Gweld i'n gofyn i'n argymwysio'r ysgolwyd yma. Mae'n amlwg Tom West. Rhywbeth a'r argynteg cyflawn o'r cyflawn ar y cyfrifiad i'n ddiddordeb cyflawn o'r cyflawn cyfrifiad. Rhywbeth yma, rydyn ni'n gweithio'n ymddiol ac mae'n gweithio'r ysgolwyd. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r ysgolwyd, I initiate, now I typically develop on a platform called, Splunk. Is there anyone that's used Splunk or got Splunk? Anything? Yex perks. Anybody want to use Datadog or ELK? Or anything on those lines? Nope. Excellent. You can't see where I'm going to go with this. Along with working, I've gone and developed... 13 or so apps at the moment, over those 1600 downloads. The main one that I've gone and the most popular one fel gyngor. Wrth gyd am gyflawn o'r gaelio. Mae'r gaelio chi gaelio'r plwn yn eu wahanol, iddyn nhw'n gwybod gyda'r gweithio isio i gaelio a adrylu'r corfodol iddyn nhw o'r ddaf i'n gwybod gydag weithio. Felly, mae'n gwybod i'r tynnu'r bwysig cofair yn cyffredin gan gyrs. Mae'r wahanol ffrind MAC, Fyrddiau gyda'u proffesiwr professionol. Mae gennym wahanol o eich 10 dwylch, ac mae'r byddwn yn chwyn fawr i'r llyffaethol. So we work in healthcare, financial services, and we do some quite innovative and different things. And one thing that I want to talk to you about today is why you might want to use something like a data tool where you would typically throw your application logs for DevOps. Why am I here to talk about that? Well, typically those tools are generally available, they're generic in terms of what data you can add in there. The APIs for DevOps tools, GitLabs is one of the best that I've gone and used. It's really well documented, it's easy to access the format of the responses quite easy, and you can just pull that in, it's not particularly difficult to do. And then you can start to identify patterns with your data, just like you can do with inbuilt reporting within GitLab, within any other DevOps tools that you do use. But you can then also apply that report into your application logs and security incidents to then enrich that further, and all of a sudden you've got everything all in one place, which is quite nice, and it's ecosystem agnostic. So you can, it doesn't matter whether you're using, whether you're already using GitLab for everything, whether you're trying to move over and use GitLab for everything, if you've got legacy projects we heard earlier on about how companies, like large companies, they're using GitLab for a lot of their things, but struggling to get data to merge everything into GitLab. And this would be a solution for that. So that's enough about kind of the concept. Really what I want to do today is actually show you, we've done this. So right here what you can see on the screen is something that we've developed within Splunk, but if you don't want to use Splunk, you can use exactly the same methods with whichever tools that you do use. And what we're showing here is that we've got four projects which we're currently coming in, we're tracking plan quality and commit areas of your development lifecycle, and we've got four projects, like I say, we've got three that we're actually tracking plan information, one where we're checking quality, and we've got three for commits. Now that's all kind of, you know, there's nothing particularly exciting there, until I say that commit, we're moving over our data at the moment. So we were using BitBucket, we're now using GitLab. So one of those projects on there is actually BitBucket, the other two are GitLab, but it doesn't say which one's which. It just says, like, there's a status of my repositories, my projects at that particular time, and we're even able to see a timeline of how many commits we're going on. Now this is dev data, so the timeline's not particularly interesting. If you've got it into your own organisation, I suspect that it's going to be a lot more interesting and entertaining. But then what we're able to do after we've gone and summarised it, is still produce some of the details that you get off the back of that. So we've got, so we're tracking Trello, we're tracking Sonacube, and we're tracking GitLab, all three of them are entirely different ecosystems, and there are integrations with different DevOps tool sets across them. We've got to see that already today, but we're just pulling all that data into one place and actually able to report on that. And we can see for this one, which is GitLab, we've got two commits within the time period we've gone and specified, and we can see actually an activity timeline. And this is just pulling in the activities that we've got straight out of the API, from the GitLab API, ready and available. But we're not saying this is something that you have to manage totally separate. This is just automated, basically cron jobs, calling the API, pulling the data in, and putting some visuals in front of it. The thing that you probably can't see certainly at the back is that there's a table right at the bottom there, so we can click on that table, we can click on that time chart on that graph, and it's going to go and show, right, these are all the commits, these are all the activities that happen at this particular point in time, and you can select that table, and it's not going to show you any further information within Splunk or within Elastical, whichever tool you're using, it's going to take you straight to GitLab to actually show you, because why would you do anything more? GitLab is the best place, that's what you're using for your toolset. Why would you not just go there and have a look at what it is that you want to have a look at? So it's really powerful just being able to just pull those bits of information just all into one place, and what I want to do as well is just to kind of prove that it's not just me saying something, it's just theoretical. This screenshot, and it looks very, very similar, is actually Bitbucket, so this is actually telling me, this is a totally different project, we're getting it in the same screen in the same way, but this is Bitbucket, so this is our legacy project that for some reason we can't move across, and we're just showing it in exactly the same way, exactly the same method in terms of making it look really standard, really, and then linking into that toolset as well. So it kind of eliminates that problem or helps eliminate it to some degree in a totally different way. And it means that you're not having to have as much of a, you're not feeling as though you're under pressure to get everything moved over into an ecosystem as quickly as possible. You can do it at times that are a lot easier for you, it's easier to manage that process. And the last thing, like I say, I try and do talks where I have takeaways. So in this case, check out what's already available and I would always say, whichever toolset you're using, check what's already available, I guarantee there's going to be integrations and things already available. In this case, you can, if you're wanting to take, check out those screenshots and everything in more detail, go to splunk.com and you can get a free licence. There's a website called Splunkbase, which is their app store. You can go on there right now, there are integrations for, we've gone and done them for GitLab, for Bitbucket, for Trello, for SonaCube. The app that I've gone and shown you a couple of screenshots of right now will be live in 20 minutes time, which is entirely deliberate. So, but the main thing is take advantage of the APIs. Understand what your own objectives and goals are. If you're going to write this and do this from scratch, understand what it is that you can get from the APIs in the first place. It may be that you can't do something that you really want to do, but you can get 90% of the way. And if it's something really big, then break it down into really small chunks and do it that way. Go right, okay, so I've got six, seven different projects, different tool sets that I want to integrate or just focus on the first one and get that in and make sure you're happy with that, but make sure that's the most valuable one and then see what you can do based on that and go from there. Don't just aim for the moon, just do it in steps on the way. That's just kind of basic principles.  And then the last thing really is just check out, we're building integrations and tool sets and new apps all the time. Within six months, six, seven months I've been in the company, we've developed seven different apps that are actually on the App Store. Like I said, we've got over 1600 downloads now. I personally have got over 13 apps available. So check out what our latest news is on convergingdata.com. We hope to add even more data and more value later on. Certainly the next thing that we're looking to do is to add alerting back in. So if you've got security products or things like that and you've got events that come in, then being able to actually post out, or to make things like merger requests and production of pipelines, even rollback of code, that sort of stuff that we're looking to do next time and next in the pipeline. Again, this is all going to be free. We're not going to charge anyone for you to be able to download it. It's just something that we, again, as part of like an open source thing, we're just making sure that we give it back to you as something almost to thank you for me because I've learnt an awful lot from the community, so therefore I want to give back a lot to the community. This is one of the best ways in which I can go and do that. That's me. Thank you very much.


Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering RSA Conference 2017. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Hello, welcome everyone to the special live CUBE coverage here inside our studio in Palo Alto. We've been at RSA Conference and San Francisco for the past two days, scouring the landscape myself and Jeff Frick was up there doing interviews on the ground, again, huge crowd. We couldn't bring theCUBE there this year, so we're going to do a live in-studio wrap up today, all day today, wall-to-wall coverage. And our first guest is Darius Goodall, who's the director of security products at Barracuda, Barracuda Networks. Well-known, I mean, they've been doing security as an appliance when they first started the company. Now they're super successful and grown from the anti-spam virus firewall back in the day to full-blown security portfolio. And the threat detections in the whole landscape has completely changed, obviously, RSA this year. Darius, comment on the first welcome to our- Yeah, thanks for having us, John, I appreciate it. It's been a dark vibe there, and honestly, and by the way, I kind of love the whole cyber thing, personally, as a geek, because it is a digital world now, and there is cyber warfare going on. There are threats that are global, and we were staying on theCUBE, not a last show. Where's the cyber West Point? And so, the younger kids coming up into the industry are all now living spear-fishing. Every kind of attack you can imagine. So it just seems that the diversity of attacks is grown, and there's more tactics, good guys, bad guys, white guys, dark web. I mean, what's- That's right, you're exactly right, and that's a really good question. Where is the cyber West Point? I'd like to love to see that as a university come out in the future as well, that would be awesome. But yeah, it's unrelenting, right? It's absolutely unrelenting. The number of attacks that we're seeing with our broad threat intelligence that we have is just crazy. I mean, one of the, I was talking to Michael Osterman, actually, industry analyst a while ago, and he's predicting that we're seeing, just in ransomware alone, 200 new variants a quarter, at the very least, and there's no sign of abating, well up into 2020. So this is definitely following, like you say, you know, the threats they're changing as time goes on, the landscape changes. These guys are just moving with supply and demand, right? Ransomware is one of those things where it's just so coordinated. Talk about some of the threats, because I want to get into some of the things that you guys are doing as a company. I think it's important to highlight as this changes, but talk about some of the key things that are happening. What are the top security threats in your mind that you see out there, isn't it? Ransomware is one of those things where it's kind of an embarrassing thing, so you don't really kind of hear about it. It's one of those things where it's also coordinated so that the attackers know who they're going after and know how to get the leverage, whether it's a hotel or... Well, you're right, you're right. I mean, some of it's coordinated, some of it's very coordinated and starts with the spearfishing campaigns and so on, and obviously comes to the less coordinated, you know, in the fishing campaigns to boot as well. But I've seen some very interesting occurrences over time, just like you say. We've heard of the ICUs at the hospitals being locked up. We've heard libraries. We've heard of hotels with the electronic key card systems being disabled and so on. It's all very disruptive, all pretty nasty stuff. But we're starting to see some strange strains coming out as well. I mean, one that I saw come out in November was a new strain called Ranscap. It looks like ransomware, it feels like ransomware. I asked you money in Bitcoin for ransomware as well, but at the end of the day, it actually, what it does is destroy your files.  So the motto of the story, the moral of the story. It's fake ransomware. That's right. It's fake news. It's fake ransomware. It's Ranscap, right? It's Ranscap. I mean, there's no honor amongst thieves now. They're just ruining it for themselves, right? But we like that. Then come over, let them spend more of their investment actually, or invest more, I should say. My friend Bill Tai, who's a former venture capitalist, big kite surfer, he's big into Bitcoin, and he just got his two-factor authentication nails. So two-factor, you get your phone, you get SMS message. Now they're hacking the phone, so now that's at risk. So what is the prospect? I mean, my liberties are being at risk here as a user, as a consumer. If two-factor authentication is not going to work, if the phone's going to get hacked, and certainly emails can be compromised, I'm just assuming my emails compromised these days, but what's next? How do I, as a user, and as a company, or a consumer of a company, get secured? It's a big challenge. It's a big challenge. And this is something that we talk about on a daily basis, is you have to secure from all of the threats, right? And so it's no longer about having the old legacy systems. We hear of companies all the time saying us are legacy tools, they're not doing the job, they're just not cutting it anymore, right? So they're always looking for the latest things. So the advanced threat detection, the advanced threat protection, that is live up to date, and distributes all of that information across all the threat vectors. Just like you say, now we're getting another one, which is talking more, what you mentioned is more about end point protection, specifically around mobile devices. So yeah, that's another challenge. That's going to be another area of the market that we have to look at. Well, you mentioned attack vectors. Some people also say surface area attacks, which now with the way the web is digital, there's unlimited doors to enter. It used to be front door, back door.  Secure, everything's good, VPN in. That's gone, everyone kind of much validates that. So what is the challenge now? Because I was just talking to my son as I was driving to school, we were talking about how Teslas are being hacked. Cars are being hacked. So IoT, Internet of Things, opens up this, and everyone says AI is going to cure all, but the reality is that it isn't. So is the answer first of all, one, talk about the surface area of attacks, and two, is the answer data sharing, is the answer open source? Because some are saying, if you have open source, the collective intelligence of everyone. Could be the answer. What's the current state of the world? So from a barracuda perspective on the threat intelligence, we collect our threat intelligence from numerous different places, and that's absolutely critical. You can't just have a single point source. But then a leading, and some of that is open source stuff, getting that information from open source places. Of course that's critical as well. That adds to your threat intelligence. But aside from that, like I said, it's one thing for you to understand or see an attack coming on a specific threat vector. It's then how do you leverage that information? How do you make that information available across all the other threat vectors? So for example, ransomware, there's no question, 70% of ransomware gets deployed over email, right? Whether you pick it up on your cell phone device or your laptop or your desktop, whatever, it really doesn't matter, right? But what we see then is that as soon as we detect a piece of ransomware that comes in on that threat vector, what we need to do is make sure that that information is available right across all the other threat vectors. So these guys are planting the same piece of ransomware out on a website. They're waiting for someone unscrupulous user to come and download it, right? In which case, endpoint protection might not necessarily help you there. You then need to be able to thwart that kind of attack and a web download. So a web gateway, a secure web gateway, and be able to take that information and upload it to your ATD stack and what have you to make sure that that's cleansed. But you don't want it to keep on going up to the sandbox every single time. That's the point, because that's not the great user experience. Nobody wants to wait for that download. You want to use your threat intelligence saying, hey, I already saw this in my email threat vector or whatever. You want it to be more efficient. Exactly, exactly. Coordination amongst the data and these points to the back end. All right, so talk about the ransomware, because this is really interesting, because ransomware is an obvious example and that people can get a mental model around that. The timing's impeccable. It's kind of like the old, when I didn't pay my bills in college, the lights get turned off. I need the lights now. They know exactly when to turn off everything, so you have to pay more. But what are the use cases? And what do customers do? How do they protect it? What's the, take us through the day in the life of, hey, I have a ransomware potential problem. Do I deploy a certain way? Do I lock down certain assets? What do I do? What's the playbook? So the playbook is relatively clear from our perspective. We actually put this down into three very distinct buckets, right? So there's the detect category, there's the prevent category, and there's the recovery category, right? So on the detect category, this is all about making sure that your infrastructure, be it your email servers, your web servers and all that kind of stuff, they're all secure, right? The email service specifically, if you're doing a migration to Office 365, you need to make sure that those emails that have been migrated with them aren't taking all that existing ransomware, malware and viruses all across to your new infrastructure, because now you're just waiting for somebody to go back into an old email, double click on it and boom, you're done, right? So first stage is to take care of that, clean house there. The other thing is as well, it goes across to all the other threat vectors as well. Make sure that your web infrastructure, we're looking at web hacks, we're looking at people uploading files to companies like monster.com or what have you. Are they uploading malicious content or is it genuinely a resume, right? For example, so you're gonna make sure that those environments are secure and so detect any of the vulnerabilities associated with your web. Then you move over to the prevention category and that is exactly what we've been saying. Apply advanced threat detection across all the attack surfaces, whether it's email, whether it's web, whether it's network perimeter and so on. So make sure that you've got an advanced threat detection program to actually cover all of those as well.  You've got great products, you have enterprise presence. You guys do great job of security. Again, you're DNAs from your first product and it's done a great job and so I've been following you guys there. The question that comes up is, IOT, I mentioned the surface area, it could be air conditioning to Tesla cars, it's all these new attack vector points that you mentioned. But ultimately, the big topic is cloud. Where are you guys with cloud? Because at the end of the day, it's cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud also complicates and exasperates the threats. That's right. So Amazon's done a good job with security, Azure's out there, but I'm a customer, I might want to play in multiple clouds. So these are the things that are on the minds of the buyers right now. How do you help those customers? That's exactly right, and very good question, John. So migration to cloud is definitely an area for concern and quite rightly so. Because it just breaks up your network perimeter, it breaks up all your application perimeter and so on, right? So the rules still apply over here. As you migrate out into the cloud, the AWS's and the Azure's of the world, of course, they make their infrastructure secure. That's good for them. That's good for them. It does essentially nothing for you. If you put an application up there, it's like sticking it out on the cloud, right? It's sticking it out on the public internet. It's exposed. So what you then have to do is then... So essentially it's on them to make sure it's secure. Amazon is secure, but you have to take advantage of their stuff, which might change, again, more of the dynamics. Exactly. So it's on the customer to secure in the cloud. So essentially what you've done is you've opened up, perceived it as you've opened up a hole in your network perimeter. Now you need to close it up again. So you've just moved your assets up into the cloud. The first thing you're gonna get to do is go deploy a cloud instance of a firewall up there, right? So that's one thing, but then making sure that you can get to those assets securely is also equally important. So making sure you have the VPN, the encryption and the traffic prioritization and capabilities for that to get you access to your data up in the cloud, that's critically important as well. How do you, what do you guys do specifically for the customers? What products do you actually... Yeah, we push... Easy, I mean, is it push button report, like the provisioning? So it is, it is, right? So we have our well-known NGF products that are now, which are well-established either as IoT devices to secure the IoT framework, but more specifically as your network perimeter. We've taken that version because it's x86 based and we've created versions available for Azure and AWS. So it's exactly the same user... Is that the cloud-ready program? That's it. Well, the cloud-ready program feeds into this. But the firewall experience is exactly the same. You're just moving your perimeter out. So the cloud-ready program is just to address this and promote this. We've seen a lot of customers starting to move out to the cloud. And of course, what we want to do is enable them. So we've got a promotion out there that allows them to secure the network perimeter, but we'll give them free 90-day licenses for Azure and AWS to help move them up there. So it accelerates there. That's right. So I get this right. Your model is, okay, if you have an endpoint on Barracuda, you're extending them with a clear path of the cloud in things that they understand the Barracuda and the other pieces and whatnot. And exactly. And for newer customers who are looking to... So it's not a major shift for your customers? No. No, not at all. But for somebody moving out into the cloud where the leader out there in the cloud space in the firewall arena, and we've got very good traction. Business is good for you guys. Security's hot. I mean, what's the bottom line of the show? What's your takeaway first two days? Now I'm on the third day. What's the total vibe? Do you have to summarize the show? I want to talk about the, you know, I would say it's still around about the threats, the dark web, just like you opened up the conversation, right? I mean, it really is around that. And keeping up with that, keeping up with what's going on out there. That's a fascinating spot. And all the noise out there for customers that are being bombarded and the first wave of security that I would say in this kind of the unsecure list perimeter market, customers were buying everything in sight. Oh, it's security guy. Give me some of that. So that sprawl of buying security products is out there. And there's still, pretty much, they'll kick any solution most customers will. That's right. But now the challenge is they got to really start building stuff. What's your advice to enterprises out there that have bought everything and now got to start narrowing down on a straight, narrow on solutions? Yeah, you know what? Take a step back. My advice is take a step back and analyze your threat exposure, right? And really understand that before you start diving into buying products, okay? The nice thing about Barakur is simply that we are a portfolio company and we'll give you that visibility right across the entire threat surface and manageability as well. So that's, you know, those kind of things are critical. You've got the tactical solution to deploy and then you've got the data model behind it to back it up. That's right. So are you for this whole notion of data sharing amongst vendors? I think we have to. Yeah, I think we have to. Barakur is absolutely up in there. We've got to share that threat intelligence. We've got to get that single source of truth going. That's absolutely critical. All right, Darce, thanks for coming into the studio. Really appreciate it. Pleasure. I know you're heading up to San Francisco. We are here live in Palo Alto for our coverage of RSA Institute. We have a lot of guests lined up.  Darce is going to shoot up to San Francisco and to the show with Jeffery. And I'll be attending some of the parties. I think we're going to be schmoozing people late night up in San Francisco. So we'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.


In this presentation, we're going to talk about a statutory merger in more depth. Get ready to act because it's time to account with advanced financial accounting. We will now compare what could be called a friendly merger compared to what could be called a hostile takeover. So we're obviously looking about the external expansion. We're talking about two entities that are somehow in some way merging. So we have the friendly merger, which could be the transfer of assets in exchange for stock and or cash. The reason that could be more of a friendly merger type of situation is because you have the management of the two entities that are basically then negotiating over what's going to be the price and the consideration for the assets of one company to another. So you have that negotiating process. Hostile takeover. On the other hand, we have the purchase of the stock of another parent and subsidiary relationship is created and then the parent liquidates the subsidiary into the parent. So why is this going to be more of a hostile situation? You could think of this situation, of course. If you have a hostile takeover type of situation, you have one company typically going to be larger than the other company. Instead of basically going to the management and saying, okay, let's negotiate over the purchase price of possibly the assets. They could go straight to the stockholders and look to purchase enough stock, which would be over the 50% to have a controlling interest. Now once you have a controlling interest as we've discussed in the past, now you have a subsidiary parent relationship. You have a parent in a subsidiary because one has a controlling interest. However, if the objective then is to take that situation and then to liquidate the subsidiary because of that, you have that controlling interest and therefore the authority and the power typically to go through the liquidation process, then you're left with basically a merged company in the same kind of fashion. So the friendly merger is going to be like you could think of kind of a negotiation of the management. The hostile takeover, you can kind of think of one company possibly going to the shareholders and not possibly bypassing management in some way, shape, or form you could think of and purchasing over the 51% with the intention not of having a parent subsidiary relationship but using that controlling interest to then basically dissolve or liquidate this subsidiary into the parent resulting in just one company, one merged company. So statutory merger, if we're talking about a peaceful merger, then we have the A shareholders and then the corporation. So the shareholders are here, the shareholders are obviously the owners of the corporation. They own the shares of corporation A and then you've got the other entity over here where we have B, the B shareholders are now the owners of the company, the corporation B. Remember that the shareholders just to remember the hierarchy, the shareholders basically have the right to vote on the board of directors. And one of the things they have control over is who is management and who is management management then will be the people that typically will be making the decision making process. So it's kind of like you can think of it kind of like a governmental situation where we vote for representatives, those representatives then actually make the day to day type decisions. But if we have more than 51% of the shares of another of an entity, then we have complete say on who is management and that obviously gives a lot of influence on what's going to happen in the organization. Okay, so in this situation, we have A stock plus up to 50% of the assets. So we're going to say A then could provide some kind of consideration they're going to be purchasing from B and then B is going to be giving the B's assets. So in other words, B is going to be giving most of their assets, their valuable assets to A in exchange for some type of consideration, which could be stock or it could be cash or some type of other consideration. So A is going to be in essence the purchaser here, which is purchasing with something. You can consider it purchasing with cash. Typically there's stock transaction or something other than cash as well, that'll complicate things a little bit in terms of the recording of the exchange, but you can think of them as the buyer here. They're buying and they're buying out in essence all the valuable assets of B in this situation. Then B becomes in essence a shell at this point in time, right? B is now the valuable assets that have been removed from B. B is now basically a shell type of company and then there would be an elimination of B. So that means that the stock and any value, any purchasing power or any purchase price that came from company A to B will now be transferred from B, whatever's left in B in other words, whatever value is still left in B, assets minus liabilities, which will include the A stock that was transferred and any assets, the purchase price, whatever they purchased it with, if it was cash, it would be cash. That would then be going to the B shareholders because they're the owners of B. So B would then be liquidated at that point in time and B's shareholders would be compensated with basically whatever the purchase price was here and whatever's still on the books at B's books before it was ultimately liquidated resulting in one company here. So now we have A corporation, A basically has the assets and the major assets that they wanted through the negotiation of B and of course A's assets. And then we have the shareholders of A that obviously own the company A still. So they're still owned by the shareholders and any shares that were part of the negotiation price, part of the payment, they paid cash, A paid cash to B and also paid possibly shares, which is a common. Then those shares would then go to the shareholders of B when B was liquidated. So now you could have A's shareholders and B's shareholders having some ownership interest, the percentage would depend on the negotiation of the one company and you're left with the one company, company A, which now includes the assets of A minus any consideration they gave and then the assets of B that were purchased in that merger process. Now, if we talk about a statutory merger that's a hostile takeover, you can see here, you have the same setups. You have A owns the shareholders here own A, the shareholders for B own B. And then instead of A, instead of like A's management going to B's management and having a negotiation, A's management is going directly to the owners and you can imagine if they're going to the owners and they're trying to, a really hostile takeover you see in the movies or something like that, they're trying to go and buy out the shares and get to 51% before anybody knows about it. They get a controlling interest and whatnot or something like that. But you can see how this is basically, it's kind of bypassing the negotiation process from management to management, it's going directly to the ownership interests and are buying the individual ownership interests. So we have that and then obviously at this point in time, if A, at any point in time that A corporation then buys over a majority in B, which would be 51 or above a controlling interest or if there's some other circumstance, it could be something different, but typically that's going to be the number, then they would then have a controlling interest. At that point in time, then we wouldn't have exactly a merger situation. We'd have a parent subsidiary relationship at that point in time. You'd have a parent subsidiary relationship and you would have to then generally prepare the consolidated financial statements for the two organizations. However, if the intention of corporation A after having control, now they control the board of directors, they control the voting power of the board of directors, which includes who management is and therefore basically the big decision-making processes of management and therefore they could use that control to then liquidate B. That's why it's going to be a hostile takeover, right? So now you've got the company purchase them not to make a subsidiary necessarily, but basically ultimately to liquidate company B resulting in a similar situation we had before with just basically A remaining and then A shareholders and B shareholders, depending on how this whole thing went, being now the owners of the one organization, which is A. These assets are given to A and B is liquidated. This is a situation where we create a new company. So you can imagine a situation where you have the two entities, they're going to create a new entity, then the new company issues stock to both the combining entities in exchange for their stock. So now that the new entity is going to issue their stock and basically the two existing companies that the investor are going to then exchange their stock for it. So now the new entity, the newly created entity is basically the parents. So we're at this step of the situation. You have the new entity now being the parent because they have complete controlling interest of the other two companies if assuming that all stock of both companies were then exchanged. So resulting in both combining entities being temporary subsidiaries of the new company, both subsidiaries are then liquidated into the new company and become divisions. So you can imagine at that point in time then you got the new company that is now the parents company of the two older companies that have traded their stocks into the parent. Then you liquidate the two prior companies resulting in just the one company resulted in one legal entity. Same starting point. We have A shareholders owning A, B shareholders owning B. A new company is created. The new company is issuing stock. They issue stock to A and B in exchange for the stock of A and B. The result of that being that C now becomes in the intermediate step is going to have a subsidiary relationship that C will then become the parent at that point in time, the parent over A and B. So in other words, a shell company is being created. That shell company is exchanging the stock for the stock of A and B. And by doing so becomes now the parent company of A and B. And then we're going to say that A and B, now that C has a controlling interest, C can then liquidate A and B, the result being that now you have basically A shareholders and B shareholders having some type of controlling interest over the new entity, which is now going to be the C corporation. Now obviously we could have a third option in that format using a similar format that we just looked at, which is similar to option two, a statutory consolidation, but the subsidiary companies are not liquidated. So if that's the case, the new company issue stock to the shareholders of the two existing corporations in exchange for their stock in the new and the new subsidiary corporations. Therefore, the end result will look something like this. Now you've got A and B still having ownership over C in essence, but C now here, the new the new company is now in a situation where they're a parent company of A and B. So in other words, we just negated the last step of basically liquidating A and B into the new company C. So company C has been set up. That makes A and B the subsidiaries. And then of course you can keep that structure, you can keep that structure. Whereas you now have the shareholders, the hierarchy being A and B shareholders owned to in some ratio, the new company that's been set up company C. And then company C has a controlling interest in the subsidiaries, which were the original companies, company A and B.


It wasn't for Q-Logic, we wouldn't be here. I want to say thanks to Rob and his team at Q-Logic for providing the boot space for Oracle Open World. And for the folks out there, Oracle, we just know space available for SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, they're hardcore, they want to control all their video operations themselves, the big company, and we got in through Q-Logic and EMC and Intel supporting us, and we're on the ground bringing all the coverage of Oracle Open World.  Oracle is a huge company, 800 pound gorilla, and at the bottom line is that Oracle is one of those companies like Apple that controls the industry at an enterprise level. We know Apple on the consumer side, Oracle's the Apple of the enterprise and they're trying to change, Oracle used to own the CRM, ERP, all those big software, big database applications, now the world's changing to open source, cloud, mobile, big data, and anyone who's developing software knows that that's a big opportunity and Oracle's kind of the incumbent, Dave. They are the big guys that everyone's trying to steal market share from, so whether you're an entrepreneur, startup, or a company, you want to compete with some of those scraps, so for Oracle, they're clutching on to the marketplace, they're trying to control everything, and that's Oracle. You know, John, I'm reminded of a comment that Tom Georgins has made on theCUBE. He said, the headlines are relentlessly bad, but this is good, or maybe he said it in reverse, but yet again, the market is down, 100 points. What's Apple stock doing right now? Apple is down. Interestingly, the NASDAQ is up. So what's the current? Okay, so you can see from the screen here, we have a live picture of the Apple keynote which's going on in Cupertino, California. We could not get theCUBE there in time. We, you know, try and get there and get finance to go do these big events like Apple, and soon we'll be there, but right now, we're covering Oracle, but Apple's announcement is the iPhone 4S, and we're still waiting to hear about the iPhone 5 and other announcements. Obviously, their operating system is shipping like crazy. Big news there is that, you know, Lion has really been a successful product and the iPhone 4S. So you're looking at Apple, yeah, so they're going through the feature listings of the new 4S, and we're going to continue to get coverage here. If I had Wi-Fi up here, I'd have more access to data, so Marcus and Hopkins is yelling the features over the wire here. So basically it's off on no iPhone 5, right? No iPhone 5 announcement yet, but we still may see it today. So I think if you look at the screen, for the folks out there watching the picture here, we just want to do some commentary on Apple, because really we talked about this yesterday here inside the Cube at Oracle, and is that the world is lagging in this enterprise business on the consumerization side, meaning that the user experience and the user interface really sucks compared to what Apple's doing. So if you look at what Apple's done, they've absolutely revolutionized the user experience, the user interface, and even Android, which has some cool features, is so far away from being close to Apple in terms of user interface, user experience, and the iPad, and how they do that is really hard to do. Apple has a huge lead on the tablets. I still don't think anyone's going to catch up to Apple for at least a couple of years on the iPad side. On the iPhone side, we all know how revolutionary that was, and they continue to change the game. If you look at their reader, they're integrating media, iTunes, obviously as iTunes, and the App Store has just been a huge success. Apple continues at every single level to dominate on a performance basis of both products and finances. And you talk about the Apple stores. Apple stores, you know, people thought Apple was crazy for launching retail, Dave, and the fact of the matter is, it's been so successful, successful, because one, the stores are beautiful, and the products in there are good, and Apple takes huge painstaking steps to make sure that the products that go into the Apple Store are good. And what's worse is, well, what's worse or better for Apple, is that they take 50% of the cash. So if you and I come up with a really killer product and get in the Apple Store, we have to give up 50% of our revenue just to be stopped in the Apple retail outlets. So it's a double-edged sword. You get in to the Apple Store, you make a boatload of money on the product, but Apple gets 50% of the revenue. I still think it's a good deal. I definitely would do that deal. Well, and your point about the retail presence, Ron Johnson ended up at JC Penney, right? Ron Johnson's the guy who basically brought Apple to the retail marketplace, and huge. So the news today, John, is that evidently Apple will not announce an iPhone 5, they're going to announce an iPhone 4S, same dimensions, I guess, as the four but more powerful guts. So, you know that teardrop-shaped device that we all saw that evidently ain't happening today. Now, the word is that even if it's not an iPhone 5, the 4S is pretty peppy. I think it's going to have a gigabyte of RAM, it's got Apple's new A5 chip. What do you think that means?  Or will people skip over the 4S? Will you buy one? No, I won't buy the 4S. I have a 4, I'm waiting for the 5.  I can't get online right now, and Wi-Fi's down here. I don't know how you're getting on, but I wouldn't, I might buy it, I mean, the features are good, but here's the thing. My speculation from what I've been hearing about the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S is Apple's kind of stuck in a little bit of a halfway spot here, mainly because the iPhone was primarily built for AT&T's network. So you look at the RF side of the business. You've got GSM and CDMA, so you have two different approaches. Even though Verizon Wireless carries the iPhone, it's completely not optimized for Verizon's network. It's optimized for AT&T. So, there's been some discussion around Sprint and iPhone, so I believe, this is my conspiracy theory, that Apple, based upon my data, talking to friends in Silicon Valley, is that the Apple team is really trying to divine the iPhone so it can work across multiple protocols and multiple RF capabilities and transports, mainly because Android supports it as well. So they want to compete there. And why wouldn't Apple want to be on Sprint, AT&T and Verizon? So, you know, I think there's some design challenges. They might have holed off the iPhone 5. For that reason, don't know. I'm still waiting to confirm that or not. Yeah, so that's a good perspective. So you feel like the market feels. What? Breaking news coming in. 1080p camera. That's a feature that I might want to buy. I mean, the iPhone already takes great photos. 1080p camera. That's iPhone 4S. Okay, so we've got breaking news coming across the wire here. It's iPhone 4S has a 1080p camera. That's the biggest feature. Same chipset as iPad 2. Yeah. So we reported on Silicon Angle last year and then last fall that the major improvements to Apple is going to be very much enterprise-like, meaning you're going to start to see some software increases. So what's happening is that the Blackberry and everyone else is trying to be more consumer-like. Apple is being more enterprise-like, meaning encryption, software for productivity apps, integrating at the software level to be a stronger device. So obviously with the 1080p camera, I think you're going to expect to see Apple introduce a more set of diverse features to support the kind of environments that users are expecting, whether it's work or play. Do you think that it's a little bit of catch-up to some of the Android phones that are out there? No, no way. Android's way behind Apple. Way behind Apple. Can you elaborate on that? Well, I mean, Android does some technical things a little bit better and some of the voice recognition, some of the built-in features. Obviously, you know, it's Google, so it's got some integrations with Google tools and Gmail on YouTube. So I think that's a good enough feature set, but overall, it's just not as elegant as the iPhone. Just overall, from a software, just overall software usability standpoint. So the next web is reporting an eight megapixel camera and an A5 processor, a gigabyte of RAM, better optics, and a more accurate differential GPS stage. So, yeah, I kind of agree with you, John. I'm not sure that's going to be enough to push people over the edge, you know? I'm on the fence.  You're going to go for it? Oh, okay. If we're in iPhone 5, would you go for it? He's waiting. Okay. So I think, look at the video integration, it's phenomenal. I just love the fact that you can just, the camera is so versatile, you can just take photos, it's phenomenal. The iOS has got to get better. The other thing that no one's really talking about is the monetization platform of Apple.  Obviously, we've been following that very closely with millennial media, so we know that Apple's doing extremely well, and obviously Google has bought ad mobs, so it's interesting, Dave. I mean, Apple just has such great market power. They are the 800 pound gorilla on the consumer side, and they continue to dominate, and if you've got stock on Apple, I would say hold, I would not sell. Well, it's interesting what's happening in the stock market right now. The Dow is way down, tech is up, the NASDAQ is up, but Apple is off, way off on the news that- Yeah, what's your connectivity? How are you getting internet? Are you on Wi-Fi? No, we've got a Wi-Fi going on. Look for River. Yeah, so. What's the password? Can't say. Huh, can you say it louder? So we're here, let me just reset here. We're here live at Oracle Open World. This is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and I'm with John Furrier, my co-host, who is the founder of SiliconAngle.com. Now, for a lot of you out there, Oracle might be new, Oracle Open World might be new. There's a lot of buzzwords in this world. My Oracle, obviously, big database company, and obviously does a lot of applications, but Sun, it's full stack hardware, software, and to a certain extent, a services company. A lot of you may be new to this world, so we encourage you to check out SiliconAngle.com. Check out our TV site, SiliconAngle.tv. We've got a new site up. It's a vertical publication into services where the new IT web services, IT as a service, SAS meets the traditional services marketplace. It's a site that's being run by Alex Williams and Clint Finley, two writers that came over to SiliconAngle from the Read-Write Web. Big contributions from folks on the Wikibon side, including Bert Latimore and Jeff Kelly, so check out servicesangle.com, check out Wikibon.org. If you got questions, we'll try to get answers. Check out the resources that we have. If you can't find what you're looking for, ping us, ask a question, send us a tweet. I'm at Dave Vellante. John is at Furrier, at SiliconAngle, at Wikibon, and we'll try to get you an answer. Yeah, so Dave, the other news coming from Apple is they announced newsstand partners, New York Times, Wired, Nationally Graphic, and more. We haven't gotten the email yet for siliconangle.com, but I'm soon sure we will. Certainly the Cube videos will be up on there as well, but here's the disruption that Apple's going to take next, and that is the media business. So Apple obviously disrupted the music business, they disrupted the applications business. Expect Apple with the iPad to disrupt the newspaper business and the magazine business. Obviously with magazines and virtual reality and augmented reality, you're going to see Apple do some serious damage there. I predict that eventually they will be controlling most of that marketplace. So the stock's getting crushed today. It had hit a high of a little over 380 just before noon in anticipation. Buy in the rumor, sell in the news. That's exactly what happened here. Of course the sell off is compounded by the fact that there's no iPhone 5. So the stock was up at 380. It's now bounced off a 360 down about, almost 3% for the day. And I'm sure that'll pop right back up. I have no debate at all about that. You've heard John Furrier calling for a buying opportunity. Buying opportunity. He will see how it finishes at the end of the day. We'll keep an eye on the Apple stock. Let's get back to Oracle, Dave. Oracle Open World. You get Joe Tucci here in picture in picture. Joe Tucci, I'll see the CEO of EMC announces he's going to step down in 2012. And they're looking for an heir apparent there. Pat Gelsinger is also in the running. A few other candidates. Obviously EMC is watching the succession plans. And so the debacle at HP and knows that finding a CEO to run, the company is important. So obviously EMC's got really strong management over there. So expect to see EMC most likely look at Pat Gelsinger or someone from their organization internally. I would be shocked if EMC went outside for a CEO, Dave. I think Joe Tucci is too smart. I think the culture of EMC is too strong. And with their positioning and their branding and messaging around cloud meets big data, Pat Gelsinger clearly has a roadmap for success. I am so impressed with Pat Gelsinger that he is bringing that Intel Mojo to EMC. And you're going to see EMC quickly get into the marketplace, move from a storage dominating company to a cloud based services and product company that is going to be enabling the mobile cloud social revolution. I expect them to have a major presence in the unstructured data market. Obviously they have Green Plum, they got Isilon. Still the jury's out on how that Green Plum's going to work out, but still seems to give them a good beach head in the unstructured business. Want to hear how they evolve Green Plum, given Oracle's announcement here with their big data approach. John Mark Risen Hopkins, when the news came out that Tucci was going to step down in 2012, Hopkins wrote a story on Silicon Angle. That was very good. The two front runners for the job, for the Tucci replacement are Pat Gelsinger, as you mentioned, and David Goulden, who's the CFO. Now Goulden's a long time EMC-er. He believes it's on the board of VMware. So he's plugged into the Wall Street scene. So, you know, Gelsinger is not locked, but Hopkins predicted, and I support that prediction, that Gelsinger is next in line. I think that's a big reason why Gelsinger left Intel after 30 years. He's a legend in tech circles, and so I think that he is the heir apparent, and has the charisma, has the knowledge, and I think it's his delusion. Let's, Mark, can you pull up Silicon Angle's site, and let's just review some of the top stories we're seeing on the marketplace today that Silicon Angle's reporting. Obviously Silicon Angle, excuse me, it's reporting, obviously the RIP Zoom. Yeah, I mean, that's a slow death, obviously long time coming. Red Hat acquiring open source storage from Gluster, IBM, security services. These are the kinds of stories that we're going to be covering, okay, as well as the Apple stories, in depth. We have more in-depth covers than any other major tech blog on the marketplace. We cover the breaking news, but we go in-depth, and obviously we are watching theCUBE. This is our flagship telecast, siliconangle.tv, where we bring live coverage at the most important tech events and bring them to you, and we do multi-day in-depth analysis, commentary, and insight to provide to you from the event, and obviously we'll report on other events, obviously the Apple event, if we could get an anchor desk there, we'd be there. But this is theCUBE, our flagship telecast, and we are here in San Francisco, California for Oracle Open World, where Oracle is announcing all their major innovations, and the story here, Dave, is big data, not so much cloud. Last year Larry Ellison was talking about cloud in a box, cloud everything. This year's about analytics, big data, and the future of Oracle, which is a fully integrated hardware software, special purpose-building architecture for the enterprise. And I also want to let people know, go to siliconangle.tv, you'll see all the videos, you'll see the live coverage here, you'll see, check, click on newest videos, you'll see all the videos from this event. You can go to Wikibon and you'll see that we've got up a page on Oracle Open World that has all the videos it'll have, it'll consolidate, it's called Oracle Open World 2011, it consolidates all the videos that we're doing here, all the editorial that's being done. It's a great resource, shout out to Jeff Kelly for putting that up, and you'll see a number of guests, and we've already got, check it out, we've probably got 10 at least, maybe 10 or 12 articles and research notes and editorials up already on this event. We want to cover this like a blanket, if you've got questions, hit us up, we'll try to get you an answer, and let us know what you think, tweet us, and we'll try to help you out. Yeah, so we have a little Wi-Fi problem here, I can't access my laptop here, so I really can't respond to tweets directly, on my iPad a little slow to do that, but if you want to tweet us at Siliconangle, hashtag TheCube, we will respond, Markers and Hopkins will get us the questions, but I want to talk about that story about Microsoft and the Zoom. Zoom is their iPod kind of competitor, been out for a while as a player. The death of the Zoom really puts an exclamation point around the dominance of Apple, and how strong Android has come out of the woodwork, and how Zoom really kind of just never happened, because this is a classic example of Microsoft dropping the ball on doing anything consumer-driven, and one of the complaints about Microsoft, Dave, has been that they have no awareness around consumer. They've never really been a leader in the UI side of the business, they've never really been a leader in the user experience, and we all know they copied Apple, and then they fumbled with the phone, now they have trying to get with Nokia, so I think Microsoft really needs to up their game on the whole user experience, it's been a big theme, they've been very weak on virtualization, so I think Microsoft is in a, really not in a good position right now for me, they're on the track, they're a horse on the track, but ultimately Microsoft has just really been hurting. They continue to dominate their business of selling Windows and licenses, but their ecosystem has been strong, but Microsoft really has to get their game up and bring on more and more of that product leadership, and that could be fast-following too, it doesn't have to be like pioneering, just get some good products out the door. Yeah, I mean we've had this discussion several times, I mean I've asked you before, I'll ask you again, is Microsoft still relevant? I think so, Microsoft is relevant in the world that they're in, but the world's changing, right? There's new users coming on that are entering the workplace, it used to be like back in the old days in the business of auto manufacturers, they wanted to get the people to buy their first car because if they bought their first car, they could stay with that company and keep that brand alive with first-time car buyers. With computing, the same thing is happening, it's consumerization of computing is really relevant, and that's where Microsoft is not relevant. Microsoft is not hitting the mark on the new users.  Yahoo who? So these older brands in the computer business, just because they have market power and good cash flow with their incumbent franchises, really are hurting to the new users. The new users will ask themselves, why would I ever want to use a Microsoft product? And you know what, that hurts the overall Intel PC business and that gives us, again, more strength to the argument that Apple will continue to dominate with their product leadership, with their execution, and overall for financial performance. I think it's very symbolic that IBM recently surpassed Microsoft in terms of market cap. They're both hovering around 200 million, 205, 203, Microsoft's a little ahead right now, but essentially Microsoft decoupled IBM's mainframe business, took IBM out of the monopoly, and was the most valuable tech company in the planet. And now here's IBM with its new business model over the past 10 or 15 years crawling back and now is at least an equally valuable company. Of course, Apple is the big king in the block now. Yeah, I mean, I think the way you can explain the IBM transformation to take over the leadership position in terms of market cap over Microsoft is simply put, they're executing on their business and they're actually transforming their business. So what Microsoft has not done as well as IBM is that IBM has absolutely moved with the marketplace. They sold off Lenovo PC to still supply that product to their customer base, expanded their services business, essentially execute on the execution side, brought in more revenue streams, and IBM's got some dogs in their portfolio. I mean, they've struggled with Lotus and transforming that brand. Again, that's just a whole nother conversation. The debacle of Lotus, but that's, again, a whole nother conversation. But in general, IBM has executed extremely well. They've great corporate marketing, as Ray Wang pointed out, but for the most part, it's pure execution. I think Microsoft has fumbled on the execution side and the roadkill of products is just endless. Phone, Zoom now, it just goes on and on. So, is Ballmer the right CEO? I still think I like Ballmer, but, you know, something's got to change. I mean, they got to start establishing some execution in their business, and that might mean cannibalizing their existing Windows and Office business. What about Microsoft and Cloud? What's your take there? I think they have a huge opportunity with Cloud. Obviously, Azure is not a small platform. They have scale.  They do have scale. They just got to get their act together and get out of the politics that goes on there. And when I talk to people inside Microsoft, there's two camps. There's the, well, we're Microsoft, we're big, we can do a lot of cool things. And then there's another camp that says, this is so political, it's a disaster. And the interesting thing about Microsoft, and this is more on the website, if you look at Yahoo and Microsoft, both have failed, in my opinion, to really cross over to the new architecture of Web 2.0 and social. And I'll give you an example. If you look at the management team of Yahoo and the management team of Microsoft, the MSN and their online and cloud operation, in essence, what you have here is a complete swip swap of people. If you look at the history, and this has not been posted out there, so this might be a good blog post for some of our writers, because I have yet to report on this. The top management at Yahoo is ex-Microsoft. The top management at Microsoft on the search side is ex-Yahoo. So there's been a complete flip-flop of the management team on both companies. So the Yahoo guys went to Microsoft, Bing, and then the Microsoft guys went to Yahoo. So that, to me, tells a story. Well, and we have Craig Patel coming on shortly, maybe even bring him in a little earlier, from VMware, and VMware obviously has a lot of Microsoft, former Microsoft executives, not the least of which is Paul Moritz and Todd, who's been on theCUBE a number of times. Todd Nielsen. So, yeah. I mean, VMware isn't exactly the kind of company we look at that's emerging, that quite frankly has the DNA to take territory down on the new marketplace. I mean, you said to start VMware, we had the cube there. VMware was very active in laying out a year ago in 2010, their architecture, which is in essence a kind of a software mainframe, as we talked about, that's Paul Moritz laid out. Larry Ellison's completely copying the same exact messaging of VMware, but he's taking a completely different twist on it. He's vertically integrating performance and hardware. So, interesting enough, is they both have huge ecosystems developing. I see Oracle as a monster ecosystem, but VMware's got a very robust ecosystem developing, and there's, I think, a lot of money to be made in VMware. The question is, how does that all kind of cross-connect? Well, I think VMware is driving a lot of the discussion in the data center, and its owner, EMC, I think actually has a lot to lose when you start thinking about Oracle, and what Oracle's trying to do with Exadata, and grabbing more of the storage stack, so it's going to be interesting to see how they... What's the market cap of VMware right now? What's the market cap of EMC? I'd like to, interesting, get those stats. So, VMware is trading in a range of about $30 billion, maybe $33 billion, and EMC, let me just pull them up, problem guessing around $50, but we'll take a look at EMC's. $33 billion. $33 billion is VMware, EMC's around $42. $42, okay, so less than EMC, so the question that I have is when... No, no, EMC is still about $10 billion more valuable than VMware, the interesting thing about it is, EMC owns 80% of VMware, so if you do the math, a disproportionate proportion of the value of EMC's value is VMware, much higher than... My joke at the cocktail parties that I go out in Toronto Silicon Valley is, can't wait for when VMware spins off EMC, and that'll happen once the market cap increases to over $42 billion. But my contention is that EMC is a great way to own VMware stock, because you get the great cash flow of EMC, I think the core EMC business is undervalued because everybody's putting a premium on VMware, and because EMC, Tucci has said, I'm not going to spin it off, people devalue the core EMC piece, so it's a great way, a more conservative way to own.


We are at King's Dining and Entertainment. This is a really fun place. It's got a bowling alley. We got an arcade. We got a bar because after 21, today we're gonna be doing a micro drone shootout. The Bobito, the Vision 40, and the Dribblet. We're gonna be telling you guys the differences about them today. Of course, just have a good time. I'm gonna try flying the Dribblet. This is a two inch open prop quad. I think it's gonna be probably a little too big for in here but I just kinda wanna try it out because it's my thing, right? This is probably better suited for small outdoor areas like front yard or just small parks or something like that.  My Dribblet, so I pretty much get one go with it because it's open prop. So if I crash and break a prop, I'm just done. Messed up, I messed up. The Dribblet's really more of like an outdoor small space ripper, like a tight park. Yeah. I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do much than just kind of like rip around but it's still fun. Yeah. For me it seems like the ideal front yard ripper, I just wanna fly around my house. It's dreading though. Is it okay to just have fun with the drone? No, no, no, no. Hey, hey, come on police here. No fun with the drone, trips only. Oh, let's see some trippy spins. I wanna see some matty flips, some backwards stuff. I did a roll. I did a roll. Otherwise we're gonna have to confiscate these drones here. I have the Bapita which is my nano indoor drone and I designed this thing to have the ultimate freestyle abilities when you're in a really tight small area. So even this place that we're at right now is kind of big for it.  All the little tiny gaps, all the things that I made the Bapita for. Ideally a place for this to be like a house where I live, I don't have any land so I wanted to fly some freestyle inside. So that's what I made this for. So let's go ahead and get some freestyle here.  The Bapita is really cool. It's definitely the smallest drone here. So that's an advantage. I'd say disadvantage is right now there's not a good digital solution for a drone of that size. So, but we still rock an analog. This is the V1 1S Avatar VTX. The V2 isn't out yet. Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean by the time this video comes out it might be out. I know it's coming really soon. It's exciting that they're like coming out with new versions of it to make the camera even smaller. That looks great. About the Vision 40. I do. It's a good like in between ripper, something between like the driplet and the Bapita. It's a little heavy, but like once you're up in the throttle you can maneuver it, do some flips, do some juicy flicks. I was doing a trippy spin out here. So you can do some tricks with it but it's not something that's as nimble as a Bapita. But I had a lot of fun. I'm cool enough to trippy spin indoor. And it's HD. HD. And I was actually surprised. Like I took some tumbles. I ran it into myself. It doesn't seem like it feels light on crashes. Yeah. Well, it's nice having the ducks because like I forgot to bring props when I dribble it. I only got two packs in. I broke a prop. I'm just done now. I also forgot to bring props for this, but it doesn't matter because you got them ducks. Yeah. I usually think about like protection for from four people or things. Right. When I think about ducks, but I, you know, it's protecting the props as well. Yeah. It's the HD. That's the main differences. You got HD on board with this. Hopefully when they have the V2 VTX, they shave a few grams. It'll make it even better. It's better than I thought it was gonna be. Three props out of four? Three props out of four.  So James gave me his vision 40 so I can get a little bit more flying it. And I think this is better suited for in here anyway. I want to just go up kind of like in the disco ball and orbit around there. I think that could look like very psychedelic, man. This is exactly what I do. I do the hard thing and then I get all psyched and just run into a wall for no reasons. And it's trying to dive this and it thumps off the bowling ball apparently. It's so far down, dude. It literally says moving parts, keep hands clear. Yeah, it might live there now. It's not my veto. No, don't, don't. That's a great way to lose a finger or an arm. Yeah. Yeah, this definitely needs to be off. Okay.


Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Pat, Mike Cortez, Erwin Stewart, and brand new patrons Maxime and Ed. Welcome, Ed, everybody! On this episode of DTNS, Patrick Beja is here to talk about Unity's multi-platform strategy and Ubisoft's AI NPCs, plus Threads takes a few more steps towards the Fediverse. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 20th, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. I'm the show's producer. From the forests of Finland, I'm Patrick Beja. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yes, indeed! Patrick Beja, the coolest French podcaster we know, is back. Welcome, Patrick. It's good to have you. It's nice to be here. I totally did not feed you that line about, but you probably only know one French podcaster, right? It's still true. I think I might know one other, but it's still true. Is it the solstice yet? Almost. March 20th. Equinox. Equinox. Equinox. It's, you know, in Finland, it is so important because that's when you start to have hope again.  And it's been a few weeks that we kind of start wondering if it might. And now we have the confirmation because we have a little bit more sun. So, yes, it's good. Yeah, according to a quick search, Tuesday, March 19th at 8 p.m. in the Pacific time zone was solstice. So, or equinox. Keep saying solstice. Happy equinox, everybody. Equinox. And congratulate Patrick on getting more sun. All right. Let's start with the quick answer. The US executive branch has agreed to authorize $8.5 billion in direct funding and a further $11 billion in loans to Intel as provided by the US Chips and Science Act. So the way it works, Congress passes the act and then the executive branch authorizes the funding. Intel will use the money to build chip plants in four US states. Huh? I think they might be swing states in the upcoming election. So odd. The goal is to bring US share of advanced chip production from close to zero, as it is right now, to 20% over the next few years. Business Insider sources say OpenAI may release GPT-5, the next version of its generative model this summer. OpenAI is testing the model after which it will do a safety test before public release. A CEO saw a demo of GPT-5 called it, I should say, materially better and suggested one new feature would be the ability for enterprise clients to call unreleased OpenAI agents to perform tasks on demand. Yesterday, we mentioned that two of the co-founders of Inflection AI were headed to Microsoft to start a new division there. A few more details will help you understand this story. The remaining co-founder who stayed with Inflection is Reid Hoffman. If you're like, that name sounds familiar.  But he is staying on at Inflection with new CEO, Sean White and whatever staff that didn't head to Microsoft AI because it looks like a big chunk of them went with their bosses. But Microsoft is also a big investor in Inflection. So it seems to be a case of Microsoft incubating a startup probably at Reid Hoffman's idea, then eating the good parts. Inflection's original business was multi-platform conversational AI, which would try to remember not only you, but previous conversations it had with you. And the new focus now that all of those people have gone over to Microsoft will be on building custom generative chatbots for commercial customers. India's Ministry of Electronics and IT announced on Wednesday that it has amended the IT rules of 2021 to solidify the legal basis of the President Information Bureau's fact-checking unit. That unit will monitor platforms with more than five million users in India to make sure they do not display, store, transmit, or otherwise share information that deceives or misleads users about matters pertaining to the government. Critics say the Bureau sometimes labels factual information critical of the government as misleading. Which I'm sure in their opinion it might be. Stardew Valley 1.6 came out Tuesday and according to SteamDB data, it reached 146,159 concurrent players on Steam, beating the previous peak of 94,875 set in January 2021 right after 1.5 came out. That puts it above the current high numbers of PAL world and since we're talking about actual games, EA says it has deployed a layered series of security updates to Apex Legends to address vulnerabilities that were exploited to add cheats to players competing in the global series this past weekend. So just following up that they fixed that patch. Did you see that, Patrick? I saw it after the fact, but it's kind of crazy because people were hacked as they were playing participating in the eSports tournament. So you can see in the videos one of the players is telling, is speaking with his teammates and he's like, okay, I see them, I see them, they're here and oh wait, I'm being hacked, I'm being hacked. And then he freaks out and he logs out because he's afraid that the authorities of EA would accuse them of cheating. So he just logs out and he starts praying that, you know, things go well, but it was pretty crazy to see that happening. Yeah, it was kind of impressive presence of mine, to be honest. All right, Rob, tell us what's going on in the Fediverse. Yeah, so yesterday was the first day of the FEDI forum, the two-day virtual unconference that discusses the future of the Fediverse. And on Tuesday's presentations, Metas Peter Cottle showed off a brief demo of how users can eventually connect their accounts and post to the Fediverse through threads. The Fediverse is an interconnected social platform ecosystem based on an open protocol called Activity Pub, which allows you to report your content, data, and follow a graph between networks. Threads is one of the many platforms aiming to join the Fediverse. Mastodon is arguably the most notable platform currently there. Interestingly, Blue Sky, the Jack Dorsey-started decentralized social network, uses the currently incompatible IT protocol or AT protocol to do what Activity Pub does. My questions to you, Patrick, are if threads eventually joining the Fediverse is a big deal and are competing protocols a good thing? So, to the first question, yes, of course. The size of threads is completely dwarfs any other instance of the Fediverse. And a thread actually joining the Fediverse would make the Fediverse into an actual global important thing. I'm sure people who enjoy Mastodon and other Fediverse instances and pixel-fed and all of those would say, but it's already a big thing. Well, we could debate that. They're big and big, right? Yeah, exactly. Threads is what, 100 million users already or close to that? And Mastodon.social is like a couple of million currently. So, yeah, there's big and there's big. Obviously threads joining that would be massive. It wouldn't mean that everyone using threads would be aware of the Fediverse, but it would mean that everyone would have super easy access to it or essentially already have access to it. We will leave aside for the moment the question of whether or not other instances will rebel against threads and block it because it comes from Facebook and is very centralized at its core, which many have threatened to do. So we'll see how that will go. But to the second question, I think a lot of people don't realize why Blue Sky is different from Mastodon and why it is an interesting alternative decentralized social network. What Blue Sky does, which is different, is that it externalizes many aspects of a centralized service, whereas Mastodon is created so that anyone can create an instance and interconnect all of them together, which is cool. Blue Sky essentially feeds, which is not just a list of people that you follow or don't follow, but you can customize with algorithmically different feeds and you can externalize also different moderation services or moderation styles. So you could construct your presence on the network with different feeds, with different moderation rules that you would subscribe to or pay for. So it is pushing the decentralization idea much further than Mastodon is, which Mastodon does it in a very straightforward way, which is interesting. But what Blue Sky does is interesting as well, I think. Yeah. And this Fediverse interaction, just to keep this in people's minds, is proceeding slowly. When they roll it out, it's in the alpha stage right now and they haven't rolled it out to everybody. But when they roll it out to everybody, you won't be able to do everything you can do on a Mastodon instance. Right now, you can only see likes. You can't even see replies. And it's very limited what they can do. But what they were showing off is how they will label to show like, oh, this person has a Mastodon integration or Fediverse integration, not Mastodon particularly. And you can be able to get their Fediverse ID to add them if you are on something like Pixel Fed or Mastodon. And how you can't be sure if you delete a thread that has been pushed to the Fediverse, that it will be deleted on every Mastodon or other server out there. So they are delaying posts five minutes before they push them to the Fediverse, just in case you suddenly decide immediately you don't want it out there. So it's going to be a very slow and very interesting integration, I think. I certainly do and I think it will, no matter what happens, it will remain a small part of threads users that will be aware of the Fediverse. But it might interest some people who might not have heard of it just by the labeling thing alone. Yeah. Yeah. And it will certainly help spread the word and raise some awareness. Ubisoft revealed a GDC that it has been developing an NPC, a non-player character that uses large language models so it can have more realistic conversations with players and developers. Players create Neo NPCs, sorry, developers create Neo NPCs by feeding a description of its backstory and personality into the large language model. That creates the NPC and then players can speak into a mic and their speech is transformed into text prompts for the chatbot powered NPC. Occasionally, a pre-written game plot, like you would get in a traditional NPC, will show up in response.  We'll still be part of the mix. Ubisoft's Neo NPC was made with Nvidia's audio to face application and in-world's large language model. Ubisoft says the characters are still prototypes. So they're demonstrating them, but they're kind of quirky and they're like, yeah, we haven't worked out all the details. The Verge's Sean Hollister described the characters as, quote, awkward, a little stunted with lag before replies and occasional vocal stutters. But you know, hey, prototype here. Patrick Rockpaper Shotgun quoted Brendan Keough saying, why would I want to listen to dialogue? Nobody wrote. Whereas Ubisoft's CEO, Yves Gemma said, you don't have to make them human. You have to say what they are. What's important is make sure they've games become more intelligent. Do you have a side you prefer in this argument? I think a lot of people are going to have a, you know, knee-jerk reaction saying, but I don't want that because I want real people writing my NPC's dialogue and I don't want to speak to them. I don't want... I certainly can understand the idea that you don't necessarily want to have a full conversation with every NPC you meet. And it will be awkward, at least for now. It will be awkward. There will be lag, etc., etc. What I think is interesting is that this is an actual video game developer testing this Ubisoft because we've seen it from NVIDIA before. We've seen it a few weeks, a few months ago. And Ubisoft actually trying to see if it can be implemented and benefit the player is the really interesting thing here. The way I think of it is think of a randomized algorithmic, the word is caping me, level generation, for example. You can use it badly and you can use it well. And it certainly is not applicable everywhere, but in a game like, let's say, Hades where you go from room to room and you randomize your runs with, you know, a roguelite or something like that, randomization or algorithmic level building can make sense. I think I would be surprised if these types of technologies never bring anything to any NPC in any game, right? It's not going to be good for all of them, but certainly in some cases, depending on the type of game you want, it could bring something. If you can focus the NPCs well enough and if you don't easily jailbreak the AI and it starts saying silly stuff for, you know, you start bleeding one NPC into the other, like if it's done well, it could bring something to the game, I think. I'm already starting to feel the cognitive dissonance from this, from holding two completely disparate thoughts at the same time. I love this and I hate this. I want my NPCs to be useful while not being there at all. Is it just get out of my way and let me do what I want to do or at least be useful to me and to help me meet to do the things that I'm trying to get done. So I'm kind of excited about this, but I could see it making games a nuisance. And I do get the point. You know, I like games for story. I generally will play a game on story mode just because I want to get all the story. If it was never written, I don't necessarily want AI making stuff up, you know, about the story. But then that sounds kind of cool. I might actually like that. So I don't know how to feel about it. But that's the thing. You're, I mean, that you're exactly on point. Like if you go out and start talking to an NPC and you start having a full conversation as if it was a real person, is there any point if it's not a real person, right? Like if it just starts, imagine you plug in chat GPT and you start chatting, you just, you don't necessarily always just chat with chat GPT just to chat. You need to have a point to it, even if the point is to, you know, I don't know, some therapy support or something like that, which some people use it for, which actually might be useful as well. I don't know. In game therapy. Why not? Yeah. I think the point is this is one tool and you don't use, you know, not every game has to be 3D, not every game has to have auto generated levels, not every game. And in this case, it might be useful in some instances. But I think they will be relatively limited. Yeah, I hit upon the same things that y'all are talking about. And to me, it's a game design question, not a technology question. This is a great tool to have in the arsenal. There certainly are times when I wish NPCs didn't feel so automated, where I would like to ask them other things and see if I could glean other things and feel more immersed in the world. But I'm with you, Rob, at the same time, I don't want to have to be sitting around trying to guess what to say to get them to give me my quest. I want that to be easy. So it's about game design and having characters that are using the generative models for NPCs where appropriate and it doesn't get in the way of you enjoying your playing, right? That being said, currently, the interaction with NPCs is dialogue trees, right? It's just one, you say something and you can choose like four different things to say. They answer, again, you choose four different things. This is very primitive. It is extremely primitive. So I'm sure some interaction, it's impossible that no interaction will be made better by having an actual conversation with the NPC. The important thing is to focus it. I think they can. Yeah. No, I think you're absolutely right. I played that too early. If you can't get enough Android in your life, then listen to Android Faithful every week. Android aficionados, Ron Richards, Wen Tui Dao, Michelle Ramon and Jason Howell team up like a team of superheroes and bring you the latest Android news and information. They just had another excellent episode on Tuesday. You didn't watch it live, maybe, but you can next week Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. But don't worry if you missed it live. You can always find it on demand at androidfaithful.com. On Monday, Unity Technologies, developer of the Game Engine Unity, hence the name, released its 2024 Unity Gaming Report at the Game Developers Conference. Insights and data from more than 5 million Unity Engine developers was put together. More than 342 billion ad views were used to generate the report and collect all of this. Among the findings was an increased diversification of revenue sources such as in-app advertising, a finding of increasing retention for games that are powered by in-app sales, rapid adoption of AI, 62% of studios incorporating AI tools into workflows, mostly for coding and assistance, and expanded multi-platform and multiplayer development.  Why did that recent trend catch your eye? Yeah, this is really the most interesting aspect of the report for me. Now we have to keep in mind that this is games using the Unity Engine, so Unity is used a lot across platform, so multi-platform, so that skews it a little bit. But still, it kind of puts a data point on something that we've been seeing and feeling in the industry for a while, which is a lot of developers are going multi-platform, including some of the bigger developers who are also platform holders. We've heard about all the hula-baloo about Microsoft putting games on PlayStation and PlayStation putting many games on PC, which they didn't use to do, and how generalized that trend is becoming. And this report is kind of saying, yeah, it's significant. We're seeing, I think they said, 40% increase from two years ago, so it's really not nothing, even for specifically Unity. And I think you can explain it in a straightforward manner. There are IPs that you have used as much as possible, and then you still want to extract revenue out of them, so you will put them on other platforms, because then the people who didn't get access to it on your initial platform can also give you money. And it's the same for developers who actually develop multi-platform from the get-go. Let's try and reach people where they are. I think an easy way of extrapolating too much is going to that idea that, well, that means platforms are dead. And that's where I would like to kind of take the counterpoint a little bit. Multi-platform is very obviously getting more and more important, but platforms, I think, are here to stay. And if you want to understand why, the answer is very easy. It's because it makes more money for the platform holders. And usually those big companies like money, so if your option is to get 100% of the revenue or 70%, usually they prefer 100%. So yes, multi-platform, expanding a lot, but platforms are not going to go away, PlayStation is still here, Xbox is still here, the Switch or whichever it turns out to be for the next one is still going to be here. As a gamer, I am really interested in the multi-platform stuff because I actually have a, I still have an Xbox 360, I've got two Xbox ones, various models of them, I have PlayStation 5, and I got a couple switches. And I don't often play the same game on multiple devices, but I kind of would like to be able to. So if multi-platform gets it to where, I'm probably still going to always have each of the platforms, but if I take my Switch with me and I can continue playing a game that I normally play on Xbox or on PlayStation, that is a plus to me. I would actually play a premium for that to be able to port games in between systems relatively easily. So I am excited about this. I'm with you, Patrick, I don't know that the game developers, I don't know that PlayStation is going to want to make less PlayStation, I don't know that Microsoft is going to want to make less Xboxes, but those two companies, I don't believe they act, I think they're loss leaders for them. I don't know that they make a lot of money selling those devices, they still make their money primarily on the games, and I see this as a way for them to do more of that. So I think a lot of people look at this and think, well, get a Steam Deck or get a ROG Ally or whatever, a portable PC console type thing that looks like a Switch and you buy all your games on PC and you'll be good. And the ideal situation is that every game comes out on every platform and that would be fantastic, but I disagree. I think that means every platform is a PC and then you lose the exclusives when that happens because every platform can run every game. The point of the exclusive, you're right, they don't make the platform holders, don't make a lot of money on the consoles themselves. They make money on the royalties, not the royalties, the commissions they get from everybody selling games on their platforms once they have a large install base. And in order to get a large install base, what they need to do is get people to buy their platform because they can get something there that doesn't exist elsewhere. So in effect, what you do when you say, I want every console to be a PC, is you're telling PlayStation, we don't want you to make The Last of Us again. We don't want Microsoft to make Halo, although that might not be such a bad idea. We don't want Nintendo to make Zelda. Of course, if there was only PCs, I'm sure they would still want to make those games, but the real motivation to make them excellent and to make them stand out is that it will bring players to their platform that they then monetize. So we don't want those platforms and those exclusives to go away, I don't think. Although the same thing doesn't happen in television. We don't need a platform for someone to make a good television show. Of course you do. HBO is a platform. But it's not. The platform is the Apple TV, or the Roku, or the TV. It's the service that is Max or Netflix. Yeah, Potato Potato. The new platform for Xbox is the Game Pass. The reason they're saying, oh, we want our thing to be everywhere is that they're doing a bait and switch. They're just changing the nature of their platform and providing Game Pass to PlayStation owners or switch owners is just a way to insert their own platform. Yeah, you can call it a service, but it's the same thing. You want people to come to your platform to then monetize them in other ways. I think it's important to have a little bit of a distinction there because I think folks will get caught up in the idea of Microsoft has to always make the Xbox or Sony always has to have the PlayStation, but they can keep their platform by having Game Pass, like you said. That could be the platform for Microsoft in the future, right? Could be. Yeah. Again, that's a whole other rabbit hole to go down on cloud gaming and all of that, but Microsoft's certainly positioning itself for that eventual possibility. I mean, Steam is a platform, impossible to move out of its dominant position, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, before we wrap up, Rob, let's check out the mailbag. So yeah, we have an excellent mailbag item from Tim, who writes in, Hey, DTNS crew as a merchant mariner and former crane engineer, I wanted to give a little extra context on the ports needing to be made ready for those ships with the sailing wings on them. Tom mentioned air clearance for things like bridges, which will matter in some cases, but nearly every port will have to be retrofitted to support these kinds of vessels, primarily because of the huge gantry cranes that are used to load and unload the ships. The crane's booms extend over the entire width of the ship and move to containers or move containers between the vessels and shore. Those cranes will have to all be tall enough to clear the wings while they're performing cargo operations. While most gantry train's booms are raised and lowered, it's very slow and usually done as little as possible. For example, to get around the ship's house, which is the navigation bridge in the living area for the crew. And when the ship is arriving and departing, having to raise the crane boom to go between cargo bays would significantly increase the time to work each bay. Another potential issue that could require modified procedures and training of longshore teams is removing and replacing the massive hatch covers that make the cargo bays watertight. Those hatches are enormous and would be very difficult and very heavy to move in out of place without hitting the wings. None of those things are insurmountable, but there is a lot of shoreside work that will have to be done alongside the wing engineering before vessels can be put fully into service. Man, when we were talking about this, and to catch anybody up if you mixed yesterday's episode, we were talking about the technology being proven that these big wings they put on ships can capture enough wind energy to save a lot of money, save a lot of fuel on ships. They've been testing them for six months. But I mentioned, as Tim mentioned here, that you would have to reengineer ports. And I knew there were people out there who were like, why do you have to change the ports? Just a boat, it goes in. And I was, I knew there was more to it. But the only thing I could think of off the top of my head was bridges. And I was like, man, I wish I knew more about ports. But thankfully I didn't have to know more about ports because Tim deputy knew about ports and wrote in this excellent email. Thank you, Tim. This is, this is fantastic. Tim knows a lot about ports. So yeah, this is an excellent email. Now I have a better understanding of like, oh, yeah, okay, it makes sense. If you have three big towers, you know, for, for collecting wind energy on top of a boat, the cranes aren't going to be able to unload the ship. That's, that's fantastic. So thank you, Tim. I love it when people with actual knowledge of stuff like Tim has right in and help us all get a little smarter. Thank you, Tim. Keep those coming feedback at daily tech news show.com also something we would like to keep coming is Patrick Beja. Welcome back to the show. It's been way too long. I know you've been up to stuff though. In the meantime, what, what have you been doing to tell folks about? Well, I do shows in French because I am French. I do the rendezvous tech and the rendezvous, which are weekly shows about tech news and gaming news. We take, you know, a little bit of a industry analysis approach. And it's in French. So I don't know it will be interesting to you if you don't speak French, but if you want to learn, it's a good way because it's a topic you might know. All of these are linked at notpatrick.com. Very easy to get to. I have fallen off my study of French in favor of Korean lately. But when I was trying to, to, to learn French listening to your shows was helpful because I know you. So I was, it was easier to understand. And I know the topic. So I was like, okay, I can put together with context a lot of things. So really, it really is helpful. It's, it's no joke. Go check that out. Patreon, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We look at a Deloitte survey to see what consumers say they actually want from streaming services. And it's not just for them to stop raising prices. In fact, that doesn't seem to be part of it as much as you might think. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4pm Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com, Forsyth Live. We'll be back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. TNS Family Podcasts. Helping each other understage.


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