 Live from Dublin, Ireland, it's theCUBE, covering Hadoop Summit Europe 2016, brought to you by Hortonworks. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone, we are here live in Dublin, Ireland, it's theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program, where we go out to the events and extract the signals and noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is Emer Coleman, who is with Disruption Limited, Open Data Governance Board in Ireland and Transport API, a growing startup built, self-sustainable, growing business, open data. Love that keynote here at Hadoop Summit, very compelling discussion around digital goods, digital future, Emer, welcome to theCUBE. It's great to be here. So what's, what was your keynote? Let's just quickly talk about what you talked about and then we can get into an awesome conversation. Sure, so the topic yesterday was, we need to talk about techno ethics. So basically over the last couple of months, I've been doing quite a lot of research on ethics and technology and you know, many people have different interpretations of that, but yesterday I mean, I said it's basically about three things, it's about people, it's about privacy and it's about profit. So it's asking questions about how do we look at holistic technology development that moves away from a pure technocratic play and looks at the deep societal impacts that technology has. One of the things that we're super excited about and passionate about is this new era of openness going to a whole other level, obviously open source, tier one, software development environment, cloud computing allows for instant access to resources, almost limitless at this point that you can project it forward with Moore's Law and whatnot. But the notion that digital assets are not just content, it's data, it's people, it's the things you mentioned about. Create a whole new operating environment or user experience, user expectations with mobile phones and internet of things and transport API which you have, if it moves you capture it and you're providing value there. So a whole new economy is developing around digital capital. Share your thoughts around this because this is an area that you're passionate about, you do some work here. What's your thoughts on this new digital economy, digital capital, digital asset opportunity? Well, I mean, I think there's this huge excitement about the digital economy, isn't there? And I think one of the things I'm concerned about is that that excitement will lead us to the same place that we are now where we're not really thinking through what are the equitable distribution in that economy? Because it seems to me that the spoils are going to a very tiny lease at the top. So if we look at Instagram, 13 employees when it was purchased by Facebook for a billion dollars, but that's all our stuff. I mean, so I'm not getting any shares in the billion, right? Those 13 people are. Now, that's fantastic that you can build a business, build it to that stage and sell, but you have to think about two things really. What are we looking at in terms of sustainable businesses into the future that create ethical products and also the demands from citizens to get some value for their data back? Because we're becoming shadow employees. We're shadow employees of Google. So when we email, we're not just corresponding. We're creating value for that company. And Facebook is a great example. And Facebook, and the thing is, when we were at the beginning of that digital journey, it was quite naive. So we were very seduced by free and we thought this is great, and so we were happy with the service. And then the next stage of that, we realized, well, if we're not paying for the service, we're the product. But we were too embedded in the platform to extricate ourselves. But now I think when we look at the future of work and great uncertainty that people are facing, you know, when their labor is not going to be required to the same degree, are we going to slavishly keep producing capital and value for companies like Google and ask for nothing more than the service in return? I don't think so. And certainly the future will be impacted and one of the things we see now in our business of online media and online open data is that the data is very valuable. We see that, obviously data is the new capital, new oil, whatever phrases of the day is used. And the brand markers are the first ones to react to because they're very data-driven. Who are you, how do I sell stuff to you? And so what we're seeing is brand markers are saying, hey, I'm going to spend money to try to reach out to people and I'm going to activate that base and connect with, engage with them on Facebook or other platform. I'm going to add value to your Facebook or Google platform, but yet I'm parasitic to your platform for the data. Why just don't I get it directly? So again, you're starting to see that thinking where I don't want to be a parasite or parasitic to a network that the value is coming from. The users have not yet gotten there and you're teasing that out. What's your thoughts there, progression we were at? Have people realized this? Have you seen any movement in the industry around this topic? No, I mean, I think there's a sort of a kind of a silence around, I mean, technology companies, you know, want to get all the data they can. They're not going to really declare as much as they should because it kind of bends their business model a bit, right? So also the data is emergent. You know, Zuckerberg didn't start Facebook as something that was going to be a utility for a billion people. He started as a social network for university and what grew out of that, we learned as we went along. Okay, so I'm saying now that we have that experience, we know that happens. So let's start the thinking now and also this notion of just taking data because you can, you know, almost speculatively getting data at the point of source without even knowing what you wanted for it but thinking I'm going to monetize this in the end. Now, Gérard Lanier in his book, Who Owns the Future talks about micro licensing back content. You know, and I think that's what we need to do. We start at the very beginning, we need to start baking in two things, privacy by design and different business models where it's not a winner takes all, right? It's a dialogue between the user and the service, right? And that that's iterated together, right? I mean, this idea that it's not a zero sum game is very important, and I want to go back to your Instagram and Facebook example. At its peak, I think Eastman Kodak had, I mean, hundreds of thousands of employees, maybe 400, 500, 450,000 employees, huge. Facebook has many, many more photos but maybe a few thousand employees. Wow, so all those jobs are gone but at the same time, we don't want to be protecting the past from the future. So how do you square that circle? Correct, but I think what we know is that, you know, the rise of robotics and software, you know, is going to eat jobs. And basically there's going to be a hollowing out of the middle class, you know, for sure. Well, that's happening. I mean. Journalism, retail, exactly. It's not future, it's now. Exactly. So, you know, we may be coming to a point where large states of people don't have work. Now, what do you do in a world where your labor is no longer required? So think about the public policy implications of that. Do we say you either fit in this economy or you die? Are we going to look at ideas which they are looking at in Europe which is like a universal wage, you know. And all of these things are a challenge to government because they're going to have a citizenry who are not included in this brave new world, right? So some public policy thinking has to go into. What happens when our kids can't get jobs, right? When the jobs that used to be done by people like us are done by machines. I'm not against the movement of technology. What I'm saying is there are deep societal implications that need some thinking. Because if we get to a point where we suddenly realize if all of these people who are unemployed and can't get work, you know, this isn't a future we envisage where robots would take all the crap jobs and we would go off to do wonderful things. Like how are we going to bring the bacon home? Yeah. But it seems like in the digital world that the gap is creativity to combine technologies and knowledge, I mean, I find it scary when you talk about maybe micromanaging wages and things like that. Education is the answer, but that's how do you just transfer that knowledge? I mean, that's sort of the discussion that we're having in the United States. I think some of the issue is that the technology is so, we're kind of seduced by simplicity. So we don't see the complexity underneath. And that's the ultimate aim of a technologist is to make something so simple. That complexity is masked. I mean, that's what the iPhone did wonderfully. But that's actually how society is looking now, right? So we're seduced by this simplicity. We're not seeing the complexity underneath. And that complexity would be about what are we doing in a world where our labor is no longer required. And one of the things that's interesting about the hollowing of the middle class is the assumption is there's no replacement. So one of the things that could be counter-argumented is that, okay, as the digital natives of my daughter, she's a freshman in high school, my son, my youngest son's eighth grade, they're natives now. So they're going to come in. So what is the replacement capital and value for companies that could be sustained in the new economy versus the decay and the Darwinism of the old? So the digital Darwinism aspect is interesting. So that's one dilemma. And the other one is business models. And I want to get your thoughts on this, because this is something that we were teasing out with this whole value extraction and company platform issue. A company like Twitter, highly valuable company. It's a global network of people tweeting and sharing, but yet it's under constant pressure from Wall Street and investors that they basically suck. And they don't, they're good. People love Twitter. So they're being forced to behave differently against their mission because their profit of motive doesn't really match maybe something like Facebook. So therefore they're instantly devalued, yet the future of someone connecting on Twitter is significantly high. So that being said, I want you to get your thoughts on that and your advice to Twitter management given the fact that it is a global network. What did she do? What should they do? It's just the same old capitalism, right? Just it's digital, right? It's a digital company. It's a digital asset. It's the same approach, right? So, you know, Twitter has been a wonderful thing, right? I've been a Twitter user for years. You know, how amazing it's played a role in, you know, the Arab Spring, all sorts of things, you know. So they're really good. But I think it's, you need as a company. So for example, in our company in Transfer API, we're not really looking to build to this massive IPO, right? We're trying to build a sustainable company in a traditional way in using digital. So I think if you let yourself be seduced by that idea of phenomenal IPO, you kind of take your eye off the ball. Or in case, in this case, you got IPOed, now you're under pressure to produce results. Absolutely, yeah. Which changes your behavior. Right. But in Twitter's management defense, they see the value of their product. Now they got their by accident and everyone loves it. But now they're not taking the bait to try to craft a short-term solution. Right. To essentially what is already a valuable product, but not on the books. Yes, and also I think what the danger is, we know that there are generational shifts across channel, you know. So teenagers probably look at Facebook, I think one of them said like an awkward family dinner, they can't quite leave, right? But for next gen, they're just not going to go there because that's where your grandmother is, right? So the same is true of Twitter and Snapchat. These platforms come and go. It's an interesting phenomenon then to see Wall Street putting that much money into something which is essentially quite ephemeral. You know, I'm not saying that Twitter won't be around for years, it may be. But that's the thing about digital, isn't it? Something else comes in and it's wow, that becomes the platform of choice. Well, it's interesting, right? I mean, everybody else included, we criticized the, Michael Dell calls it the 90 day shot clock, right? But it's actually worked out pretty well. I mean, economically for the United States companies, maybe it doesn't in the future, but what are your thoughts on that? Particularly from a European perspective, where you're reporting maybe twice a year, there's not as much pressure. But yet, from a technology industry standpoint, companies outside the Silicon Valley in particular seem to be less competitive. Why? So for example, in our company in Transport API, we've got some pretty heavyweight clients. We have a wonderful angel and investor who's given us two rounds of investment. And it isn't that kind of avaricious, absolutely built to this super price. And that's allowed us to build from starting off with two, now to a team of 10, and we're just about coming into break even. So it's doable, but I think it's a philosophy. We didn't want necessarily to build something huge, although we want to go global. But it was, let's do this in a sustainable way, with reasonable wages, and we've all put our own soul and money into it, but it's a different kind of cultural proposition, I think. Well, the valuations always drive the markets. It's interesting too, to your point about, things come and go, channels, kind of reminds me, Dave and I used to joke about social networks like nightclubs. They're hot and then they're just too proud and nobody goes there, right? As Yogi Berra would say. And then they shift and they go out of business. Some don't open with fanfare, no one goes, because it's got different context. So you have a contextual challenge in the world now. So technology can change things. So I want to ask you about identity, because there was a great article posted by the founder of a company called Secret, which is one of these anonymous apps like Yik Yak and whatnot. And he shut it down and he wrote a post, kind of a post more, I'm saying, these things come and go and they don't work. They're not sustainable because there's no identity. So the role of identity in a social, global, virtual world, virtual being, not just virtual reality, is interesting. You live in a world and your company, Transport API provides data, which enables stuff. And the role of identity. So anonymous versus identity, thoughts there, and that impact to the future of work. If you know who you're dealing with, and if they're present, these are concepts that are now important, presence, identity, attention. And that's the interesting thing and who controls that identity. I mean, you know, Mark Zuckerberg said, you only have one identity, okay? Which is what he said when he set up Facebook. You think, really? Right, no, that's what a young person thinks, right? Right, well, when we're older, we know. We also said that young people are smarter than older people. Yeah, right, okay. I carry three business cards. He could be right there, he could be right there. We all have different identities in different parts of our lives. You know, who we are here, you know, they do so much. It's different from what we're at home, to when we're with friends. So identity is a multifaceted thing. But also who gets to determine your identity. So I have 16 years of my search life, you know, in Google, right? Now, who am I in that server compared to who I am? I'm the sum total of my searches, okay? But I'm not just the sum total of my searches, am I? Or even that contextualize. So I'll give you an example. A number of years ago, I was searching for a large, very large waterproof plastic bag. And I typed it in and I thought, oh my God, that sounds like I'm going to murder my husband and try to bury him, right? It's a compost bag. Right, right. And I thought, oh my God, what does this look like on the other side? Now it was actually from my summer garden furniture again. But the point is, if you looked at that in an analytic way, who would I be, right? And so I think identity is very, you know, The mistaken. And also this idea of what Frank Pasquale calls the black box society, right? The secret algorithms that are controlling flows of money and information. How do they decide what my identity is? What are the moral decisions that they make around that? What does it say if I search for one thing over another? Right? You know, if I search constantly for expensive shoes, does that make me shallow? Right? What do these things say? If I search for certain things around health. And there's a value judgment now associated with that. Absolutely. That you're talking about, that you do not control. Absolutely. And which is probably linked to other things which will determine things like, you know, whether I get credit or not. But there can almost be arbitrary decisions because I have no oversize of the logic, right? That's creating that decision-making algorithm. So I think it's not just about identity, it's about who's deciding what that identity is. It's also the reality that you're in. Context. Yeah. Situations. Yeah. Dark side, bright side of technology in this future of work. This new digital asset economy, digital capital. There's going to be good and bad. Obviously education can be consumed non-linear. A new conforms of consumption. Metadata as you're pointing out with the algorithms. Where do you see some bright spots and where do you see the danger areas? Well, I think the great thing is, you know, I mean we're saying, you know, software is the future, right? It's our present, but it's going to be even more so in our future. You know, some of the brightest brains in the world are involved in the creation of new technology. I just think they need to be focusing a bit more of that intellectual rigor towards the impact they're having on society and how they could do it better. Because I think it's too much of a technocratic solution, right? Technologists say, we can do this. The question is, should they? So I think what we need to do is to loop them back into the more social and philosophical side of the discussion. And of course, you know, it's a wonderful thing. Hopefully, you know, technology is going to do amazing things around health, you know, we're going to, we can't even predict how amazing it's going to be, right? But all I'm saying is that if we don't ask the hard questions now about the downsides, we're going to be in a difficult societal position. But I'm hoping that we will. And I'm hoping that raising issues like technoethics will get more of that discussion going. Well, transparency and open data make a big difference. Absolutely. And public policy, as you said earlier, can play a huge role here. I wonder if you could give us your perspective on, really, I mean, public policy, we're in the US most of the time, but it's interesting when we talk to customers here to hear about the emphasis, obviously, on privacy, data location, and so forth. So in the digital world, do you see Europe's emphasis and I think leading on those types of topics as an advantage in a digital world or does it create friction from an economic standpoint? Yeah, but, you know, it's not all about economics, right? So, you know, friction is a good thing. There are some times when friction is a good thing. Most technologists think all friction is bad. Sure, and I'm implying that it's necessary to go to bed. I'm curious, is it potentially an economic advantage to have thought through and have policy on some of those issues? Well, what we're seeing here, because I feel like the US is a ticking time bomb on all of these issues. I was talking to VC, some VC friends of mine here in the UK, and what they said, they're seeing more and more. VC is asking what we call SMEs, small to medium enterprise, about their data policies and SMEs not being able to answer those questions and VC is getting nervous, right? So I think over time, it's going to be a competitive advantage that we've done in that homework that we're basically not just rushing to get more users but that we're looking at it across the piece because fundamentally that's more sustainable in the longer term. You know, people will not be done to forever, right? They will not, and so doing that thinking now where we work with people as we create our technology products, I think it's more sustainable in the long term, you know, that's it. When you look at economics, sustainability is really important, so. I want to ask you about the transport API business because in the US, same thing, we've seen some great openness of data and amazing innovations that have come out of nowhere. In some cases, you know, unheard of entrepreneurs and or organizations that better society for the betterment of people from delivering healthcare to poor areas and whatnot. What has been the coolest thing and of things you've seen come out of your enablement of the transport data? Use cases, have you seen any? Things that surprised you or? Well, I mean, it's quite interesting because when I worked with the mayor of London as his director of digital projects, my job was to set up the London data store which was to open all of London's public sector data. So I was kind of there from the beginning as a lobbyist and, you know, when I was asking agencies to open up their data, they'd go, what's the ROI? And I used to say, I don't know, right? Because governments want to know, right? I'm saying, no, no, it's a chicken and egg. You've got to put it out there. And we had a funny incident where some of the IT staff in transport for London accidentally let out this link, which is to the tracker net feed, okay? And that powers the tube notice boards that says your next tube is in a minute, whatever. And so the developer community went, ooh, this is interesting. And one guy, well, Candy. Yeah, and of course we had no documentation with it because it kind of went out under the radar. And one developer called Matthew Somerville made this map, which showed the tubes on a map in real time, right? And it was like surfacing the undergrounds. And people just thought, oh my God, that is amazing. It's illuminating. It didn't do anything, but it showed the possibility. And I mean, the newspapers picked it up. It was absolutely brilliant example. And the guy made it in half a day, right? And that was the first time people saw their transport system kind of differently. So that was amazing. And then we've seen hundreds of different applications that are being built all the time. And what we're also seeing is the integration of transport data with other things. So one of our clients in Transport API is called Toothpick and they're an online dental booking agency. And so you can go online, you can book your dental appointment with your NHS dentist and then they bake in transport information to tell you how to get there. So we have pubs, you know, pubs using them in screens so people can order their dinner and then they say, we've got 10 minutes to the next bus. So all sorts of cross-platform applications. That you never could have envisioned, right? And this is your point earlier about it's not a zero sum game, you're giving so many ways to create value. I mean, again, I come back to this notion of education and creativity in the United States, education is so unattainable for so many people and that's a real concern. And you're seeing the middle class get hollowed out. I think the status, the average wage in the United States was 55,000 in 1999, it's 50,000 today. The political campaigns are obviously, you know, picking at that scale and you're seeing what's the sort of climate like in Europe from that standpoint? In terms of education? No, just in terms of, yes, the education middle class getting hollowed out, the sentiment around that. I don't think people are up to speed with that yet. I really don't think that they're aware of the scale. I think when they think robots or automation, they don't really think software. You know, they think like robots like there were in the movies, right? That would come as I say and do those jobs nobody wants it, but not like software. So when I say to them, look, e-discovery software, right? When it's applied retrospectively, what it shows is it's only 60, they're human lawyers are only 60% accurate compared to it. Now that's a no-brainer, right? If software is 100% accurate, I'm going to use the software. And the ratio difference is one to 500, where you needed 500 lawyers before you need one, okay? So I don't think people are across the scale of change. But I mean, it's interesting, you're flying a heat throw, you're flying it out, you're dealing with a kiosk, you drive out, the billboards are all electronic, there aren't guys doing this anymore. So it's tangible. Right, and I think to your point about education, I mean, I don't think I'm not as familiar with the education system as the U.S., but I certainly think in Europe and in the U.K., the education system is not capable of dealing even with the latest digital natives, right? They're still structuring their classrooms in the same way. These kids, you know- They're misaligned with the technology, absolutely. So reading, writing, arithmetic, fine, and the cost of education is maybe acceptable, but they're maybe teaching the wrong thing. It's synchronous nonlinear. There's a wonderful example of an Indian academic called Sugata Mitra, who has a fabulous project called The Hole in the Wall, and he goes to non-English speaking, little Indian villages, and he builds in a computer and he puts a roof over it so only the children can do it, right? They don't speak English. And he came back and he leaves a little bit of stuff they have to get around before they can play a game. And he came back six months later and he said to them, why did you think? And one of the children said, we need a faster CPU and a better mouse. Now, his point is self-learning once you have access to technology is amazing. And I think we have to start- We're seeing the same thing with the nonlinear consumption, the synchronous, all this, the API economy enabling new kinds of expectation and opportunities. And it was interesting because the example, he, some UK schools try to follow his example, right? And six months later, they rang him up and they said, it's not working. And he said, why did you do? And they said, well, we got every kid a laptop. He said, that's not the point. The point was putting a scarce resource that the children had to collaborate over. So in order to get to the game, they had to figure out certain things. I think you're right on something that no one's talking about. And Dave and I are very passionate on this and we're actually investing in kind of a whole new e-learning concept, but it's not about doing that laptop thing or putting courseware online. That's old workflow. In news. And a new bottle. I mean, come on, old wine and a new bottle. So that's interesting. I want to get your thoughts though, a personal question to end the segment. What are you passionate about now? What are you working outside of the venture, which is exciting? You have a lot of background going back to technology, entrepreneurship, public policy. And you're in the front lines now, thought leading on this whole new, wide open sea of opportunity, confusion, enablement. What are you passionate about? What are you working on? Share with the folks that are watching. So one of the main things we're trying to do. So I work as an associate with Ernst & Young in London and we've been having discussions over the past couple of months around techno ethics. And I've basically said, look, let's see if we can get EY to build an EY good governance index. Like what does good governance look like in this space? A massively complex area, but what I would love is that people would collaborate with us on that. If we could help, you know, to draw up an ethical framework that would convene the technology industry around some ethical good governance issues. So that's what I'm going to be working on as hard as I can over the next while to try and get as much collaboration from the community. Because I think it'd be so much more powerful if the technology industry was to say, yeah, let's try and do this better, rather than waiting for regulation, which will come, but will be too clunky and not fit for a purpose. And which new technology that's emerging do you get most excited about? Drones. How about, anything about Bitcoin, blockchain? Absolutely, absolutely, blockchain. Yeah, blockchain, you'd have to say, yeah. Yeah, I think it's Bitcoin, you know, it's worth 20p today, it's worth 200,000 tomorrow. Yeah, but blockchain. Right, right. I mean, that is incredible potential, I think, right? I mean, new terms like federated, that's not a new term, but federation, universal, unification. These are the themes right now. Well, it's like the world's been coded, isn't it? And we don't know where it's going to go, but what a time we live in, right? Eberkamp, thank you so much for spending your time and joining us on theCUBE. We really appreciate the conversation. Thanks for sharing that great insight here on theCUBE. Thank you. It's theCUBE, we are live here in Dublin, Ireland. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more SiliconANGLES theCUBE, extracting the signal from the noise after this short break.