QuickBooks Online 2023. Enter service items. Get ready to start moving on up with QuickBooks Online. Here we are in our Get Great Guitars practice file. We started up in a prior presentation using the 30-day free trial. Support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. We also have open in another incognito tab the free QuickBooks Online test drive sample company which if you want open at the same time as your company file you would need to open in an incognito window or another browser. If using Google Chrome you could find the incognito mode by going to the three dots new incognito window and then search for QuickBooks Online test drive. We will be using the sample company file to look at the differences between the accountant view which is what the Get Great Guitars file is in and the business view which is what the sample company is in. You can toggle back and forth between the two views by selecting the cog up top and switching to the accountant or business view. Also note that we're zoomed in a little bit you can hold control and scroll up or down to zoom. I'm currently at the 125% on the zoom in. Thus far we have set up a new company file. We've looked at some company preferences located at the cog up top in both the business and accounting view. We have a chart of accounts although it's somewhat of a generic chart of accounts thus far it having been provided by QuickBooks when we set up the company file located in the accountant view under the accounting tab on the left hand side and then the chart of accounts. If under the business view it would be under the bookkeeping tab and then the chart of accounts. Now the chart of accounts is going to be something that we're going to have to modify because the chart of accounts is going to have a whole lot of accounts is the way the QuickBooks Online is currently set up. What we want to do now is look at these balances that are our beginning balances that we talked about last time which we're going to say these are the balances at the end of the prior accounting system 1231-22 the balance sheet accounts that I'd like to put in our accounting system as of 1231-22 so that we can start our new accounting system on January 1st 2023. So I need to have at least these accounts into our chart of accounts so the general rule for the chart of accounts as I add these accounts is if there's an account already here that is the same as the account that I want to be adding then of course I'm going to use the account that is already here. If there is not but there's a similar account then I'm going to try to change the name possibly of the account to be appropriate and fit my needs instead of having two accounts that are very similar in name which will confuse the data input and then as after we do like two months of data input with that strategy then I would go back into the chart of accounts and look at those accounts that I'm not using and then try to clean up my chart of accounts making those accounts inactive. So at this point in time we want to look at these accounts and add them into our system and and then change the chart of accounts as needed. So right now we're going to be looking soon at the inventory assets which have an added complexity of inventory items and we're going to kind of lead into that by first looking at service items. In other words we'll pick some of the harder accounts firsts that have these sub ledgers that become more of a problem that is with inventory if you're tracking inventory within the system that is also going to be the same with the accounts receivable which means you have to have customers that are kind of attached to it with a sub ledger and the accounts payable. So we're going to start leading into kind of the inventory that we're going to be adding into the system and the way we add the inventory items into the system is we have to add the actual inventory items if we're using a perpetual inventory system within QuickBooks and the cost of those items which the system can then make into and determine the ending balance of this 2008-96 the other side going to the equity. Now to lead into that though we're going to start with service items. Service items don't have an inventory component but they're going to be added in a similar fashion and they're going to be easier to add. So if I close this out the service items if I go to the left hand side back to the dashboard note that when we make a sale of items if I go to the plus button up top we make a sale with invoices and we make a sale with the with the sales receipt typically. If I was to open an invoice then the things that we sell are going to be down here in the products and services. What we want to do as we add the invoices is make it as easy to populate as we can. We can imagine if you're at a check register of the grocery store you can check out your own stuff basically by just scanning it. That's how easy we want the data input to be. We would like a checker to be able to input it basically we would like to be able to input it ourselves even if it's our own bookkeeping we would like to make the items as easy as possible to do the data input. That means that this section the items is what we have to add. Now if they're inventory items that we're tracking in the system then we also want the inventory to be adjusted on a perpetual inventory system if we're using a perpetual inventory method. But for now we're going to start off with the service items which don't have any inventory component to them but the items are set up in a similar fashion as inventory items. So they give you the default of like hours here hours late fees and services. These are generic items which are fine for some businesses. I mean you might you might be in a bookkeeping business or a law firm and you're just going to charge an hourly rate say this is how many hours and charge a rate for that. However even in a system that is traditionally an hourly rate system if you can bill in some other way for example with bookkeeping if you're able to say hey look I'm going to bill you by how many transactions I have if you're between 25 and 50 transactions I charge you this much if you're between 50 and 100 transactions I charge you this much. If you could do something like that it makes the billing process a lot easier to go through. So it would be great if you could set up your items so that you can make the billing process as easy as possible. Okay so we're going to we're going to sell actually guitars do you want to leave without saving we're going to sell guitars as one of our primary items and get great guitars but we'll also set up service items we'll set up guitar lessons later and we'll set up other kind of generic service items so we can see the differences of revenue generation with a service item versus an inventory item. So now this is going to be our list of items that we're going to enter in the system and they're kind of generic and they sound more like an auto an auto shop than a guitar shop but we're just trying to enter some generic items so you can see how the items can be entered into the system. Note that you can enter the items as you as you enter an invoice for example so if I went back on over here I could I could as I'm entering an invoice enter the service item add a new service item here but I don't typically want to do that as a general rule I want to have the items set up so the entering of the invoice is easy I just pick an item I don't have to set up the item the setting up the items is the behind the scenes thing that's a little bit more complex typically or if I close this out and note what the items are located through under the sales area which I would call like the customer cycle and then they're under products and services this is in the accountant view if you're in the the business view they would be under the get paid and pay area and then they're under the products and services there so same stuff just a different location on how to get in there and then once we're in here we can close up the hamburger and we can add items by saying new so if you add a new item then you have your choice of inventory item non-inventory items service item or bundle inventory items it says your products you buy and or sell and that you track quantities of meaning we're going to track the units not just the not just the dollar amount non-inventory products you buy and or sell but don't need to or can't track the quantity so we're not going to be tracking the quantity of the units which is that added level so it's kind of like a service item and then service item services that you provide to customers that's what we're going to do here we don't need to deal with inventory with regards to the service items and so that's where we'll start and then we'll go into the inventory items bundle a collection of products and or services that you sell together so you can bundle them up all right closing this back out just to see what they have thus far they've got these three items those are our generic items we saw in the drop down of the invoice so i could add an item one at a time by saying new and then service item and then put the name of the item it probably wouldn't have a number if it's a service item a category means that i can have items of a similar nature categorized under a subcategory so if it was guitar lessons by different instructors maybe i have them under the category of guitar lessons and then i sell this product to my customers the description this is what's going to show up on the invoice and sales receipts when we populate it the rate and then we've got the income account notice that it's generically set up here to go to a service's income account this is a gl account that that is on the general ledger that we just we looked at the general ledger so that's a generic service type of account which looks appropriate for us and then i purchased this product no i don't now we could add these one by one or if we're pulling this in from another accounting system and i have a list of items that we want to do at the same time we could import this importing process can be done in a lot of these areas like setting up your customers setting up your items and setting up your inventory service items and your vendors so i'm gonna say okay let's say i hit the drop down and say import if i do an import option here's what we have first time importing products or services all your products and service information must be in one file the top row of the file must contain a header title for each column of information required fields if you're importing inventory then product name product type quantity and quantity as of date are required if you're importing services or non inventory items the name of the item is the only required field now this this is selected a csv item here uh and this on this side we've got the google sheet so over here csv is is like an excel file it's like a comma delineated file but you can open it in excel with it basically looks like an excel file with no formatting to it now we can open up their sample so a good way to do this often time is to open up the sample which shows up down here if you're in google chrome it'll typically open up in uh in an excel worksheet so i'm going to say enable and then if i have my information that i got from another accounting system like this then i really all i really want to do is populate the headers to fit to to fit right so i can i what i'd like to do is line up the proper headers so that it will line up when i import it into the system it won't get confused because i use different header names then they have formally used so what i'll do is i'll just modify their template here and and then enter my data into it so i'm going to change the headers to line up to what my headers are and then i'm just going to copy and paste my data into this excel worksheet and use it to upload so let's i'm going to delete this one all together i'm going to delete this and then and then let's look at what we have here so what i have is the is the item name products and services so product service name product and service description let's keep that the sku i don't have one so i'm going to delete the type is going to be service for us so let's keep that line the sales price uh so we need that line income account i think we're going to need that line and then the purchase description is uh we don't need that because it's a we don't need the purchase cost the expense account we don't need so i'm going to delete those it's not inventory so i'm going to go i'm going to put my cursor on the f and then reorder point don't need inventory asset don't need because it's a service item that's why this is a simplified intro into the inventory which we'll do next time quantity on hand we don't need so i'm going to delete that and then if i go back to the right we've got the product service name i'm going to delete these and i'm just going to copy my product and service names which i put here i'm just going to copy these either generic things obviously so they're kind of don't and then i'll put them in here and then we got the sales description which i'm going to just say is the same so this is what this description that's going to show on the invoices and sales receipts i'm just going to copy this put it down there paste it and then i didn't have something for the type but the type is going to be a service item it's not an inventory items they're service items so i'm just going to copy this and paste it down and delete these two and then the sales price i'm going to pick that up for my data so i had these so i'll copy those and put that on the sales price and the income account i think they had an account called service for the income account that's the account that will be hit every time we enter the information to the system and i think there was a tax there should be a tax account which i didn't see whether it's taxable or not and i'm going to say non-taxable and see if they'll able to pick that up because it's non-taxable meaning not subject to sales tax okay so then i think that's good i'm going to save this i'm going to say file save as i'll put it on my desktop somewhere i'm going to say it's going to go to my desktop i'm going to put it into my quickbooks online file get great guitars and i'm going to call it service items and then save it and okay continue i think this is like an old excel file is what they're trying to say there so i'm going to i'm going to close it out now and see if i can import it into the systems i think i have everything i need the headers are proper now because i used their headers except this one is a little iffy we'll see what it does with that okay so let's test it out i'm going to close it up and then i'm going to browse and look for that file that i just did which was on the desktop it's on quickbooks online it's get great guitars service items it's an excel file which is appropriate for this side or it could be a csv so i think i'm good there so i'm just going to go okay next and so now it's trying to line up all the categories so these are the header categories that are possibly available when you enter the items these are my headers and they should line up hopefully because i copied their names so this is what they have this is what on what was on my excel sheet it lines up perfectly great this one lines up perfectly great this one lines up perfectly great because i used their header names sales price lines up perfectly and then the income account lines up perfectly and then that tax thing where did the tax thing go it looks like they don't have the tax option here to see if it's taxable or not so that's why i didn't have the header in the sheet so okay we'll have to deal with the tax separately possibly so let's go ahead and say next and so now it's going to give us another sheet which give us the information the the items in red or questionable items here right so we've got the name so there's the names that we set up that looks right and then we're not we're not buying them or tracking the inventory items there's no number there the type looks good as a service item sales description looks good price looks good income account i said service and they're having an issue with that so i'm looking for an income account service income let's use that one now i'm going to right click on the tab up top and duplicate it pull that to the left and then i'm going to go down to my chart of account i'm going to close this out over here and go down to my chart of accounts under the accounting tab chart of accounts if you were under the business view that would be under the bookkeeping tab and the chart of accounts and what i'm looking for is an income statement account that's appropriate now if they don't have one that's appropriate then i would make one up but i can see down here they've got service a fee income so i'm going to keep i'm going to use that one as my income account if i didn't like the name i'd change the name of it and then use that account basically would be my my idea so i'm going to go back to the back to the other tab and say okay i'm just going to change all these to the service income account boom service income account boom service income account okay and then we don't really need an expense and then the quantity i'm just clicking on them just to get rid of the red there shouldn't need a quantity because we're not we're not talking about inventory no reorder point this is not really necessary because we're so it should be good now the as of date shouldn't really matter but i'm trying to get it at the it will matter later for the inventory and i want it in there as of the end of last year the end of last year so if there wasn't a journal entry it doesn't affect the current period there won't be this time but there will be when we get to the inventory items and this is a precursor to the inventory so let's say import and see what it does so four out of four successfully imported boom that's what we like four for four four for four okay so if i scroll down there we have them so here's our here's our service items if i go into edit them now so we've got the service items look good all right and so now uh when i populate a invoice if i hit the well i hit that i can hit the plus up here and then go to the invoice now i can i have more options to be populated in the invoice now i know these are very generic as well hourly service one hourly service two a diagnostic on the gut on the guitar you know hours but that's just a precursor to us so we'll we'll get a difference between the entering of a service item versus an inventory item clearly when you're doing service items for like a bookkeeping firm or a law firm or something you'd like to think through it you know the the grouping and that gets away from bookkeeping and more into your strategy in terms of how you're going to be grouping and billing your items do you have to bill on an hourly rate is there some other way that you can bill common billing methods for like a law firm would have a staff and you're going to bill out the staff's time based on possibly hours or possibly the work they're doing but again if you can come up with some other method of billing that would be good later on we'll get into some other service items for like guitar lessons which will kind of mirror which you might see in a job cost system for an accounting firm or a legal firm but this is just to give us an idea of how to set up those service items and help us lead into the inventory items so that when we enter actual service forms and voices sales receipts we could see the difference of the impact on the financial statements balance sheet income statement or profit and loss and related reports for the different kinds of things you know items we enter service versus inventory now there's no impact on I'm going to close that out the financial statements yet for this one but we're leading into then the inventory items that we're going to do next time which will have an income statement impact because we're going to have to add the units and the number of units we have on hand which will then be used by QuickBooks to create this beginning balance in the system and it'll throw the other side over here to the owner's equity the other added burden we'll have to deal with when we enter those items is the information related to inventory the quantity on hand the cost and then the sales price the inventory account and the cost of goods sold so we'll get into that next time


Hello and thank you all for being present online and also physically to this conference. I have the pleasure and maybe the whole pressure as well to present the first. So I will try to to live up to this challenge. And I'm really happy to present this work here in Toulouse, where Dino came from, also I can say, and which was a big work during my PhD phases that I completed two weeks ago. So in this presentation we discussed about rational behaviors basically committee based blockchains. And without going too much into details about what the blockchain is, I want to just give a small information and the big things we want from a blockchain. So first we wanted to be a distributed ledger. So basically all the participants should locally have the same ledger and they want to keep it more central authority. We want it to be temporary resistant. So modification of the information already in the ledger should be hard to modify and even impossible and also to be built in an app and only matter. So we can only add information at the end and not in the middle because that will somehow be like a modification. The participant can communicate only by sending messages to each other. And basically a blockchain is just a chain of blocks, hence the name blockchain, where each block is linked to the prior block in the chain. By a unique identifier that we call a hash. To build a blockchain, one of the most known blockchain is Bitcoin. And what Bitcoin does, you have for example two participants here, INJ, that want to add blocks in their blockchain. So the first one that is able to produce a block will add it and send it to everyone else. For example, the I player at its block will propagate it. G will add it as well. Then let's say G found a block first, propagated, everyone finds it and so on. But what can happen is that they both find a block at the same time. And in this situation, we say that we have a third because if we have a third participant, for example, then we can see that it has two blocks. It doesn't know which block to take, doesn't know what to do. So we need to solve this problem because in critical situations, we don't know when the transactions are being done or are being computed. So we want to avoid the fourth situation. To do that, there is an abstraction that exists in distributed computing that is called the consensus problem. And the consensus problem is defined as following. We say that an algorithm implements the consensus if and only if it satisfies the three following properties. Firmination, which says that every participant should actually decide should they need to agree on something at the end. Then validity, which says that any value that is decided by a participant that is following the protocol, the algorithm is actually valid with respect to a validity predicate that depends on the application. And also the agreement property, which says that if two of our participants or players that are following the algorithm decide, then they should decide the exact same thing. If we are able to satisfy those three properties, then all the participants that are following their algorithm will always decide something and decide the common value. To use the consensus to build a blockchain, what can be done is the following. First, we have the first block in the blockchain that is called the Genesis block that will actually set up the whole system. And in setting up the whole system, it will also decide on the committee or fixed size that is known by everyone. That committee will run the consensus algorithm to produce a block and they will propagate the block to the whole network. Then a new committee will be selected thanks to the whole history for the two blocks. That committee will do basically the same and so on and so forth. And there are already blockchains that exist that exist that are doing this, for example, Tandremint, all health stuff that is actually at the core of the Facebook Project Libra blockchain. And once the block is produced, then all the committee members that worked basically are rewarded for further work. And to be totally frank with you, there are a lot of analysis about those blockchains already that exist, but one thing that is really important is that they consider only two types of participants in the system. So we call them from now on players, only the obedience that are actually following the protocol exactly forever and also the basal team that can actually model any kind of bugs in the system or malicious behavior. So we only have those two types of participants in our system. And one question we wanted to know is are these blockchains resilient or resistant to rational behaviors? And in particular, if you have participants that want to maximize their gain, are we still able to ensure the consensus properties? And I just want to recall that the three properties are termination, agreement, and validity. So in the rest of the presentation, we'll introduce the rational players and then we will see how the system evolves with their presence. So before doing that, the model we consider. So we consider that we have another set of players in our committee. So N is known and the other of all the players is also known. They are known and we only have them. So only one committee at a time, one block at a time. Then we assume that messages are synchronous and messages cannot be lost. So if a message is sent, everyone will receive the message basically. And we consider that you have two types of players. So the strategy that we call type S that want to maximize their gain by reducing the cost of executing the protocol and the adversarial for the type A that just do want to prevent the consensus. So they don't want the consensus to be achieved. And we assume that a player knows if it is an adversary or a strategy and is also known its position in the committee basically. It doesn't necessarily know the type of the other participant in the committee. And we assume that they are also even evenly distributed in the system. Under this model, basically we can enter agreements. So if we recall, I wanted to talk about the three properties of the consensus. We can just forget about agreements for the moment and we'll focus on termination and validity. So how committee-based blockchain works in a night show? So it works in multiple rounds. So all the players are trying to solve the consensus during each round. During the first round, we'll have one player that will be the proposer that will propose its block to the whole other committee. Then the participant, once they receive the proposal, they will vote or not on the proposal if it is valid or not, basically. And if we have sufficiently many votes, then we consider that the block is produced. And that's it. If the block didn't receive enough votes, which is new or traditional, then we go to the next round. We do exactly the same thing with the new proposer. And we continue that until we reach a decision, basically. If we focus a bit on the different things that are being done here, we have a proposal, a checking of validity, and also a vote. And we can put them here with emphasis. I don't know if you are seeing the bold part. So the proposal actually generates a valid block normally that will be propagated. Then the others will collect and then check if the proposal is really valid. And then they may vote if that block is valid or not. We can put the actions on these key steps of our algorithm. And we can put a decision tree that will model that. For example, if the participant is a proposer, then it has two choices. So either proposing an invalid block or proposing a valid block. And if a participant receives a block, basically, it can check if the block is valid or not. And then decide to vote or not depending on the validity. One thing important is that if the player did not check the validity, it doesn't have any validity information that can still vote or not, however. But if it checked, then it has the validity information and can in either case vote or not vote. So we have that as our actions. And then we can try to understand the strategies that each participant can have. Do not forget that we have two types of players in our game. So we have the check. We have cost on each actions. So for example, checking validity or sending a vote. And those costs can represent the cost of executing the protocol or the electricity cost and everything like that. And we suppose that any strategy actually when checking the validity pays a cost, see check. If it sends a vote pays a cost, see send. And if a block is produced, so a block is added to the blockchain, then the one that sends a vote gets a reward R. And we assume that the reward is bigger than the costs, which are bigger than zero, basically. And we also assume that if somehow they may need to make an invalid block accepted and added to the block, the whole ecosystem pays because that we call Kappa, that is way bigger than R. And the goal of each strategic participant is to maximize its expected gain, basically. The reward minus all the costs. For the adversaries, we have electrical graphical preferences actually where since they just want to prevent the consensus, they do not care about the cost of their actions, basically. And they are happy if they make an invalid block accepted and added to the chain. Otherwise, if there is no block that is accepted, well, it's also still better because the consensus is not achieved. And in the worst case, an invalid block is added. We have the consensus, they are not happy, but they cannot do better better than that. And we assume that we have strictly more than zero adversaries in the committee. And we denote that number F. And F is not necessarily known by everyone. They just know that there is at least one adversary. The participants will have different informations. So for example, all the votes that happened before, so in the around before, are public knowledge. So everyone knows those votes. But each one has private information. So for example, if a player checked it knows that they checked and then it knows if the block checked is valid or not. If a player did not check, that player did not, doesn't have that information. And also we have an asymmetry of information now, where the strategic participant, a strategic player, excuse me, only knows its type, its own type, and doesn't know the types of everyone else in the committee. But the other adversaries do know that information. So basically they know who are the other adversaries and who are the other strategic. So we have an asymmetry of information here. So to work and understand the whole behavior of participant and how the system will evolve, we need to use our solution concept of perfect Bayesian equilibrium. Because first we have incomplete information. Everyone doesn't know who is the others. And we have asymmetrical information between the different type of players. And basically a perfect Bayesian equilibrium is a situation where each player is maximizing its own objective, anticipating rationally what the others will do. Then we are drawing in rational inferences from what they observed from the other players to actually guess a bit the type of the different players according to Bayes' law when possible. And they're always picking their best action no matter where, when they start basically the game. So we use this concept to understand the different equilibria that can arise. And, oops, I forgot the slide. The question now is what are being done in committee-based election in presence of rational participants? Now we can ask the question by what are the different perfect Bayesian equilibria that are in the game? And if these perfect Bayesian equilibria are satisfying the consensus properties, basically. First, we can see that we have optimal strategies for each of the participants. For example, the strategists will always want to propose a valid block. Because if they propose an invalid block, that invalid block may be accepted. And then they will all pay costs, basically. In the contrary, our adversaries actually always want to propose invalid block because then the blocks will be accepted and then they will be happy if the consensus is not achieved. And also, actually, when they receive the proposal, they always check the validity because they do not care about the costs, basically. And they always vote for invalid blocks only. And these are the optimal strategies for both type of players. And in the rest, we'll just focus on the different other actions that are possible. And the first equilibrium we have is without going a bit too much into all the text, we don't know exactly the value of the number of adversaries in the system. We just know that they are less than the threshold for accepting a block. In that situation, we cannot ensure termination. Basically, all the strategic knows that by sending a message alone, nothing will be accepted. They know that everyone else is not sending, so they prefer not sending as well because if they send a message, their votes will, they will pay the cost of voting for nothing because the block will not be accepted anyway. And that is this equilibrium. No one is happy. We don't have termination, and that's it. Well, our question before is not well answered, but we can go more to understand what is really happening. And we have a second equilibrium where actually even validity can be broken, where still we don't know exactly the value of the number of adversaries in our committee, basically, but they can actually also be, they don't necessarily need to be less or more than new or minimal threshold. And there, everyone is voting without checking the validity. Basically, I know that everyone else is voting no matter what is happening. So the block will always be accepted and added. In that case, if I do not send a vote, if the block is accepted, I'm not getting a reward. But if I send a vote, at least I'm getting a reward even if the block accepted is invalid at the end. So I will always prefer sending a vote without even checking. If an adversary propose, an invalid block is added, but if it is a strategic that proposes, then the block is valid. We cannot ensure validity, basically. And as I said, that is due to the, that is not even linked directly to the number of adversaries we have in the committee, which is actually a really strong result. If we have even one adversary and the new value is equal to n minus one, so we have way more strategic, this equilibrium still exists, which is really something not good. But we still wanted to have a good equilibrium that satisfies both property. And first, we try to understand what happened and why would we have this equilibrium? First, all the players are not pivotal. So basically none of them has all the possible actions to change the whole outcome. So if everyone else is doing something, they prefer following them because that will not change anything. And we're trying to avoid these kinds of situations. So in a good equilibrium, where everything will be nice, we need to make the players pivotal. So make each of them such that if they change their strategy, then they can make a good thing happen. To do that, we need the following. If the, if the proposer is strategic, so type S, then you want the proposed block to be accepted directly. So to get at least new votes. And we even wanted to get n minus f. Why? Because first the block is produced and then if only one strategic didn't vote, then the block is not accepted anymore. So not getting a reward. And if the proposer is an adversary, then the block will be invalid anyway and we wanted to get less than new votes. And actually we want to get even new minus one votes. Why? Because first the block will not be accepted and added. But also if a strategic deviates and now sends a vote where it shouldn't, then we will have exactly new votes. The block will be accepted. And since it is an invalid block, then they will pay cost kappa that is bigger than the reward. That is what we want. And we found an equilibrium where both properties are satisfied. But to have this equilibrium, we need to know exactly the number, the number of adversaries in our system. We don't need to know where they are placed, but we need to know exactly how many they are. If you have that information, and if the cost of accepting an invalid block is high enough, then we have the following equilibrium. We are asking all the players that have index between one and n minus new plus f plus one. All those that have an index there, they are ordered and they know their index to always check the validity of the proposal and send a vote if and only if the block is valid. And all the others, if they are placed after n minus new plus f plus one, they will always send a vote, no matter what happens. And if we reach the round f plus one, basically, we can also say that, well, all the strategy can just directly vote because in this situation, whenever a valid block is proposed, the block will be accepted. But if somehow we reach the round f plus one, then we know that all the first f blocks are invalid. So the f plus one is valid for sure, and then they don't need to check the validity. We have both properties because we will always terminate round f plus one at most, and all the block that are accepted are necessarily valid basically. And that is our good equilibrium. And since out of time, I will just conclude this presentation with the analysis we did on understanding actually the rational behaviors in committee based blockchains to the blockchains that are using committees and consensus to add new blocks. And we also consider in our analysis the presence of malicious players. So the players that are adversaries and want to break the whole system. We found that we do have a good equilibrium that do satisfies all the properties we want in a block chain. But actually, this equilibrium is not unique. As for example, I showed that we can break both validity or termination. Free writing can occur, so we need to pay attention on how to design this rewarding. And what you want to do next is to first extend our work to more set things less hypothesis having, for example, less than a synchronous communication where messages can be lost, for example, and also analyze this equilibrium for real people and see exactly what they want to do. Thank you.


High gas prices, the worst inflation in 40 years, a violent crime wave, chaos at the border. It's not funny. And later, before you have that garage sale, you want to find out why this so-called cheap vase may be worth a thousand times more than what the original owner paid for it. All of that and more coming up next right here on News On. Happy Friday, congratulations. You made it. Welcome to this edition of News On. I'm Miranda Khan. We begin today with a new jobs report just out today showing that more than 400,000 jobs were apparently added last month, exceeding expectations at a very tight labor market. Additionally, the unemployment rate held at a low 3.5 percent and wages increased more with the rate of inflation for the last month. But the numbers that indicate positive growth are confusing in a time when you, you know, the average American, well, maybe don't feel so positive about the economy and it's hitting you and your pocketbook. And one senator knows that. The same liberal Democrats and media elite who falsely attack Senator Johnson for exposing the truth are laughing it up in Washington while America is dangerously off track. Record high gas prices, the worst inflation in 40 years, a violent crime wave, chaos at the border. It's not funny. Senator Ron Johnson is fighting to get inflation under control. Ron Johnson is fighting for law and order. Ron Johnson is fighting for freedom and for us. All right. There you just saw Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson use the jokes made at the Correspondence Center that just happened this past weekend as a way to show how out of step he thinks Hollywood and the government are when it comes to the economy. And the real impact it's having, again, on you real Americans joining us live now to discuss this more as CEO and founder of Stock Swoosh, Melissa Armo. Good to see you again, my friend. Happy Friday. So, Melissa, we have even more examples later of the negative effects that Americans are experiencing as a result of this post-pandemic economy. But then we know that these reports about great unemployment rates and how did jobs keep coming out? So help us break this down. How can these two factors coexist? It's very interesting right now what's happened since COVID is less people are working. So today was a mixed report, as you previously stated. The negative thing about today's report and one of the reasons why the market's falling right now today still is because there is a lot of people, they're still not back in the workforce and working. So we have all these job openings and then we have people that don't want to come back to work. And part of it is too much stimulus, too much stimulus for the last two years. And now I think we're creating a society where people don't feel like they have to work or they're not as motivated to work. And remember the United States of America is a place where we pride ourselves on being a productive country. We're the number one country in the world. We have to work.  And unfortunately right now, since COVID, some people were scared to go back to work. They just didn't want to go back to work and some people feel like, listen, I'm getting enough money that I don't need to work. And so that has created problems for anybody that's going out that's a consumer.  And that's a problem. Yeah. And I've seen that here in Florida and I'm sure some of the viewers are probably nodding their head as you were saying that thing. We've seen it here as well. I want to get to the stock market in just a moment, but we know it's Mother's Day this weekend, reminder everyone, send flowers, card, you know, the works. Mom deserves it. But new mothers may be feeling more stressed than ever because the country's baby formula shortage, creating empty shelves everywhere now, mom say that the issue now isn't just finding the brand you like, but just finding anything at all. And other women say that even trying to order on Amazon is proving futile because the orders are just, they're just getting canceled. The shortages started with the supply chain issues, but now recalls are obviously exasperating the problem. Melissa, some others are calling for some kind of political action, in fact, to help with this. Is that even an option? I don't think that's going to happen, but I think this is across the board with many, many products that you're trying to get right now at the supermarkets or online, even on Amazon. Things are backwater, things aren't available. Again, it's a problem with the labor force where they're not producing or there could be a problem since COVID restrictions. Remember, there's parts of the world right now that are still shut down because of new COVID variants. All of this is affecting the supply chain. And again, if companies want to produce a product and want to sell it and can't get the supplies to sell it, that of course is a problem where they can't make the money to sell it. That affects the overall economy. We just got done. Most of the earnings that would affect the overall market have reported even though it's still a second quarter earnings season. And a lot of them forecasted not so good outcomes for the remainder of 2022. So I think it's going to be a rough year for companies, not just that sell baby products, but companies across the board when they want to sell things, if they can't get the labor to make it and they can't get the actual product to make it. Yeah. And again, I want to go back to the stock market. You mentioned it's down again this after it just tanked yesterday following the Fed's announcement of raising interest rates. Again, another half percentage right there. But we expect even more increases, several more real quickly. This is your territory. What does this overall mean for average day of real Americans? Well, it's a problem when rates go up because when the rates go up, then economic growth slows. And so the market doesn't like rates going up so quick so fast. And that's what's going to happen this year. And the reason that the Fed is doing that is because they think that it's going to curb inflation and stop a recession. I happen to disagree. One of the reasons, again, that we're in an inflationary period is because we're having supply chain issues. And again, we don't have enough workers back at work. So I think we're getting into a real problem for the market this year where it's going to intersect, where you have things costing more and you also have rising rates. It's called an inflationary recession. That's something that's negative for markets. And that's why markets are selling off. But this is profit taking, though, because the markets have had a nice run up really since Trump was elected in 2016. So a lot of people are at money, but it is scary for people to see the market sell off the way it has in the last 24 to 48 hours. We're going to continue to monitor it as I know you will at Melissa Armo. Thank you so much and enjoy your Mother's Day weekend. Thank you, you too. So head on this edition of News On. You might have a lot of questions about this draft, you know, that was leaked from SCOTUS regarding abortion. We've brought in an expert to help us break it all down. And that is the one, the only Dr. Wendy Patrick that's coming up next. We'll be right back.


but keep your team alive, keep yourself alive, you're still in the danger zone or the X as we call it. And then, you know, stop the bleeding, take care of them, stabilize them enough to get them to better care. Explosive Ordnance Disposal Flight, Airmen Training exercises at Fort Irwin's National Training Center. In a unique inter-service collaboration, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Flight from the 812th Civil Engineer Squadron recently teamed up. With the Army's Sea Company, 2,916th Aviation Battalion, Desert Dustoff, for an intensive series of training exercises at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. The objective was to put the EOD team through physically and mentally demanding scenarios, including one they called Team Leader Down, where team members had to apply tactical combat casualty care to an injured leader. What set this exercise apart were the real-world elements integrated into the training. We've done nine-line exercises, but this is the first one where our guys got to call the nine-line to a helicopter at Fort Irwin. Said tech. Sergeant Joseph Griffin, 812th Civil Engineer Squadron, EOD Training Manager. The team had the opportunity to communicate directly and interact with helicopter pilots during landing, all without any simulation. Griffin said the cooperation of Fort Irwin's medical team was crucial to the training. The Army was great. They used a lot of creativity to make this happen for us, Griffin noted. He praised the flexibility and ingenuity of the Army personnel, who were willing to adapt their routines to accommodate the EOD team's needs. But the training was not without its setbacks. The EOD team had to deal with real-world problems like a Humvee breaking down in the middle of a drill. That's the whole goal, to stress them out, Griffin emphasized. He expressed optimism about his team's performance, it didn't go perfectly, but it went better than I thought it would. Sergeant Brandon Breidenbach, C Company, 2,916th Aviation Battalion Flight Medic, echoed the sentiment of the value of such cross-branch training. It's always a learning curve when bringing together different branches, but we're all on the same team. As the exercises concluded, Griffin was appreciative of how his team performed in the austere NTC environment. I wanted to extend my gratitude to my leadership team and my airmen. They've been suffering, but they've kept their chin up, he said. The training event underscored the adaptability and ingenuity inherent in U.S. military operations, providing invaluable lessons for future inter-service collaborations.


OK, the next talk will be Secure Computation on the Web, Computing Without Simultaneous Interaction by Shai Elevi, Yudhe Lindel, and Benny Pinkas. And Yudhe will be giving the talk. Good afternoon. I'm going to talk about Secure Computation on the Web, or Computing Without Simultaneous Interaction. And I'll start with my standard first slide for Secure Computation, unlike my predecessors, there's no cloud on it. But basically, what we talk about is a set of parties with private inputs, and they want to carry out some joint computation. Without revealing their inputs, they want to guarantee correctness. They want to guarantee independence of inputs and other properties. And these properties have to be ensured, even if some of the parties involved attack maliciously or in some other way. Semi-honestly, the protocol that's going on. And what we say, and this is what I want to focus on, is what we like to say, is that this models any problem, essentially, elections or auctions, private statistical analysis, and so on. So if it's an election we're talking about, then privacy means that my individual input won't be, my vote won't be learned. The correctness says that the candidate who gets the most amount of votes will be the one that actually wins, and so on and so forth. The question that we address in this paper is really whether Secure Computation does actually model these problems that we're trying to solve. So the real-world problem of online elections, auctions, statistical analysis of distributed parties data, for example, a website wants to carry out some statistical computation aggregation about the parties who visit the website. Does Secure Computation really model these problems? And I'm not talking about the problem of efficiency. So assuming that we can do things really, really efficiently, there's still a question as to actually whether we can solve these problems. And the reason is that in all known protocols for Secure Computation, all the parties interact simultaneously. So everybody has to come together and give their inputs at the same time. Now let's analyze some of these problems that we're talking about. Let's take a simple problem with a closed group of parties. Everyone knows who's there. It's not too many. We just want to carry out a vote for faculty members tenure. That's all we want to do. Since there's a lot of politics in our department, we want to make sure this is a secure protocol. And the problem is that if anybody's ever tried to schedule three faculty members in a meeting, you'll know that it takes about two months. So getting 40 faculty members, or however many you have in your department, together at the same time, even to go online at the same time when half of them are overseas or at different conferences, is actually a very, very big problem in practice if you want to run such a protocol. You need everyone to get online at the same time, and that's hard to do. It gets even worse if you want to talk about this application of a website that wants to somehow, I don't know, compute demographics, statistics of demographics of the parties who are coming to visit the website because each party comes, does whatever it does and goes. It's not going to hang around till another 5,000 parties get together and then run some joint protocol with parties that it has nothing to do with anyway. So this actually becomes a very, very big problem. Stated differently, this is the model that we're used to with secure computation. It doesn't have to be synchronous, but everyone's there and everyone's computing. However, the real world model is more like this. The party comes, does some computation and goes. A couple come, they go away. The only stable member here is the web server. Everyone else just comes and goes, and we want to somehow see if we can do secure computation in this sort of model as well. And the question is, can we make secure computation non-simultaneous? So can the parties come along and just visit once and go away and actually compute securely on their inputs? And this actually is an important theoretical question. It gives deepens our understanding of what communication is necessary for secure computation, for secure protocols, which is really a very, very important and basic primitive of cryptography in general. But it also has very important ramifications to practice because if we want to actually have secure computation be used in reality, then maybe actually one of the biggest obstacles to adoption is the fact that we need everyone there at the same time and that rarely happens. So this is important to practice, especially if it can be done efficiently and that we'll talk about a bit later on. I just want to know it because he sort of seemed to need to say that these days, fully homomorphic encryption doesn't solve the problem. You can think about it a bit and you'll see why because we just basically have to think of who owns the key. So our model is as follows, we have n parties p1 through pn and we have one server s. And each party interacts with the server once and exactly once. So you come, interact and go away and all of our protocols that I'll talk and one that I mentioned here, these interactions actually just retrieve something from the server and send it back. But as far as the model is concerned, we don't mind if you interact a few times, that doesn't matter. What is important is that you carry actual computation on your input and then go away. You don't have to speak to anyone else. You don't have to worry about when the other parties are going to be online. At the end, the server obtains the output. The reason why only the server is attending output is because only the server is there to get the output. Obviously if you wanted you could have the server post that and you could come back later to get it but you don't have to be there for the computation to take place. And we call a protocol for this setting one pass because all the parties just take, we just do one pass over all of the parties. Now this actually, if you think about what this model means, it means that we have to compute what we call residual functions. So since the protocol is one pass, it means that the last n minus i parties, p i plus one through p n and the server actually have to compute this residual function of the first i parties input. So parties, I don't know how you use the pointer on this thing like this, yeah. So the first i parties came and they gave their inputs and then the last n minus i parties have to give their inputs but whatever their inputs are, these ones are already fixed. So we can actually look at this residual function. Why is this important? Because it means that if these last n minus i parties and the server are all corrupted and colluding, then they can actually compute this residual function on many sets of final inputs. And this is inherent to the model. This is not something that our protocol doesn't achieve. Any protocol which works in this model, this one pass model, has to have this problem because the legitimate last n minus i parties and server have to be able to compute on any set of their inputs. In particular, they can do this many times but it's only, again, I wanna stress if both the server and these last n minus i parties are colluding, this could be one, two, three, four, depending on what's the corruption setting we have. So this leads us also to talk about something called function decomposition. So decomposition of a function is just really a series of n two input functions which is a series computing the final function. So you first compute f1 on the first input, then f2 on that result on the second input and so on and so forth. In the end, you get the final output. And in the one pass setting, it's again inherent to the model what's actually happening. Pi and the server s, if they're interacting are actually computing the i-th function fi in this decomposition series. And also what that means is that if the last n minus i parties and the server are all corrupted and colluding, then what they're learning is the output of that i-th function in the decomposition. Function decomposition and these residual functions are inherent to this one pass model. The question we have to ask ourselves if it's inherent to the model, then what does it reveal if these last n minus i parties and the server are corrupted? Then what are they actually going to learn? And what we're going to say, what we define in the paper is that if this output of the i-th function reveals nothing more than that what the residual function gives, then we call it minimal disclosure. And that's because as we said the residual function is inherent to the model. And so we would like, if we have a decomposition that reveals only that, then that's the best that you can do. And so that's okay. Well, of course it depends on the application. Let's just look at a couple of examples.  So f one of x one gives you x one, f two gives you just the outputs of that, the inputs and you essentially have all of the first n minus one functions giving you the identity functions and the last one will compute it. So this just tells you that everything can be decomposed, but of course it's not interesting because if the last party and the server are both corrupted, then that's all you need and they get absolutely everything.  In contrast, let's look at this decomposition for the sum function. It's just the partial sums until the i-th input. Now it's clear that if you're given the output of the i-th function, you can get the sum of the first i, but that's all that you're getting. And indeed this is minimal disclosure because you could get that anyway by just having your, by knowing your inputs and even the standard setting of secure computation, any n minus i colluding parties can learn this information. So this is completely minimal disclosure and what you can actually say is that all that is revealed by the i-th function in decomposition is what would be the output if only those parties were computing. So this is optimal and sufficient for many applications. So we define security by in the standard way of secure computation, the ideal real paradigm I won't go into it, it'll be discussed more tomorrow morning, I think, but all I wanna stress is that in addition to what an adversary can usually do in the secure computation model, we allow it to get the output of the i-th function in decomposition, but only if both the server and the n minus i last party is corrupted. If the server is honest, it gets absolutely nothing, just the standard definition of secure computation and if the server is corrupted, then it just depends who the last party who came in the series in this one past series is corrupted and we call a protocol optimally private if it computes the decomposition, a decomposition that's a minimal disclosure. So I just wanna stress one thing about the security definition, it talks about securely computing a decomposition. So whatever decomposition you have for your function, the protocol should then compute to that level of leakage which is modeled by the decomposition itself. You'd like optimally private, you don't always have. The main question I wanna deal with the rest of my time is, can this notion be achieved if yes under what assumptions and at what cost? Cause it sounds like something which is quite difficult. And in fact, at least to my surprise, we can do this really, really efficiently for a number of very interesting problems. Let's talk, we'll talk in this talk, focus on binary symmetric functions. These are functions with binary inputs zero one and but the output depends only on the hamming weights. So if you think about and or parity or majority which is again voting for tenure for our faculty member, then all we care about is how many people voted yes and how many people voted no, we don't care what the order of that is. So these functions, binary symmetric functions have a very concise truth table representation. So instead of a for n inputs having a truth table size two to the n, you actually have a truth table of size n plus one. Why is that? Because you just look at the hamming weight and for each possible hamming weight you write each possible out, you write the output and because there are only n bits for input there are n plus one possible hamming weights and the function only depends on the hamming weight. So this is a complete description of the function. And this is the majority function. You can see if up to two parties only have one then the output is zero and otherwise the output is one. So now I need to describe to you this decomposition into functions and then I'll show you how we can use that. So we're gonna define y one which is the f one of x one to be this complete truth table but we're going to erase the first row if the first input is one and the last row if it's zero. So let's see that if the first party if the party has the input one then we know that the hamming weight of the function cannot, the hamming weight of the output cannot be zero of all the inputs sorry cannot be zero because we already have a hamming weight of one given by this bit so we erase this row. On the other hand if the first party's input is zero then we erase the last row because again it means that the hamming weight of all the inputs cannot be five because we already have one zero. The second function is defined similarly we take the truncated truth table which we already got and now we just erase the first or last row depending on the party's input. So if the input is one then again we know we can't get the first row that's remaining so we erase it. The third party if it has one then we again erase the first row. The fourth party has zero so it's the last row the last party has zero so that's the again the last row each one just relates to the first or last row of the remaining table. And note the magic that indeed the majority of zero one one zero zero is zero which is the only remaining row in the truth table. I just wanna stress that we're not actually giving the hamming weight that would be too much we're only looking at this. So this is just erasing the first or last values of this table which is the second column. So that says nothing about cryptography about decomposition this is just a decomposition away of dividing a function into a series of two part of two input functions along the way. This is actually a minimum disclosure because the truth table at any given point only shows only tells you the it only enables you to compute on compute the residual function. Essentially it's there's nothing more disclosed than the aggregate of what was beforehand or in other words what you could compute given your residual inputs. Now I wanna show how to actually compute this very very efficiently. The main tool is layer re-randomizable encryption so you can think about you have a number of keys and you encrypt the input under many many keys and different randomness each party using different randomness and we call it layer re-randomizable if you can actually just re-randomize all of the random values in this sort of onion encrypted cipher text and I just wanna say that you can do this with El Gamal really really efficiently it's the cost of a single encryption you can do crypt threshold wise you can re-randomize very very efficiently so this is actually not difficult to do. And I just wanna note that all our protocols assume a PKI it's essential for the model but you can see the paper for more details. In the semi-honest model our protocol works as follows. The server starts by encrypting the entire truth table under all the party's keys and uses re-randomizable layer encryption. Then each party again it's a one pass protocol so each party comes talks to the server and goes away so each party comes takes the truth table that remains from the server and erases either first or last row depending on what its input is which already showed how that works but you can do the oblivious you don't have to know what was already done beforehand and that's the beauty of the decomposition. So I just get back what's remaining of the truth table erase the first or the last row now I peel off my secret key so I decrypt under my secret key and re-randomize everything that's there. At the end all that remains is a single row which is encrypted under the server's public key and the server then decrypts that and gets the results. So let's just look at that graphically here's our table what it means is the server encrypts this table or the value 000111 under the six public keys five public keys of the parties who are participating and its own public key is the sixth one. The first party gets this truth table all encrypted and has input of zero so it erases the last row the last element last ciphertexts then it removes its key and re-randomizes so you can see now that it's the public keys from two to six rather than from one to six the second party has input one it erases the first row again now removes its key so now we go from pk3 to six and re-randomizes and we continue p3 again erases the first input because it had x3 equals one removes the key re-randomizes p4 has zero so it erases the last and we're left now with these two values encrypted under pk5 and pk6 and what this means is if the fifth party is corrupted and colluding with the server then they're able to actually get these two values but all that means is that they know that the first four parties were evenly divided they don't know anything else beyond that and in fact they would even know this if it was a regular secure computation scenario so this is actually optimal and nothing is lost in at least most applications or anything that I can think of. The security of this protocol is that follows from the fact that if the server is honest then no one learns anything because everything the entire time is encrypted under the server's public key but even if the server is corrupted as long as the truth table is encrypted under at least one of the honest party's keys nothing is learned and the re-randomization prevents from making any connections between what was erased the first or the last row along the way and so that the means is until the last honest party comes nothing is learned once the last honest party has come and the remaining parties are all corrupted then as we said this is inherent to the model that they can then see what remains but that's as if we just computed on the subset of parties which is actually okay. The concrete cost of this is three and over two exponentiation for n parties and since we can do even probably 3,000 exponentiation per second if we have good software then this can be practical even for thousands of users the only problem can be 500 come at the same time they actually have to wait for each other but at least for many of our real scenarios like the tenure of votes or others this is definitely practical. For malicious adversaries and I won't go into exactly how we can actually also do this efficiently using the Fiat-Chemir paradigm to help us get really efficient zero-knowledge proofs and our estimate is that for about 40 parties you take 10 seconds computation per party so this is really something which is practical and can be used for something like voting that we talked about and in the paper we actually have highly efficient protocols for other problems as well and in addition important results since we're studying this also from a theoretical point of view is that we prove that in fact any decomposition can be securely computed under in this one pass model and that's an important general feasibility result saying that this one pass model actually has a lot of applicability and this is our result is under the DDH assumption and if you need and for a malicious adversary you also need non-interactive zero-knowledge and this works for any decomposition so if it's minimal disclosure then that's the best you can get that but otherwise it depends on the application whether your decomposition is good enough and that's part of your design-free application so in summary fully interactive secure computation is actually a problem in practice and in many cases we need what we call a one pass client server protocol in addition to this being of interest from a practical perspective it's also interesting from a theoretical point of view to understand what communication is needed for secure computation we introduced this model and define security for it we also studied inherent limitations and we used and introduced this notion of function decomposition and residual computation and minimal disclosure in order to understand this and then we constructed highly efficient protocols for this setting and showed that for many natural problems actually we have we can really do this in practice and we also proved a general feasibility result showing that we can solve any protocol problem at least within the inherent limitations of the model thank you and fortunately again we don't have time for questions


When a featherboard's too big, but you need more pins than a cutie pie has to offer, Itsy Bitsy is the go-to option, the happy medium. And Itsy Bitsy is now available in the tasty RP2040 flavor, which means it has a lot more pep in its step and tricks up its sleeve. A dual Cortex M0 Plus running at 125 MHz, 264K of SRAM and 8 megs of flash. In addition to standard niceties like the built-in NeoPixel, the Bitsy can speak 5-volt logic on pin 5, so there's no need to add any additional level shifting hardware, which is nice. And bonus, that boot select button can be read and used within your code. So I don't have to add a push button, but I do have to figure out how I'm going to use 16 channels of pulse width modulation.


Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Interconnect 2015 brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. And you're watching theCUBE on the ground. I'm here in Las Vegas, Nevada at IBM Interconnect. And here with Ray Wong. Hey Ray, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm good, thanks. So can you tell me a little bit about what you're doing and what you're working on these days? Well, a lot of work's happening in this digital space and digital seems to be very fluffy, right? So people are like, I digitally enabled something by making it mobile, I digitally enabled this by making it the cloud. But what we're actually looking at are business model transformations, like major shifts that are happening. One of the interesting facts that we talk about all the time, 52% of the Fortune 500 have been merged, acquired, gone bankrupt, falling off the list. And that's a huge change, but it wasn't the internet, it wasn't new technologies. People are pumping out brand new business models. You take something like Airbnb. What's cool about Airbnb? It's not the fact that it's got more hotel room nights than Hilton, Starwood, Marriott and Intercontinental combined. It's the fact that I now know who are really good users. So for example, I can rent out a million dollar condo to someone and know that I can trust them. And that's actually what we're getting at. So that hits on social, that's hits on payments, that's hits on networks, trust, collaboration, collaborative economy, all these things are coming together. And the business model happens to be, hey, how do I open up some empty space, let people actually make some extra money and you know what, help people actually get into places they want to be. And that's what we're looking at. It's this kind of digital transformation that's happening. And that's lodging, right? There are other things like aircraft engines, there are things like happening in the oil field services business, there are things happening in retail. All these things are being transformed and we're seeing it happen right now. Awesome, yeah. So are you working on specific things in this digital transformation realm, anything for your company specifically? Well, we're doing a lot of research and Constellation is basically a Silicon Valley based research firm. Our job is to go out and say, you know, where can we find these ideas and take them to other people who are looking at this? And we try not to take an industry focus because what we're learning is that different people are learning things from other industries. Retail is learning from banking, banking is learning from telecom, tech companies are actually learning from startups, right? So we see this kind of like shift happening and everybody's really trying to get to the right business model. Yeah, definitely. There's a lot of interaction, engagement and we see companies collaborating and using that community model. So what other areas do you see that happening in social media and that community engagement? The interesting thing about social media is it's now a channel of choice, right? So customers where they're digital natives, digital immigrants, even digital lawyers are actually looking at it and saying, I might want to try this. I might want to communicate in a different way.  It says, hey, are you available at four? Are you available at three? I mean, that's kind of how we communicate. And you could do a direct message. It would have been fine too, right? But that's the kind of thing that people are expecting is instant communications, short bursts, right? On the content side, people want snackable content, things that they can get to, understand quickly and then move on. And we're basically building for an attention economy, which is actually happening right now. And how do you see social media changing the way you work? Oh, wow. That's a great question. It's everywhere, right?  I would say, you know, a quarter comes from the blog. We get a little bit from email, a little bit from the phone. I mean, just think about that. Channel-wise, we are now hitting, what, six, seven different channels. People expect the same experience. Are they friendly? Can I access them? Is it fun? Is it engaging? Doesn't matter what the channel is. We're actually, the term omni-channel is actually kind of stupid, and I'm going to put it out there. I see what people are looking over are ubiquitous channels, but more important, continuity of experiences, right? Continuity of a process, continuity of data, continuity of, you know, an insight, continuity across the board. You know, they just want to know that it's seamless. Awesome. Yeah, great tips.  Can you tell us a little bit about how you use social media personally, and how you built your brand on social media? You know, I just, I think the most important thing about building your brand in social media is to be authentic to who you are. I love to share, right? And that's what I do. So I'll post things that are happening. Like right now, I'm really craving Rice Krispies. Someone posted Rice Krispies, like, where are these Rice Krispies? I don't know. I'm looking for them. Where are they? I mean, but anyways, the point being is like- Jordan, can you let us know? Yeah, let me know I'm in. But the thing is like, you know, I got like 15 responses like, hey, Rice Krispies are here, great, these are wonderful, where do I get a Rice Krispies? I mean, but that's what it is, right? You got to throw yourself out there, but there's things I'm private about. You'll never see things about my family. You'll never see things about my kids. I mean, I create a wall there. And I think you just have to figure out which medium is for you. Like some of my friends' Facebook is for everyone that they would invite to a wedding, right? That's it, and that's the circle. LinkedIn is anybody they meet in person, and Twitter is, you're just out there, right? I mean, that's kind of how it works. So we're seeing that happen, but we're also seeing like private networks come up, right? People are kind of like support groups working with each other, and I think that's important. Can you actually talk a little bit about the privacy concurrent with social media and the issues and challenges that there exist there? I think the number one issue in social media and collaborative economies is that once you realize that something is free, you're the product, that's the issue. So it might be worth paying for a service where there's a private cloud, there's a service where it protects your privacy and identity, they don't trade your information for something else. I think that's going to be important, and I think once we get used to these paradigms, people are going to start paying for those types of networks. Awesome. Anything else you want to share about yourself and how you use social media? Well, I'm publishing a book. It's coming out, actually I'm not doing the publishing. Harvard Business Review Press is doing the publishing. I've written a book and they're going to publish it, and hopefully comes out May 5th. What's interesting? Disrupting digital business. And we've got tales and conversations about what you can do even if you're not a digital business on how to take advantage and build those digital models, and also looking at companies that have actually done a really good job. So there are five things that are kind of fun ones, thinking about the trust and transparency factor, but more importantly, I think, are you ready to transform your business? Thinking about companies that are authentic, building authentic brands, and then there's this thing about intention driven. We're talking about all analytics and context and sentiment, but it's really, do I know you well enough? Why know that you'll make a decision and how can you use that to be self-learning? And then of course, we're looking at network economies that are out there. So we're bringing all these different concepts together, and I think what's going to be interesting about the book is like it's an easy read. You pick it up and then suddenly you're like, oh wow, this is a great idea. Oh wow, here's another idea. And what we're trying to do is to spark that creativity inside companies, and if we do that, hopefully people actually can get to their next breakthrough innovation. Awesome, sounds like a great book. Gotta check it out. Anything you can recommend for companies just off the top of your head that they can do with social media to help build their brand, build some customers, some tips from your- Well, let's go back to the brand authenticity piece. I think what's really important is once you realize that you're not selling a product or service, but you're basically delivering on experience or outcome, what do you need to do to keep your brand promise? And if you figure out what your brand promise is, then you can be authentic in your communications, you can be authentic how you interact, you can be authentic just all across the board. And I think when there's so much noise, especially social media, we're creating so much content, whether it's a blog, a video, a chat, or tweet, or like, what we really need is people to be authentic, right? And that authenticity stands out despite all the noise that's out there, and there's really no good signals. And what I mean by that is there's not a lot of good content, and when you're authentic, it completely shows, and you stand out. Yeah, well, you've definitely stood out in the conference, we see you trending, you're always on the leaderboard. I know, oh, duck. Awesome, so what's your favorite part of IBM Interconnect? You know, actually what I really liked was the social media lounge.  There's a lot of creativity, you got the legas going on, the pads, the paperclips, you know, you got the social media lounge that's just around the corner. And I think when people who've never been to an IBM conference come to one, they'll realize that this is not a stodgy conference, this is not what you would expect.  Awesome, last question. What does join the conversation mean to you? Join the conversation, it means engage, right? I think a lot of people are, I mean, you should listen and see if you fit in the conversation, but figure what it is, actually jump in, participate, and you might be surprised. Awesome, well, thank you so much. It was great to have you on here, Ray. And you're watching theCUBE, I'm Ariana Gratto here in Las Vegas, Nevada.


What's your go-to pizza topping? Sausage. They go pretty well together. Cheese and sausage. Cheese and sausage. Would you rather fly or be invisible? Fly. Fly. Where would you go? The moon. I wouldn't really. I don't really want to go to the moon. Well, I'd just fly around. Yeah, just anywhere. In the clouds. Yeah, just anywhere really. What's your most used emoji? I like the upside down smiley face guy. Do a demonstration. That's great. I'm not much of an emoji person, but I quite like the prawn. For no reason. Demonstration. Is that an emoji? Demonstration. Rub it. Terrible. What's in your pocket right now? Nothing. Nothing. Oh! Like, listerine, strip, strips. I don't like those things. They stick to the roof. Ah. Ah. Alright. Feel rejected. That's good. Now it is stuck to the top of my mouth. Would you rather have fingers as long as arms or arms as long as fingers? Whoa! Man, we really are rolling on speed. Fingers as long as arms. Or arms as long as fingers. Can I have both? No. You can have one of each. I love that. What's your party trick? Oh, my God. I don't have one apart from I Can Irish Dance. That's, I would say, a party trick. It's not a trick, though. I don't really do it that often. Only at weddings. Wow. Those rules. Come on. I don't know if I have a party trick. If you could beat any type of sandwich, what would you be? Oh, just a plain butter and... Butter and chicken. Excited. Isn't that a question? Oh! No, we're getting into the real stuff. I love sandwiches. I don't think you can overlook just butter. Butter and possibly ham. But I don't really agree with ham. Cheese. Cheese or coleslaw. I don't know. Oh, I love sandwiches. I refuse to follow that. What was the last text that you sent? A prawn. A prawn, unfortunately. I got like three kisses to a friend. A male friend. What's your favourite reality show? I like RuPaul's Drag Race. I don't have one anymore. They're bad for me, but I used to watch Made in Chelsea. Hence why it's bad for me. What's the best impression you can do? Louis Armstrong.  What about you? I don't know, probably. You do quite a good impression of me, human being. Just an awful... I should have started speaking on it. Yeah, I'm pretty good at pretending to be a human. What was the last fancy dress costume you wore? I was a cleaner. How'd you dress up like a cleaner? I loved it.  Oh, no, I was Russell Brand, actually. That was the most recent. Yeah, I had hair extensions. And a woman hit on me. She actually thought I was a man. She thought you were Russell Brand. She said, I'm really strangely attracted to you. And I was like, that's fine. Cool.