 Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Mobile World Congress 2017, brought to you by Intel. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Palo Alto at the SiliconANGLE MediaCube studio. It's our new 4,500 square foot office. We merged in with our two offices here to have our own studio. And we're covering Mobile World Congress for two days, 8 a.m. to six every day, breaking down all the analysis from the news, commentary, and really breaking down the meaning of the impact of what's happening and the trends. And we're doing it here in California, bringing folks in and also calling people up in Barcelona, getting their reaction on the ground. We got a report, we have analysts there, but all the action's happening here in Palo Alto for our analysis. Our next guest is Christina Koo, Director of NTT DoCoMo Ventures. Welcome to theCUBE, appreciate it. Coming in. Hi, well it's good to see you again. Great to see you. So you obviously we've known each other for over a decade now and you've been in the investment community for a while. I got the first question is why aren't you there at Mobile World Congress? Because it's changed so much, it's a telco show and some apps are now thrown in there. But there's so much more going on right now, around 5G, AI, software, end-to-end fabrics. So it's not just give me more software, get more provision, more subscribers, it's a whole other ball game. I mean that's a great question. And so our CEO of NTT DoCoMo is there and his C-level team, but we are the innovation team. We have been here since 2005 doing research and then added business development about three years ago and then a Ventures team that's been around and now we're part of NTT DoCoMo Ventures. What we're looking for is more services and software and this year I guess the focus is AI and AI is, I would call it the new infrastructure. And since wireless networks are all data now, the new infrastructure is AI rules. Rules for everything, vertical and new maps. So I can talk a little bit more about what we've been seeing in the software and services area and how we're looking at the Bay Area as the new innovation to bring back to Japan with NTT DoCoMo. That's awesome. Well, let's take a minute, Christine, if you can, just before we get started. Take a minute to explain what your role is and the group that you're in at NTT DoCoMo here in the Bay Area. What you guys are doing, the focus and some of the things that you're involved in. Great, yeah, no thanks. So I'm a director and I invest on behalf of two funds. One is NTT DoCoMo Ventures for NTT DoCoMo, the wireless carrier, 60 million subscribers, all in Japan, our competitor SoftBank, but we're bigger in Japan and have more market share. And also the NTT Group has a $250 million fund and they're off the 101 freeway. There's NTT Security, IQube, a division of companies as well. And the idea is to bring these technologies through startups through BD to help them enter Japan and also to invest, a minority investment. That's awesome. And so you have to pound the pavement, go out there and see all the action. Obviously, still can buy a lot of stuff happening here and you have experience here. Your thoughts on the business model and how the AI as a service you mentioned that, which is we totally see the same thing. We see a confluence of old network models transforming into personal networks. We're seeing a trend where the relationship to the network, if you will, from a personal standpoint could be the device initially, but now it's wearables, it's the watch, it's the tablet. So now people have this connection, digital connection to the network. Might not be just one network, it could be two. So now AI has to come in. But people are speculating that AI could be that nice brokering automation between all the digital services, whether I'm jumping into an autonomous vehicle or not. If you refer to services for consumers, then the approach that we have is to offer a B2B to see business model. So in each lifestyle category, we purchased a cooking school or percentage of a cooking school ABC cooking, and then we're looking for kitchen devices. So offer that service, an oven, a Bluetooth connected pan. I think some of these devices will be showing up at Mobile World Congress, and then people want a service wrapped around that. Same thing that happened last year with fitness, with Fitbit, but also there's so many other devices to monitor your heartbeat and your health at the consumer level, but consumers want a service provider or someone to put that together for them, and I think AI would be in that layer. So when you say service, you don't mean like network services or like connections, you mean like lifestyle services, as you mentioned, cooking, by the way, Twitch has one of the most popular shows in Korea. People watch each other eating food. It's one of the hottest, you know, live streaming shows. But this kind of talks about that. You mentioned healthcare. Is this the kind of new software you're seeing? These are the kind of new digital services. Is that what you're looking at? That's exactly what we're looking at. I think people don't associate a carrier and services. In Asia, more so, maybe Korea and Japan, because 5G will happen there first, and Dokomo will be the first carrier to have 5G in Japan. I think Korea, they'll have their version first. So I think with that, we have been, I guess since the days of iMode, offering services in a way, and because PC and phone has been analogous, all data services have been just data in Japan. What's your take on 5G right now? Because obviously that's the big story at Memorial Congress. Is it real? Is this one of the big upgrade areas? You see that being a catalyst? Yeah, I mean, we will have it for the Tokyo Olympics. And what kind of speeds are they talking about? A gigabit? Is that what they're looking at? Yeah, I think it's within 30 seconds, you can download a full HD movie. What's for consumers like that? Come on, I want that now. We're going to ask a sargellonic. What am I going to do with the game? Well, absolutely figure it out. That's one of the beautiful things about software. What's the coolest thing that you've seen? In terms of as you look at some of the things that are around the corner, what are some of the cool highlights that you see? Connecting the dots with some of these new kinds of services. What's the trends? Depends if you say consumer enterprise or kind of core. Like I said, what's in the home is interesting. I think on the infrastructure side, mapping. I think new types of beyond ways mapping. 3D drone mapping. The drone thing is super hot. That is killer. But it requires a new data set, right? And if you look at ways is great, but if you look at it, it's almost outdated now, right? In terms of what you can imagine if there is a tree that comes up because of the storm or it's falling down, you want that map to configure that so that the drone can fly over kind of the building or the tree or whatever's in the way. So you need real-time mapping. And I think that's an interesting area that we've been looking at a lot of places. And connectivity will fuel a lot of these devices, whether they're drones or other sensors on the network is that's, I'd imagine, the good instrumentation out there for that stuff. And also social data. The confluence of easy, cheap social data and the mirroring that and stitching that in there. We found companies that will identify you through video, the computer vision, and a drone will follow you and recognize you through AI. That's cool. That's kind of, you know, there may be their small little increases in innovation, but without the AI and the machine learning, you can't. Yeah, we were, it's interesting, you're on this lifestyle, just these services. I think that's the right strategy in the right direction because we were just having a debate earlier this morning on theCUBE here about autonomous vehicles because one of the four categories of the hot trends in Mobile World Congress is autonomous vehicles, entertainment, and media, smart cities, and at home. Automating all that stuff and that's all an opportunity for services. But we were debating that, you know, transportation's not going away, but I might not buy a car in the future. But the differentiation might come from really cool software that allows me to take my preferences, my Spotify playlist, all my digital services that I'm leveraging into an environment whether it's a car, a theater, a park, a stadium, whatever lifestyle I'm in, I can then move with my digital ecosystem, if you will, my personal digital aura, if you will, and not have to have to reboot and connect with me right now my phone works, I just associate, but it still feels clunky, it's not. So I think that's kind of a cool direction. Is that something that you see that telcos and most folks will pick up? Or is this just you guys doing that right now? I think, you know, what interested me about NT Jocomo when I joined was that they're kind of in the forefront and in kind of leadership of that and I think Korea and Japan and Asia are looking ahead. You know, what do you do with unlimited data and then kind of following you everywhere, right? So I think AI, you know, we had Siri, Shibet Konsey, which was, I guess our version of Siri a long time ago, there's a lot of voice enabled applications. So I guess, you know, will that be the interface? I think another interesting concept is what will be the interface, the phone, the Amazon Echo, and then will be the natural interface for you to connect to these devices. Take us through the day to day of the life of a VC that you're kind of the deals that you do. What happens in your day to day life here in Silicon Valley? Take us through some of the things that you go through every day. So most days, I guess, just meeting with companies and trying to find, you know, the next one, there's so many great areas and also the next trends. So we also do a lot of enterprise deals. So I've been looking at security, cloud, a lot of the DevOps are kind of, you know, what's around the cloud systems. And so, you know, finding the right companies and then also intersecting with my other business development team and they connect to Tokyo. So they're at night talking to the business group leaders and finding that balance of, you know, what is a technology that would work in Japan? What are they interested in? And then out here, scouting for those companies. Yeah, one of the sub plots of the Umo World Congress this year, which is not, which is consistent with pretty much the trend is that the enterprise IT is evolving very quickly because of the cloud. Amazon has certainly demonstrated the winning in the cloud and security, no perimeter, API economy. These new trends are forcing IT to move from this, you know, proven operational methodology to very agile, data-driven, high compute clouds. And security is one of the huge issues. And now you have multi-clouds where I might have something in Azure, I might have something in Amazon, I might have something on a geographic basis in around the world, trying to operate globally being a multinational is challenging. What's your take on that? Because this is an area that is not sexy as the consumer play, but in the B2B space, it is really front and center RSA conference, just last week we were talking on an email about RSA two weeks ago, that was the number one thing. You got the cybersecurity issues, you got the cyber surveillance and also just the threat detection from ransomware to just consumer phishing. What's your thoughts in this area? So I guess we're looking at kind of what's the next new area, which would be using AI to analyze all this data that's coming in from the perimeter, from the endpoint, on your network, right? And then what can bubble up to the surface? So I think we've invested in two companies in this area, Centrify and CyForg, looking for kind of, other companies as well. Well, Centrify, they're really focused on the breach. They're really focused, yep. Yeah, Tom Kemp, in fact, we went to their party at RSA, Jeff Frick and I had had a great band, had a good time with those guys, but they're doing extremely well. They're very focused on mobile. They're doing really well, yeah. So what is the challenge in your mind right now, if you're an entrepreneur out there for the folks watching? They're looking for kind of like the white spaces, they're looking for some tea leaves to read. Can you share any color on just advice to the entrepreneurs out there? Because it's certainly a turbulent time in the enterprise and just in general, the cloud market. Like it's very competitive. Advice for entrepreneurs, they focus much of the key metrics they should be building their ventures around. I think it depends on if you have an idea or have a product already, but I think it's very competitive, right? And it's hard to break out of what's your product differentiation. On the enterprise space, I think building a product, solving the problem. And then once you've done that and have built a great team, then sales. And then I think in security space, we're trying to get to a million AR, right? Just getting to a certain scale. So it's a little less centralized. When did you guys invest in those guys? Early, later on, what was around? We invested pretty in the last round. So we were a little late stage investors, but we were happy with investment. Yeah, they're doing very well. Awesome. Any other cool things you're working on you'd like to share? I think we have taken apart AI and started to look at transportation. So I think mapping is a little bit part of that. It's also driving different industries like e-commerce, IoT. We've looked at IoT. You must get a lot. I guess all the time. I got to ask the same question because I always get asked, John, what is AI? I know, now I have two answers. Oh, AI has been around for a long time, but then there's a new AI. How do you answer that question? Because AI as a service essentially is software eating the world paradigm. And it certainly is happening where you're going to start to see some significant software advances, but AI in and of itself is evolving. How do you describe that AI as a service? How would you describe it to the lay person out there? I think maybe it's early stage, it's the team and the technology. How many PhDs? What are you looking at? What type of machine learning? So we have a more technical team. We build services. My boss's boss is the head of services and he reports the CTO of Docomo and so his team and they look at that. And then on the other hand though, I think it's later stage is vertical industries and have people taking it apart, put it together and then are monetizing that. And so I think it's- It's a lot of machine learning, a lot of data driven. So algorithms over data or data over algorithms? Is there a philosophy there? I mean, that's a debate that people love to talk about. Maybe it depends on where you're applying it, who it's for, where do you get the data? How do you train the data? And what is the result, right? And are people happy with the result? I think the core infrastructure, I think once an AI company becomes hot, then it gets bought and at that point, we all know who the players are and people are probably looking for more and more of those. So I think those are harder to find. So then like I said, we've taken that apart and maybe looked at mapping. What are maybe more of the components underneath that that we can start to say this is going to be huge in the future. And I think that's a great philosophy too. If you look at how IBM has branded Watson. You can almost look at how successful that's been because people can get a mental model around that. And they've taken a similar approach, although I would say they've done very good on the vertical packaging. And a lot of work's going on now, I think it would say down in the guts of the tech. I think there's a machine learning and more going on there, which is really cool. Which utilizes the cloud, right? That's where the power, the compute. I mean, Amazon has that at re-invent, last re-invent they announced the machine learning as a service. You're starting to see this now where people can take a iterative approach to leveraging this AI as a service. So that's a real brilliant, I'm really impressed by that. Congratulations on a great strategy. I think that should be a winner. And that's going to be probably a core business model. I think other telcos should take notice of that, but I believe we shouldn't tell them we're alive. Well, we can't put it back. Christina, thanks so much for coming in. Appreciate it. Christina Koo here inside theCUBE, special coverage of Mobile World Congress, doing all the investments, checking out all the new business models and really looking at AI as a service. And that really is cutting edge. That really is consistent with the data. It's theCUBE, we're back with more after this short break.