 Prepare for the extraction point. We've been briefed on all the important stories and events in the world of emerging information. Now, it's time to extract the data and turn it into action. Live from the SiliconANGLE Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, this is extraction point with John Furrier. Hi, I'm John Furrier with the extraction point, turning the signal out of the noise, turning data into action. This is your extraction point. I'm here with Rich Screnta, the CEO and co-founder of Bleco, who's joining us today. But first up on the news today, Google is announcing social search, or an update to their social search, and updated some real-time capabilities from search from a year ago. And this is an interesting story about Google. They're launching real-time Twitter, friend data, essentially social graph information into the Google search results. And the extraction point here is that Google is actually turning into a social company, trying to be like Facebook. But the reality is that Google already has a lot of social data. They have a ton of data on us from their toolbar, Gmail, or services we use on Google. And then I try to integrate that into the search results. My angle on that is that they're trying to be sticky. They see Facebook soaring with growth, 600 million people and growing. If you look at the amount of time Google users, Facebook users stay on the site. It's growing at leaps and bounds. And Google is definitely, definitely threatened by this. So this is a signal from Google that, one, they have the data, and two, they're going to move aggressively to counter Facebook. And they're really trying to create that aggregate data set to create a user experience that's sticky so that people can move back to Google. And it's really a move away from their classic search result, which is find stuff, get in, get out, and they're trying to make it more sticky. So that's the key extraction point. We're going to watch that from Google. Google has been known over the past years of really not innovating well within the search results. I've written many blog posts and tweeted many times that Google's phenomenal for search for finding things like maps and stuff, but it's been talked about in the press. And by me, it's littered with spam, backlinks. Now the recent debate, which we'll talk about today with Rich, Screnta from Bleco is the whole content farm debate. So, you know, Google is Google. They're huge players. They own a major market share in the business, but they have to really start thinking about innovation around their data. They really have to start thinking about using that to be more social and need a move against Facebook. So that's the key extraction point for Google. Point number two, it's now official. We are not in a tech bubble, says our favorite community college of startups, Y Combinator. Paul Graham announced today on Hacker News that we're not in a tech bubble. And I got some quotes here from that, and it's pretty funny. He says, Paul Graham says, in the 90s, it was the dumb leading the dumb. Smooth talking MBAs were raising money from hapless limited partners and investing it in startups run by other smooth talking MBAs. He said, now it's Yuri Milner investing in companies run by Mark Zuckerberg. So, you know, smooth talking MBAs to Russian investors. I don't know what bubble we're in now, but it sure seems like a bubble. I wrote a blog post about it. Are we in a bubble? Yes and no. I think we are and aren't. And we'll have more to drill down on that. But not to be outdone by that, Mark Cuban weighs in today and says, it's a new era like the old email chain letters. And story on private equity hub, pehub.com had a great story. And it's quote, remember the old chain letters where you put some money up, then you get other people to put money up, and then you give it to other people who were in the deal before you. That's what's happening today says Mark Cuban, who knows a lot about bubbles who sold broadcast.com for a billion dollars. I would say at the top of the bubble. And he's smiling because the bubble bursted right after he sold broadcast.com. Now he owns a sports team. He's, you know, living the high life and we're a big fan of Mark Cuban. But he's saying it's a scam. It's a chain letter scam and the VCs are paying top dollar from the VCs before him. And he said, the only player is really on the hook of the guys from the last rounds holding the hot potato at the end. Not to be outdone, Andy Kessler yesterday here on Extraction Point talked about the bubble in detail. And his angle was that the valuations are completely bogus because there really is no free market to validate whether or not the valuations are good. So if Zynga's getting 9 billion and Twitter's going to get 5, 10 billion, Facebook's got 60 billion, yeah, there's some shares trading hands, but people aren't meeting in the middle to really understand the true value. So, you know, those kinds of valuations really are not really that set in reality. And that's the message from Andy Kessler. And he said, you don't want to be the last one holding the potato at the end of the one it pops. So that's the key to success with that. The third point is today, and Extraction Point, is President Obama is in Silicon Valley for a big dinner with industry leaders from Silicon Valley. He's going to be meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and even Carol Bartz got on the list, which surprises me because she's been probably the worst CEO in tech in the past three years doing nothing with Yahoo as they continue to crumble. But you had a lot of the big names in there. And I think, you know, as Andy Kessler and I talked about yesterday and the Extraction Point, is that the government really to be effective needs to just get out of the way. And I think the government policies, whether it's net neutrality or promoting innovation and job creation, really should just let the smart people do their thing. Let the Silicon Valley tech leaders and young startups get out there and lead the way and create jobs and just stay out of the way. So if they want innovation, we think it's in the big data. We think it's in infrastructure. We think it's in real computer science. And Rich, you and I will talk about that today, about computer science and real tech, not just some fancy app, not some game app, but real tech. And the Extraction Point here today for the interview is Rich Grenta, the CEO and co-founder of Bleco. And the innovation of the future, in our opinion, is going to come from this convergence of a new user experience, where infrastructure and services are driving a new economy, new value, new user experience. And to me, the signals like Twitter and Facebook and these new apps coming on Apple's App Store are a sign that the world's shifting and the user experience is changing. The web is changing. The internet now is mature. The plumbing's all in place. The service is on top of it. But there still needs to have some innovation. So Rich, welcome to Extraction Point here today. Thank you, John. And let's talk about that. Let's talk about the world we live in. You are the CEO and co-founder of Bleco, which is a search engine. And I guess search engine is kind of an old word, but still people search for things. And search is dominated by Google. Now Bing's trying to nip at their heels. Yahoo's kind of sideways and, you know, syncing fast. But search is about users finding things. And the world's changing and there needs tech involved. Talk about your view on search today. Well, that's exactly right. You know, people, you know, when they go looking for something, they always turn to a search engine. And that's why search engines make more money online than any other business. Search CPMs are $50 to $100. You compare CPMs on a news site, you know, might be $10 CPM or on a social network, you know, 50 cents, $1 CPM maybe. Search is so valuable because that's where people turn when they want to find something. But search isn't done. I mean, the composition of the web has changed so dramatically over the past decade. In 2000, we had about a billion rolls on the web. We're up way over 100 billion rolls today. Different kinds of material, all the social graph data that didn't exist a decade ago, new categories of search. I mean, folks go over to search.twitter.com and they don't say, hey, I'm cheating on Google. They're like, I can do new searches that I just wasn't doing before. I couldn't poll the audience during a presidential debate and see what other people were thinking. And we find this absolutely fascinating. I just want to say to the folks out there who know me and follow me on Twitter, or if you don't follow me on Twitter, I was pretty critical of Rich's company when they launched. I was a big fan when you spun out of Topics, your last company, brought your whole team of super geeks over there, real computer science guys doing some good work. But your launch was, I think the title was All Sizzle, No Steak, or something like that. I remember that, yeah. And mainly because I just had a bad user experience when I first used it, but I got to say, you guys, as I dug into the story more and looked into it, you guys were a victim of the press. The press were pitting you against Google and you guys really, as a company, got an overhype yourselves. You stayed kind of close to your knitting, building some tech. It takes some time to build these kinds of systems. You weren't doing a lot of PR. You didn't want the big splash. You were pretty much not looking for that. But yet the press built you guys up as this big story, the next Google killer. Do you want to kind of clarify that and clean the record up there and then I'll fall on my sword? That's the story they want to write. I had a blog post, actually, I think like two years ago where I said, no such thing as a Google killer. Google's got 20,000 employees. I think half of them have PhDs. They're a great company. They're not going anywhere. But when you launch a search company, people don't say, oh, how many users are you going to get? Or how are you going to appeal to a certain segment of the market? Or what's your plan to roll out new products? They say, how are you going to kill Google? And when you launch other kinds of companies, if you launch a new social gaming company, people don't say, well, how are you going to put electronic art side of business? That's not the question you get. But there's something about the search space that if you launch a search company by default, Blacko, new Google killer. I mean, that's the headline that everybody wrote and it certainly wasn't part of our messaging. But Noma is really launching search startups today. I mean, I think about search a lot. It's something that I'm really into and been a student of the whole search industry really from the beginning. You can't not think about Google as the major player because they own the market and you've got Bing out there. But Google launched search when everyone thought search was portals. So it's a fair thesis to say, hey, there's business in search. If you build some good technology and create great user experience, it's not a bad business opportunity. I mean, that was pretty much what you guys were thinking. That's right. I mean, search CPMs are so valuable and you're right. We don't see a lot of search startups launching. In fact, I think we're the last one. I mean, there's actually three search engines left. There's Google, Bing, and now Blacko. And there just aren't any other entities out there building search technology, crawling the web, and trying to differentiate a product in the market. And that's kind of, you know, we scratch our heads over that. We don't understand why VCs don't want to fund more search startups. I mean, maybe it's because there's been some high-profile failures in the space. You know, you need 5 or 10 million dollars in hardware to go build a search engine. You can't do it with EC2. You can't do it with why combinator funding is not possible. But 5 or 10 million dollars in hardware, I mean, that's the sweet spot for what VCs like to write checks for. It's not drug discovery. It's not FDA Stage 3 trials or building a search app. And there's some tech involved. I mean, there's some computer science or serious tech which we'll drill into in a second. But let's talk about what's different. I mean, what Google made Google so great was they had a very unique perspective. Obviously, the founders were focused on quality, the specific thing about Google. And we all know, insiders know, the history of Google, they were pushing away from advertising until the variants will only kind of, you know, force them their hand to kind of take ads. But Google, you know, simple search box, high quality. But that was different. That was something that was different back then in the day, right? You know, versus everyone going portal. What's different about what you're seeing? And what you guys see as a vision, not necessarily, you know, lay all your cards on the table, but what do you see that's going to give you some opportunity and some lift in the marketplace? Is it the platform? Is it the user participation? Is it all the above? Well, you know, we have a feature called Slash Tags that let you basically pick a high quality vertical. It's corpus selection. If I put slash health on my bleco query, I know I'm getting only trusted health sites. If I put slash colleges, I've got a good college search engine. If I do slash hotels, it's a hotel search engine. We have thousands of these slash tags. And we think they're necessary because at this point, the web has become so big, so inundated with spam, the cost of making new web pages is effectively zero. Or if you're willing to pay some folks in content sweatshops, maybe you pay five cents to generate a couple hundred words of content. You can't write algorithms to pick up all the garbage on the web anymore. The garbage outweighs the good stuff 99 to 1. The only way to do this is to make, you know, categories of the best sites, category by category, and then try and get the user's query into that good category. This is a new problem. This is a new problem that's really, you know, been developed over the past, you know, five years. 2005 search results were a lot better than they are now. But now you've got these giant entities just putting, you know, I think Demand Media puts 20,000 new articles onto the web every day. Articles about medical topics, right? Do you want an article about osteoblastoma that was written by somebody who has paid five cents to do it who doesn't have a medical degree? You shouldn't be getting your medical content from it. Well, let's talk about the content for us. But first, let's just ask Ricky. Ricky, do you have a screenshot of the Bleco search or a demo? Did you have that demo? And we'll see if we can with the demo. Bleco is a search engine. Obviously, you guys have a unique approach. You guys are a startup. Let's just sort of walk through a demo here, if possible. Yep. We have it on the screen. So there's just search box. So it looks very Google-like. So type in Obama. Walk us through the play-by-play here. Yeah. Go ahead and search. So you've got your standard results here, boracobama.com. I've got New York Times number two. If you go ahead and click on the slash date that's in the upper right above the search results, we'll sort of demo one of our more popular slash tags. You can add slash date to any search and basically sort the entire web by date. And you can see in the lower right of each result we've got two minutes ago, seven minutes ago. So slash is a clarification. Is a user-generated folksonomy? It's a way to tell Bleco to basically modify your search and do something different. And users do that, right? Well, slash date is one that we've made. You've done it. Not every URL on the web has the date property, right? Homepages don't have a published time. It's the interior posts that come out on the pages. So it's a way to basically sort the entire web by date. We could do another kind of search. Instead of slash date, you could do slash liberal or slash conservative. Let's just search the liberal web. Let's just search the conservative web. You could do... Yeah, let's go ahead and check that out. Do Obama slash San Francisco or would that be a slash tag? I don't know if we have a slash San Francisco tag or not. Innovation. I don't know if we have an innovation tag. It's a fixed taxonomy. Let's try green slash green. This is... We're going to search green-friendly websites. Obama says climate change is real. We'll hire Gore. This is really interesting, right? This is a search that you can't do on Google, right? This is a novel kind of search. And you say, well, what is this green thing? Go ahead and click on the... You see right above the top search result. It says slash green there. And that's a link that you can go ahead and click on. And we'll show you the list of sites that we've put onto our green slash tag. Now, maybe these are good. Maybe these are bad. This is sort of a first draft we've taken. We're inviting people from the public to come in and help us extend this. Help us edit these slash tags. And since we've launched on November 1st, we've had about 50,000 slash tags actually created by members of the public. So it's really helping us fill out our system with a Wikipedia-like model. Do you have a developer API? We do have a number of APIs, yeah. I want to develop how the developer can play with this. Yeah, just write to us. We have apiauth at blacko.com. We'll send you an API key that'll let you get past our rate limits that the scrapers are coming in through. And then we'll get you all set up with some documentation. So the content farm spam, people out in the real world don't know the search business. Think of spam. They think of email. Viagra and their inbox and all that stuff. The web is getting the same kind of effect where web pages are bombing Google. That's exactly right. With massive amounts of like, crap. Just to get redirection to some sort of paid scam or affiliate program, right? That's right. I mean, the same thing that happened to your email inbox in the 90s, right? I remember a paper came out of Microsoft's hotmail team and they said, hey, we looked at the SMTP traffic on the wire and 95% of it is spam now. 95% of all email traffic is spam. What happens when 95% of all the web pages out there are spam? Well, I'll tell you, page rank doesn't work anymore in that world, right? And you better figure out what the good 5% is and just run your link analysis on that and exclude all the other garbage. That's a starting point. It's a firewall. Assume everything's spam and what you're doing is assuming everything is spam and focusing on the quality. Opt-in is better than opt-out at this point. There's too much bad. And Google social search. What's your opinion on your angle on social search? I haven't checked out Google's product, but we did an integration on Blecha with Facebook where if you log into Blecha through Facebook, we have a pitch on our site that says, friends make search better. If you click that, sign in through Facebook, we'll personalize your results using the Facebook Graph API data. So if you do a search like, say, San Francisco Sushi, you can see if some of your friends have lined some of these restaurants and you could add slash likes to the query and then only get results that your friends have lined. When you think about what's the signal in a random URL on the web pointing at a random web page versus the signal in a random Facebook user's like? And because Facebook more tightly controls, most of the people on Facebook are actually people to start with, which is you're already light years ahead of links when you do that. And then we're not going to consider every like on Facebook. We're just going to consider people that you're connected to. And you're probably not connected to a whole bunch of spammers, right? You're connected to people you know. And when you take that body of data and project it onto the web and use that for relevance ranking, it's just light years better than using links. Let's talk about black listing because some of the sites out there basically have been black listing demand media's e-house site. Is that good, bad for the industry? Is it time to start white listing and black listing sites? I mean, do you guys do that? Yeah, we went and we've got a feature on Blacko. Under every one of our results, there's a button called slash spam. And you can click on slash spam and ban that site from your own personal search index. So every search you do in the future, you won't see that site. Well, after three months, so when we launched on November 1st, we went back and looked at the data and said, well, what did everyone click slash spam on? Let's go tally it up. And we had the top 20 most hated sites on Blacko at that point. And I said, well, you know, here we are picking the best sites vertical by vertical. We've got the top health sites, the top Lyric sites, you know, the top recipe sites. But here I have a list of all the worst sites. Why do we have these people on our index? Why don't we just kick them all out? So we did that. We banned the top 20 content farms, including like sites like experts, experts of change, demand media's answer bag and eHow.com and some other sites. And, you know, I got a lot of heat from that. I had the CEOs from these companies coming to me, coming to me through my investors, through my board saying, hey, Rich, we want to explain to you how great our content is. I said, look, you know, I hear you. But all I know is that everybody on the web hates your site. And you can tell me that you've got this great site and it's full of wonderful content. But everybody hates you. Why should I leave you in the index? And I don't want to, you know, let's not be mealy-mouthed about this, not say, well, we're going to let the algorithm decide, no, everybody hates your site. You're out. Search is editorial. Let's clean it up. Yeah. By the way, people are seeing a little QR code on the screen. If you whip out your mobile phone and click on that, we're running an experiment to see who will click on it. We had 350 click-throughs last time. So we're experimenting with trying to tie content to the video. Do you want to click on it? Yeah, actually, you know what? Yeah, go ahead and see what happens. Yeah, I mean, so I'm really impressed with the bravado and the guts you guys have taken with that. I've got to say, you know, that's bold and that's what we need right now. Let's talk about tech, technology. Did it work? Yeah. Where'd it go? I think it might be redirecting to... It redirected somewhere. That's very cool. Let's talk about the technology you guys have. So you've got some deals going on with Stack Overflow. We'll talk about that in a second. You have a slash like button, which is... I do agree, friends do make search easier, which makes Facebook so interesting. This graph API from Facebook, you're doing that. You're doing a million queries a day. What's the biggest tech feature that you have that drives your core engine? Is it software or is it the hardware, the SSDs we were talking about? You need quite a bit of hardware to crawl the web. We have 700 servers and we basically built a big distributed data store that we could copy the web into and use that so that our small engineering team could be more productive building a big search engine, which is a hard task. So it's a big structured data store. It looks a lot like Google Bigtable from the top down, but it's an integrated design. But we crawl, index, and serve out of a structured data store, not flat files that are custom code, but a programmer can write a couple of lines. They can fetch any web page, get all of the backlinks, get the anchor text, get all of our classifier facets, figure out if any users put them into a slash tag. A really rich API that our programmers can use internally to build a search application. And it's let us cover a lot more grounds more quickly than we otherwise could have. What about the slash tags? How are you handling that kind of inbound data? I mean, you integrating it right into a core index, is it just separated from the core? It's all stored in our main data store. So it's search time. If you are logged into Blacko, we'll go and basically do the fetches that put together your search page based on the keywords you fetched. We'll also go and say, okay, do you have a slash spam slash tag? Let's go fetch that list and scrub any domain or any URL that you've put onto that list out of your results. Have you applied a slash tag? Let's go basically intersect the web against your slash tag and return that. If you have logged in through Facebook, that makes a set of virtual slash tags on Blacko, the slash likes tags. And so we'll take every one of your queries and compare it against the like data, annotate the snippet so that you can see if one of your friends liked that site and if you've added slash likes, do another set restriction to really let you drill into just the best content. So the folks don't know, we're here with Rich Screnta from Co-Founder from Blacko who has a distinguished career in tech in ninth grade. We're the first Apple II virus. We were in Sun Microsystems, Netscape which became AOL and then Topics and now Blacko. Topics is obviously the local, powering back end that powers a lot of the local papers and huge, huge company. Chris Toles is the CEO over there and acquired by Tribu as a tribute. Tribu and Gannett and I Ritter. And this huge amount of page views. So I live in Palo Alto, so the local Palo Alto Online has all the local sports and comments all powered by Topics. So you have seen your share of data scale challenges from running Open Directory at Netscape, dmos.org and Topics. So you're seeing a lot of the local. When you saw the local, you saw the big old school search paradigm. You saw the local. Now you're in Blacko. Talk about the user experience in the tech. Obviously, mobile is hot. It's the edge of the network. Companies like Groupon are getting, you know, tons of press with local stuff, coupons and local this. I'm hearing the word local almost as much as I hear photos in the startup community, you know, everyone's, that's the hot area. So you've been there, right? So you're building this massive end user engine for search. What's your focus? Is your focus to have people use you directly as a site? Are you looking to push out APIs? You haven't figured it out yet. What's your focus relative to this whole new user experience? Well, we're doing both. I mean, first and foremost, we consider ourselves an end user, consumer destination site. We want people to come, switch their search engine to Blacko, come do, you know, do slash tags, right? Make your own slash tags or at least use ours. If we can figure out that you've done a query where we can automatically turn on a slash tag for you, maybe you didn't know we had a slash colleges slash tag, but you did a query and we say, oh, that's a, you're looking for where to go to college next year. This can take the spam out. Let's turn this on for you. We like putting out our data and APIs. We're trying to be extremely open. When you talk about big data, there is no bigger data set than the web, right? It's the sum of all human knowledge. It's the world's library online. And it's interesting to me that, like, you look at the papers coming out of universities. University professors don't write enough papers about the web. And the reason is they don't have the data set. It's a data set they don't possess because to have the copy of the web to analyze... You need the big servers. You need a thousand servers and you need gigabits of bandwidth. You have to be crawling all the time. So, you know, and it's too heavy to move. I can't give you a copy of the web. I mean, how... I'm going to have to send a truck down with 50 racks in it. So, how do I give you the web? Well, I give you the web by giving you APIs, by giving you very powerful ways to intersect it in real time, surf the web backwards, like, who's linking to you? Who linked to you five minutes ago? To answer that question, you have to be constantly crawling the entire web. See, anytime a new URL goes online, go fetch it, index the backlinks. It's extremely computationally difficult, but we can then turn that data back to the public. Data that the big guys up to this point have kept secret. They don't let you see your backlink data in any sort of detail. And you guys are offering that? We're offering all of that stuff. What about the fire hoses? Twitter and... Because, you know, Google and Twitter have a relationship. Twitter is also with Microsoft. They have the Twitter fire hose. Are you guys with Twitter on that? We don't have the fire hose. We have what they call the garden hose. Yeah, yeah. So, I think it's like 15% of all tweets. And so, we're doing some things with that. We haven't stepped up to the fire hose yet. Yeah, because you're signing with Gnip now for the licensing big partnership. Yeah, I think they want to charge, like, you know, my first born son or something. It's very expensive. I've been pretty critical on Twitter and their whole developer community. They should give it to us for free. So, I want to develop on top of Blacko. What can I do? Do I just sign in with you guys? Can I ping the APIs? Because the users are consuming now through different avenues. Mobile, sites like ours. The old days just go to browser, browser-based. Now you've got mobile. How are you designing for mobile? Do you see this fitting into that? Right, yeah. We put out an app to use Blacko on both iPhone and Android. So you can go into the marketplaces or the app store. You can get the Blacko app. And it's pretty cool. We've seen some pretty good adoption on that. It's a nice interface. You know, we've done a lot of positioning with Blacko around the slash, right? And if you have an iPhone, the big problem is the slash isn't on the first keyboard. You have to go to the second keyboard to get to the slash. So the Blacko app actually fixes that. It highlights the slash. And it often suggests slash tags. You don't even have to type out the slash tag, which is important if you're trying to type something on your iPhone. You want to type as little as possible, really. So it's a pretty slick way to use it. It is very fast. And it's a nice user experience. We have the Rich Scranto, the CEO of Blacko, and co-founder at Tech Guru and Search. Final couple of minutes I'd like to spend with you talking about a couple of things. The user experience, what you're seeing out there and what's changing kind of going forward. Specifically, what are the top challenges that you're seeing with Search right now? And Search being kind of the holistic term, not just going to the page and getting results, just in general, people search for stuff. They're online. What are the biggest challenges like cluttering all these things up? But what are you seeing in your data that you can share? Well, on the user experience side, we've got this feature called slash tags, which you look at it and you're saying, well, did they introduce the command line syntax from DOS into the search box? What's up with that? We actually did a lot of user testing around that. I mean, the mirror glass and the moderator and the cameras running and bringing people in off the street. And it was kind of cool because we had assumed that this was sort of only going to appeal to technical people to geeks, right? That they would like it, but this is going to be a hard sell for grandma. And from random people in the public, we got a lot of pushback actually in the messaging. They're like, slash weather, what's so hard to understand? I get it, slash shop. This is great, slash date. Oh yeah, I've always wanted that. It's very mnemonic. So once you show people, they tend to use it. And we started to think, hey, people are using hashtags on Twitter. Paris Hilton has a blackberry. The audience has gotten more sophisticated since when I was at AOL, N years ago. And they said, oh, you can't click on the columns in AOL mail and sort, because grandma couldn't understand that. Well, grandma knows how to sort by columns now. She's pretty web savvy. And it takes a lot of the functionality that you might otherwise have to put into a very complicated advanced search page. And it just hides it, right? So they're smarter. The users are smarter. Is it speed? Is it clutter that the big challenge is? You're a big challenge. We knocked down your top three challenges that you guys are developing on to solve. Our top challenges are really on the back end, on the search relevant side. Crawling. How do we go get every URL on the web, evaluate it? Is it porn? Is it spam? Do we want to include it in our index? What's the topic of this page? Is it suitable for slash date? Is it a good live crawl page? Sites that don't let us crawl, right? Unfortunately, Facebook only lets Google and Bing crawl them. We're not allowed to crawl Facebook. We said, well, let Blacko win. And they're like, yeah, we like you guys, but gee, some people scraped us and we're selling the data and we just don't know. We have to think about it. Blacko can't crawl Facebook. It's kind of like Google and Bing pulled the ladder up after they got in the top spots. In order for us to index the web, we have to have access to it. And we need lots of hardware, lots of good classifiers. Sort of 10 problems all strung together. So question for you. Rich Scranto, the CEO of Blacko. A question about entrepreneurship. Obviously, your experience, you and I are about the same age, a couple of years off. I think you're two years younger than I am. But in our day and age, computer science was different. You had to start a company. You had to buy DSU, CSUs, routers, sunserver. It's very expensive. So it's easy to be a startup. But it's also, as Andy Kessler pointed out yesterday in the extraction point, it's more startup, but it's easier, you're more competition, right? So what's your advice to startups? We're here in Cloudera. It was a lot of smart startups. We're doing big data. What's your advice to startups around going forward? What advice would you share with them in terms of building a company? Not a flip. I don't want to build an app. Like serious entrepreneurs who are like, like the A plus athletes out there, tech geeks. What's your advice to them you can share with them? I think go start a company. I mean, there's a lot of exciting stuff being built right now. And it's really cool that you can build a company for less money. I mean, back in the late 90s, you needed $5 million in a series A to go buy your sun servers and get your Oracle license and then go get racks in the data center. And now, you can rent all that. EC2, you get MySQL, it's free. You're off to the races with hundreds of dollars, literally. I mean, you don't need that much money. And so we're seeing a lot more people starting companies. You don't need 50 people to go put up a website anymore. You can do one or two guys. What's the key success factor that you would share with them? Young Buck came to you and said, Rich, what's the key thing I need to be aware of in the market? I would fail fast and iterate. If what you're doing sucks, realize it and try something else. I know some big successful startups that went through three or four pivots. And you can't stick with something if it's not working for too long. Just pull the plug on it. If you got time on the clock still, try something else because your next idea could very well be a winner. All right. We're here with Rich Scranto, the CEO and co-founder of Bleco. Final question to end the segment here on the extraction point is, what's your vision of the world we live in over the next five to ten years? I mean, five years ago, Facebook was just kind of dipping their toes in the water, putting out college in a bad UI and now it grew up to a huge company. Google's changing. What's going to change in our world in the next five years in tech and for consumers on the internet? I don't know. It might be around five years. It might be ten years. We've gotten about half the gizmos from Star Trek so far. We're not going to have the laser beams and all that stuff because power is still a problem. But the thing we want is to be able to talk to our computer and have it be our personal assistant. The middle class all got Rich, but there's no butlers, right? Everyone wants that thing that knows them really well that they can ask any question. Hey, can you go book this flight for me? Where's my buddy? What's for dinner? What time is Obama getting into SFO? I want to avoid that traffic. And just have it know you and be able to interact with you in some kind of fluid way. We've got this sort of landscape of applications that we use applications on our iPhone, applications on the web, Facebook, Twitter. We've got hundreds of buttons. It's like we're all flying personal 747s that we've put together. With a million buttons and you're like, I understand all these dials, but just to be able to fluently converse and have a sophisticated system be your buddy online, I think we're going to get that. I think we're getting close. We have all the component pieces. I think you're right on that. I think that's computer science and where it needs to go. I was talking with someone on the Cube when we were at an event and they're saying, if computers were cars, if cars were computers, we'd be driving into the wall. I mean, when you drive a car, you don't think about the steering wheel. You're looking at the road, you're doing your thing. But computers, no, computer science has not evolved to a true reasoning kind of value proposition. I mean, Star Trek's kind of cool to say that, but reality is, that's where it's got to go. I mean, that's the tech, right? I think we're in the verge of it. Connect, you know, Microsoft Connect is so cool, right? It can finally, hey, it can see me and it can understand what I'm gesturing. You know, natural language processing, understanding spoken speech. It's gotten good lately. It doesn't suck anymore. You put all this together and I think there's, you know, a platform of tech that another generation of entrepeneurs are going to use and they're going to make some really cool stuff. I got to ask one more question because we're in a roll here. I like this conversation. Big Data is one of the hottest buzzwords. I mean, I'm not a big fan of it. O'Reilly actually didn't call their show Big Data. They called it Strata, the data conference. But Big Data is a big hype to report. You deal with the world of Big Data. Data now is at the center of the value purposes for all the stuff, cloud, mobile, social. Where data warehousing used to be this fenced off kind of industry locked in and maybe used the data. But data is being used every data to create value. What's your definition of Big Data and what does it mean to folks out there? I mean, Big Data is data that can't exist on a single box, right? You know, if you need 10 servers or 100 servers to hold your data set, you know, there are not really nice turnkey off-the-shelf solutions to do that. We're just starting to get some, you know, sophisticated products that can do that sort of thing. And, you know, here we are at Cloudera. You know, they're being generous at, you know, hosting this. And they're doing some really exciting stuff around that. You know, if I do a query, you know, is it going to take, like, 24 hours for it to spin in this old database system? Or when I was at AOL, right, log processing, they had a billion browser starts a day on AOL.com. They couldn't process the logs in 24 hours. It took more than a day to process a day's worth of logs. And that, you know, if you're a product manager, you're like, well, did people use my service? You know, you'd go and you'd click on the form and it would just sit there and hang. And then the browser would time out. It's really exciting to be able to say, can we take tons and tons of data and get to it quickly? Can I grep the web with a regular expression, right? I can't, because I have a machine that can do that. But how do we empower regular people? How do we turn these tools over to everyone? Yeah, speed and provide good value, personalization. You mentioned this kind of system. Yeah. All right, cool. Thank you for coming in. Rich Scranto, the CEO and co-founder of Bleco, Hot Startup, who's pretty humble, not overhyping their service. These guys are programming away. They're trying to create a great user experience, have some interesting new updates. They have the slash tag concept, which was at launch, but recently have a relationship with Stack Overflow, which is a very popular community around development and programming and tech. A new feature around like, the like button, slash like button. And you guys are just sticking to your knitting, programming away, indexing the web, and hopefully getting some relevant search results. So thanks for coming on The Extraction Point. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com and SiliconANGLE.tv. That's a wrap for this episode of Extraction Point.