So dear colleagues, we move on with our program. That's my time to have my say on the subjects of our conference. And as you know, it will be my last conference about the financial integration report that we prepare, and which I have more or less supervised, let's say, throughout many years. Departures always entails some problems, but at least they have a silver lining, which is that one starts to feel more and more free. And in my case, particularly because my successor is already appointed, so I feel more and more detached, which means that I can be more ambitious in what I say. Let's put it that way. So today I would like to reflect on the relevance of financial integration to economic and monetary union and provide some suggestions for future directions. So already at the very early stages of the project, it was clear that financial integration was needed to make the monetary union sustainable. The 1970 Werner Report mentioned the complete liberalization of capital transactions and the full integration of financial markets as one of the three necessary conditions for a monetary union. Along with this, it was understood that the single currency would secure the full benefits of a single market for capital. During the run-up to the Maastricht Treaty and in the context of the DeLore Report discussions, it became clear that the dictum one market, one money, also implied addressing possible new concerns about financial stability in economic and monetary union. In some cases, these translated into precision calls, like that from Alexander Lamfalusi, for assigning the European Central Bank a role in banking supervision. Eventually, however, the institutional setup of monetary union left financial stability considerations largely unaddressed. This approach clearly showed its limits during the financial crisis. The financial fragmentation of EMU during the financial crisis was partly a result of the initial choices concerning EMU's institutional architecture. To be precise, its minimalist design, which left economic and financial policies mostly at national level. This was maybe due to an overriding faith in the efficiency of financial markets that even though not chaired by all EMU founding fathers, prevailed in Maastricht. It has to be acknowledged, however, that over the following years, financial market integration in EMU and at a global level, accelerated at the speed that was hard to grasp in those early days after the creation of monetary union. The introduction of the single currency gave a major impetus to financial integration in the euro area. Financial integration was impressive in terms of quantitative indicators, but it was also not sustainable. It proved to be shallow and reversible. In fact, it even contributed to the rapid contagion in the early days of the crisis. We learned the hard way that the single currency requires a financial system that is sustainably integrated and indeed as single as possible. Much has been done to correct the initial design failures of EMU. Along with the introduction of the euro, the EU Financial Service Action Plan was launched to provide an overall framework for the integration of financial services in Europe. With the surge of the financial crisis, it also became very clear that macro-prudential policy needed to complement both monetary policy and micro-prudential supervision. The European Systemic Risk Board and the European Supervisory Authorities were then established at the beginning of this decade. However, these reforms quickly proved to be insufficient to keep pace with adverse financial sector developments, especially concerning the role of the banking sector in the monetary union. So in response, the banking union project was launched, but convergence in regulatory and supervisory standards is not enough to spur the development and integration of capital markets that is needed for growth and private risk sharing. Therefore, efforts in this direction were also undertaken with the launch of the Capital Markets Union Initiative. In short, the history of EMU is marked by an evolving search for the right institutional embedding of financial markets. And in that search, Europe has to be agile to react to changing circumstances. In doing so, it has to find a balance between markets and regulation, between liability and control, and between the European and national levels. However, the crucial question is whether we will achieve a sustainable financial integration that is commensurate with a single currency. The fragmentation that occurred has reversed along several dimensions in the last few years, but significant room for further improvements in financial integration remains, for example, in the integration of retail banking services and in the financing of the corporate sector. Financial integration provides risk-sharing mechanisms which can reduce the impact of country-specific shocks and contributes to macroeconomic stability, international diversified portfolios, cross-regional and cross-border asset holdings, including firm ownership, are more resilient to global and local shocks and can mitigate the impact of such adverse scenarios. For countries in the monetary union, this risk-sharing mechanism is particularly important because the single monetary policy is unable to address asymmetric shocks, since other important adjustment mechanisms, for example, related to fiscal policy and exchange rates are limited. Therefore, more private financial risk-sharing can significantly improve the macroeconomic stabilization of the euro area and thereby the functioning of EMU. However, bear in mind that in recessionary periods, the power of this private risk-sharing mechanism is significantly reduced, in particular via the powerful credit channel. And let me point out that this channel accounts for about one quarter in the United States of the income smoothing and around 12% in the euro area of the overall smoothing that is achieved in both jurisdictions in normal times. Perhaps even more important, financial integration is also essential to foster economic growth. Integrated capital markets provide a wider source of financing and lower funding costs for households and firms and ultimately support innovation and the efficient allocation of capital, a financial system which allocates resources efficiently and is resilient to shocks, ultimately supports the transmission of monetary policy and its effects on price stability. So the banking union and the CMU affect different parts of the financial system at different stages of development but follow similar objectives to achieve a more efficient and stable financial system. They are also complementary projects and work on them should run in parallel. So completing the banking union is the first task ahead and each of its three pillars, notably the single supervisory mechanism, the single resolution mechanism and the plan European deposit insurance scheme address the risks of fragmentation. They are also, they are all necessary to ensure a proper balance between markets and regulator and liability and control at European and national levels. However, the framework is still incomplete. Most notably, it requires, as it has been said also by Vice President Dombrovsky, a common public backstop to the single resolution fund, which is essential to inspire full confidence in the resolution regime. In addition, it would be desirable to eliminate national divergences in the insolvency and liquidation of credit institutions and in the implementation of the BNRD through national resolution laws. Allowing these divergences to persist ultimately implies that the geographical location of a failing bank may still influence the outcome of the resolution, which is inconsistent with the idea at the heart of the banking union. Finally, in order to complete the banking union, we need a single full-flagged eddies. And the eddies would strengthen depositors' confidence through an equal level of depositor protection across member states, and therefore, promote financial integration. Ultimately, a fully-flagged eddies would be strengthened by the pooling of resources thus building confidence in the single currency. The finalization of the banking union through the third pillar would require an adequately-sized fund built and financed by banks by raising exotic contributions accompanied by a public backstop as recommended by the ECB's opinion on eddies. The calibration of these contributions should help to minimize the risk of some banking systems subsidizing other banking systems in the event of a general crisis. Recently published ECB Occasional Paper simulating severe banking crisis, it demonstrates precisely that with proper bank risk-based contributions, an almost negligible cross-border subsidization occurs in the case of general banking crisis. For this reason, a crucial element of a full-flagged eddies would consist of risk-adjusted contributions to the fund based on bank-specific strength and weaknesses benchmarked at the banking union level. Progress is also needed in the framework for a macro-potential regulation. I regard these as a precondition for safeguarding financial stability in an integrated market and, therefore, protecting the single market. The CRR-CRD4, the ESRB, and the SSM regulations already define the key elements of the macro-potential framework, but as the framework is tested and more experience is gained, the rules will need to be steadily revised. Authorities with a mandate in this area must have well-defined roles and responsibilities, including a distinct set of instruments. Current overlaps between instruments should be eliminated, like pillar two for micro-potential reasons and macro-potential tools for macro-potential policy. And at the same time, more flexibility in the macro-potential policy framework should be maintained so that authorities can implement those measures in a consistent and timely manner, which would require significant changes to article 548 of the CRR. And if I may develop on this idea, indeed, the proposals that are now on the table about the review of CRD4 and CRR are in the view of the opinions that the ECB has formulated and the recommendations that ECB has done in this sphere are not really contemplated in the present projects that are being discussed. So I still hope that some of our recommendations can be taken up by the European Parliament and by the Council. A more integrated financial market will support the emergence of new types of risk and also require extending the toolkit with new instruments. For the banking sector, this includes complementing the toolkit with borrowed-based instruments, such as limit on loan-to-value or loan-to-income ratios, as well as sectoral buffers and a time-varying leverage ratio add-on so that all aspects of systemic risks can be addressed in general in the banking union. Finally, the mandatory reciprocity framework needs to be expanded so as to ensure the effective mitigation of cross-border spillovers and regulatory arbitrage across jurisdictions in the EU. The significant progress we have made with our banking union needs to be recognized also from the international regulatory framework perspective. A case in point is the GSIBs framework, which currently penalizes cross-border transactions with the banking union by attaching a higher systemic risk score to banks with more transactions within the euro area, because the euro area is not considered a single jurisdiction for this purpose. This goes against the very rationale of the banking union as it reduces the incentives for cross-border capital transactions and risk diversification, thus making banks more vulnerable to local shocks. At the same time, we also need to remove the remaining obstacles to further integration within our banking union. Such obstacles are often due to regulatory fragmentation and ring-fencing of national markets. For example, a number of national options and discresions, which Philip addressed in his presentation and are noted in the report, such as diverging large exposure rules or the question of waivers about capital treatment at centralized level in banking groups, hinders the free flow of liquidity and capital in the banking union and should be harmonized further. Turning to other parts of the financial system, we can expect that the CMU will provide further impetus to the growth of market-based finance and may present new challenges to financial stability. Additional steps should be taken to strengthen the ability of European regulators and supervisors to address systemic risks stemming from the non-banking part of the financial sector. This could be achieved by expanding the mandate of relevant authorities and in the medium run by creating a single supervisor for the capital markets. Adequate macro-prudential instruments need to be envisaged as well, including instruments targeted at market-based finance. Macro-prudential tools for this area either still need to be provided to authorities or need to be further clarified in respect of their applications. For securities financing transactions and derivative markets, macro-prudential margins and air cuts have been identified as potential powerful tools for reducing the excessive buildup of leverage and prosyclicality in these markets. For alternative investment funds, the existing macro-prudential leverage limit needs to be operationalized. The forthcoming review of the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive provides an opportunity to resolve any issues that may ender the future implementation of this leverage limit. The stability and integration of financial markets in the monetary union is also closely related to the creation of a Euro area safe asset in for a number of reasons. First, an European or Euro area-wide safe asset could help reduce the excessive on-buyers in banks' sovereign exposures, which exacerbates the feedback loop between banks and sovereigns. Reforms to the resolution regime, like BRID, have tackled the issue from one direction, meaning from banks to the sovereign. However, at present, there is no clear solution for tackling it in the other direction from the sovereign to the banks. The creation of a Euro area-wide safe asset composed of a pool of sovereign bonds would lead to a reduction in the on-buyers of banks' portfolios by facilitating de-risking and diversification. Second, a Euro area-safe asset would be crucial for the financial integration and the capital markets union. In fact, it is necessary for the creation of an integrated, deep and liquid European bond market as a central piece of CMU. A single term structure of risk-free interest rates could serve as a Euro area pricing benchmark for the valuation of bonds, equities, and other assets. The safe asset could also be used as collateral, for example, for repo and derivative transactions across the Euro area. In principle, several options are available for creating such a safe asset. Some options are not politically viable, while others may not be economically sound. I'm not referring to the type of Euro bonds that would replace national sovereign debt as a joint liability of member states as these would require a deep political union that does not exist. Various proposals have been put forward, but I will concentrate on just two. A variant of the European safe bond, ESBs, or sovereign bond back securities, SBBS, as proposed recently in a big report published by the SRB, and the e-bonds as proposed in the Monty report. The current proposal for SBBS refers to a tranched, synthetic bond backed by national sovereign bonds. The senior tranche would have very low risk levels, presumably below German debt, as a result of the diversification gains based on historical correlations and of the protection granted by the lower grade tranches. Market literature and rating agencies have been skeptical about the instrument. Their main concern is a perceived lack of sufficient diversification to ensure that the senior tranche can be, indeed, as safe as claimed, because correlations among several countries could increase in a stressful situation, as occurred during the financial crisis. Also, it may be difficult to sell the junior tranche at coupons that do not compromise, fatally, the overall economics of the synthetic security issuance. Indeed, if the junior tranche had to be placed at a relatively high coupon, then the senior tranche would need to offer a lower coupon than bonds, a doubtful selling prospect. This would likely render the economics of the SBBS invaluable, which would be very unfortunate. These obstacles could be overcome, if, for instance, a small first-last tranche were to be covered by public guarantees jointly provided by member states. Such contingent liability could be limited to a reasonable level. The success of the synthetic European bonds would have significant benefits for financial integration and for the banking and capital markets union. Alternatively, an European entity could issue e-bonds as a pure secretization of sizable amounts of national sovereign bonds without tranches, but with a preferred credit to status over national sovereign bonds. Such a structure would be less efficient and could increase the cost of issuing the non-preferential part of national debt that is not included in the securitization. However, this could even act as a disciplinary device and would not necessarily imply an increase in the cost of the total debt issuance. The amounts achieved could nevertheless be considerable. For instance, according to a recent working paper of the Patterson Institute, in order to have an expected five-year loss rate of 0.5% or lower, the European entity could securitize 50% of a country's debt or 25% of its GDP. An European safe asset is crucial for the CMU project, which in turn is important for economic growth. A big and liquid market, both of debt and equity, would spur innovation and enable the development of an efficient venture capital market. This relates to the importance of boosting the euro area's capacity to engage in activities conducive to innovation and productivity growth. In the years since the Great Recession, the pace of productivity growth in Europe has been persistently slow. In fact, European productivity had already started to stagnate during the mid-'90s. While some economists have argued that this is all part of a global secular decline in growth, driven by factors such as aging, population, and growth convergence across emerging markets, others believe that scientific progress will keep pushing the technological frontier forward. In any case, without trashing now among these two views, although I must say I'm closer to the first one, it is vital that we have financing mechanisms in place in Europe that can support science and technology's contribution to economic growth. One powerful way in which policy can assist this process is by stimulating the emergence of deep and integrated European capital markets. Capital markets, after all, play an important role in sharing economic risks and in smoothing consumption, but even more fundamentally, they contribute greatly to innovation and growth. Evidence increasingly suggests that while both banks and markets are important for the financing of economic growth, non-bank financial intermediation provides a relatively more powerful contribution to innovation and productivity enhancing activities in modern sophisticated economies. And the special feature in our report is totally dedicated to this issue, having a very good survey of literature and the evidence that supports this statement. While the European Commission's current CMU initiative is an important step in the right direction, a much more ambitious agenda for bolstering capital markets in Europe is needed in the future. Developing well-functioning capital markets which support growth requires a comprehensive approach. To that end, Europe needs to boost the supply of equity finance. Policies which stimulate individual ownership of trade shares, such as reducing the tax advantage of debt over equity or enhancing financial literacy and can have a material effect on public equity markets. At the same time, because stock markets open penalized companies which undertake radical but uncertain innovative activities, the contribution of private equity, particularly in the form of early stage venture capital finance, is indispensable as a critical mass of angel investors who can provide financing for a medium-sized project is also needed. Only with a deep liquid market is it possible to launch IPOs of successful projects that can offset the losses with projects that fail. Harmonizing insolvency rules across jurisdictions would be a major step towards supporting capital markets. This is critical for mobilizing finance through capital markets as it would create incentives and favorable conditions for institutional investors to overcome the own bias in their investment strategies. This is especially true for pension investments as large private pension funds tend to be a complement to deep capital markets. We need to establish an harmonized regulatory environment for new types of finance, such as crowdfunding. The emergence of increasing complex financial products need to be accompanied by adequate consumer protection or of financial investment in order to safeguard financial stability and ensure the protection of individual investors. The second component of a comprehensive approach entails policies that will stimulate entrepreneurship. ITEC entrepreneur firms that aspire to go public should be supported and facilitated by stock exchange specializing in IPOs for young innovative companies. A reduction in the wedge between corporate income taxes and personal income taxes has already been shown to have a strong positive effect on ITEC investment in an European context. Last but not least, the efficient application of R&D tax incentives and increased public funding of private research universities whose labs often make key scientific and technological breakthroughs are other important avenues for stimulating innovation and the commercialization of science. Let me conclude. So far, measures adopted in the context of the CMU initiative, albeit positive and helpful, are not yet commensurate with the ambition of the project. With CMU, we should aim to reach a situation where issuers and investors enjoy the same basic legal rights concerning capital markets activity regardless of the EU country where they are located. The CMU project involves all EU member states, but it is of particular importance for Euro area member countries. It is a big waste to have made the huge step to adopt a single currency and continue to forgo the benefits that could be reaped by creating a true banking and capital markets union. I believe that Euro area countries should forge ahead in enhanced cooperation in order to more rapidly achieve CMU. We should, however, be well aware that CMU requires an European safe asset, harmonization of taxes on financial products, conversions of company law, including on bankruptcy, creation of a single rulebook of regulation for markets activity, and ultimately, an European single securities market supervisor. The other big condition is a rock solid monetary union to so that asset risks and returns are not significantly influenced by pure re-denomination risks but exclusively by their idiosyncratic features. Have it all, I know. But I will believe that the CMU project is possible when I see authorities start making inroads in some of those difficult issues. Thank you very much.


ॐ nã baw continuing. Sa baht this was being done by an artist of querer and after being شڣل and was accepted fully for charity. ॐ meanings changed and people were liking work and lunch milk and this is sh円 has been delivered to them by artist from outside the community. ौ winning interest and goin on to work. ॐ how many other way of what are you doing? mmm one way and two ways of making ends meet. ॐ how many other wishes and goals are you trying to tell them after thisinaudible dwindling? ॒ it is about to happen with bare hands. ृ what is exactly so if someone would ever expect from you and didn't even ever think about helping you out. wietся 對 celui సార్లిబన కార్నిన్ళ్పినికరిరిన thành రిలె యాపిసివాడ౿ త్తాపి సూఽపనలనినిలె పదాతిసేవకనై ఱగొజివరిలెల్. జజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజజ में यान था श puntos Wonderful में यान जी टरी दquel। perform Frankfur  Flowers  Agriculture and transformations ศ เฎ, ศinger Ü ku  verder Ü ku 侸 having ì Akai uu  xu  xu ì distributor Ü uu  xu  xu  xu  xu  xu  xu


The breaking news in sport that AFC Bournemouth had lost their fight to avoid going into administration. Starting the next season on minus 17 points you thought well this is it, there isn't going to be a Bournemouth anymore. There wasn't going to be a great escape season, it was the end of the road. I think a number of us thought well the writing could be on the wall this time, this might be just one deduction too many. You was always aware of the situation, you know the ramifications of what could happen if we did get relegated to the club. The journey began with it. Free kick Pittman 30 yards out ahead, oh Dereva from Fred Pittman. Fletcher left with his strike, it's into the back of the net. It's one of the best moments in my career still now. Our attitude was these are the big boys coming in, let's have it with y'all. Still running Molesley, loose it! It's in to Pittman's path once more, still he goes out two players, oh what a goal by Fred Pittman. Difficult times for the club but they still showed up in their numbers and backed us when we needed them.  When you look back and look at it from start to finish, what an achievement it actually is. If there's ever a time in my 20 year career to score a goal, it has to be now. If everything had been easy at the start, I think the story wouldn't have been as good.


I'm shooting through a clue. I'm trying to switch the line. Say what? Come on, run away. What? That was the one there. Ready to drop? Two.


Want to save on that new car, reduce the price on your phone bills, or perhaps you just want to get more when you sell your old or unneeded stuff. Hey brainwash friends, I'm Aaron Tupaz with Positively Brainwashed, and today I promise to teach you 20 tips on how to bargain and negotiate. These tips will be about having the right mentality, preparation, practical techniques, precautions and what not to do, and some scripts and structure to get you started, including my favorite phrase. So let's get started. Step number one is don't feel bad. Some people feel bad for negotiating. They don't speak up and just accept the price that's been handed to them. So don't feel embarrassed like you're cheap because if it's done the right way, you'll feel great and save a lot of money. Number two is to do your research. Do research on the product. If you can quote the prices of the competition to the person you're making a deal with, you will have the upper hand and they will be more likely to compromise. It helps to bring proof so get ready to pull your phone and show their competitor's website. Believe me, nobody wants to lose business to a competitor.  Find what you think is a fair price and then aim to lower it by like 10% if you're buying or increase it if you're selling. Number three is to determine your cheapest price or worst case scenario. Before you even negotiate, make sure you know what's the price that you will without a doubt refuse to accept. Because if you've ever agreed to something and the next day you've regretted it, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. So if someone is getting you to cross this line, be willing to confidently walk away and perhaps do more research or just go to a different place. Number four is to know who should make the first offer. If you're prepared and did your research, then make the first offer. Now if you're buying, make it low enough that they'll say no but not so much that they think you're crazy. Because you'll always wonder if you could have gone lower if you don't pick something low and they accept it immediately. But if you're not prepared, then let them make the first offer. Just make sure you don't accept it and counter offer a better price for you, knowing you'll probably meet somewhere in the middle. Number five is to build rapport. Asking for their name and using it often can help build rapport. People tend to love hearing their own names. Also, there's nothing wrong with a little bit of small talk and trying to find something you guys have in common. Because it's much harder to take advantage of you if they like and connect with you. Number six is to try to get add-ons. If the price is non-negotiable or they've gone as low as they can already, then see if they can throw in things like free delivery or free accessories. Like if you're negotiating your salary, ask for more vacation time or if you can work from home. The point is don't always just focus on the price. Number seven is to ask to speak to someone higher. There might be someone higher who can listen to your complaints and give you a better deal.  Number eight is to go under the table. On eBay I'll sometimes message the sellers and ask if they want to bypass eBay and just use PayPal. Because remember, they have to pay eBay too. So they'll save money as well or it won't make much of a difference. Worst case scenario, they'll say no. But it's definitely worth asking especially if they just want to really get rid of their stuff. Also whenever possible, try to pay by cash. They might save money by not having to pay transaction fees on credit cards and they might not charge you tax if you get it under the table. Number nine, cash says you're serious. Take out cash to show your serious about buying and talk about your competitors. So if the price can't be agreed upon and you walk away, there's a chance they'll give in because like I mentioned in tip number two, they don't want you going to their competitors. But if the person has a monopoly and has the best price in town, then another strategy is to consider playing dumb during the negotiations. Because if the person knows you've done your research, then most likely they'll know you'll come crawling back. Number ten is to match their body language. If possible, scope the area first and pay attention to match the body language and enthusiasm of the person you'll be negotiating with. This is easy to do as you can just say you're browsing if anyone tries to help you. So watch them interact with other customers and ask yourself, do they have high energy or are they low and calm? This way you can match them later. Matching your body language tells the person, hey we're on the same page, we have the same mindset, so let's both be happy with the end results. Number eleven is the leaning away technique. Start your negotiations leaning in and when you disagree with the pricing, slightly lean your body back. Subconsciously, they'll pick up that they said something you don't like and the negotiations might even start tipping your way. You should also watch their body language in case they're doing the same. For more on body language, I highly suggest you take a look at my videos specifically on this topic, especially about understanding open and closed body language because it's very important in sales and negotiations. Number twelve is the power of silence. Silence can create pressure, it can make people feel uncomfortable and make them crack. So if they throw in a price you disagree with or right after you challenge them on something and they respond, consider pausing for an extra two to three seconds longer than usual like you're not impressed. Number thirteen is understanding the situation. Is the negotiations a necessity or is it just an opportunity? Ask yourself if one or both parties can walk away from the deal. In a divorce for example, an agreement is required from both parties because you'll have more power and negotiations if you know the person needs what you're offering right now. Sometimes people just want to get rid of their stuff. Like for Craigslist, you could just arrive at their place and simply say, listen, I know you asked for $50 but all I got is $40 right now. Do you want it? And many times, they'll say yes without arguing. Number fourteen is to mention if you're a regular customer and if you come there almost every day and if you're dealing with your phone provider, tell them how long you've been loyal to them. Or if you're not a regular customer, then give them the impression you'll be a regular customer or that you'll have future deals. Number fifteen is to have an escape plan. If you really can't settle on an agreement, then always have an escape plan, especially if you don't want to be rude and just leave. Like just tell the person you have a meeting or an appointment to go to. Number sixteen is to never ever tell them the bottom line. Telling people your worst case scenario from tip number three can change what was a win-win situation to a lose for them. Don't tell them at the beginning, middle, and certainly not at the end. Tip number seventeen, while you're negotiating, don't physically hold the item you want to buy because you'll be less effective. This can cause you to be biased and the seller thinking it's already yours. On the other hand, if you're selling, try to get the person to hold the object or try out the product. Number eighteen, don't salami yourself. If you're selling and bundling things or services, don't break down the prices for each item. Just give the total price and say what it includes or what you're going to do. Otherwise, people might ask to remove certain items that they don't want or could get cheaper somewhere else. But if you're buying, then try to salami the person so you get only what you need. Next, to help get you started, practice giving a reason and then offering a price. That's really expensive for this old place. I was thinking more like $50,000. The other store has this for just $60 bucks. Would you take it for $40? I've been a customer for two years. Could you reduce my bills to $60? You might be going back and forth for a while and some negotiations can take out receiving. So try to save your best arguments for last. The last tip is my favorite phrase. Now, after you've done all you can to get the best offer, try to get one last punch by asking, is that the best you can do? Practice this in the mirror using different inflection points. Is that the best you can do? Is that the best you can do? Remember, a lot of people are bad in negotiations.  But I'm always trying to improve my negotiation skills myself. So let me know in the comments below, what's your best negotiation tip? Or D, hope I go bankrupt.


I'm from Iran, I'm from the west part of Iran-Urmia, and I'm going to talk about Noros, yes? Yes. Yes, tell us, what did you do at the moment of the equinox, when the year changed, what did you do? All the family, all the members of family, we got together, and the table setting, you mean what I mean by table setting, have seen. Yes, have seen. So there are seven things that we place on the table representing Noros. Yes, yes. What are the seven things, I'm not familiar actually with that, tell me a little bit about the tradition. Yes, there are seven things which are started with S, and yes, one of them is Sieb, which is called apple in English, and I do not, and one kind of flower which is sombal, and I do not know its meaning in English. Oh, Hyacinth, Hyacinth, Hyacinth, yes. And Cenged, again I do not know its meaning in English too, and these kind of stuff which are started with S in Persian are getting together in our table setting, and all the family, all the members of family got together on table setting, and we started in New York with such kind of tradition, and it's our culture, and after that the family start to see each other, the younger families go to older ones to see them, to meet them, and to say congratulations to them, and the older ones get some gifts or money as a gift to the younger ones, and something like that. And some of the family goes to travel, spend their holidays by going to travel. Did you, did you or your family travel for Norus? No, no, we have some gifts from capital city, and it didn't go anywhere. Okay, how is the weather in Orumia? It's really good like spring weather, but we haven't had any raining. Okay, so it's dry? It's dry, yes. So do you have any, well I know it's January 1st for the New Year, it's traditional for people to make New Year's resolutions, things they hope to achieve in the year to come. Is that a part of Norus, or did you, do you have any hopes and wishes for the New Year? Part of? So a New Year's resolution is a tradition, so that is, that means a promise sort of that you make to yourself to do something in the New Year, or to overcome something or to achieve something, a special goal. Because I know it doesn't seem like Persians have that tradition, but people certainly do have hopes and wishes when they sit in front of have seen, right? Yes, I myself have some goals that I want to achieve them, and I... Would you mind sharing, telling us about some of your goals? I've been trying to get admission from American University, and it's one of my goals to get admission graduate assistant from American University, and I hope I can get that admission in this year. What do you hope to study? What do you want to study? My main field of study is English language teaching. I'm doing my, I'm doing my master, and I want to pursue my studies in PhD. So what is your master's in? Is it in education, or? Yes, English language teaching. Okay, and where do you teach now? I teach for teenagers in English language institutes. Okay. And so have you taken the TOEFL or the IELTS test yet? Not yet, but I'm forced to take part in TOEFL exam, and I need it.


What a difference 24 hours makes. Yesterday Australia was at the bottom of a list of countries ranked for their efforts to tackle climate change. Now it has pledged $200 million towards a global fund to fight global warming. The money will help poorer nations mitigate the impact of climate change. It's being seen as a U-turn for Prime Minister Tony Abbott's government which had earlier refused to join other wealthy nations in contributing to the fund. So what has caused the about face? Well joining me here in the studio is Camilla Tullman, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development. Thanks very much Camilla for joining us here on Impact. This is a bit of a U-turn isn't it? It is indeed and I think it shows how important these global climate negotiations can be for providing a focus on laggards in coming to a deal. So it's partly as you said the climate change performance index that put Australia right down at the bottom with Saudi Arabia and Canada I should say and a number of other countries that depend heavily on fossil fuel activity. How significant is this $200 million figure? Well in itself it's not a huge amount. I mean if you take Norway, Norway has pledged something just a bit below I think $130 million. So it's not a huge amount but it's the beginnings of a move in the right direction because of course when Tony Abbott's government came in last year they did a whole number of things like scrapping the carbon tax. So maybe next week we'll see them putting the carbon tax back on. Let's hope. Do we know where it's coming from? It's coming from the foreign aid bill but that's nothing unusual. In fact many governments take money from their foreign aid bill in order to fulfil climate change pledges which shouldn't really happen because this money should be on top of the existing aid budget. Why has Australia been so reluctant up until now to pledge anything? I think it's really you have to look at where their economies is coming from and it's largely mining both of minerals but also coal, coal oil and gas and coal if you like. Reliance on coal is obviously going to make you pretty wary of signing up to an act that basically wants to keep coal in the hole and to get emissions of greenhouse gases down as close to zero as we possibly can as soon as we can. So what does this about face, this U-turn say about Australia's attitude towards climate change? Well I think Australia's population is made up of two groups. There's the groups of if you like people very reliant on the mining sector, people who maybe have an attitude that's more 20th century and another group of people who are very much global citizens and who see Australia or who would like to see Australia on the front foot as playing its role as a global citizen taking on these big global challenges and of course the political conflict that we saw at the election this time last year was essentially seeing those two groups playing it out. Okay well thanks very much for joining us here on Impact that was Camilla Thulman director of the International Institute for Environment and Development.


So, Rebecca and I, we operate Fair Share Farm. This is the farm. We're in Northeast Clay County, Missouri, North Kansas City. So that's our house. We've got a barn, our new fermenting facility, a high tunnel, two different fields that we operate. We tend to use more in the spring because it dries out quicker. We have an irrigation pond here and a solar panel. The irrigation system is solar powered. We started in 2003 and first CSA season was 2004. This year we had 130 members, our members work on the farm. That's part of the CSA operation. Rebecca's a fourth generation farmer. We also have some hens at this point. And so this is our CSA. Like I said, we're a participatory CSA. That's kind of the traditional model. Our members are required to help two to three times a year to come out with the harvest. It's one of the things in our survey. They say they actually like it almost the most about the farm. We grow 40 different types of vegetables like most CSA farms. Our approach, we're not certified organic and we consider ourselves a biological farm. We tell people that what we do is we think of the soil as the plant's stomach. You're going to feed the soil, you grow cover crop, you turn it under, the biology of the soil digests and decomposes that matter and that's what you feed the plant with. Just like yourself.  And we also like to say you are what you eat so you are what your plants eat. We feel all the cover cropping and biological methods that we've used over the years really helps improve the nutrition and the flavor of the crops. We feed the soil a balanced meal. We try every year to either give us cover crops, compost or hay mulch, straw or organic fertilizer and we cover crop pretty much all year long. So we do a lot of mulching. We buy compost. There's an organization called Missouri Organics in Kansas City. We can get, that's enough for about 20 beds of 20,000 foot beds, about half acre. We use Fertrell Super-N as an organic fertilizer that we can apply. It's easy to put down. We have one, we actually now have two movable henhouses. We like to move them into areas where we have cover crops growing and have them use that as a food source as well as their ration. Like I said, we grow a lot of cover crops. This is Crotalaria and Sorghum Sedangrass here, buckwheat. We have an electric tractor. So it's an Alice Chalmers G. There was a serigrant from a while back that from a farmer in New York State, Ron Colsa, he converted it from gas to electric. You can see the batteries on the back there. It essentially runs like a golf cart. This was our field day that we had this year. So another thing, like I said, we've been farming 13 years using biological practices. Last year I decided to compile all of our soil data. So back in 2003 we actually got a grant from the State of Missouri, a Sustainable Ag Demonstration Award. Joan is familiar with that. She signed off on that. And we were able to get money for soil testing. We got a manure spreader, money to buy cover crop seeds. And so that kind of got us started. And just want to kind of point out here, you know, the whole point of organic or biological farming is to improve soil quality. If you do that, then the plants are going to grow. So we have this first sample. There's only one. I don't think it really is a baseline as much as this. So we started out with about 2.6 percent organic matter on our farm. And for a while every year and then we skipped and we just kept taking soil samples. And you can see as time went on here, we went from our ranges being less than three in the twos to where we get down here towards 2013, 15, our ranges have gone up. So you can see we've basically raised our soil organic matter by almost one and a half percent. And that's one thing that we're really proud of. And we like to show this, this is a graph, that this is what organic farming can do. I don't think it's talked about enough. If you look at from like 2008 until now, with the acreage that we've grown, calculated that we've added about 250,000 pounds of our organic matter to our soil, which relates to about 350,000 pounds of carbon dioxide that we've sequestered. So that's something that in agriculture you can do just kind of a matter of course. We think that's important. You can see that it kind of bounced around and went down and then up. For a while we took a while, a lot of years for us to really get our cover cropping going. You can see the improvements. So like I said, the biology of the soil is important and we've always kind of wanted to do value added but didn't really want to slave over a stove and make tomato sauce for people. And what we've decided to do is to do fermenting. So we like how that kind of ties the biology of the soil to the biology to the food to the biology of our digestive systems because they're all really the same thing. So sauerkraut's obviously one fermented food most people are familiar with. Here's Rebecca. It's a little blurry, filled with some jars with kimchi in our new kitchen. And there's a facility built on like a 100-year-old tobacco barn. And those are a couple of our products. So that was part of the genesis for this project. We do grow some things that are more fruiting vegetables like cucumbers to make pickles and jalapenos to make pickled jalapenos. But the idea was going to grow a lot of cabbage. So we want to do it the simplest way possible, least amount of labor. And so the roller crimper and planting into rolled down beds is something that we wanted to work on. So it's been quite a long project. So you see here 2013, first step was to plant rivets in the winter or in the fall so that the following spring we'd have a crop to roll down. The idea was that we would so crimp these down. We also trialing tomatoes in rolled down cover crops. And then in July, late July, plant the fall brassicas into that. And then in September, seed the rivets for the next year. So we'll go through all that. So 2014, no-till brassica. You can see here this is a flail mower that we had. And part of the project also was to get us a better flail mower. That one's a little lightweight. There weren't a lot of safety guards on it. But one thing it did show is that in talking to Ron Morse also, who's our technical advisor, Dr. Morse is from Virginia Tech, so you don't need to buy a roller crimper. We had that in there originally and then we took it out. To roll down a cover crop, the flail mowers have a very, very large roller on the back of them, very, very heavy. So all you really need to do is to drag the flail mower through a bed without the mower going to roll down the crops. And this is what it looks like. So 2014 all started out really well. We had a really nice rye-vech crop. We rolled it down. It looked like this. It looked really good. The vech came back up, which isn't unusual. It's more viney. It doesn't really have the stem like rye does. It'll just break. We mowed that off.  So we did the rolled-down beds. And then we used our spader and we tilled in beds. And the idea was to compare rolled-down production versus tilled production. Rolled-off the rye-vech. But then, as you can see behind our farm crew here, the bindweed started coming in. We had other areas where the grasses started coming in. So we were trying, sent these guys out here, I think it was maybe 75 foot. I don't know if it was even that far. And it's like, okay, let's just see how long it's going to take. So it took like five hours of personnel time to handweed this area. And then it just came back anyway. So we tried another thing. We had this organic herbicide called Ground Force, which is just like a citric or acetic acid. And so we tried spraying that. And then we sprayed the whole thing. And it didn't matter. It just all came back. It's not a systemic herbicide. It just kind of kills the top growth. So the main focus of this whole project. The first year, we just had to abandon the thought of even planting into this. We did, I'll show you, with the no-till planting aid. We did try to run the machinery, but we didn't plant into it. So no-till planting aid, it's basically a furrower, and it's a system that Dr. Morse developed. And so he helped us in building the no-till planting aid. So it's a way to just pull furrows in the rolled down cover crop, and then you can plant into that area. So you can just look. He has a lot of literature on this. You can go online. You can buy a toolbar. You can buy this and that, and you just kind of build it. But we had this equipment laying around the farm. So it was like, well, we're going to kind of farm hack the whole thing. So we had this toolbar, which looks like it's a squirrel toolbar. And after I bought the clamps, found out it's actually a diamond toolbar. And then the shanks, you know, one's longer than the other. Are you saying these colters, they were really too small to use. So I kind of roughed it up. So these are one of the things we bought were these colters. You really need them to be big. If you have a lot of rolled down cover crop, it has to be able to cut through it. This shank wasn't going to, there just wasn't enough space there.  And then it turned out that they're still kind of too close. We had a bolt and extension onto that. You can kind of see where this is a square on a diamond. And then you got this little bit here. We didn't cut that off the first year. So it worked. It worked well, just like he said it would drag through. You just had a furrow going there. We have a waterwheel transplant, or the idea was we'd space the waterwheels at that distance and pull it through and be able to plant. But I'll show you those pictures before. You can see that already all this vineweed had grown back in. So last year we couldn't do it. I'll go into that. This year, I kind of fixed it up a little bit. You can see here I cut that off. That was really catching on the cover crop and causing a problem. And you can see here the steel, that's the extension. We spent money and bought a diamond clamp. So it worked really well, pulls right through there. You can kind of see it cuts down maybe eight inches into the soil. So the no-till planting aid worked fine. Conclusions are you can farm hack it and maybe save a little bit of money, or it's not that hard to find the parts you need for a toolbar and everything else to make it with new parts. It's a great tool. It does what it says. And we still may use it. There may be times when it's really wet out and we don't want to till an area. And we can use this to create a planting furrow without causing a lot of problems. So this is Rebecca. This is one of our other field days. We had a field day each year. That same year, 2014, we did the same thing for tomatoes. So the idea with the tomatoes, we only, in the summer, we do a second planting of tomatoes in there. We call them our summer tomatoes. We use a hybrid. We'll cage them. So we took this 200-foot bed, that's our standard bed length, and rolled down a hundred foot of it. And then the other hundred feet we spaded in and planted into that to mulch. Here's the tomatoes that we hand planted in here. Unfortunately, I'm still searching for the data from this one, but it was really wet. I mean, when we dug the holes and put these tomato plants in, there was water at the bottom. It was a really wet year. So I don't know that the data from this necessarily would have been that good. And we did the same test this year, and I have much better information from that. But you can kind of see. We did hand weed this once. And for the tomatoes, it didn't work out too bad. The thing with the tomatoes are that you roll it down. Most of this happens in late May. That's when the rye has reached a stage where you're going to crimp it down. And the tomatoes, our summer tomatoes, will plant maybe the second week of June. So it will have died back, and we can plant right into it. So with the brassicas, you roll it down before May's over, and then you're not going to plant until the middle of July. You're a cabbage or something, and it's just sitting there all this time, and weeds have more of a chance to grow. Just wanted to go through this real quick just to kind of show you. We've done a lot of cover cropping. This is an example. We do cover crops in the spring, summer, and fall. This is like a summer cover crop of mung bean or beans and sorghum, sedan grass. So we'll let it grow. We'll flail-mow it down. That's what it looks like when it flail-mows. It's all nice and chopped. Then this is our spader. I don't know if you guys have ever seen a spader. It's one of the first pieces of equipment that we got. They had one at the farm in New York where we were. It's a really nice piece of equipment. You can see these shovels in here. So there's like a half dozen shovels, and they actually dig the soil. You can actually go through a bed so you had potatoes in, and you harvested them all, and go through and spade, and you can find potatoes that haven't even been damaged when you're all done spading. So it's not as pulverizing as a garden-type tiller. That's what it looks like on a good day. We have silk clay soil, so it's really difficult to always find the exact perfect soil moisture to spade, but that looks nice like that. We consider cover cropping kind of composting in place. We also have, in the past, taken the plastic off our high tunnel and cover cropped our high tunnel. So 2015 was going to be our second year. It's going to be a two-year project, but we suspended the project because of rain. So I don't know if you can read all this data, but you can see down here at the bottom. It was the first year I ever decided to keep rainfall records and just add a little log, and I kept the notes, and it was really interesting to have done it this year. Over the course of 74 days, we had almost 36 inches of rain, which recreates to almost a half an inch of rain every day for 74 days. Right in here, this is about the time that you would normally be rolling and crimping, and up till the end of May, we had 10 inches. And then the first week of June, we had 10 inches just in those couple days. We also had hail. So this, you can kind of see, this is total precipitation for that day, and we're right in the middle of the worst of it. So this is what strawberries look like after they've been pummeled by hail. Like Rebecca said, it looks like little tiny fairy punches on them, and when you count on your strawberries and they're just ripening and you get hail, it's no fun. And so we're trying to keep the project going, too, but like you can see, there was really no time period when this was ready to be rolled down that we could get in there. And I was doing everything I could to work on this project and keep the rest of the farm going, and there were a few times when I probably went out, went out there when I shouldn't have. So that was a lesson all in and of itself. This is more of the rain that we had. So we skipped 2015 and got into 2016. So one of the other parts of this project was to evaluate our cover cropping method. We had always just done broadcast seeding and harrowing. So that's how we would do our cover cropping. And you've seen some of those pictures. Things worked out fine, but it's pretty labor intensive. So the idea was to get a seeder. And I spent almost two years looking for a used grain drill, like six foot wide. And I had absolutely no luck finding one. So eventually decided to go to getting a vegetable seeder. So our Alice Chalmers G, we have a toolbar, and we have three Planet Junior seeders. And we can seed with that just off the electric tractor. So the thought was if I can get four new Planet Juniors, I could put that on the Alice Chalmers and we could use our electric tractor to do our cover cropping. But it turns out once the seeders came that these are newer ones and they're like twice the weight of the other ones. So that didn't really work out. So we had to get a toolbar so that we could just pull it behind our farm all. So these are vegetable seeders and we're trying to seed cover crops. But for the most part seeds are seeds. So we started looking at, well, you know, what's the seed plate for rye or vetch or whatever. And so one way to do it was simply to measure the circumference of the front wheel, which would be the ground tracking on it, open up the seeder and just spin the wheel for so many feet and count how many pounds fell out. And then we could calculate, okay, well, this wheel will get you so many pounds per acre or per bed, whatever we wanted. So I did that and every, like this hopper, it looks like these both had like vetch in them and those two might have had rye. These were offset so we wanted eight rows so I had to kind of turn around and go back down the other way and try and have the seeder go in between the other rows. So that didn't work out all that great. It worked out okay. And then the other thing was having two different seeds and two different seed holes and trying to keep all that perfect really was kind of a pain. So I went to just mixing the seed and you just use the largest seed hole and you calibrate it that way. So you mix the rye and vetch or the oats and peas or the Sudan grass and crotal area together, whatever it is you need, and you find the seed where you get, we're trying to get about about two pounds or so per thousand foot bed. So you can see here, we got one, two, three, four, five, like six rows here. This is a bed, so you really want like eight. So it wasn't too bad, grew pretty well. The peas were supposed to be separate inside there and some of those works, some didn't. So for the next time I did it, I tried putting it all on one side, figuring at least I'd make sure everything was on one side or on each side. This was the summer and some of that didn't turn out that well because it got very dry for a while and the seeds just sat there and so the weeds started to take over. But this is part of the trial where this area here was broadcast and harrowed in and these were with the cedar and it pretty much looked like that. We'd cut areas and weigh them. And so we did this two different times and so you can see from the top one the first time we did it in a spring crop, the cedar had a little bit better weight and then when we measured in the fall for one of the summer plantings, the broadcast had better weight. We took like a four by four area, just cut it down and weighed it. We kept using it. It does the cedar, it does give you a pretty good stand. It doesn't always look like it at the start. These are peas and oats and this is just interesting, it's so warm. This year this is actually a sun-hemp flower which we've never seen before because it's just been growing all winter long or fall long. So we feel the vegetable cedar can be used to seed cover crops. It's a multi-use cedar then if you have more than one use for it, if you're a vegetable farmer. We would advise combining two seed types and use the larger cedar hole, the one for the larger seed. Then you can just have all your cedars at the same cedar hole. We had it a little difficult to get eight perfectly spaced rows. And harrowing can be just as effective as the cedar, it just takes a lot more effort. So this is our second try at the No-Till Brassica, this is this year. So last September we put down Rye Vetch, that was a really, really wet year. And for some reason, you can see there's hardly any rye that came up, but we had a lot of vetch. So that's what it looked like in May. We rolled down the vetch, that's a picture of the new flail mower. You can kind of see that roller there that just helps roll stuff down. And this is one of the trial beds and pretty much the same thing happened. You know where we are, I mean all out here, it's a lot of grassland. And like between the end of May and then you have all of June and going into July, that's when grasses really, really want to grow. This area we'd never put down hay or anything. It was a relatively new area that we were, it's like the second year we used it.  So, it's easy to roll down with the flail mower. There's a problem because of the weed pressure from the grasses in the heat of the summer. You saw all the wet periods we had, it's really hard to implement the roller crimper and planting in it during the wet periods. And we tried doing like hand weeding and everything and that really is not an effective way to kind of make up for any problems that you might have. This is more rain, so this year at the end of August we had ten inches over a couple days and four inches a couple weeks later. So there was still a lot of this this year. So these are the summer tomatoes. So this is the same thing as shown you before. We grew a cover crop. One area we mowed it and spaded it in. The other one we rolled it. This is what it looked like right after we were done with that. You can see there's hay on the left. We mainly use hay. We're able to get hay off of Rebecca's family land next door. The one on the right is the rolled-down betch. So things started out pretty good, both of them. These are Belarus, I believe, or the tomato type. They're summer tomato. This is once they really started going. I don't know if you can really tell, but the hay mulched ones were really a deeper green. They're a better stand than over here. We weeded these once, but after that it was like, well, they're kind of on their own. That's the point. We don't want to be spending a lot of time weeding. What kind of hay was that? Was it native grass hay? No. What type of hay? It was like a lot of brome. There was some clover in there, but it wasn't native. We may be able to get native soon. Her father just seeded a lot of switch grass all over the farm, so maybe in the future. This year we had a lot of, you know, the fruit was really great. There was a problem when we first started going out to harvest, our irrigation had kind of, we had some complications with it for a while, and kind of the first fruits that we were picking had a lot of blossom end rot. Got the irrigation working, we watered a lot, and that kind of went away. And this is the data from this year. So you can see here that once with the hay mulch had three times the yield that the rolled ones did. They both had a decent amount of fruit set, but the hay mulch ones had a lot more firsts. This is mainly firsts, at least firsts trying to come off the field. So both the roller crimper, like I said, they keep down the weeds because you're going to plant them pretty much right away, so it's a much better situation. We are maybe considering trying this for the summer tomatoes a different year, and then mulching the rolled down areas right away. And that might really eliminate weeds and maybe then the rolled down crops will get a little more digested. You know, all that top growth, if you don't spate it in, it doesn't really get digested and you don't get as much nutrient release. So part of it is there just wasn't as much in the soil. But spated and hay mulch beds, if you can get a good spating, seem to work as well as anything. So these are some of the costs. So the no-till planting aid, with us already having a toolbar and a few things, was about $1,100. The flail mower I was able to find online. I actually came out here to Kansas somewhere to pick it up. And then the coal cedar with the hitch was a little over $4,000. So sorry, there's not more data about what we planted, but it did demonstrate to us that we tried and tried. It's not necessarily a system that's going to work in our area, in our soils for us. Did you ever get rid of the bindweed? No. Well, it's funny, the wet year, we hardly saw any bindweed on the farm. And we didn't really have as much this year as we had two years ago when I was showing you that. Rebecca applied for a permit from USDA to buy these bindweed mites, have you heard about them at all? No. So supposedly there are these mites that only attack bindweed. And somewhere out in Colorado, you can buy them. So she had to go through this whole process. It's like same type of paperwork if you're going to transfer smallpox across state lines. So she applied for it and we were going to do it the next year, but because of all the rain we didn't do it. I had a bindweed problem and cattle worked wonderful. They cleaned it out. My only concern was were they going to carry seed elsewhere, but they digest the seed. I had no spreading. So haying it would be an option if you can find somebody that's willing to buy hay with bindweed in it. Yeah, we're hoping maybe the chickens might do something to it too, but we don't know yet. Have you guys ever tried anything with like on your cover crop having an edible mixed in with the cover crop? For us? Yeah. Like as a cash crop? No. Well, I guess I shouldn't say that. We're growing daikons. So we eat tillage radishes and we're doing the fermenting. And right now we're kind of trialing. There's some varieties from Johnny and other places that are really more culinary. And I've tried the tillage radishes. But right now the batch that we did is really has a lot of bitterness to it. And I suppose if you're playing a whole bed of them you can just pull up 100 pounds and you're not going to lose a lot. But the whole idea of tillage radishes is to leave it in the ground. And then otherwise we don't have a combine. If we did we'd probably get a lot of buckwheat because buckwheat seeds it almost right away.


The Cube at IBM Impact 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Paul Gillin. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for IBM Impact. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out for the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm really excited to have here inside The Cube, CEO and president of Ustream, Brad Hunts the Bull and founder of Ustream on The Cube. Hey, we're on the front page of Ustream.tv today. Thanks a lot. Hey, right, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for having me. Thank you for enabling us to stream live across the web. You guys, I remember when you guys started, fantastic startup, it was like, whoa, social media. Wild West, I'm sure the cost is stacking up. You've learned a lot.  You guys are growing like crazy. We're here. Tell us about your relationship with IBM. What do you got? You're here for business reasons, not just for a social call at The Cube. You're here for some legitimate business. So tell us what's going on. Well, increasingly it's served the needs of the public. So we build video capabilities from everyone from the sales course of the customer, to skills of the customer, into it. For things, you know, from robotic launches, press conferences, and doing webinars, to training internally, to CEO town halls.  And so what we're here with IBM is we're a part of their new launch called the IBM Arcade. It's one of the launch part, in fact. The only video site, video platform that is part of that. I mean, we're really excited at the opportunity to work closer with one of the most, if not the most iconic enterprise brand in the world, which is IBM. And then the trend also with the marketplace is also bring some ecosystem support for IBM's overall portfolio. But if you think about it, you know, people want package solutions, right? So people want to have, they don't want to, they want to pure play video. Maybe they do that, but also we want the big data. They want the analytics. They want the reporting. And it's also hard for a customer to go out and say, hey, what if I want to bring in new video? I want to do a town hall or sales trainings. I want to do all this stuff. Wait a minute, where's the analytics? Where's the investment? Where's the closed loop? I mean, we've heard this before, right? How much is the platform? Where's the ROI? Well, I mean, if you close one deal, I guess, but see where I'm going with this is a bigger system. So what's your take on that? When you approached IBM, was it like they came to you? Did you go to them? Just take us through the interaction. You know, I think we've been in talks for quite a while, so I don't even remember exactly who approached you, but you are right. When you're dealing with enterprises, they do want full solutions. They want to be able to have those solutions supported. And the beauty of the cloud is that you can, no matter what size your organization is, you can quickly and easily test and try before you buy, get access to powerful capabilities, and build on top of them to meet the needs of whatever your specific organization is. So every business is different. Every business has different needs, but the robustness of the cloud and the robustness of properties like ours, like Ustream and what we're dealing with IBM, allows those companies to build these experiences and video solutions in a way that meets the needs that they have. Last time we talked at IBM Pulse, you and I were chatting on the hallway around Ustream's technologies. Share a little bit of folks out there that might not know Ustream. I mean, the complexity around running a global scale video operation. Sure, what are you guys doing that's different now that's going to give you some headroom for the future? Well, Ustream today is the largest live video platform in the world. And we came from very modest beginnings, actually just I wanted to watch my brother's band on the internet because I was in the military deployed and I couldn't see his concerts. So we had a very simple way. We started the company to now, serving the needs and serving very complex video needs for very large corporate part customers. And it's all built on top and this makes us unique, certainly different than most of the video properties out there is we've built our own technology. And so we built what's called the Ustream CDN. This is, we've scaled this globally. We have data centers around the world, pops around the world. In most markets, we're a tier one peering provider just to give you a sense of how much bandwidth we push with the same peering status that something like a Netflix would have. And so we built this out all on top of our own technology called the Ustream Media Server. And what the Ustream Media Server allows us to do is to scale very rapidly, reliably, leverage multiple CDNs around the world, multiple partners and do all of that in a very cost effective manner. And it's a big part of our IP and our flexibility and our value proposition to customers. What are your big opportunities that you're looking at as the next chapter of Ustream?  Foundation said you guys are scaling up. What is the next chapter going to look like? What are your ambitions? Well, I think if you look at where the growth is happening in video, most people don't realize this. Most of the growth that this next wave is going to happen within the enterprise. Take a company like Nestle. You've heard of Nestle, big consumer good, packaged good manufacturer. They actually produce more hours of content a year than all of Hollywood combined. And that's not my stat, that's from Frost and Sullivan. When you look at last year for live video alone within the enterprise, they broadcasted over one billion hours of content was viewed in the enterprise live. That's almost what we've done in the history of the Fountains-Borke company. Is that internal or external? Is it content marketing? It's both, it's both. External and internal, external if it's to the customer, internal if it's to the employee, the other important customer. And so the enterprise is a tremendous opportunity. What you're going to see coming from Ustream, we're going to continue to provide really robust solutions that solve the needs of these organizations for productivity, for transparency, to connect with consumers and their employees in deeper ways. And have those all be very, very much API-driven, leveraging the data of these companies and deep integrations that are simple and feel like a consumer product. Because we come from a consumer background, we want to bring that same sort of knowledge to the enterprise. Well, one of the trends in social media that we're really high on, SiliconANGLE, when we watch closer to the cube is this direct business model. And even my previous startup, the failed podcast, we were all kind of like the democratization. And we all kind of failed all those podcasters and the video bloggers just never happened, right? But then that was just first generation, now Twitter, everything else. The business model of advertisers is to go direct. I mean, you're seeing, you mentioned Nestle, I know Pepsi, Coke, these guys, they have dollars, right? So the old model was put dollars into a vehicle that you didn't know which half was working for you. Now you say I can instrument big data and put 100% of my dollars to work with crowdsourcing, with content marketing, completely different mindset. And we're seeing uptake. What are you seeing on the status of that trend? Growing still, is it changing directions? Is it still viable? Is it exploding? What's your take on that? I think it's exploding. I mean, the realities of it are, every corporation today is a media company. Whether they want to be considered that or not, they are. I mean, Red Bull creates as much content as most Hollywood, more content online than Disney. Companies like GoPro are creating more and more content. You know, even companies that, like you wouldn't think were creating content are like Cisco and Intuit. So they're creating content in a variety of different manners and that's allowed them to connect with their users. So most corporations today really know how to create compelling content where that wasn't the case five years ago. And then we built products like our live ad products that can help those companies that are good at creating content, but not so good at driving the viewership. We can help them get millions of simultaneous viewers live. In fact, we do that for a variety of corporations around the world. So have you thought about the whole disruption side of the business? In other words, did we look at kind of like what cable did for TV? Cable disrupted TV. Is it even possible for that to happen again with social or is it going to be more of so many channels that there's not going to be that kind of revolution or is it going to be just different? I mean, because you guys probably looked at multiple revenue models.  Do you become the cable? Are you the enterprise? What's your take on that? Because video is so pervasive, you could pick any horse to ride into the sunset. What's your take on that? And which horse did you guys pick? Well, I think it's definitely different. The model of cable on the internet is going to change, is fundamentally different. I mean, look at what's happening, even the last couple of years with Netflix and Amazon, and to a certain extent that ship is already sold for video, and that's not really where our opportunity is. We think our opportunity happens to be leveraging similar technologies, but in a lot of ways, more powerful, and using that for this other type of content creator, this other type of media company, which is a major corporation or even a small business. And so it is a- It's an enterprise grade, basically. Yeah, absolutely, enterprise grade, but offering it in a way that you can try before you buy and serves the needs of the entire scope and size of enterprise. I mean, just because you're a small business doesn't mean you shouldn't get access to certain capabilities, and that's the beauty of the democratization piece, just like for YouTube content creators, the same thing is happening now for small businesses all the way up to companies like IBM. You don't know what's going to go viral, and I think one of the things, if you bring video into your operation, one thing I've learned is when you bring video into the operation, you get to do some things with it, and sometimes some things will fall flat, some things will go home run. You don't really know. But having that built into the workflow is pretty critical. So with that, what are some of the things that you guys are doing that are going to make an enterprise gradient? What do you expect from the IBM relationship? Well, enterprises want a couple of things. One first and foremost, they typically want a security. So they want to make sure that, particularly if it's a private broadcast or something they don't want the word to get out, they want a reassurance that your product is not going to be able to be compromised in a way that would jeopardize their business or very, very sensitive information. And so we've really doubled down our ability to provide a secure capability. They also want scale. And so as an example, when we did the Sony PlayStation 4 launch announcement, this is a press conference, a product launch, live on Ustream, if they had tried that through some of the existing traditional capabilities, it would have crashed. We had over 1.5 million simultaneous concurrents at its peak. During that two hour block, it was about 2% of the internet's traffic. And so enterprises need scale and they need reliability. And so a lot of what we're doing is to continue to invest there and then they want solutions that actually solve. How about competition? Obviously you have live stream, you have Adjustment TV, which they've kind of gone into the whole gaming thing with the Twitch thing. It's almost like everyone's kind of selling into their swim lanes. But what's your take on, does that come up at all, the competition for you guys? It comes up sometimes for us. I mean, we have a very large brand, at least by most measures today, we're the largest. And we've leveraged that brand we built on the consumer side to help us close very large enterprise deals. And the hundreds of thousands, or in some cases even the millions. And so those other players that are in the space that are like you have the traditional OVPs, you even have companies that we're starting to replace like Cisco Webex, which is used a lot. A lot of people are now turning to usuring for those services. The biggest issue with people with video and we live in every day is the cost to build out is just significantly, I mean, just too massive. I mean, someone would say, hey, I want to do some live broadcasting or built that into a workflow discipline, whether it's for content marketing, to having broadcasting, you know, a big concert somewhere or doing, it's expensive, right? I mean, if you want to just do one offs, I mean, what are some of the cost numbers? I mean, what's the order of magnitude from your data? Is it like, because you have a leverage model. To me, it's very simple. Your leverage for the customer is great because you're already got the cost in so you can pass on that leverage to the customer. They could pay it as a service. That's the beautiful things. Now, the alternative is what? Data centers, direct metering. By the way, it might not be running properly. I mean, can you give us an order of magnitude? Is it like 100X more problematic and more costly or is it benchmark somewhere?  But in the early days of USHIM, we had to pay other people to do this and it was very, very expensive. In fact, so expensive, we almost didn't get USHIM off the ground because it was so expensive. But there's been a lot of environmental factors where the cost of these things are continued to come down. And because of the scale that we operate at, you can be a small business and get access to a global infrastructure, perfectly serve all your content in Korea or in South America, leveraging our infrastructure that we built.  And so it's a very daunting proposition for most businesses that have yet to scale all the way up to our size. What's next for USHIM? What are you going to do now? I've been following you on Facebook. You got a lot of you just in the White House. Yeah. Was that fun? It was neat. Yeah, it was a long time. Tell us a little bit about that. Can you share it? Yeah, I can share it. I had the opportunity to go meet the White House Business Council, which is something President Obama I think did that was really smart. He formed a group of cabinet and secretaries that work under him to represent the needs of business and have relationships with business. And I was part of a small group that got to go and talk about some of the issues today and visit the White House and have lunch there. You know, it was amazing. You certainly could, although you couldn't see it, I could feel the power of I think the US government. Well, that while I was in there I was intimidated. The security was very tight and that was an interesting process to go through having never gone through it. You know, the good news is that whatever side of the alley you're on, the reality of it are, I was very impressed with the people we met and I get the sense they generally want to solve problems. I mean, they want government 2.0s about opening up things and I think that's something that's interesting to them. We get to talk about the whole healthcare.gov issue and so I get to make the CIO and the CIO. They tell you how you have a live stream of how to do it every time. So, you know, how to use Obamacare website. I don't want to even go there, it's a whole no that. That's my most dynamic thread on my Facebook page. So, to end this segment, I'll give you the last word. Where do people find out more about some of the things you're doing on the enterprise size or corporate website, USEstream.tv? Is the consumer side or is that the main site? Today, it's still all on USEstream.tv and the future of that may change, but the, so if you just go to USEstream.tv, you'll see and we have a very simple platform you can try before you buy. You can put your credit card in and within a matter of minutes, you know, be broadcasting live to the world, leveraging video technology, even doing linear broadcast like a television, right at your fingertips and then if you're a business that needs more of the robust capabilities that we may have specifically targeting enterprises, you know, we've talked to one of our sales reps and we'd love to be able to work with you. We're a proud customer. Thanks for hooking us up. We appreciate the cube love on USEstream.tv and again, it wasn't for the USEstream. We wouldn't be in business.  So, appreciate it. Brad, great to have you on the cube.  This is the cube at IBM Impact and we're on USEstream all the time. So, keep on following the cube. Thanks to these guys. So, we'll be right back.