 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. Okay, welcome back everyone, live here in San Francisco for the Samsung Developer Conference, SDC 2017. I'm John Furrier, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage and I'm excited to have an amazing guest, Amanda Coulomb, who's a chief storyteller, women in tech international, tech TV, tech Zoolo. She's been really a storyteller and digital for a long time. Great to have you on, been following all your Twitter, sphere and your content. Thank you. You did some work with Leo Lapour, Jason Kilkanis, both this week in tech's kind of version of the scene. What do you have to know? Well, I am working very closely with Women in Technology International, WIDI. It is the largest oldest organization for women in tech. They have a huge summit that they put on in San Jose every year and I'm sort of the class clown for that and emcee the conference and lead the charge there. Well, certainly you know what's interesting, you have kind of a cool vibe, you're a cool person, you know tech, you know cloud computing, you've been inside baseball for the tech scene, but now the consumer market with digital, pretty powerful. I mean, it's like, finally us geeks are now have a national and global stage to flex our geekness. So you see, nerds- We're suddenly cool? Cool to be a geek and now you see, well, the programmer culture's over, thank God. Well, is it? Well, I mean, well the bad side of it, the good side of the democratization is happening. So now you have an augmented reality. So this is some cool stuff happening. What are you most impressed with? What am I most impressed with? Well, I love blockchain. I've been involved with some of that for three or four years now. I actually had a podcast about blockchain and Bitcoin and I'm really excited about what that means for investment specifically and ICO's initial coin offerings. My friend Brock Pierce is a big, big figurehead with all of that with blockchain capital and I believe that, especially for women that are looking to get into investment and get back in the earlier stage of things, I think ICO's initial coin offerings are a huge opportunity for them to really change up the venture world. So when you say ICO's, which we know a lot about because we're doing one, it's looking at an angle the next couple quarters, no rush to do it but we're going to be doing, she's our own cryptocurrency. But there's nuances. When you say investment, do you mean as an alternative to see venture capital investment or actually investing in, say, the currency itself? Both. But I think of it as a completely new way to invest in companies and there's so many barriers especially for women in technology again, that's a big platform for me to getting into that world that ICO's just are completely changing up the entire ecosystem there. Well, we're seeing a ton of stuff, we saw Lisa Fetterman was on earlier, she had a huge success with her Kickstarter now, she's got some pretty glamorous products. The cooking thing is pretty sexy, right? That thing could go- Suvide, even the term suvide, I mean it's so fresh. I would put money into that. But that was a good example Kickstarter. If you look at some of the ICO's, a lot of people are raising some serious amount of capital in utility and stock or securities, although the regulations are moving train, but on the utility side it's a no-brainer. There's some significant cash being raised in some cases from five to say 50 million plus in token sales. So that's got Kickstarter on steroids. It really is and some people are afraid of it. Some people are saying that's completely absurd, why would you ever do that? I personally would say, don't put all of your eggs in one basket either, we know that. There's volatility anywhere. But again, I think it's opening a lot of doors and giving certain people opportunities that they didn't have before. So how is your Bitcoin position these days? I may have been an early investor in some Bitcoin. I may obsessively look at the value every 15 minutes or so, no. I am fortunate. I listened to my mentors and luckily I love emerging techs so I'm doing well in that regard. I saw a post on Facebook, if you just bought $10 in Bitcoin and smoked weed and sat on the beach and clipped coupons all day and did nothing else, you'd be worth $20 million. Let's just say I know people that have actually bought castles with it. I'm not joking. So what about, like about the crypto blockchain side is that there's an early community growing. So what's your analysis? Because a lot of you want to know, is it Silk Road guys? Are they bad actors? Bitcoin's the underbelly of the internet, the earlier adopter. Those stories were so funny at the beginning. I mean, everyone, I live in LA. Everyone loves the sensationalized story. And of course that existed with Bitcoin too. And yes, there was some truth to it. And yes, absolutely the Silk Road story was real. Anonymous and encrypted transactions. Oh yes. That's going to attract some honey to the bees. There's a reason why certain people can't come back into the country. Let's just leave it at that. However, however, we've also seen major financial institutions get on board. Yeah. FinTech has exploded. There's a lot of legitimacy to blockchain and the distributed ledger technology. It's one of the fastest growing projects on the Linux Foundation, the hyper ledger project. Which is just going gangbusters, IVAs behind it. So it's got that open source vibe. I get that. But the community, talk about the community because there are people who are leading the community, you said you know a few of them. What's your take on the community? How big is it? It's emerging, obviously it's growing. And what's the protocol for new entrants coming in? What's the behavior norms? It's grown in leaps and bounds. I can say that. From the time I did my Bitcoin podcast a few years ago to now, back then it was very much the bro culture to a degree. A lot of libertarians. A lot of folks that couldn't come back in the country, to be quite honest. But there were certain people that came out of that movement though like Brock Pierce that really thought ahead to how do we legitimize this? How do we make sure that this is white knighted? Yeah. So to speak. Well it's a revolutionary. It's fundamental. I had the founder of Alibaba Cloud on the record. Haven't published a video yet. So this is exclusive material. He said, I asked him about blockchain. He says it's fundamental to the internet. It is. It is the internet. Just like TCPIP was in the stack. Absolutely. He was adamant that this is not on top of the internet. It's fundamental to some of blockchain. Absolutely. It's supply chain. It's currency. It's a zillion things. It's not just coins. Everyone focused in on Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. It's a distributed ledger technology. So it goes hand in hand with the internet of things. So the two have become very, very much married in that regard. You know all these guys I interviewed on theCUBE over the years, and certainly I lived through it. Talk about the waves. The PC wave. Talk about the client server wave. Client server essentially, yeah it's not so much about the mini computers the mini computers were not the client server wave because that was proprietary operating systems and proprietary hardware and son HP. What made client server was TCPIP. That created 3Com, Cisco, interoperability. So that really was that second wave. People are comparing blockchain to TCPIP in the case of Dr. Wong from Alibaba Cloud. Other people saying like the dot com bubble though this is euphoric excitement. So that begs the question. Who can bring functionality? This is my thesis, I want to test it with you. Who can bring functionality and simplicity? Because all the successes in Web 1.0 was Yahoo, a directory of links. Simple, easy to use. Cisco routers, connect your networks. It works. So simplicity and functionality seems to be the norm in the blockchain world. What's your thoughts on that? Can you share your reaction to that? Simplicity and functionality. I mean, for me it's. In terms of the winners versus the losers. Because that's what people want to know at blockchain. Where's the scams and where's the legit? Well, the scams are the people that came from the gaming side that had no real business expanding out the way that they did and everybody loses their coin. But we won't name names there. I think more. It's like they didn't name names. But with functionality, I mean, again, I keep going back to it's marriage with IoT. The ledger-based technology and just being able to do anything transactional. That's the simplicity of it for me. The fact that it's open source. The fact that, yeah, I think that's the core of it. So let's talk about Samsung. We're here at the Samsung event. How do you see these guys? Because we were talking about blockchain. It's kind of the next big wave coming. Obviously, a lot of things are underneath that. But above that, you got software machine learning. All the goodness of open source is growing exponentially. That wave is coming to exponential growth and open source code shipments, meaning more people using open source. And things like blockchain. How does it impact a Samsung, an Apple, an Amazon? Well, I think open source is necessary for IoT, specifically, you know, obviously. That would be shut down without that. I've been talking with a lot of the developers here, the Samsung specific people saying, what is it that is exciting you about this forward movement? Like with the keynote this morning, what do we need? How do we move this entire industry forward with IoT? And they're excited about the platform that Samsung has announced this morning, in terms of just the ubiquity of everything working together in comparison to, well, a lot of other, sorry, quick sip. So the crypto thing is also tying into that too. I was tying that up with IoT because IoT has some security issues. So you can argue, maybe there could be blockchain. Some security issues? A little surface area. So, you know, the theme in the enterprise is you don't cloud computing. There's no moat anymore. There's no firewall. It's primalist security. Primalist problems. So it means the edge is a surface area. We've seen these attacks coming. That's a problem. There's no silver bullet right now. So Samsung probably is cagey right now on the data. We've got some security products, but smarter things is their kind of pitch. And then everybody keeps saying, well, who owns the security piece? Who's responsible for the security piece? I think that's a big question. We're going to see popping up a lot because the security piece is going to be a very valuable piece to all of this, especially when you're looking at edge computing too and data being passed back and forth between the edge. I would rather see everything stay with just the edge devices personally, but. Oh, it's easy to manage. Why don't you have data across the network? Exactly. Move computers a lot more efficient. All right, so final take on augmented reality VR. Oh, okay. What's imploding? What's imploded? What's growing? What's rising? What's falling? I mean, we had a comment earlier said VR 1.0 is over. It really is. I personally think AR is where it's at. I've watched a lot of things on the VR front and a lot of it was marketing speak. I think we need a bigger push on the hardware side for VR to work effectively too. We also need to look at the audience there. A lot of people are complaining that, well, I don't want to just go disappear into a separate world. A lot of women actually are complaining about that side of it, but the AR side, I think, has way more application on the product. Crawl, walk, run in virtual space basically. Yeah, yeah. VR is, I think we'll still have a place, but I think AR is going to be big. One of the things we were talking about earlier was, you know, as folks who've been through many ways, you and I have seen ways of innovation. Web 1.0, the early adopters were the adult industry with banners, they were about making money. We saw this wave, we're seeing the silk rows and blockchain. Arbitrage comes from usually bad actors and not necessarily desirable actors. But one big indicator of the current user experience that we're seeing is the gaming culture, right? Gaming right now seems to be the early adopter indicator of the major trend lines because it's gamification, it's a little bit of analog, multiplayer. Look at Unity. You know, Unity has a huge presence here at SDC, and you know, especially on the VR front, if you want to look at that, Unity is a huge player there. What are some of the things you see coming out of the game world? Because we're seeing virtual currencies. Hello, ICO. Yeah. Data, a lot of storage, a lot of dynamic, real time. Yeah. Well, gaming mechanisms too across the board always play into this too, but I think the big one is ICOs for me. That's one I've been focusing on a lot. Well, let the follow up board with you on the ICO thing, we're doing a whole programming on that on November 2nd. Look at what Crystal Rose with Sensei's been doing. Who? Crystal Rose. Sensei, she's launched her own ICO called Sense. Sense. Yep. Great, looking forward to chatting with her. Out of LA. Final question for you, for the folks not here. What's the vibe here? What, how would you describe SDC 2017? Well, I love that there is a great vibe of innovation. Honestly, I've been to some other Stodgy-er conferences lately, and this one definitely has a nice playful, creative. DB is boring to boring. Vibe. I know, you were talking about E to E, everything to everything. See, I was listening. You were. Everything to everything. Exciting to exciting. See, I listened to that too. That's our table. So yeah, I would say there's a lot of creativity here. There's a lot of side conversations happening that that's important. And I see a good balance of men and women. So that makes me happy. Well, I'm excited to have from Vanessa at any context of bringing it on a great lineup. Thank you. You included great to meet you in person and great conversation in a cool, long year. Inside the cube, power cube, I'm John Furrier here. Inclusive coverage of the SDC 2017. We'll be back after this short break.