Because you always hear about these huge botnets. I'm like, am I ever been one of those and not known it? Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like those notices you get in the mail sometimes like that you could be part of a class action lawsuit and will be awarded $2.50 cents. If they were actually part of it. I haven't been in Darkbot where the FBI did push a notification, but sometimes they don't want to do that because that's more intrusive than they feel comfortable being. It's more passive to just replace the server. And then that fixes it. Yeah. To get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right. Back on August 1st, if you recall, in the parade of revelations that Voice Assistants were recording you, shocking, and then in some cases, the companies were using some of those recordings to review, Apple suspended the review of its less than 0.2% of Siri Voice recordings by contracted companies. Usually it's a company that they contracted to review these things in order to improve the virtual assistant. So Apple since August 1st has not been doing that. Apple has now announced it will reinstate reviews later this autumn. They're not reinstating them now. They're reinstating them later this autumn when a software update comes out. And that software update will leave audio recordings unavailable for Apple to review by default. So it's opt in if you want your recordings to contribute to the improvement of Siri. Well done, Apple. This is the right way to do it. I don't have to opt out. I can opt in. So they're going to leave them off, but they're going to add a software update that will allow you to go, you know what? I don't mind. I would like to contribute my voice recordings potentially to this. And there will definitely be a prompt.  And even if you opt in, it doesn't mean your voice recordings will be reviewed. 0.2% were used. I don't know that percentage might go up, but they're not going to review every single one. They don't have that many people. So it doesn't even automatically mean they're going to hear what you said, but you have control over it. That's good. Apple also announced that from now on, only Apple employees will review the recordings. So this will not be a contracted out behavior anymore. Apple's going to say only our full-time employees only are, well, maybe they're part-time employees, but our employees will review the recordings and they will delete ones or they will make an effort to delete ones anyway that they determined were inadvertent. Now, one of these things that I know this bugged Marco Armin a little bit, computer-generated transcripts of what you say will continue to be used to improve Siri. So when you talk to Siri, Siri turns your voice into text. That text is stored and that stored text will continue to be reviewed to see how well Siri did with it. But that's not your voice. That's not the sounds in the room. It's the same thing that you're seeing on your screen when you're voice to... Yeah, I guess maybe there might be some personal information in there, but I'm already sharing my email with this device. I'm already sharing so much personal information with this device. I guess maybe I don't want that to be reviewed and I would like to opt out of that if Apple wanted to be perfect. Which would mean Siri would have to be some sort of, I don't know, a list of local common questions and commands where it wouldn't be completely useless, but if you really wanted to, you could lock it down. The perfect way to do all of these voice assistants would be to say the model is trained and then we deploy it onto your phone and then what you say to it never leaves your phone. But right now it's not possible to do that well on device. Someday it will be. I worry or I don't worry. I wonder if they've already got more than they could expect to get out of learning enough. In other words, I'm actually where this is going to hurt Siri. I don't think Siri will benefit from less... I might say how would you tell? There's no way to know exactly, right? So I feel like on one hand I'm like, well then Apple, I like that you're letting me opt in. I'm always asking for this from everybody. I want to opt in, not opt out. And now that they've done it, I'm like, oh yeah, but what did we lose for that? I think about that for a minute. We've lost a lot of people who aren't going to bother to figure that out or don't know and never will or just skip through the prompt and don't even know what it asked. I'm actually less concerned about the number and more concerned about the selection bias. So suddenly now you're introducing a selection bias that says you're going to be trained on voice from people willing to be heard. Maybe that may, I don't know, but that may be people who make fewer mistakes because they know Apple's listening. And that's a great question. I don't know. I'm going to be the first to turn it on because I would like the service to get better and I don't really care what it hears. But now, I don't know. I don't know. It's a weird thing because I want it both ways and that you can't. It's the kind of thing you can't have both ways. I do care what Apple gets from me, but I will also opt into this because Siri is horrible, let's be honest. And I use Siri more and more because for a while I was just like, eh, I just, I don't know. I'll go about it the other way. The Google Assistant is so heads and shoulders better about understanding what I'm saying, almost 100% accuracy and Siri is always wrong. But because I have a car that supports CarPlay now, I actually do use Siri quite a bit when I'm, when I'm in transit and I kind of, it's so convenient for lots of reasons that I'm like, just get better, make my life better. So I think Apple's doing a good thing here. I think the only thing I ever ask Siri for is to set the timer for two minutes. I don't think I've ever asked him for anything else lately because I just assume he's going to show me web results pretty much every time. I do. I don't do anything that would give the web results, but I have gotten used to doing timers. Like you said, alarms, set a reminder. I can do calendar stuff. What time is it? I do use it for a reminder. That's a good point. A few things like that. But again, at this point, there's nothing that it does that a Versa two won't do for me come this fall. So I feel like maybe I'm less interested in Siri as time goes on, but you know, whatever. I mean, at this point, maybe, maybe they're feeling that way too. And we're looking at a next generation voice assistant out of Apple at some point. I think Siri will get better. And it would, despite whether the training set of data is impacted or not, we'll say that. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit, whether or not you Siri, you are welcome. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We're also on Facebook, Facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News show. Let's check out the mailbag. Yeah, this one came in from Ryan. And this actually is in reference to last Friday's show. Shannon Morse was our guest. Ryan says, you and Shannon, we're talking DoorDash and had a little confusion over the practice of adding a tip before the service has been rendered. At a business conference this summer, I had the pleasure of spending a lot of time chatting with international sales coaches who gave me some insights as to the origin of the word tips. Now this is coming from the coach that talked to Ryan, who said the word actually started as an acronym, T-I-P-S, which stands for to ensure proper service, meaning it was an extra value given to the service provider before service was rendered to incentivize them to provide service above and beyond what might be expected at the normal purchase price. Ryan says to me, this still seems like a practice that has been used alongside a fair wage system rather than the current method used in restaurants of forcing the service payroll onto the customer. Either way, after hearing your conversation about it today, I thought it was an interesting anecdote. Yeah. I mean, I was like, that's what tips I can be pedantic and say like, I don't know that tips originally meant that it might be a background, but that's a good day internet topic. The point Ryan's trying to make is, yeah, your tip is meant to reward someone for good service. And with DoorDash, I don't think you guys were confused. You were just saying, oh, that is interesting that you can put your tip up front. But I know Uber Eats works this way. I think DoorDash does too. You can change it later. You can say, go ahead and add 20%.  They were bad. But if you don't do anything after a certain period of time after delivery, it automatically goes in. So it's a way to say like, I don't want to forget to tip them. Let me just do that now. Sure. Yeah. Well, we weren't confused, but we did both agree it was a little wonky based on, I think Ryan's point, which is a tip is sort of the whole thing originated to work a certain way. And we're kind of living in a new world now. So with the understanding that everyone wants the delivery folks to be getting their fair share, yeah, it's a concession to make. Thanks to everybody who read into our mailbag. And thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today, Scott. What's new in your world? Oh, whole bunch of stuff. Go over and check it out at frogpants.com. Lots of new shows and stuff happening. A couple of reworks of a few things. And there's always something to catch. I got more shows today even. So if you're interested in a lot of podcastory and you're looking for a lot of diverse, nerdy type of topics, check it out. It's over at frogpants.com. You can also find me as usual on Twitter at Scott Johnson. Our entire operation here is just us. I'm surprised sometimes how I get people like, well, some interns probably going to read this or like, can your operation? It's like, man, our operation is me, Sarah, Roger most days. And then we have Scott on Wednesdays and Patrick Beja on Tuesdays and Shannon comes in. But this is an independent organization. We're doing our best to help you be the smarter person about technology in the room. And the way we can do that best is to remain independent of any corporate master or big funder. So we take small donations from people who want to support the show and we give them things in return, like my editor's desk today or Roger's column that's going to come out tomorrow. That's patreon.com slash DTNS. We use that to stay independent. So if you want to support us as an independent voice in the technology world, please go check it out. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Here, here. Our email address is feedback at daily tech news show.com. We love hearing from you. So keep them coming. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4 30pm Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show.com slash live tomorrow with Nicole Lee as our guest talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com.


Television news is like radio. You've got to listen to whatever is being streamed to you. There's no personalization There's no customization. There's a stream coming to you. You can watch it and if you don't like it, you change the channel That's TV news and radio Digital video news today is like cassettes and CDs. You can find the story that you want But you've got to go searching for it and the user experience is not correct And by the way, if you're saying algorithms are going to give it to you, even that's not perfect because the algorithms are being guided by your click behavior Not some other details which I'm sure we can discuss later Shantanu, but this is a broad thought process Now music found an answer, right? Music found the answer through Spotify and Apple Music and others such formats And what fundamentally is it that those formats are doing? Why is music solved a problem? It's because what is Spotify does it? It curates the 20-30 million songs out there Just as in the digital world today you have 20-30 million stories out there, all of them are short phone It curates it for you in a manner that is consumable Number one, it curates it by algorithms, so AI That's why it says for you, music for you This is the playlist that you will like and customizing this and putting it forward for you Number two, it does it through expert curation Expert curation means these are the best 20 songs in the last week Top 70 songs of the 1970s, 30 best Bhangra songs to listen etc etc That's number two Number three, it allows people to build their own playlists and share them That in a sense is where there comes Armadhani curation, where it's thrown open to everybody That's the Spotify solution And in essence what we have tried to build with editorgy for the last four years or five years Was to find a better phase to Spotify or read your news and information So that essentially is what it is about It is about how you curate the plot of information in the stories And take them into a digestible packet where people do observe


Live from Munich, Germany. It's theCUBE, covering IBM FastTrack Your Data. Brought to you by IBM. Welcome everybody to Munich, Germany. This is FastTrack Your Data, but I brought to you by IBM and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host Jim Kabilis. Rob Thomas is here, he's the general manager of IBM Analytics and longtime CUBE guest. Good to see you again, Rob. Dave, great to see you. Thanks for being here. You're welcome, thanks for having us. So we were, we talked, we missed each other last week at the Hortonworks DataWorks Summit. You came on theCUBE. You guys had a big announcement there. You're sort of getting out of doing a Hadoop distribution. Right, we, theCUBE gave up our Hadoop distribution several years ago, so that's good that you joined us. But talk, tongue in cheek. Talk about what's going on with Hortonworks. You guys are now going to be partnering with them for, to essentially replace big insights. You're going to continue to service those customers. But it's more than that. What's that announcement all about? We're really excited about that announcement, that relationship, just to kind of recap for those that didn't see it last week. We are making a huge partnership with Hortonworks where we are bringing data science and machine learning to the Hadoop community. So IBM will be adopting HDP as our distribution and that's what we will drive into the market from a Hadoop perspective. Hortonworks is adopting IBM data science experience and IBM machine learning to be a core part of their Hadoop platform. And I'd say this is a recognition. One is companies should do what they do best. We think we're great at data science and machine learning. Hortonworks is the best at Hadoop. Combine those two things. It would be great for clients. And we also talked about extending that to things like BigSQL, where they're partnering with us on BigSQL around modernizing data environments. And then third, which relates a little bit to what we're here in Munich talking about is governance, where we're partnering closely with them around unified governance, Apache Atlas, advancing Atlas in the enterprise. And so it's a lot of dimensions to the relationship, but I could tell you since I was on theCUBE a week ago with Rob Bearden, the client response has been amazing. Rob and I have done a number of client visits together and clients see the value of unlocking insights in their Hadoop data, and they love this, which is great.  You kind of got to be relevant. You want to be part of the community. And, you know, a number of folks did that, but it's really sort of best left to a few guys who really want to do that and Apache open source is really, I think, the way to go there. Let's talk about Munich. You guys chose this venue. There's a lot of talk about GDPR. You've got some announcements around unified governance, but why Munich? So there's something interesting that I see happening in the market. So first of all, you look at the last five years. There's only 10 companies in the world that have outperformed the S&P 500 in each of those five years. And we started digging into who those companies are and what they do. They are all applying data science and machine learning at scale to drive their business. And so something's happening in the market. That's what leaders are doing. And I look at what's happening in Europe and I say, I don't see the European market being that aggressive yet around data science, machine learning, how you apply data for competitive advantage. So we wanted to come do this in Munich and it's a bit of a wake up call almost to say, hey, this is what's happening. We want to encourage clients across Europe to think about how do they start to do something now? Yeah, of course, GDPR is also a hook of the European Union and you guys have made some talk about that. You got some key notes today and some breakout sessions that are discussing that. But talk about the two announcements that you guys made. There's one on DB2, there's another one around unified governance, what do those mean for customers? Yeah, sure. So first of all, on GDPR, it's interesting to me, it's kind of the inverse of Y2K, which is there's very little hype, but there's huge ramifications. And Y2K was kind of the opposite. Look, it's coming, May 2018, clients have to be GDPR compliant and there's a misconception in the market that that only impacts companies in Europe. It actually impacts any company that does any type of business in Europe. So it impacts everybody. So we are announcing a platform for unified governance that makes sure clients are GDPR compliant. We've integrated software technology across analytics, IBM security, some of the assets from the promontory acquisition that IBM did last year. And we are delivering the only platform for unified governance. And that's what clients need to be GDPR compliant. The second piece is data has to become a lot simpler. As you think about my comment, who's leading the market today? Data's hard and so we're trying to make data dramatically simpler. And so for example, with DB2 what we're announcing is you can download and get started using DB2 in 15 minutes or less. And anybody can do it. Even you can do it, Dave, which is amazing. For the first time ever, you can still do it. We'll test that problem. Let's go test it. I would love to see you do it because I guarantee you can. Even my son can do it. I had my son do it this weekend before I came here because I wanted to see how simple it was. So that announcement is really about bringing or introducing a new era of simplicity to data and analytics. We call it download and go. We started with SPSS. We did that back in March. Now we're bringing download and go to DB2 and to our governance catalog. So the idea is make data really simple for enterprises. You had a community edition previous to this, correct? We did, but it wasn't this easy. Not anybody could do it. And I want to make it so anybody can do it. Is simplicity the only, greater simplicity the only differentiator of the latest edition? Or I believe you have Kubernetes support now with this new edition. Can you describe what that involves? Yeah, sure. So there's two main things that are new functionally-wise, Jim, to your point. So one is, look, we're big supporters of Kubernetes. And as we are helping clients build out private clouds, the best answer for that, in our mind, is Kubernetes. And so when we released data science experience for private cloud earlier this quarter, that was on Kubernetes, extending that now to other parts of the portfolio. The other thing we're doing with DB2 is we're extending JSON support for DB2. So think of it as, if you're working in a relational environment, now just through SQL, you can integrate with non-relational environments, JSON, documents, any type of no-SQL environment. So we're finally bringing to fruition this idea of a data fabric, which is I can access all my data from a single interface, and that's pretty powerful for clients. Yeah, more cloud-native development. Rob, I wonder if you can, we can go back to the machine learning, one of the core focuses of this particular event and the announcements you're making. Back in the fall, IBM made an announcement of Watson Machine Learning for IBM Cloud at World of Watson. In February, you made an announcement of IBM Machine Learning for the Z platform. What are the machine learning announcements at this particular event, and can you sort of connect the dots in terms of where you're going, in terms of what sort of innovations are you driving into your machine learning portfolio going forward? I have a fundamental belief that machine learning is best when it's brought to the data. So we started with, like you said, Watson Machine Learning on IBM Cloud, and then we said, well, what's the next big corpus of data in the world? That's an easy answer. It's the mainframe. That's where all the world's transactional data sits. So we did that. Last week, with the Hortonworks announcement, we said we're bringing machine learning to Hadoop. So we kind of covered all the landscape of where data is. Now, the next step is about how do we bring a community into this? And the way that you do that is we don't dictate a language. We don't dictate a framework. So if you wanna work with IBM on machine learning or in data science experience, you choose your language. Python, great. Scala, R, Java, you pick whatever language you want. You pick whatever machine learning framework you want. We're not trying to dictate that because there's different preferences in the market. So what we're really talking about here this week in Munich is this idea of an open platform for data science and machine learning. And we think that is going to bring a lot of people to the table. And with open platform in mind, one thing to me that's conspicuously missing from the announcement today, and correct me if I'm wrong, is any indication that you're bringing support for the deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow into this overall machine learning environment? Am I wrong? I know you have PowerAI. Is there a piece of PowerAI in these announcements today? So stay tuned on that. It takes some time to do that right, and we are doing that. But we want to optimize so that you can do machine learning with GPU acceleration on PowerAI. So stay tuned on that one. But we are supporting multiple frameworks. So if you want to use TensorFlow, that's great. If you want to use CAFE, that's great. If you want to use Thaendo, that's great. That is our approach is we're going to allow you to decide what's the best framework for you. So as you look forward, maybe it's a question for you, Jim, but Rob, I'd love you to chime in. What does that mean for businesses? I mean, is it just more automation, you know, more capabilities as you evolve that timeline without divulging any sort of secrets? What do you think, Jim? What do I think you're doing? When you ask about deep learning, like, okay, that's, I don't see that. Rob says, okay, stay tuned. What does it mean for a business? If I'm planning my roadmap, what does that mean for me in terms of how I should think about the capabilities going forward? Yeah, well, what it means for a business, first of all, is what they're using deep learning for is doing things like video analytics and speech analytics and more of the challenges involving convolutional neural networks to do pattern recognition on complex data objects for things like connected cars and so forth. Those are the kind of things that can be done with deep learning. Okay. And so Rob, you're talking about here in Europe how the uptake in some of the sort of data orientation has been a little bit slower. So I presume from your standpoint, you don't want to over rotate to some of these things. But what do you think? I mean, it sounds like there is a difference between certainly Europe and those top 10 companies in the S&P 500. What's the barrier? Is it just an understanding of how to take advantage of data? Is it cultural? What's your sense of this? So to some extent, data science is easy, data culture is really hard. And so I do think that culture is a big piece of it. And the reason we're kind of starting with the focus on machine learning, simplistic view, machine learning is a general purpose framework. And so it invites a lot of experimentation, a lot of engagement. We're trying to make it easier for people to onboard. As you get to things like deep learning as Jim's describing, that's where the market's going. There's no question. Those tend to be very domain specific, vertical type use cases. And to some extent, what I see clients struggle with, they say, well, I don't know what my use case is. So we're saying, look, okay, start with the basics, a general purpose framework, do some tasks, do some iteration, do some experiments. And once you find out what's hunting and what's working, then you can go to a deep learning type approach. And so I think you'll see an evolution towards that over time. It's not either or. It's more of a question of sequencing. One of the things we've talked to you about in theCUBE and the past you and others is that IBM obviously is a big services business. This big data is complicated, great for services, but one of the challenges that IBM and other companies have had is how do you take that service expertise, codify it into software and then scale it at large volumes and make it, you know, adoptable. I thought the Watson data platform announcement last fall, at the time you called the data works and then so the name evolved, was really a strong attempt to do that, to package a lot of expertise that you guys had developed over the years, maybe even some different software modules, but bring them together in a scalable software package. So is that the right interpretation? How's that going? What's the uptake been like? So it's going incredibly well. What's interesting to me is what everybody remembers from that announcement is the Watson data platform, which is a decomposable framework for doing these types of use cases on the IBM cloud. But there was another piece of that announcement that is just as critical, which was we introduced something called the data first method. And that is the recipe book to say to a client, so given where you are, how do you get to this future on the cloud? And that's the part that people clients struggle with is how do I get from step to step? So with data first we said, look, there's different approaches to this. You can start with governance, you can start with data science, you can start with data management, you can start with visualization, there's different entry points, you figure out the right one for you and then we help clients through that. And we've made data first method available to all of our business partners, so they can go do that. We work closely with our own consulting business on that, GBS, but that to me is actually the thing from that event that has had, I'd say the biggest impact in the market, is just helping clients map out an approach, a methodology to getting on this journey. So that was a catalyst, so it's not a sequential process. You can start, you can enter, I think you said, wherever you want, and then pick up the other pieces from a maturity model standpoint. Exactly, because everybody is at a different place in their own life cycle, and so we wanted to make that flexible. I have a question about the clients, customers use of Watson data platform in a DevOps context, so are more of your customers looking to use Watson data platform to automate more of the stages in the machine learning development and training and deployment pipeline? IBM, do you see yourselves taking the platform and evolving it into a more full-fledged, automated data science release pipelining tool, or am I misunderstanding your strategy? No, I think you got to write it. I would expand a little bit. So one is it's a very flexible way to manage data. When you look at the Watson data platform, we've got relational stores, we've got column stores, we've got in-memory stores, we've got the whole suite of open source databases under the compose, IO, umbrella, we've got cloud, so we delivered a very flexible data layer. Now, in terms of how you apply data science, we say, again, choose your model, choose your language, choose your framework, that's up to you, and we allow clients, many clients start by building models on their private cloud, then we say you can deploy those into the Watson data platform, so therefore then they're running on the data that you have as part of that data fabric. So we're continuing to deliver a very fluid data layer, which then you can apply data science, apply machine learning there, and there's a lot of data moving into the Watson data platform because clients see that flexibility. All right, Rob, we're out of time, but I want to kind of set up the day, we're doing cube interviews all morning here, and then we cut over to the main tent. You can get all this on ibmgo.com, you'll see the schedule. Rob, you've got, you're kicking off a session, we've got Hillary Mason, we've got a breakout session on GDPR, maybe set up the main tent for us. Yeah, main tent's going to be exciting. We're going to debunk a lot of misconceptions about data and about what's happening. Mark Altshuler's got a great segment on what he calls the depth of correlations. So we've got some pretty engaging stuff. Hillary's got a great piece that she was talking to me about this morning. It's going to be interesting. We think it's going to provoke some thought and ultimately provoke action, and that's the intent of this week. Excellent, well, Rob, thanks again for coming on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure to see you. Thanks guys, great to see you. You're welcome, all right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Munich. Fast-track your data, right back.


I'm Suvi, and today we're going to learn how to customize your class settings. We have tons of options available to customize how your Seasaw class works to make it perfect for your classroom. To manage your class settings, tap on the wrench icon in the top right corner. In this class settings menu, you can adjust your class settings, add folders, add students, and approve families once you've invited them. We have lots of useful options in this menu, so check here if you're looking for ways to customize your Seasaw class.  The students sign in mode is the first thing we'll look at today. This is where you decide how your students will sign in to Seasaw. Seasaw defaults to share device sign in mode. This mode is great for shared devices. Students sign in by scanning your special class QR code or typing in a text code. Then they choose their name from the class list every time they add a new post. No need to sign in and out as devices are passed around. If you have one-to-one devices, you can switch to individual sign in mode. With individual student sign in mode, students sign in using a QR code or a text code and select their name once from the class list. They stay signed in as this student for up to a year and can only add items to their specific journal. If you want students to use their email and password or Google account to sign in to Seasaw, you can choose the email Google option. You can switch how students sign in if needed. Another setting to check out is students can see each other's work. If you want students to be able to see other students' journals in your class in addition to their own journal and work that you as the teacher post to the class, keep this setting on. If you don't want students to be able to see other students' journals, turn this off. Keep in mind that if you have this off and you're using class code shared device sign in, students will only be able to add items, not view any journal content because the app doesn't know whose journal to show. You can also decide if you want your students to be able to like or comment on journal entries. Comments are a great way to encourage collaboration and constructive peer feedback in your class. Enable or disable student likes and comments here. By default, new student comments require your approval. If you want students to be able to edit their items, turn enable item editing on. Editing editing on also enables the copy and edit option, which is great for assignments. Let's demonstrate what this looks like. With the enable item editing option on, students will be able to tap on the three dots, choose the copy and edit option, and then edit and adjust the post as necessary. They'll also be able to then post that to their journal. And there is the item that has been edited. Let's say you want to edit a student name or profile icon or the family members who are connected to that student's journal. You can do that by tapping the wrench, choosing manage students, picking the student and editing these options. Let's go back. Tap the back arrow and the back arrow again. You'll see there are tons of options for customizing your class in the exact way that works best for you. You're creating folders, inviting families, creating a CESA blog, and using skills view to track and view progress of skills and standards. We won't go into all these options now, but they're there for you when you're ready. As you get to know CESA in your class, you can change any of these settings at any time and make sure that CESA works well for your classroom. The next step is introducing CESA to your students. Check out our awesome activities for introducing CESA to your students at web.cesa.me slash teacher dash resources. If you have any questions, visit help.cesa.me or tweet at CESA.


Hey, Isaac. Hey, man. How was your weekend? Oh. I guess I'll start with Friday, so I left the office, and then the elevator key card wasn't working this time, so I actually talked to the lobby guy, and then he sent me down. I realized I didn't have my keys, so I had to come back and I talked to the lobby guy again, and he was not happy this time, and then I just... It was pretty good, dude. Thanks for asking. No problem.


What's up everybody, Jason here for jazbeescasebrake.com. We're doing a quick little fantasy sports breaks. This is a multi-sport high-end five box case break. Random team's number one. So we've done a lot of different products with fantasy sports before, we liked their stuff. This one is a multi-sport high-end guys, where each box gets you one guaranteed hit and two random packs. Now everybody gets a random team from the NMLB, NFL, and NBA. I think this was just a typo from a previous, you know, but remember, random team from the MLB, NFL, and NBA. Falcons, commanders, NHL is comboed, and then Jets, Texans, and soccer comboed. All comboed to make 30 teams. Now again guys, you get one hit plus two packs, so it could be packs of anything. So we'll open up those packs and distribute the hits out accordingly. I know in previous ones there sometimes was like WWE. If that was the case, we'll leave those sealed and we'll just randomize it to the group and someone wins the WWE packs or something like that, but looks like NHL could be in here and also soccer, so I think that's probably why we had a little combo in there. So, we're gonna set it up like this. So one, she would be MLB, one she would be NFL, and then one she will be NBA. So we're gonna roll the dice to three and a four, seven times. Randomize the list of names. One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. Matt L, down to Matt L. Now the list is gonna be the same for all three. We're not gonna randomize it three different times. All right, but you will get a random team from each league though. Now we're gonna go seven times on the MLB. One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. Seven, what's the seven? Braves, down to the Cardinals. We'll leave that there and we'll go through them again. I'll give you some time to look. Let's just quickly do the randomizes now. Now let's go to the NFL. One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. Seven times, seven, seven. Patrons, down to the Colts. All right, and then last one here will be NBA. One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. Seven times, Suns, down to the Bulls. Boom. All right, so let's go back. We'll be here. Let's make this a little bit bigger. And let's go back to the first sheet. And again, we'll show you guys your hits or your teams really quickly. I'm not gonna go through every single one cause that's like calling on 90 different teams and names. But the way it looks like this, the way it came out for Matt Owl with the Braves all the way down to the Cardinals, Matt Owl. I'm gonna alphabetize it, make it look nice. And I'll give you guys, obviously like a quick minute to look at your teams right there. Now let's switch it and let's show you guys your next list here. So Matt Owl from the Patriots, down to the Colts. Let's alphabetize it here, make it look pretty. Same thing here. Now the customers that got the combo. So Michael P, you have the Jets Texan Soccer. And then the AA Ron got the Falcons Commanders NHL. And let's show you guys this next one here. So again, Sun's down to the Bulls. And I'll quickly show you guys what you have there. Let me go print out the sheets. Look at all your teams that one offered. So stick to what you got guys.  Teams hit and we'll keep track of it there. All right, here we go guys. So again, there's everybody there for the MLB, the NFL, and the NBA. That is true. That is true actually. No cell sheet to trade. True that, but yeah, I mean, that's what we'll find out. But either way, it's kind of tough to trade anyways. Because honestly, ain't nobody gonna trade any of the cell sheet teams anyways. So it don't really matter. Nobody really trades on multi-sport breaks. It's really tough. All right, looks like we've got a top series two pack and a UFC prison. So there you go. So that's what I was meant like, I think the combo teams was only Falcons Commanders NHL and then Jets Texan Soccer. So those MMA patch or WWE patch we'll just ship them to the customer shield whoever wins it. So I won't open this one, okay? And I think the reason why Nick probably, I mean, there must be a cell sheet out there obviously because they wouldn't be selling this without just blank, but I think Nick just has the photo only of the Fatty Sports logo. But I'm pretty sure we go look out for it. I'm pretty sure there's a cell sheet out there somewhere, but like I said, I think there might be like some soccer cards in here that they're chasing and some NHL cards. So that's probably why. But I remember last product too, there was like some WWE and prison packs. So again, we're going to keep those sealed. We'll give them away to one customer at the end of the break. And there we go. Basically, Fatty Sports basically likes to do where they give away either one card, two or three cards depending on the level of their tears like hip rake. They give you two sealed repack cards so it can be from any sport, any product. And then one card for this one since it's supposed to be a little higher end. So we're only going to rep the sports that we have actually. Tropical Field with Maryfield, that is number to 2023. Randy Johnson, legends of the game. Juan Soto, one out of 10. That is a three color patch and autograph from Dynasty, 2019 second year of Juan Soto. And it's going to go to the Washington Nationals, which is James. Congrats, buddy. Sweet hit. Like I said, most of our customers here have ripped fantasy sports before and previous years that we've had, but I don't think I've ever ripped the high end because usually the ones I ripped I actually have two or three cards. So this one technically is a little bit more higher end per box. Let's check it out. Ooh, this one might be a greater card, baby. Made the box a little bit bigger. Select draft picks and optic. Let's go with the optic basketball. Denny Odija, nothing super crazy there. I guess we could show the card. 1993 SP, foil Derek Jeter. That is a PSA seven. I don't even think a seven is that bad. PSA 10s in this are ridiculously hard to hit. And that is another one there for the MLB Chad B with the Yankees. Very nice. Solid. Let's go with the pack right here. Got a Josh Allen, number to 10. Four out of 10. That's gonna go to the Buffalo Bills. Gold. Got to add a 149 Emmett Smith. Again, call it drools, of course, do it for the Cowboys most of his career. And then we have a Andrea. Oh, Sivas. We'll have to take a look and see who that goes to. Nice. Let's look at this two really quick. Looks like he's a water shoe for the Bengals. Drafted in the sixth round. So Bengals with that one. Cincinnati Bengals. Cincinnati Bengals. That's Zach. All right, halfway through guys. Yeah, it's a little something different. I mean, like I said, we've been breaking this product for years now. It's been a little bit since we broke some fantasy sports, but we've always kind of liked it. It's a fun break. Like I said, I think this is the first time at least I'm doing like the higher end one. But usually when we do fantasy sports, I've been noticing like we always had at least like two or three cards. This one's only giving you one, so definitely a lot better. Quality of the card probably. But still obviously hit or miss though. All right, we got Prism baseball. Looks like a hobby pack. Jack Morris for Detroit. Silver Prism PSA 10. Solid. Minnesota Timber was Michael P.  Little J-Dub. Nice. Next one. Way cheaper product. Spotless Logan, of course. That Edwards is around $700. That's crazy. I mean, the Silver Prisms usually are really tough to grade. So, wow, the Jews have gone down a lot then. Those should throw out a lot more expensive. All right, Bowman. Eddie Rutchman. All right, then behind the Bowman U Chrome is a Joe Burr. What about a rookie Joe Burrow? Nice. That is a gold out of 79, 20 out of 79. That's on plate autograph as well. Sheesh, that's actually, this is a good product right here. Zach with the Bengals. Very, very nice. Okay guys, so again, obviously high risk because there's only gonna be one card in every box. That obviously is the big chaser, big hit, but I mean, not a bad chance to potentially get something nice. It looks like we have another graded card. Looks like SGC grade at this time. Let's go with the baseball stars and stripes. We have a young Chuang Wang, and then we have a Silhouettes Collegiate National Team Hunter Elliott. And then we got a Maui Ahuna, there's that. So, I'm gonna look up a couple of these here because I don't know, some of these guys might not even be in the MLB, to be honest. So, we'll have to take a look at these, but if they're not, I'm gonna ratomize the names right now, and one person will win all the non-MLB cards, like these ones here, basically. Because sometimes that could be the case. These guys are not even in MLB. Now, of course, if they've been drafted and they're affiliated with a team, then yeah, they go to the team, but if they're not, then we're gonna give those away. Last one is a Kaltrasque Crossover RPA from National Treasures Football, one, two, three, four-color patch out of 99, graded at SCC 9510, 10-babe bucks. Going to Michael P. All right, well, there you go. Plus, the Mosaic Hobby Pack, let's see what's in here. Trilling Green Rookie, Josh Giddy. I think it was 700, Mike, I thought you were saying that Burl 625, I mean, that alone right there is already well over a thousand bucks in value. Throwin' the Jeter in there at 160, you know. Trask probably could have been at around the $100 range at one point, maybe a little bit more. I mean, not too shabby for like the one cards. And obviously, you still get the packs in there you can potentially chase with a solo. So again, I don't think a bad product at all. Obviously, it's gonna be really tough to hit, but pretty solid. So there you go, guys. So let me quickly just look at a couple of these guys. I just wanna make sure that they're, some of them are not even in the MLB or associated, then we're not gonna, we're just gonna get them away. Everyone is waiting. Yeah, we're gonna finish. Yeah, this guy's not in the MLB. Let's look at the puncher earlier. Looks like this guy's in college. Service for it. It's one of the first things. What happened to Hunter Elliot? Yeah, it looks like not affiliated either. So yeah, let's just, I'll have the shipping team look up for the rest of the other cards here. But like I said, some of them could be, some of them can't and might not be, but they'll take a look at them. But I'll randomize a name just in case. That is the case. All right, so there you go, guys, thank you. And also too, actually, sorry, what we'll do here is that number one gets the prism and all the non MLB affiliated ones. So we'll just do it like that. We'll just combo them up together. So let's just randomize the names and we'll do that. So number one gets the prism WWE pack plus the potentially non MLB ones. Roll it, it's a four and a five, nine times. Here we go. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine. And Matt L, there you go, man. So you're going to get potentially obviously, I'm not sure if all those will be not MLBs, but if they are, you're going to get them. And then you're going to get the prism UFC pack. Prism UFC plus and USA baseball. All right, awesome. Thank you guys, like I said, more in the store if you guys want to try it tonight again. Thank you.


Our next presentation is by Alan Steele of UNDP. This talk will look at big data, Indonesian style, connecting communities across the oceans. Okay, if I could just make a slight correction, Kim. I'm from Fisher, and we are actually working with UNDP here in Indonesia. My presentation today is really a lifetime experience in not just the fish industry, but across multiple food sectors. Latterly in my career, I was working with Coca Cola McDonald's. And I came to Bali actually to retire about five years ago. And I was approached by one of the fishing community here who was trading about 50 million pounds worth of tuna fish and blue crab with America. And he asked, he's experiencing problems in his company with regards to the traceability of his products being exported to America. And he said, you used to be the go-to man for traceability. Can you develop something for me that will protect me? And I probably was a traceability company, but actually what he was looking for was artificial intelligence or machine learning based on seven, eight years of collected data. And he wanted to look at a different way of collecting data and to protecting his business. And I started to develop software from scratch with really what was my pension. And based on all the mistakes I had made and all the mistakes that other people had made over the years. And there was many failed attempts, I think I saw over about 25 years of people trying to develop software systems and more and more hype around traceability and a lot of imagery about where the industry was going. But I had a specific specification, I can put it that way, on what this particular client wanted. And we started, I got rid of all the ego of trying to work on the world stage and all the things I've been through in my business life. And I went right back to beginning to the small scale fisheries. 25 million dollars of blue swimming crabs, a lot of crabs. And I decided we had to go and look at the fishermen with the cooking stations, the picking stations, the processing and involve the fishermen from day one. So some basic steps to achieve success based on our experience as it can build an intelligent platform. We started at the beginning. So we involved the small scale fisheries. I was also asked to join another company called Each Mile, which they were building the first mile, they call the first mile, which was an app collecting data on board boats and rewarding the fishermen with a coin, with a reward. And the one thing I did learn was, and I think it's come up quite a bit, I think even in Amos's presentation, you're trying to engage the industry is really difficult. Trying to engage people to share their data is even more difficult. And I certainly don't have all the answers. But what I've built over the past three, four years in Fisher is a very basic system using Android phones, the very bottom end technology. And I've built it on collaborations, trying to engage everybody in the industry. Because my client who is, his client is the third biggest fish company in America. And the main species are yellow from tuna, the swimming crab and octopus. And to collect that amount of data from all these different picking stations, fishermen, we have to generate millions of individual trace codes, QR codes, we call them trace codes, every month because we mark every fish, we give every individual tuna fish this, enters the factory, QR code and follow it all the way through the factory. Same with every basket of blue swimming crab. And not just in Indonesia. Kona, we also work in the Philippines, in Sri Lanka and in India. And these are huge challenges for technology. And it was a huge challenge for me on a limited budget. I wasn't able to access grants, but my client wasn't prepared to pay for the development. And it's a very slow process trying to get money from investors and a soul-destroying process. And I'm listening to some of the other presenters, team fish, et cetera, where they're looking for funding. It's soul-destroying. But we're at the situation now where we're producing about between six and 10 million trace codes every month and scanning six to 10 million trace codes every month. And the client wants to double that production. So we as a very small boutique software company will be 20, 30 million trace codes every month, which will let my client, or let us anticipate pricing for the future. It will let us anticipate we're to source our crab or our tuna and give them predictive analytics. We are also scraping the web but we were pretty unsuccessful at that. But we did have all this data. And just, you know, we take everything pretty logically, you know, that from the harvesting, the processing, the shipping, and, you know, to look into what we're talking about, you know, the UNDP that is working with each mile fish coin company. We've developed a tag and release software suite, which allows us to tag fish that are undersized, put them back into the ocean and record that. And then when we caught again, it's actually, it's in Indonesia, in North Sulawesi. We can then link these fish to our own platform where we're tagging the fish as they enter the factory. So we've got 400 small communities in North Sulawesi, which is thousands of fishermen and communities that are using state-of-the-art software. Each of the fishermen has a mobile phone, a low-end mobile phone, and with minimum training, we're letting them scan data into our platform, which is allowing us hopefully to reward the fishermen for giving their data, which is a small part of a solution of solving the acquiring data that Amos was alluding to. But, you know, the other challenge we face is ditching the future and predicting pricing is based on thousands and thousands of individual animals. And you can see here, this is the octopus platform. And another of the challenges we face was trying to make software look sexy. So, you know, we had to bring in graphic designers, we had to bring in people with UI, user interface experience, and also user experience to make something look good. People getting bored just with numbers, numbers, numbers. And it was one of the things I learned when I was working with Coca-Cola. You know, you can collect as much data as you want, but unless it's meaningful and can actually be used, it was just an exercise in developing technology.  And we just use the GPS on the mobile phone to record where the fish has landed. Most of these are day fishermen.  And just putting your, we call it eight legs, so it was a bit of fun. But, you know, the fun goes once you start developing this huge amount of data. And this is one of the older versions that I developed. And again, it was collecting all this information to make it look and be useful. SIMP is the sales import one, one-stream program for the American exports. So we produced a unique fish ticket and imported all of that, the collected traceability data into our platform to allow these containers of tuna fish that we're exporting from Indonesia over to the States. And, you know, using a little mobile phone that was less than $100, we're protecting a container of fish that's between half a million and quarter of a million dollars of tuna fish. So, you know, we're working with fishermen that are earning $300 a month maximum. If a company that's trading $300 million and linking it all together. And that's the scale of what we're working with in Indonesia. Thousands and thousands and thousands of individual fishermen are contributing their data. This is the first time I've actually been able to achieve anything with the community of fishermen and link it all together. And the guys at Fish Coin on each mile were interested in working with me because the one thing they weren't able to do was to acquire the interest of the fishermen. The people they wanted to reward were the most difficult people to bring on board. And what I've tried to do with my background as an accountant by profession was to monetize collecting data to reward people for collecting data. And with my partnership and my small interest in other companies, I've been able to find a market for my data and for my customers' data and for everyone to be rewarded in some small way. It's not a coin, it's not a token. It is a token of a reward. We were topping up fishermen's mobile phones by allowing, by rewarding them for giving us their data. So, we've got that working. So, the fishermen are rewarded and then the processes that rewarded again for acquiring that data and the American company pays for that extra traceability data. So, it's probably 25 years of development all in this one platform of Fisher which is now predicting the future for my clients. It's providing, we've got it on the blockchain now. You can see some of the screens here. This is test data, but each individual fish, you can go right back to the individual fishermen for all these thousands of tons of fish that we're processing every month and exporting. And we found also that each of these, this was only part of the list that we were now satisfying with our very simple application that feeds into our platform that was originally to predict just pricing. And I have an interest in the tuna business as well where I'm the CFO and we're using this data to supply all of these points which for me has been a lifetime's work now working in reality. And it's been my personal observation about we're nothing without the fishing communities. I took a route in my working life of ignoring the people that were actually catching the fish. I've gone back to basics and the business is a success as a result of working with the fishermen as opposed to the supermarkets who in many cases didn't really want the information and they wanted it for their sustainability statements, et cetera, but there was never any financial reward for a technology company offering that data, but with the fishermen, it's completely different. And I think with all the parties, and I've listed just a few there, governments, fleet owners, other technology businesses, hotels, the people that are taking money from the industry and are all relying on a fisherman at the end of the day. And for me, technology has now got the ability to distribute the rewards to the fishing industry with giving them information, by telling them where to fish as opposed to when I started 25 years ago where everybody was concentrating and developing technology to hunt the fish, to catch more fish, to process fish more quickly. It's now gone full circle, at least these technologies exist, but the world seems to be focusing on what 15 years we've lost 60% of all animals on earth, fishing, through hunting, by building. And I think now we have the ability with our technologies to stop that and to stop it from the bottom rather from the top. I think I've noted here, one fisherman with a mobile phone in Indonesia makes very little difference, but we've got two million fishermen here with mobile phones that can start to make a difference. And from my retirement, five years ago, I started working 60, 70 hours a week back in the fishing industry, hopefully contributing to saving a little bit of our oceans and our planet. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alan. That was a real life story and very interesting one of that in making people along this value chain being really seen and recognized. And this is something that maybe we just weren't able to do in the past and that you thought tools and developing new tools to allow it to happen. I love your term, monetize the collection of data. And once we monetize anything, you sort of do need standards and an ability for people to be recognized. So there's so much to unpack there and unfortunately we're running short of time.


Mishra, Senior Partner, Sales Executive, Microsoft Search Advertising with 19 years of work experience. She's worked for Alibaba, UC Browser, Yahoo India, Star New Z Network, Indian Express, worked in the capacity of Sales Lead, Agency Relationship, Brand Manager, Product Manager, Operations Lead, System Coordinator, my God, amazing. She will be speaking of the Smile Effect of Technology. She's got a lovely smile.  Zodaw Thaliya, come on everybody. Am I audible? Thank you Mr. Khan for the long introduction. So I think we have heard a lot about technology bashing already and about the level of personalisation and so essentially what we're really seeing is that technology bashing has become a good phenomena. We already feel we are cribbing about how mobile phones have become invasive, how digital assistants are listening to our conversations, how robots are going to take our lives. But I believe that it's actually the delicate dance between the technology and the human which is actually going to kind of help us unravel a lot of solutions. And I will start my presentation with a small video of a 9 year old kid and his love for video game. I think it has already been played by Mr. Ramamurthy earlier than me. But let's just kind of see it for the sake of its value. It's really beautiful. Sean, my name is Ian. I'm Taylor. My name is Owen and I am nine and a half years old. I only have one. And yeah. I love video games, my friends, my family and again video games. Whenever I play it makes me feel happy. The fun that you get to have with connecting with your friends. Do you make your own rules? It's his way of interacting with his friends when he can't physically otherwise do it. When I'm playing with a regular controller, there's some things that don't work for me. It's difficult for me to use both joysticks and the D-pad at the exact same time. And it just slowed me down a bunch more while other people were like... She's never had the freedom to play at the level she knows she could. I never thought it was unfair. I just thought, hey, this is the way it is and it's not going to change. What I like about the adaptive controller is that now everyone can play. I don't even have to look at the controller and just be like looking at the screen like, hey, yep, yep. You never want your kid to feel like an outsider or an other. One of the biggest fears, early on, is how will Owen be viewed by the other kids? He's not different when he plays. It's a little challenging but that's the whole point of gaming. I can hit the buttons just as fast as they can. And I think I can crush my friends. No matter how your body is or how fast you are, you can play. It's the thing to have in this world. I think the expression on the parents' face is absolutely priceless. So I will... This is basically, I'm going to talk about, take a leaf from one of the conferences where Aseer Satya Nadella was talking to a lot of developers and he was actually talking to this developers about what the possibilities AIS could bring for a lot of clients and consumers and I will quote his words. We have the responsibility to ensure that these technologies are empowering everyone. These technologies are creating equitable growth by ensuring that every industry is able to grow and create employment. But we also have a responsibility as a tech industry to build trust in technology and I think this work stands really tall today in today's time because we see so many stories about data leakages. Companies are being so cagey about wanting to share the data because they fear it will be a breach. So you know what, this is where I think the opportunity for tech giants to kind of take the guardianship of the whole and build that trust and I think one of the word which kind of goes around in the inside Microsoft is that Microsoft runs on trust. Coming back to, this is one of the very big comprehensive program which Microsoft has undertaken. It's actually called AI for Earth. The whole idea of AI for Earth is essentially to talk about how AI could solve solutions which our planet is facing today. It could be regarding your soil cultivation, water crisis, agriculture crisis, biodiversity issues and one such in the bill 2018 conference that happened in Seattle. They are in fact kind of added another leg to it and that's called AI for accessibility and I think we heard little bit about in the earlier sessions as well but what exactly this is is our 25 million five year program for AI tools to be put in the hands of developers to see what they can work with it and kind of make a solution. And potentially this tool is supposed to kind of you know benefit 1 billion plus people with disability around the world.  Do you want to take a guess? Any response? 1 percent? Anybody else? What is it? Well I think it's about 10 percent and largely I think if you know you could send it to the developed countries so I think we really have a far way to go.  What we're trying to do here is actually kind of solve three specific scenario to make these people employable to have them like you know kind of adapt to the modern life and the most important to make human connections. And let's hear from Shakip Sheikh and a day in his life. I'm Shakip Sheikh. I lost my sight when I was 7 and shortly after that I went to a school for the blind and that's where it was introduced to talking computers and that really opened up a whole new world of opportunities. I joined Microsoft 10 years ago as a software engineer. I love making things which improve people's lives and one of the things I've always dreamt of since I was at university was this idea of something that could tell you at any moment what's going on around you. I think it's a man jumping in the air doing a trick on a skateboard. I teamed up with like-minded engineers to make an app which lets you know who and what is around you. It's based on top of the Microsoft intelligence APIs which makes it so much easier to make this kind of thing. The app runs on smartphones but also on the pivot head smart glasses. When you're talking to a bigger group sometimes you can talk and talk and there's no response and you think is everyone listening really well or are they half asleep and you never know. I see two faces, 40 year old man with a beard looking surprised 20 year old woman looking happy. The app can describe the general age and gender of the people around me and what their emotions are which is incredible. One of the things that's most useful about the app is the ability to read out text. Hello, good afternoon, here's your menu. Great, thank you. I can use the app on my phone to take a picture of the menu and it's going to guide me on how to take that correct photo. Move camera to the bottom right away from the document. And then it'll recognize the text. Read me the headings. I see appetizers, salads, paninis, pizzas, pastas. Hi. Years ago this was science fiction. I never thought it would be something that you could actually do but artificial intelligence is improving at an ever faster rate and I'm really excited to see where we can take it. Hi. As engineers we're always standing on the shoulders of giants building on top of what went before and in this case we've taken years of research from Microsoft Research to pull this off. I think it's a young girl throwing an orange frisbee in the park. For me it's about taking that far-off dream and building it one step at a time. I think this is just the beginning. So one of the things that is very popular with tech industries and it's hackathons that they do. I'm sure people who work with technology companies they are aware about what hackathons, what happens there. Basically you get a lot of developers to kind of work a lot of ideas and see if something could be scalable. One such hackathon project was done which is a three-year project and that became a solution and used by millions of teachers and students worldwide. The people who created it they were even surprised by the magnitude. They thought it would be big but they never thought it would be so big. And I'm going to tell you a story about a teacher. She was a fourth grade teacher in Washington teaching kids with basically who have learning disability called dyslexia and dysgraphia. Dysgraphia is actually a disability where you can't write properly. That's what I understand. And basically what she would do, every weekend she would actually kind of spend multiple hours just recording text for her classroom to read over the period of the week next week. It was very time consuming and kind of limiting its potential. Then she heard about Surface Pro Laptop and it comes to the learning tool called Immersive Reader and it's a very beautiful tool. What it really does is it actually is helped to created to help people improve reading and writing especially for people with learning disorders. It allows content to be read aloud, break it into words syllables, highlight parts of speech. Now if you're trying to actually teach a kid just in terms of grammar-wise or nouns or the adjectives you can actually highlight those parts and read it. I mean people like us could use it in a normal life where it's very difficult to read small text and you basically just kind of touch and kind of make it big. You can basically de-space the crowding of the word. Those are the beautiful things that you can do with Immersive Reader but the impact of this particular tool was so huge that 30 million people are currently using this tool about 40 languages around the world and basically the feedback of this teacher was that when Hallstatt class started to use this for about 3 weeks she started to see the change in their behavior. They were able to be more fluent in the English. They were able to catch on more understanding of the language and you know she said that you know what I do see things changing and it's definitely making a difference. A few years back farmers in the US added a new crop to their bounty which is called knowledge. What they did was they actually started working with drones at Intelligent Edge and this is just another fact. By year 2050 the current world population of 7.6 billion is expected to reach 9.8 billion and at this point of time I think a lot of people have to start thinking about food production, a lot of governments are going to think about it how to increase it dramatically to keep up with this growth. There's limited arable lands and water levels are going down and with the planning that we have we are actually only able to think about how to basically feed them. It's not even gone to the level of nourishing them.  So MicroSoft FarmBeat program actually is one such program. What it does it sets, it sends large amount of data from ground based sensors, tractors and cameras to the computer. Sensors help track moisture and soil data. You're essentially using this drone and Intelligent Edge data basically to kind of understand what kind of work we can do how can you increase the yield of your farm and objective is generate actionable insights for the farmer and let me kind of run a really nice video on this one. More than three quarters of the poor people in the world are farmers. They're faced with a very tough problem. They have to grow enough food to feed their family every year. When you think of digital technology you don't think of measuring soil moisture you don't think about helping people know when to plant or understand what's going wrong on their farm but if we can make these sensors small enough, cheap enough then the chance to get this down to more and more farmers get them additional productivity is pretty exciting. We're taking this data and we've built machine learning and AI models to do two things. One is virtual sensor prediction so we're predicting things like leaf wetness, evapotranspiration and solar radiation. We've used the data to customize the model for the farm and we're getting very accurate results for each one of those. These sensors use a new type of connectivity that's very inexpensive called TV wide spaces. TV wide space is unused bandwidth in between the TV broadcast channels. Governments are now allowing this bandwidth to be used to transmit data. In this case it's the data coming from the field that goes back to the computers that helps create the best advice to the farmer. What you're seeing here is a TV wide spaces router. This is like your Wi-Fi antenna at home powering all of this through solar panels.  We use it to send drone images. Once the flight is complete it will start transmitting the data over the wide spaces to do precision map generation. Whoa! Yeah, I'm bringing it back. Can't even leave. Any data you can get to farmers can make a huge difference. The weather is always highly variable. Deciding should they invest in fertilizer? When do they plant? Understanding which crop would be the right one at this time? Even 20% more productivity means that they can afford school fees save a little bit for a tough year. Climate change is going to make the farmers job a lot harder and just closing that yield gap even a modest amount would make a huge difference for all those farmers. Before I go on, one of the interesting facts is that the Ranbir Chandra who is the chief scientist he actually hails from a small village in Bihar and I really hope that someday you know we really kind of see the true beauty of this entire effort that we are able to kind of bring it to even those smaller places in India as well. Now a lot of people in the room must be wondering why am I showing a Bing slide over here and there is a lot to do with Microsoft and what Bing and what's the relation is that if you understand anything about AI it's actually a large amount of data sets over a large period of time it was actually gets baked into the artificial intelligence and that is what Bing did and does for Microsoft AI intelligence it's actually the tool which makes Microsoft so competitive today it's kind of a mouthpiece and all the data that comes from Bing is kind of what's baked into the AI today. Just for people who love some facts this is the Bing PC market share so currently we are about 10% market share worldwide our biggest market is United States we have about 25% market share followed by UK which is about 21% and we are about 8% PC market share in India these are some facts you don't know about Bing and I would love to kind of share so Bing is celebrating 10 years of its existence I'm proud to say that for the last 100 months consecutive months we have been consistently growing in market share we have doubled the search of market share in PC since launch Bing were to be an independent company it would stand as a Fortune 400 company and currently we service about 500 K advertisers globally this is my last slide I'm just quoting the words of Executive VP and our president ultimately the question is not only what computers can do it's what computers should do and what I really mean is that you know I mean we always see this danger and at some point of time technology will take over our lives and actually that's not true it is people us sitting in this room who have to be the guardians of the galaxy and kind of ensure that we do this delicate dance and not let technology power us but actually use it so that it kind of you know we all continue to have the smiling effect of technology thank you everybody thank you very much ma'am and we've got a token of appreciation from Mr Rishi Sharma Grassem Industries can have you on the stage to present a token of appreciation thank you, thank you for this very exciting session ladies and gentlemen so we request you to kindly come on the stage and present a token of appreciation thank you, let's give a round of applause Ms Reena Mishra