 On the ground, presented by theCUBE. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're on the ground in downtown San Francisco at the Blockchain Conference San Francisco at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center, and we're really excited for our next guest, Joy Shen, Director of Emerging Technology in Partnerships and Investments for Thomson Reuters. Welcome. It's good to be here. Thanks, Jeff. So you led a panel with all the biggest names in the room. You had Intel up there, IBM, Microsoft, unfortunately wasn't able to make it, travel, weather, whatever. So, pretty interesting. Those are big names at a very little conference. I think IBM's actually one of the sponsors. What does that signal to you as you keep an eye on emerging technology? I think it just signals that the larger companies learned that they have to keep pace with the external emerging tech innovation and that they could play a key role in building out the technology infrastructure that is still fairly nascent today, especially in blockchain. So there is ground to be gained and opportunities to be had. And a lot of these companies like Intel and IBM and Microsoft have enough technical expertise as well as the resources to be able to accelerate the efforts. It looks like in kind of a typical Intel fashion too, that they're kind of jumping into the depths of the infrastructure. And I think John from IBM talked about, there's the application of the platform and then there's the fabric and really trying to get into open sourcing the fabric to really enable the technology to grow much faster. Yeah, I think if you look at kind of how the ecosystem is playing out, right? You have the startups kind of focused on the application side and the user side. And the large tech companies, Intel and IBM talk about the fabric. You start at the networking and then you go into security and you have the business logic is very much aligned with how the large enterprise tech companies talk to their large clients, right? They view the stack from better level where Intel is at to drive efficiency and scale and then all the way to building out that infrastructure to the application side where you have the rigorous and scalable business logic where I think a lot of these large tech companies are trying to play a bet that they are gonna be the leader in that eventually. So we cover a ton of tech conferences. It wasn't that long ago that Hadoop was an unknown entity. Nobody really knew what the funny elephant was and now there's a lot going on in Spark on the big data side. From your point of view looking across a lot of technologies, where is a blockchain now relative to some of these other ones? It was still really early days. Do you think it's really good and start to run? And what should we start looking for as indications of kind of mainstream adoption? It's very early. I think, but the difference this time is if you think about kind of cloud, right? Cloud or big data, you started with kind of the technology companies leading the chart. Articulate what is the technology value? What's the business value? Educating the financial services firms or the other industries, the business adopters. This time is different. The business adopters, the financial services firms, the governments, the insurance companies are now the advertising. They're all looking at it themselves. So, technology wise is still very nascent. I think once you see, in my mind, more of a, for example, like R3 or other concern where they actually articulate what is one use case that has been scaled, right? Across multiple stakeholders and be able to articulate use case and how it's going to make money or provide much better service that can be adopted either by their business clients or end users. I think that's where you're going to see that. I think the other signal is, for example, the Linux Foundation, the Hyperledger. I mean, you mentioned Hadoop, right? You see Hadoop, you see Spark. It's kind of following the same pattern. So once you see kind of that accelerated adoption curve where the developers are really getting onto, for example, Hyperledger, then you will see more contribution, more commits, and build more scalable applications on top of it. Right now, it's kind of everybody trying to kind of race to the top, right? But it's interesting, because you have the open source instrument, the Linux, which is the Hyperledger project, which John from IBM talked about really trying to get into the infrastructure. And then you've got the R3 consortium. So you have both consortium and open source projects, both kind of driving innovation, both kind of driving standards at the bottom layer to really enable more applications on top. I mean, I think that's healthy, right? And that's in contrast to some of the other technology we've seen, where it was purely driven, bottoms up from the technology company, going to their clients and say, here is kind of the technology solution we're offering. And here are the use cases that we think could be credible and value add to you. This is kind of both bottoms up and top down in some ways, right? Where you know, horizontally kind of think from the industry push, where R3 is a closed consortium with 40 plus banks, they set up their own private environment to really trying to collaborate to see what is the true potential of some of these use cases by actually doing it. And then they also invite technology companies that come in and really see the business applications very early on, or kind of the business discussions very early on that. And then you have the Linux Foundation really pushing much more rigorous standards around technology platform. So it's actually very healthy in balance. And I think this is something that we didn't see with mobile cloud and some other things where it's kind of the technology companies talking about mobile first, right? Cloud first, and then the banks and other organizations in the industry start to realize we have to get on it. Right. And even the finance companies really trying to disintermediate their own inefficiencies by starting to take a deeper dive at blockchain or whether they should implement it or not for some of these particular types of transactions or applications that might be a better solution. Yeah, and there are a lot of articles written now at the War Economic Forum, right? The one key topic is the next industrial revolution propelled by technology. So I think it's an indication of the banks and other industries are realizing that the business models will change whether or not you're like in the next five to 10 years and by observing some of the things, for example, you know, Uber is doing Air and BB that they are disrupting the other industries. It's coming because the technology advances there, right? You have a more mature API economy. You have a developer ecosystem. You have more robust DevOps kind of systems that allow applications to be built much faster. So you kind of see that demarcation on the blockchain side forming as well where you have startups focused on applications. You have companies focused on blockchain as a service and then you have the infrastructure players. So the stack is becoming more and more clear and you know, any company, I think compared to last year you see more early stage companies now realizing that they have to know where they're playing in that stack versus saying, you know, I'm building a blockchain solution. Right, right. And what's the role of Bitcoin? Was Bitcoin a necessary application to get this whole thing underway? Does Bitcoin begin to fade in the distance or does Bitcoin just become one of many applications that are leveraging the underlying blockchain technology? I think one of the panel's kind of comment. I think Bitcoin is an application on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. So it's a manifestation of what an application could be built on top of blockchain, right? Bitcoin is kind of a transfer of asset, transfer of value. You can extend that to other applications. So it is important in the sense that it helped really to allow people to see the potential power and the potential blockchain. And some of the learnings from the Bitcoin community and how Bitcoin as an application is facilitating transfer value could be extended to some of the other newer thinkings. So biggest surprise from the day that you saw today, either on your panel or one of the other presentations? I think there are a lot of attendees from Asia and you actually see a startup from China pitching. I think it's kind of continued interest now, not necessarily just in the US or in London where you see the financial centers and activities are, but the idea of how blockchain could be an interesting relevant technology for different industries, for governments to solve problems now extending beyond some of the first markets that are picking this up, right? Again, US and Europe now extending to Singapore, into China and other areas. Awesome, so last question, what other kind of cool emerging things are you keeping an eye on? Because you sit in a great seat, you got to keep an eye on all kinds of things. You know, not necessarily anything that's kind of truly new, but in a lot of the areas where it's advertising technology, mobile, as well as cloud, whether it's container technology or others, you kind of see that next wave of new innovation that's coming that will further optimize some of the existing solutions out there. So we're closely watching all those areas in addition to blockchain, which is of course much more nascent. All right, we'll keep an eye on you and we'll see what you're keeping an eye on. Thank you so much, Jeff, it's good to be here. Absolutely, thanks for stopping by. I'm Jeff Frick, we are Downtown San Francisco at the Blockchain Conference San Francisco at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.