 Welcome to News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV for Monday, October 15th, 2012. I'm Kristen Filetti. YouTube has reached 8 million concurrent viewers, Angel Investing Financial Returns do exist, and Amazon is in negotiations with Texas Instruments to buy their chip manufacturing line. Join us now with his breaking analysis on these stories as SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier. Welcome, John. Good to see you. If you were watching the YouTube live coverage of the Red Bull Stratus, you saw Skydiver Felix Baumgartner drop from near space at 23 miles high back to the Earth's surface, and you might have seen another stratospheric number, 8 million, at the peak of the YouTube coverage, and that was the number of concurrent viewers from around the world watching the successful feat. So tell us, John, why is this such a big milestone for YouTube? Well, I think it's great, great for many levels first. I think YouTube is now a valuable platform for attracting audiences that are online with Facebook, Twitter, and other social environments. So this puts a legitimate exclamation point on web TV programming, and YouTube just hasn't even rolled out their whole live component yet. So it's a direct threat to broadcast television. The other area that's interesting to watch is that because it's kind of a space program, it's considered niche content by traditional broadcasters. Five, 10 years ago, you would not see this kind of coverage on national TV, yet you're seeing massive amounts of audience online with the Space Shuttle Endeavor flying over the U.S. And now with this event, it's really, really cool in that there is a big market for this. What was once called niche programming is now not because there's so many people interested in that content. And this validates what we've been seeing at SiliconANGLE.tv, which is vertical coverage of events are really important, and they do track big numbers. But it's a big milestone for YouTube as a company, as a platform, and also legitimizes that with the social web and the new environment with mobile. This is a viable platform. So people can watch on Xbox, they can watch on their laptop, they can watch it anywhere. YouTube wouldn't officially confirm the number of overall viewers. Any reason why they were unable to confirm that number? Yes, I mean, we've been doing theCUBE now going on our third season on SiliconANGLE.tv, where we go out to all the events with tech events and direct the signal from the noise, as we say, we always get challenged when we talk about our viewers. And this is a really nuance about the tech infrastructure. It's really, really hard to measure unique users in this kind of way. Because of the connections that's measured by internet protocol address or IP address. So normally what the video companies do is just measure total views. Meaning how many people actually watched it. Not, in essence, counting repeat viewers if someone logs off or logs back in or changes the tab of the browser. Or if they're behind a company firewall inside a company. Sometimes that's counted as one. So it's really kind of a voodoo science involved in metrics video. But 8 million views is still compelling. This year's been a big year for YouTube between the Olympics and the first 2012 presidential debate a couple weeks ago. Can you tell us about what those numbers were compared to the numbers that we saw at the Red Bull Stratus event? You know, I think it's interesting that you're seeing the same kind of numbers. That's for the Olympics. They delivered more than a half a million live streams at that time. That's what's being reported. That's 5x the capacity of, say, Wembley Stadium, as we were talking about. It just shows that the interest for what people want is not what people thought, right? I mean, you'd think the presidential election of the Olympics would be awesome, would be high numbers, and they were. But something like the space jump just comes out of the woodwork. Because it's really measurable. I mean, YouTube can actually measure the actual number of you need. So I think this just shows that everything's moving online. You cannot do it the old way. And the old broadcast programming mentality is going to die. And this is just a real indication that programming is shifting. If you even look at what's going on on cable TV, you see really kind of lowest common denominator programming, like keeping up with the Kardashians and parking wars and this garbage, and even the Silicon Valley story was being critiqued heavily by people like Sarah Lacy who basically said it's trash. I personally like the move just from a sense it's Silicon Valley. But it just goes to show the old way is dying when you have a legitimate content, like a space jump, so much more compelling than what's going on with keeping up with the Kardashians or Jersey Shore. So this is going to be a major shift in programming on how video is going to be happening from broadcast to web. Let's focus on the investment world for a moment. Typically angel investing overall has not had very positive feedback. The investing world seems certain that angel investors were from the backwoods and unable to compete with savvy venture capital investors. First off, can you tell us what angel investing is and how it differs from venture capital investing? Yeah. I mean, when I was in, I went to business school at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, number one in entrepreneurship. It continues to be number one in entrepreneurship and I did my thesis on angel investing to my final report and it's nothing to really change. Angel investing is essentially the term angel or sometimes called white knight depending upon the situation. Finance is the money for an early stage startup. In this case, when a company wants to start from scratch, a couple founders have an idea. Maybe they have a prototype. Certainly now with open source, they can actually have a working product, whether it's an app or whatever. They would go to an angel investor who is not as sophisticated as an institutional investor meaning they don't have billions of dollars, they're just wealthy individuals. And they provide the first, they call seed financing, 50,000, 100,000, in some cases 300,000, 500,000. And they become the angel. They protect the startup during the most formative stage of the venture. The first eight months of a startup really define the company's DNA, defines the relationships of the founders and in this case defines the product. So angels are a very, very important part of the process and have been since entrepreneurs have been around. And that's kind of moved to the sidelines since the dot-com bubble when angels were getting squeezed out by venture capitalists where they take over and dilute all the risk capital the angel would provide. So there's been kind of this shallow or hollow market of angels because angels were putting up the risk capital when it was most, they could lose it right there. And what would happen was the company would be successful and the venture capitalists would essentially, what they call wash out or essentially dilute the angel. So the angel said, hey, screw this, I'm not going to do that anymore. And then they kind of were hanging around. But now in a robust economy where companies don't need venture capital, there's disruption going on in that marketplace. There's plenty of investments where venture capital isn't needed. A couple of guys can build an application, do something clever on a small, medium-sized business and be up and running with a $500,000 investment and be cash well positive and grow internally. This is what the Mitt Romney plan talks about when Obama says small, medium-sized businesses because this is the kind of entrepreneurship because there's a marketplace now for these kinds of small businesses. iTunes, AppStores, Mobile Android, you don't need venture capital for almost 60% of the businesses out there. New data has shown that the best estimate of overall angel investor returns is 2.5 times their investment, though in any one investment the odds of a positive return are less than 50%. Is this enough proof to make them legitimate entrepreneurial investors? Yeah, I mean, there's always numbers kicked around from the Kaufman Foundation, which studies entrepreneurship, finances, a lot of research in the area. All the numbers kind of dance around the same kind of data points. And all the numbers are always up in the air and questionable in my mind because it's not an exact science, it's really an art and a science. But they're dancing around the same thing, which is, angels are fundamentally very, very important and there are returns. Now angels get wiped out a lot in a lot of deals because, like I mentioned earlier, they get washed up by venture capitalists, so they tend to lose a lot. But angel investors are the kind of people that can afford to lose it. And they know going in that they take those chances. It's something that you have to do with kind of money that you have extra money to invest. So yes, angel investment is viable more than ever now because of the ability for an entrepreneur or a startup to go to the market with less than a million dollars is totally viable. We're seeing proof points of self funding and internal growth all across the US and around the world. Going forward, do you think angel investing will be more widely accepted than it has been in the past? Yeah, I think a couple of things are going to happen. I think you're going to see the emergence of angels more in that kind of way. You're going to see venture capitalists become the top five firms, maybe top 10 firms in the world. And then you're going to see the kind of the wipeout of these super angels. I think they're going to kind of go away and or handful of firms. In other news, Texas Instruments recently announced that it will wind down its operations in smartphone and tablet oriented OMAP chips and instead focus on embedded platforms. TI now engaged in advanced negotiations to sell that particular line of business to Amazon.com. So how huge of a deal would this be for TI? I think it's a great deal for everybody. One, Amazon needs to have their own devices. And I think if you look at the trends, we talked about the Oracle open world. Everyone wants to vertically integrate their operations and having chipsets in their own devices at the edge. Something that is absolutely table stakes, in my opinion. That's why I've been so vocal about HP not giving up on their mobile strategy. They have WebOS, certainly they open sourced it. They need to have a mobile platform. The new devices at the edge of the network. And that edge is where the user touches it. And it's going to be a lot of diverse data points. Anup, Kimball, Kimball, Xbox, whatever the device is that touches the network sources, information that will be a very, very important point. So the ability to have purpose built silicon or chips is a very important strategy because the diversity in a sensor watching the border of the US or a laptop or a notebook are completely different designs and they need different criteria. So that's what I mean by purpose built. And this is this is the internet of things, whether it's a toaster, refrigerator, laptop, iPad or a sensor watching the borders of the US. These are the kinds of technologies that need custom silicon and custom chips. So whether you're Amazon or what else, you have your own silicon. Well, John, unfortunately, we're out of time for today. But we appreciate you joining us. Thanks so much for your analysis. OK, thank you for information on news of the day and the latest breaking analysis. Stay tuned to news desk right here on SiliconANGLE TV.