 And thank you. Thank you again, Rob, for doing this. Oh, absolutely. A lot of people are really curious to hear. One guy in particular in our Slack submitted the majority of the listener questions. Oh, that's great. If I had a chance to ask a VC something, what would I ask him? I do have one question. When does... Did I miss where Peter Popsen, right at the end? Yeah, it's down there. Online 2041. Oh, I see. I'm sorry. I was looking before the thank yous. Yeah, I kind of did it unusually before because I just want to finish with him and then go straight to music. I want to finish with him. Finish. Didn't mean it to sound so aggressive. He's fresh. He's fish. He's fish. Any other questions, Rob, before we... No, I just... I'm assuming that you'll queue me up at the appropriate time and all that stuff. Yeah, and for the top stories of the day, if there's any in there particularly that you know you have something to say, let me know. Otherwise, I'll just ask you kind of general opinion questions that anyone... Totally good. And if Slack channel is running, then you'll get questions from the audience. Yeah, we've got our IRC run too, so we're good. Yeah, Slack was causing trouble today. Yeah, I know a couple of people in our Slack had trouble, but I didn't. So, yeah, it's one of those intermittent... I think it depends on which server you got routed to. Yep. But I couldn't upload anything. So I couldn't upload anything. Oh, yeah. Peter Wells, who's our Mobile World Congress person, was having a hard time uploading to Slack. That's probably why. We also have a guy making a volunteer site to collect things like picks and topics, and he was ready to show it to me. And of course, it's backended on Heroku, which uses S3. And so as soon as I clicked the link, I was like, this is great. And then I looked like, except I can't see it right now. That's too funny. Hey, by the way, one thing, don't ask questions on the size of our fund. Oh, okay. Because we're in the middle of getting more money. Sure. I probably wouldn't have anyway, but that's good to know. Yeah. It seems rude to ask a person about the size. Yeah, how much money do you have? Yeah. Right? It's like age, weight, size of your fund. Yeah. All of those should be open. All right. Well, I always build in a little extra time just to be ready and not to curse us, but it seems like things are smoothly rolling along. So we can go ahead and start if you guys are ready. I am good. I will hide. Don't hide, Roger. I know. He always says that. I always feel bad. So sad. Okay. Here we go. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 28, 2017. I'm Tom Merritt. And joining me today, I'm very excited to have Rob D'Amillo, venture partner at Spark Labs Global and CTO at Nimble Collective. Rob, thanks for joining us today. Thank you for having me. We go back, we have a connection from back in the revision three days. That's how I know Rob, but you are moving on. You have moved on to bigger and better things. And we should be clear off the top. Rob is not speaking on behalf of all venture capitalists. That's very true. But as someone who is involved in the industry, I think it'll be a good chance to maybe bust some fear and certainty and doubt around what VCs actually do and what they don't do and how different ones are different. So we're going to talk about that today. I'm looking forward to it. Great. Also, we are going to talk about Amazon S3 having a partial outage right now as we record. Amazon has only said it's due to increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US East One region. It is affecting is it downrightnow.com, which means I have no idea if anything is actually down or not. It's also affecting Amazon's or was affecting Amazon's own AWS status updates. They were all showing green while they had the error reported up at the top. That was interesting. And obviously large swaths of the internet out in and out today. And I know you guys were affected as well, Rob. Yeah, we were. We've got nimble collective does a virtualized pipeline of animation systems. So when you live in the cloud and the cloud goes away, you get some problems. Yeah. Well, that aside and that is a temporary problem for today. I do want to talk to you a little bit about that before we let you go at the end of the day, but let's start off with some more top stories. So right before we started the show, YouTube went and announced YouTube TV that combines live content from broadcast and cable networks with the other content you get on YouTube. So so far, we know ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are included along with their local broadcast channels and many other cable channels. So you'll get FX. You'll get ESPN. There does not seem to be any programming from Turner, like TNT and TBS, Viacom, MTV Comedy Central, AMC, Discovery, A&E, none of those are on board as yet. Though there hasn't been a lot for this announcement other than the announcement. They didn't show off demos or anything like that. The product is separate from YouTube red. So if you're paying for YouTube red, you don't get this. And I think if you want to get commercial free and all of that, you got to pay for YouTube red. But the YouTube red originals will be available on YouTube TV in some manner. It is supposed to arrive this spring and the four major broadcast networks and 30 channels will start at $35 a month and give you access for up to six users at a time. Rob, I'm curious if you use any of these cord cutting services like Direct TV Now, Sling or any of that? Yeah, I do. I use most of them actually. My house is wired for all sorts of stuff. And I also still get over cable all the services there too. So do you look at this and say, oh, this is something that will help me because I've got a YouTube app on all of those things that I have. So I might as well add this to the series. Well, it's weird because it's diversification in an attempt to consolidate. And so there's still not a service to provide everything that I personally am interested in, which is why I still have cable coming into my house. Yeah. I thought that YouTube and Hulu is supposed to launch one of these later this year as well might give me an alternative to PlayStation View, which is kind of what I rely on for most things. I still keep a Sling TV subscription, but I don't necessarily use it much anymore because PlayStation seems to have everything I want. This is great because it adds the YouTube stuff and it makes it easy. I've already got the apps, right? Yep. But without those extra cable networks yet, which again may be solved, I'm probably sticking with PlayStation View for now. Interesting. Interesting. The Raspberry Pi Foundation unveiled a new single board computer, the Raspberry Pi Zero W. The $10 computer includes the same wireless capabilities of the Raspberry Pi 3, including 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4, along with the same CPU and RAM of the original Raspberry Pi Zero, which you can look at it as taking Bluetooth 4 and 802.11n Wi-Fi and adding that to the Raspberry Pi Zero. The Raspberry Pi Zero W is available now from the Foundation's channel partners. I know a few people who are very excited about this because they didn't want to have to jimmy around the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth limitations, but they also didn't want to shell out, you know, for all of the power of the full Raspberry Pi 3. You don't mess around with any of this stuff, do you? I actually do. So my house is, aside from being a streaming haven, there's also an IoT haven. So I have got the original version of the Raspberry Pi that I screwed around with to connect to some of my smart things controllers. And it's fallen out of favor. Like, there's so many online services that do what I want to do anyway, but... Well, and that's usually the case with stuff like the Raspberry Pi. They're very cool for people who want to mess around, who want to tweak stuff and create their own systems. But eventually somebody's going to put a product out that is as affordable as this for people who don't want to have to mess around with it. And then you wonder, okay, well, do I keep my homemade solution or not? Yeah, well, there's also full PCs coming on a stick, right? And at some point, that price differential is just going to go completely away. And if you've got a full Windows or Linux machine running on a small USB stick, is there really a place for Raspberry Pi at this point? Rich Strafilino, who helps write Daily Tech headlines with us, and occasionally on this show as well, sent me a link saying, great, now I can make this. And it was a picture of someone who has taken their Raspberry Pi's and created a virtual reality recording, like a 360 degree recording system with, I don't even remember how many, there were 30 or 40 Raspberry Pi's all pointed at the person. Good Lord. Yeah, go ahead. I don't know if you remember like thinking machines from way back in the day, but those were built off of 64, I forgot what the chip manufacturer was, they don't do this anymore, but chips that used to power very, very small components for video games, and they would build these huge supercomputers out of hundreds of thousands of these things because it was cheaper. Yeah, what would a Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pi's do for you? Heat your house. Maybe. Heat a room. Yeah, it's like a space heater, like not meant to heat an entire house, just supplemental. Microsoft announced Game Pass, a $10 mud service that lets users play any of more than 100 Xbox One and Xbox 360 games. The available games will change from time to time, but at launch will include Halo 5 Guardians, Payday 2, NBA 2K16, and Soulcalibur 2. Games download to the console and you'll have the option to buy them at a discount if you want to keep them on the console, but the idea of having them on the console is you don't have to deal with latency. They're not streaming over the internet. Xbox Insider preview members get first crack at it, followed by Xbox Live Gold members and then a full launch for anybody who wants to join later this spring. People are calling it Netflix for Xbox games. Is this their answer to PlayStation Plus? Well, they have their own answer to PlayStation Plus, but it does seem like they're raising table steaks saying, okay, now we've got something even, you know, your PlayStation Plus was better than our existing service, so now we're going to do this as well. Do you play a lot of Xbox games? I used to, actually. So I had a PS3 and Xbox 360 for the longest time and I played them both equally and then I bought the PS4 and I realized I wasn't turning on my Xbox anymore, so I got rid of that actually two weeks ago. And so now I'm just a Sony guy. Yeah, and you're not alone. There's something I hear from a lot of people and the numbers sort of bear it out as well, so Microsoft trying to make it a little more attractive to use the Xbox universe. I don't know that this is the kind of feature that changes anybody's mind. Now, they tripped coming in the door, right, when they released Xbox One and they had those weird stuff with the pricing and they had this weird stuff with the streaming and I don't think they ever recovered from that. I would like to see this extend to PCs. And if it does that, then I think it becomes a lot more compelling. True. Wall Street Journal says its sources say Apple will introduce three new iPhones in the fall. One of them is the rumored anniversary update. So you'd get an iPhone 7S and 7S Plus and then the iPhone X or anniversary version. That one we've heard a lot of rumors about. This time the Wall Street Journal sources say it's going to have an OLED screen, a touch zone on the chin of the device. We heard that from Ming-Chi Quo previously. The Wall Street Journal sources say Apple will switch from lightning to USB-C, which I want to believe, Rob. I'm not sure I do. Yeah, I wouldn't believe that either. I wouldn't believe that either. I've seen this announcement this morning as well and there's nothing in there that's particularly compelling. OLED screen is fine. That's great, like you say. It's not crazy compelling. We've heard wireless charging. We've talked about all of that. That's interesting. We'll see if the price actually ends up being a thousand dollars. USB-C would actually be the more compelling feature for me because I am starting to get more devices like my Nexus phones that have USB-C and so being able to use headphones between different devices would be a lovely thing again someday. I can dream. Security researcher Troy Hunt is among the folks who discovered that data from Cloudpets toys made by a company called Spiral Toys was available online for anyone to see. It turns out a MongoDB database was stored in a public facing network and Troy goes into details about how they were storing staging and test services next to public services which caused part of this problem. They were using real data in their staging servers, etc. It was indexed by the Connected Things search engine Shodan and you could find email addresses and passwords. Now the passwords were stored as a B-crypt hash so they weren't plain text. B-crypt hash is a good encryption but they were there in the database for anybody to get and while pictures and recordings made by children who play with the toys because the whole deal with the toys is kids can have their picture taken by the teddy bear and leave messages for their parents and then they're uploaded to the cloud you could not find those in the database but there were references to them which could be used to find them on S3 which I don't know maybe that's why S3 is down today. Probably not. I was trying to find the toy database. And the other thing that Troy Hunt found was that a lot of the passwords were super short some of them one character short which even if you're using B-crypt is easy enough to reverse engineer and break and get the hash. Several people reported contacting Cloudpets as far back as December 30th with no response. Cloudpets has now this week responded saying we didn't get contacted and we don't think anyone has been able to access any sensitive information. However, Hunt in his post shows that people were at least saying they had the database and asking for ransom and it looks like a lot of people would have been able to access at least the email addresses and the hash passwords. Nice, that's great. Yeah, so I mean this is the kind of thing as an internet of things user and fan that's got to give you pause. I mean granted this is one very small company in one particular niche but it's not an unusual story of a connected device not taking all the security precautions that we would like. Yeah, I had, so one of my IOT devices at home was a garage door opener that was connected to my system to find out if the garage was open it would shut it after five minutes. Woke up one morning at 4.30 a.m. to the sound of my garage door opening. Yanked it out, done. Was just being port scanned maybe or something? No idea, no clue. Yeah, that's all. You've seen that episode of Mr. Robot though. Yes, I have. And had you at that point? Yeah, no, at that point I had not. Okay, because I would have been way reluctant at that point. But yeah, I mean what can we say to companies about taking this sort of thing seriously and you know it does seem a little bit like spiral toys was saying well you know it's just email addresses and Troy Hunt's saying yeah but once you've got that you can lead to other things and then they can get into apps etc etc etc. So there's a lot of vectors going on here right so small companies are moving very very fast and security is hard it's just hard. And so it unfortunately winds up getting sort of put on a shelf sometimes when you're going at lightning speed to get to the next round of funding. There's also the small device problem where it's difficult to put the proper technologies on it to do the protection and then there's just the folks that really don't think it through. They just don't understand that yeah it might be just email addresses but it's email addresses associated with this spot and off they go. Yeah and honestly it could be worse this is just a toy but you're talking about pictures of your children you know that's unsettling for parents. Yes it is. That's not something you want just out and about everywhere. Yeah. Finally MS Power user reports that the latest Windows Insider preview build of Windows 10 includes an option to only allow apps from the Windows store to be installed. Before you freak out at least in the preview the option is off you have to opt into this. So this is a precaution that you can take to say you know what I want to lock this down I don't want to have any Win32 apps installed because a certain use case or I've got a person who can't be trusted to know how to install apps etc and there's also two settings you can either block all the Win32 apps and say only Windows Store or you can say give me a pop up give me a dialogue box and make me confirm that I want to install this Win32 app before I do. Yeah this is going to be you know the equivalent of Android as you uncheck the download from third party sources thing. Yeah right it's very similar to that and it's way better than what macOS has done which is by default turn off anything outside of the app store and then I always have to go in and a new install and change it to the thing that alerts me and says you know etc etc. Yeah. But basically I feel like this is a good option as long as it stays off by default do you agree? As long as it stays off by default I mean I'm unfortunately old enough to remember like you know screwing around with PCs way back in the day and it's fun to do things on the side and get things in from over the internet and whatever so as long as that option is there somehow I'm fine. Yeah and there's also a lot of Scuttlebutt out there about Windows having a version of Windows 10 that's Windows Cloud and I could see them wanting to have this option for that where they're like on these particular devices probably tablets in most cases it is just Windows Store stuff and that's a different situation as well. Folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in less than 10 minutes subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com Alright once again not representing all venture capitalists but big thanks to Rob for being willing to kind of shed some light on this industry and I've got my questions broken down into two areas there's the basics for people who really just are like I don't understand how it all works and we'll get to that but there's also the misunderstandings and I want to start with the biggest misunderstanding because I heard this when I asked people for questions alternatively people say why don't venture capitalists care about profit thinking like they just throw money away on these companies that go out of business or people saying why do venture capitalists only care about profit doesn't anybody care about the ideas that these companies have kind of generally speaking how would you address those views? Well there's two words in venture capitalism one is venture and one is capitalism right so yes of course they care about profit that's the reason that they're in that business in the first place and it's been very very good for them right for the most part the venture capital industry has succeeded in ways that people didn't imagine when the concept was first created the not being interested in the company part is about as untrue a statement as you could possibly get they each venture capital company deals in a certain genre of technology or biotechnology or what have you and in those genres it breaks down into subclasses so there might be a venture capital company that focuses on media there might be one that focuses on robotics but they get into those fields and they get into those interests because they do care about that industry so it's a combination of things it's like hey these folks are doing something that I think is really neat and I think there's a potential here to make some bank on it so yeah and I think that probably causes a lot of the confusion because you also want to make money back that's the whole course but that doesn't mean other way if venture capitalists only wanted to make money all of their investments would probably be in porn companies or something yes yes and some do but yeah well yeah like you said they are interested in particular genres there's different funds for different things the other thing I saw a lot of people say is why does it seem like tech companies can fool VCs into giving them money with buzzwords and funny names where do you think that perception comes from? I don't know you ever go on a bad date you know sometimes you get the perception of what happens up front is not really what the long term goal of the company is but what's important to understand here is the rigor involved in getting money from a venture capitalist in the first place or seed round fund which is what sparklaps is you not only have to have an idea and a concept you have to have a team that the venture capitalists believe in you have to be able to survive a certain amount of diligence depending on which fund you're trying to get involved with and there's a lot of work that goes into it and it does weed out a lot of a lot of I don't want to say charlotte's but it does weed out a lot of folks that are trying to like make something from nothing kind of thing but of course wanted to get by and that does happen and it seems to be just the statistical fluke of you hear the horror story of the people who are like they had no business plan and they got millions of dollars and the fact is that's probably not entirely true and it sounds like what you're saying is it's pretty unusual it's pretty unusual you know dot com era was the opposite but you know there were there were companies in the dot com era that that had business plans that involved losing money for decades before they they turn profit and that is interesting why was that okay back then because it's gonna sound real stupid but everybody was doing it so so everyone was afraid to miss the boat and people saw some early successes in internet companies Netscape for instance was I remember being in a government office because they used to used to work for federal government and watching the Netscape stock with everybody else and we were there was the first time we had seen anything like that yeah just climbed to like 70 something dollars and everyone was shocked and that almost to that day I can remember just the gold rush starting and so everyone was trying to cash in on that and I think that probably caused a lot of trouble I remember when we started to get the wave of IPOs from Twitter I guess it started as early as Google but but I'm thinking particularly of Twitter and Facebook and how there was definitely this feeling of expectancy that are we headed back are we finally over the bust and we're back to Netscape days and the thing is we probably will never see that again now we probably won't there's a lot of breaks that have been put into place and a lot of regulations for good or for bad that are preventing that from happening but what what's interesting if you look back over what happened in the dot com era the companies that survived that the ones actually had legitimate business plans for the Amazons of the world for instance yeah so what is the next pitfall then that VCs have to avoid because like you say if if if anybody in any investing community not just venture capitalism feels like they're missing out they're going to start doing things that maybe in isolation they wouldn't do like how I guess I'm not asking you to predict the future but what how do you watch out for that I you kind of it's interesting so that the investment community in general is in some aspect is very sort of global the way it thinks about things and in some aspect it's very insular and there's a lot of communication amongst the venture community as to is this a real thing is this a bubble is this a fad and people in aggregate basically sort of figure out what the next thing is right and so investors lean towards that if they're a particular genre and subclass like fall into that category so you know big data and IOT and back in the day enterprise technology and all that stuff so they do tend to kind of fact check with each other to a certain degree and try and avoid a lot of those pitfalls that occurred early on now the the final of the misunderstandings that I kept saying was and this one isn't so much of a misunderstanding because I know this also does happen but I don't think it happens as much as people think a venture capitalist comes in and undermines what the founders wanted to do it changes the direction of the company and ruins the vision does that really happen that often now it's incredibly rare and and it's not to say it doesn't happen but it's pretty rare what happens is you'll hear this over and over again almost to the point of sounding trite but it's actually true is that investors invest in teams they don't really invest in the they do invest in technology but it's more important that they've got a team that has done it before or they trust or has shown competence in whatever field that they happen to be in and so they invest in those teams and they give most teams most companies most venture capitalists in most companies give most teams in most startups how's that for qualification they give them enough rope to do what they need to do and at some point if things start heading south yes there is a point there then venture capitalists will step in to say you know what listen you gotta have a conversation but I have been an entrepreneur for 30 years going on 30 years at this point I've not been in a situation where venture capitalists have come and say I know you need to be building a spreadsheet that's what you should be doing you should be making a spreadsheet company right so that's not actually ever been the situation I've been involved with I do know people where that has happened but it's pretty rare what about the I think maybe this is more common but maybe I'm falling under the misunderstandings that Silicon Valley scenario where the ventral capitalists didn't do anything but they decided to put an adult in charge they put a CEO who then changed the direction of the company that happens I mean there's at all levels so the role that I play when I'm in the entrepreneurial company is chief technology officer or chief operating officer CEO role is incredibly difficult it's like you know kudos to all those folks but what will happen is that an investor will watch a company as it performs and you know they'll have conversations very open conversations with the board it's pretty rare that a C level executive board at a company and a venture board that's sitting on the board of this company don't have a common conversation about maybe we should move the chess pieces around and swap this person in for that person but it does happen it does happen that seems like something that would be more likely to play out that way than the VCs themselves stepping in again like you say most of the time well let's talk a little bit about the basics of how this works I think a lot of people wonder why a tech company wouldn't just get a bank loan why do you go to venture capitalists? Would you buy your car on a credit card? I mean not a very good one no bank loans come with a lot of strings attached to them so you could go to a bank shore and get a loan to start your company and some people do that the return that you would have to have to make up for the interest that you're paying on that loan are kind of extraordinary but with a venture capitalist the terms may or may not be better but you're getting a lot of things that you don't get with a bank and this is where I think people don't understand it's not just the venture capital it's choosing the company it's the company choosing the venture capitalist pairing in a way where you are able to leverage the advice and the understanding that the people at the venture company have on your behalf and that doesn't happen with a bank with a bank if you're borrowing you're saying I will pay back this amount at this interest rate that's it with a venture capitalist are you getting a different deal that says if we make money you're going to get this much back but if we don't there's not like a solid interest rate oh no no no yeah if you know the depending on which company you're looking at the loss-win ratio is something like 40 to 60 percent so venture companies their portfolios lose up to 60 percent of their investments and those are write-offs right and nobody likes to do it and obviously they struggle to make sure that that never ever happens but of course it happens and it happens half the time but fiduciary requirement of paying anything back doesn't actually happen on the part of the company now when you're funding as a venture capitalist or participating in a fund you are taking a different risk than buying stocks in companies why do venture let's go at it from the other direction why do venture capitalists decide to back companies that way instead of just going out and buying stock because the win ratio is quite high and the terms that they have going into investing in a startup company are significantly better than just going out and purchasing stock of a company by the way most startup companies you can't buy their stock anyway they're not public so becoming part of the ground floor of something that the VC company that is doing investment has determined is going to be a big deal or a bigger deal than the amount of money they're putting in that's their win yeah so if I'm putting this together right and tell me if I'm not a tech company that wants to get started may need a lot more money than they could raise certainly at better terms than they could raise from a bank so you go to venture capitalist the venture capitalist wants to fund it because otherwise they would not be able to buy stock in this company unless it succeeds in an issue stock and so they have a bet that they decide we think this company will succeed that's more or less correct I mean it's an educated bet but it's a bet yeah what's a realistic time frame that you expect to get a return on a company that question is really tough to answer it's anywhere from two to ten years and it depends on the market space that you're in the field that you're in what people are willing to do for the long run biotech is a huge return it's huge return but it's also a huge run rate to get to that return because there are federal regulations involved you know tests that get performed and then human trials and all that and so that process is very very lengthy and the venture capitalist involved in the biotech firms they're aware of that going in they know that when they put in their nine million dollars or whatever they're putting in they're not going to see a penny of that probably for a decade in the case of tech industry where things are moving fairly quickly that return comes somewhere between two and four and five years out now that brings up another question you mentioned tech and biotech and that's what most people think of when they think of venture capitalist because that's what gets all the headlines but there are other industries that take venture capital and you mentioned that people specify in genre are those entirely different types of companies in different areas how does it work? they're entirely different types of people it works exactly the same I have no qualifications whatsoever going into biotech so there are fields that people invest in and the levers that you pull the numerators and denominators that you pull to figure out like how much money you're going to get back it's different from field to field but the basic concept and the precept is the same so there's Sand Hill Road for tech is there like Coal Mine Road for energy? yeah sure there are actually San Diego for instance, a lot of the venture capitalists down there they're all in biotech it's a biotech capital with very little in the way of actual tech and then Boston as well Boston's a big biotech location New York is really fintech financial technologies and advertising and media Los Angeles is media there are different areas of the country that sort of focus on different things like what the hometown boys do good that kind of thing and worldwide too right? there's also in Europe and Asia I mean Spark Labs Global the place where I'm a venture partner our headquarters are Seoul, Korea and we're a seed fund company and we invest in companies worldwide and the footprint is such that it doesn't really matter we're trying to level the playing field and we've got portfolio companies in Israel and portfolio companies in Korea and the United States and just look them up in the book calm up you got a business plan right? more or less well thank you Rob for helping us understand that I know for a lot of people maybe this felt a little businessy but we talk so often about companies getting seed money or raising rounds of funding and this and that I thought it was important for people to understand a little bit more what that process is like yeah it's I lost all my hair really was that from venture capitalism? yeah it was from being an entrepreneur no no no being on the other side of the table is one thing but being an entrepreneur lose your hair being an independent podcast very much I'm sure I know thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com real quickly before out of here Dan wrote in to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and said you know what having text messages which are essentially data not count towards our data because we were mentioning we have unlimited plans here in the US is like we're zero rating text messages making us more likely to choose those over other services that will count towards our cap like whatsapp I don't think anyone really thinks about it like that but I thought it was an interesting way of looking at it and Dan's right I don't think Dan's trying to say we should outlaw unlimited text messaging plans as a violation of net neutrality but he's pointing out like there are a lot of situations where we will prefer a service because of the way it's presented and the fact that most of the world does whatsapp because they don't have unlimited text messaging is interesting in that in the light of what Dan is saying yeah that's an interesting idea it's I got to start but I was in a SMS based company very long time ago and it's a limited thing I understand what he's saying but the services provided by something by whatsapp are so much greater than what you can do in text messaging that I'm not sure you can equate the two things well and I think that's what he's saying is because we've had several international listeners say you guys use SMS in the United States and we're like yeah we do and I think what he's saying is that could explain why we're still addicted to the text message in the US I think that's part of it it's just habit the company I was part of was M-Cube and we were the first people to write a gateway that connected carriers together so T-Mobile to AT&T before we showed up there was no way to get a text message easily from one carrier to the other and we turned it on and the first day we turned it on and I remember these numbers very very clearly it was 17,000 transactions a day so 17,000 text messages a day then we sold 18 months later to Verisign and we were at something like 3.5 billion a day so in 18 months we went from several orders of magnitude to increase so Americans just think text messaging first thank you to you and your team for making that possible I remember when that when that happened because it was a pain before that you couldn't like oh you're on AT&T there were a lot of at signs and percentages things you'd have to text in well thank you to everybody who supports this show if you get some value out of what we're doing here we just ask you to give a little value back at dailytechnewshow.com you can do it by PayPal, you can do it by Patreon at patreon.com in fact if you sign up to $5 level you get an extra RSS feed with extra content, you get a weekly email that summarizes the news and has an exclusive column from me so check all that out, patreon.com. Rob D'Amillo, thank you so much tell us a little bit more before we go about what you're doing at Nimble Collective I know you mentioned Spark Labs Global we talked a lot about that but I think what you guys are doing with Nimble Collective is really interesting yeah it's a lot of fun actually so Nimble was started by four folks who were a big deal in the industry, Rex Grinion Jason Schlaffer and Scott LaFleur and Bruce Wilson so they've got experience with large scale graphic animation for film and television so a lot of folks here were involved in Shrek and Toy Story and things like that and part of the barrier of entry to animation in general is the cost of setup and the cost of your time so to do sort of a large amount of work in the animation field you need $25,000, $30,000 just to start you get the large workstations, you get the licensing for all the animation products you're going to use so these guys came up with the idea of pushing that whole thing into the cloud so taking the animation pipeline from start to finish and pushing it out in the cloud and some of the animations that you're seeing there on the website if you keep on going there's a lot of chicken animations which have been done on relatively low cost equipment Chromebooks and laptops and that sort of thing and so the idea is that you produce high quality animation complete through to rendering with very low barrier of entry and the idea was so compelling I couldn't resist coming here It's crazy to think that I could use a Chromebook that advanced power available in a situation with the internet that we have today obviously you can't be doing this on a dialogue connection but it's or today actually physically today but literally just today but go check it out folks if you're interested in that nimblecollective.com anything else to let people know about before we go that's all good thank you very much for having me on thank you for being on, this was great to have you back sometime absolutely now we're gonna finish up with Peter Wells who has been at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and took some time out of his busy schedule there to let us know his report card for our report card on yesterday's show good day my friend good day Tom this is Peter here over in Barcelona so I'm here at Mobile World Congress so forgive the noise in the background there but I thought I'd give you a quick call to rate how you guys did on your ratings yesterday now first of all, a couple of well-actualies when it comes to Sony, you mentioned the 4K HDR camera inside the Sony, it's actually the screen is 4K HDR the camera itself doesn't do HDR unfortunately it does have all the other whispering things like the 960 frames per second super slow-mo which shoots in 720p by the way if you're wondering look all of that is kind of cool but it's only available in the Xperia Z or XZ Premium which that's my constant frustration with Sony I think that they make some great phones but then they spread the lineup and the XA1 is actually the best looking phone but it's the cheapest and so I want the best looking phones to also have all the very shiny features so I wish Sony would just kind of consolidate the line and just make one amazing phone with one amazing camera I think that would play to their strengths a lot more than trying to have this line up for everyone but moving on, so LG I really really love the LG G6 I know it doesn't look that flash in the photos but in the hands it's so wonderful to hold, it's got a really lovely curved back and that screen is stunning so I'm using it right now I've really fallen in love with this phone I didn't expect to because I'm not really a big phone kind of guy but the round edges, the fact that it's quite narrow means that even in my tiny little trump s-cans I can still hold the phone and be able to reach most of the touch targets so yeah big plus there for the LG G6 for me moving on to the BlackBerry now I was never a fan of the BlackBerry physical keyboard a bit before my time and so I wasn't really impressed typing on that thing this time around either I made so many typos when I was trying to use it it just kind of feels so odd and so old and as soon as you turn the phone into landscape mode to watch Netflix or something like that then you've got this honking great keyboard on the side that you can't get rid of and so I think it's going to play well for nostalgia but I don't think it's going to actually play well in terms of sales I don't think many people are actually going to rush out and get it especially when the big reason to get a BlackBerry back in the day was the BlackBerry Enterprise server and that's gone away so I can't really see where that's going now speaking of nostalgia of course the thing that everyone that has caught everyone's attention is the Nokia 3310 if you go down to the Nokia booth it's a gigantic booth you know the size of these things down in big conferences like this well the Nokia booth is huge and everyone is just crowded into this one little mosh pit on the side which is the Nokia 3310 display everyone's trying to get their hands on it it is super cute it is super gorgeous so light as well and I do like the idea of like a phone that would last an entire month on one charge sitting in your bag but it only works on 2G so in Australia we've turned off our 2G network so I'm sure many other nations around the world have probably done the same thing so I don't know how many places the Nokia is actually going to work in but again I think most people are looking at it purely for the nostalgia I think it grabbed the headline so it did what Nokia needed it to do but yeah overall I'm kind of glad that I can't buy it because then I won't so moving on so Samsung of course Samsung like you said they had a troubling announcement actually have the S8 ready so everyone in the room the vibe of the room seemed to be everyone sitting around waiting to find out when they had to book tickets to New York and now we have a date we know that it's going to be the end of March so that's kind of what everyone was there for which is a bit of a shame because they actually did have some nice things to show I really do like the new Tab S3 that they've shown off it does have a stylus built in and it's free unlike say the Apple Pencil that you have to buy separately for 150 bucks I think that's a very nice value add there from Samsung I like the Windows 10 tablet that they've done as well but it's just I don't know I've used those in the past and I kind of prefer a proper laptop when it comes to Windows 10 maybe I'm just an old man in that way Moto have continued to establish themselves as the high end of the mid-range if that makes any sense of vanilla Android phones so I think they've really stepped into that market that the Nexus used to have now that Google has kind of abandoned that market for the Pixel, Moto is there to grab that market and say we will provide the best quality Android experience and an experience that updates all the time if you're waiting for an update so I think they'll do very well with that and it's a much nicer phone this time around with the aluminium back than the previous plastic versions that we've seen from the Moto so that's about it there's been nothing that's really kind of set the world on fire here at Merbal World Congress 2017 I should mention also the Huawei P10 I had a chat with Roger Chang in the chat room there and he was saying that say the iPhone 7 Plus and the P10 I'm a massive fan actually I know it's a gimmick, I know it's kind of software, kind of hardware and of course it's a bit of a hack but the results are fantastic I really really like them of course I'm not going to probably print any of the photos I take but when my photos are going to end up in Instagram and Facebook then I think that effect is actually quite nice and I really do like the Huawei implementation but I think it works a little bit better than Apple's version in the iPhone it's a little gung-ho sometimes the effect sometimes looks a little bit cartoony but Huawei actually allow you to adjust the focus and adjust the effect after you've taken the photos so if it does go a little bit overboard you can always kind of tone it back a little bit so I really do like that feature and it also works much better with a subject that is constantly moving like my toddler when I'm trying to take photos the iPhone 7 Plus can just never get a decent portrait shot of her whereas the Huawei always does so that's the reason why I really really dig the Huawei P10 anyway so I had to choose a winner of the show from my perspective it's hard to say I think I'm going to give it to the LG G6 it is just so so so pretty but yeah I do think the Huawei is exceptional value especially if you're looking for that dual lens system so anyway that is my look at Mobile World Congress for 2017 love the show mate speak to you soon, bye thank you Peter for letting us know all about that our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we're live Monday through Friday 4.30pm eastern at alphakeakradio.com and diamondclub.tv and our website is dailytechnewshow.com back tomorrow with Scott Johnson and a guest to explain mesh networking to us talk to you then good show thank you everybody thanks for having me guys yeah you bet thanks for sticking around did you enjoy Pete's report? I did actually I'm like jealous because I didn't go to Mobile World this year I like getting the report with all the background kind of natural sound too you've been there right? it's like city within a city thing man I love Barcelona too Sardines and Hamon Chicago let's go guys let's go down what am I down to LA next? probably I'm definitely going to be there in May I might be down in April oh we might all work out so April I got to be in New York and Seoul but I think I still might go to LA for a little bit it's too much traveling actually do you ever wake up wondering am I in what time zone you're in? no but you do get depressed it's always often you show up and you're like Jesus Christ this is horrible going trans-pacific is always a shock it's the next day and then you go back it's repeating the same day you arrive before you left there's a lot of tartising going on before you leave when you come back from the Asia Pacific biocount our chat room says to thank you he knows bad weave and a few others appreciated having you on the show today oh thank you I appreciate that very cool I'm going to go check out some other meetings thanks again for squeezing us into your schedule I know you're a busy guy really appreciate it let me know later so I will sorry about forgetting Samara's name I knew I spaced on something I didn't want to get it wrong I feel bad that I didn't say Samara I didn't want to say Samovar or something stupid like that I thought I typed it in and she just goes by Samara as far as I know okay we should find out before tomorrow too so titles Angelis and Demons of Venture Capital Angels and Demons I like it Venture Capital 101 which I like that's actually one of my faves AWS Ampers it's a bit foggy in the cloud today that one's good too your stuffed animals are spying on you how to add Venture Capital Amazon goes down with the river is it down down clear skies at Amazon um Tech Venture Capital 101 pie in the sky I ordered an Uber and I got Lyft for that reason I'm out okay X4 420 cloud used bake uses baked in a pie Raspberry Pi because I like Venture Capital 101 we don't always have to have the ridiculous pun we can actually have descriptive titles every so often let's go for it it's very interesting having been at a company that was very reliant on VC Capital it is very personality driven too depending on the group of people you have put together it's what makes it so crazy because there isn't a single model that you replicate over and over again right or everyone would just do that you know there is some skill to being able to figure out how to do this sort of thing I thought he was a great guest I know Rob and he's a great guy but I thought he did a great job of explaining all that he has a easy history for people that don't know Rob and I know revision 3 as well he was our CTO over there he used to work at JPL used to work on programming not the Mars lander but the rocket that takes the Mars lander to Mars so he has a very storied history in both technology but also VC side that financing that trying to get startups off the ground I loved his little anecdote there the unexpected anecdote about making text messages work across characters stuff like that that always comes up where I'm like you did that too? it's one of those things you don't think of but when you really think about it how important because it's like one of those things like for people who are listening who are younger than Tom or I there was a time where you could not cash a check across state lines like interstate banking was kind of like really that was highfalutin right you need to be you needed to have a bank account at a certain dollar level to even attempt that for the rest of us you would have to do all these complicated wild wire things yes and and you know we take it for granted today like I can send my cousin or someone to check I mean not check but paper whatever but across state lines it's not an issue not an issue around the world you know with PayPal you can send money anywhere that's insane it's a it's a crazy it's a crazy environment and you know people and I think a lot of people misunderstand the motivation for some of it yeah the money is key but it's that kind of it's that atmosphere that they really thrive on like it's a combination and I don't know if we quite got that across I think Rob did a good job he did a good job I think I think I could have I could have you know asked for a little bit more but but it's really it's like yes it is about money they I don't think anybody's going to deny that but but it's about okay there's lots of different ways I could make money what do I think are the really interesting ones well it's like eating right everyone needs to eat but people want to eat different things and for these people this is how they want to make that money they thrive in that environment where it's high would say high pressure but there are certain demands and expectations and stuff like that it's interesting because you know you know people I've talked to family members and associates they haven't they think venture capitalism is just like giving a loan and then just that yeah that there's it's a lot more hands-on well and that's why I wanted to do I wanted I think we did a good job of covering that like we can go to the bank and get a loan but it doesn't give you the flexibility and the benefits and yeah and that there's something to be said I think about understanding a lot of these things because policies are made around these if you don't have a good grasp of exactly what's going on you may invert inadvertently harm it more than help it yeah and there's just a lot of I mean there are I didn't say this on the show there are a lot of really bad venture capitalists like really just just you know arrogant and mishandling things and we hear about them because they are unusual we don't hear about the vast number of them who just are reasonable people who you know take reasonable risks and get a nice return like there maybe reasons to dislike venture capital and maybe reasons to look at it as exploitative but the reasons aren't because it's full of mean people or idiots if you're going to critique it I think it's good to critique it but critique it for the reasons that you know you say well it's unfair because it's based on connections or things like that like those are fair things to talk about but those aren't that different from the rest of our system I need to go to Costco speaking of I'm going to see Zoe's name not that I need bacon it reminds me I need to go grocery shopping because with three mouths to feed the groceries go a little quicker actually no three and a half about three and a half three and a half you got your wife's dad your wife and Ellie's mouth is not even a half pretty much a full mouth I'm trying to get her to eat vegetables and it's like either tomato carrots and stuff were you a picky eater as a kid? no I was allergic to a lot of foods so I just couldn't eat certain things it's probably hard to tell if you were picky when you were limited I love eggs and strawberries those are the two things I couldn't eat because I remember I liked broccoli I always liked my grandma's broccoli but I didn't like leafy vegetables I didn't like salads and stuff I was just bored by them I didn't dislike them if someone told me I had to eat a salad I'd eat it but it was never very excited about them I don't think most people are to be honest I was not a very picky eater though I was um it wasn't one thing that used to disgust me the only thing that I never would the only thing I would refuse to eat was sauerkraut I hated sauerkraut I still hate pickles I don't like sauerkraut see I like pickles but I just didn't like sauerkraut any kind of pickling I'm kind of borderline on kimchi if I bury it under a bunch of rice I like kimchi because it's spicy though and that's the burying I cannot stand pickle foods I think it's just I used to eat it too as a kid but I ate it because I thought I had to eat it and when I grew up I realized it was it was an option I don't need to I don't want to eat this Jen loves pickles because I love the crispy crunchy it's just why do you pickle it you're taking it perfectly good what is the pickle a cucumber or something what do you have to pickle this you're preserving it we have a refrigerator these days we do that's like salted meats I don't like beef turkey I used to like it but I think I grew out of it after junior high I think it was slim gyms slim gyms are really gross to me and I think for the longest time that's identified that as beef turkey well well well the s3 outage finally directly affected us Soundcloud can't oh no well now now it's taking the upload Soundcloud must use s3 on its back end because it gave me a note saying we are having problems with our back end processes but now it's just telling me it's processing it tells me it uploaded so hmm hmm what's to believe well this is what I'm going to do I'm going to put the archive.org link in there for now and then I'm going to wait a little bit before I publish just to see let's see if it actually works well sometimes Soundcloud just takes a long time to process anyway so the fact that it actually shows me it uploaded makes me think maybe it really did God this thing is so great and so I am so over the moon it's so sad my life is what is what are you over the moon no I got like a desk monitor stand like it's not like where you basically it mounts to the side of the desk and you pop your flat panel off the stand that comes on and you can mount it so it floats above your desk which is great now I have all this space that I didn't have before my desk I think it's the bee's knees I don't know why I should have gotten one of these a long time ago I just I'll get it when I move and now that I've moved I got one I know why because my desk used to have a back to it and I didn't have enough area to have anything on to it sorry we're just watching things process and upload so you know what we probably should say goodbye to the fine folks bye fine folks we will talk to you tomorrow with Scott Johnson and Samara