 Okay, we're back here live at the Fluent Conference. This is siliconangles.com coverage of theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, restrict the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm George Michael, Jeff Frick from SiliconANGLE. And our next guest is Brady Forrest, alum to O'Reilly, now a venture capitalist. Worked at Microsoft. You've been in the tech business for a while. We're just talking, tweaking on. Welcome to theCUBE. Hey, thanks for having me. Welcome to you, Jeff. So you were also involved in this conference. Talk a little bit about the background you and Fluent. And then we can talk about some of the startup action that you're seeing. Yeah, well, so I worked at O'Reilly for six years. I left last June and I did the Web 2 Expo during my time. And that was, you know, it was a big gathering of the people who actually built the web. And after kind of Web 2.0, the phrase itself became passe, we wanted to create another event that would really let web practitioners come together. And last year it was really clear that JavaScript was on the ascendancy, had been for a while, and it was time to come up with an event that anyone could attend. And Fluent was it. And so Peter and I got together. We worked with a lot of people in the community and brought together the people who created browsers, people who created the frameworks and the people who built the websites with those tools and just had them share. So great to be back this year. I'm no longer at O'Reilly. I'm now actually, I've nose dived or sky dived into hardware and I'm working with a PCH International to bring startups up to scale who are trying to create next generation hardware. And that's hardware focus. We had Jake Spurlock on, who was our first cube guest ever to wear Google Glass. We've been doing this three years, our fourth season going to events. And it was kind of cool. So that brings back kind of the concept that the wearable computers are hot and everyone's talking about all the rage. You know, you got Fitbit to wearable computers. Obviously Glass brings it home in kind of a dorky way, but it's very relevant. It's certainly exciting. It's kind of sci-fi, but that's kind of where the market's going where you have these little internet of things, these industrial internet where there's TVs, refrigerators or glasses. There's a notion that we're going to be connected and that the phone could someday be the server, a personal server for ourselves. Oh yeah. I mean, that's what got me excited about doing this new gig was basically the idea that it's going to be, so there hasn't been an AWS moment yet in hardware. So, you know, back in the early days of the web, it was a dark art for how to support a million or two users. And once AWS came out, it changed the game. And really any company could do that. That is still not possible in hardware. And so I think there needs to be some sort of service that allows companies to say, I know how to build this, but I don't know how to scale. And that's push of the button. I want to do that. We're a long way off. There will never actually be an AWS for hardware, but I think trying to get there and helping companies figure out how to scale up is a pretty interesting challenge. And so that's why I decided to make that leap. That's interesting on the hardware side because all we talk a lot about about software-led infrastructure and, you know, software kind of going now. It's such a heavy overlay over the hardware and really hiding that hardware. So where are some of the new hardware innovations coming from? What are some of the problems that they're tackling? Oh, well, I mean, I think that, you know, as John said, the first and foremost is just connected. There's so many different parts of your house that are dead, but I have a Sonos and I've had it for a long time and I love being able to control the music for my house from any room in my house and from anyone's phone. And I want my lights to do that. I'd like my appliances to do that. I'd like, you know, my house to basically control itself. And then just as you mentioned the Fitbit, I'd like other aspects of my life to be instrumented so that I know what's going on and can actually control them as well. Yeah, software is the key to this. So one of the things we're tracking, and this is a cool developer conference where you've got software engineers, you know, full stack, fast stacks, efficiency in the software side, still front end kind of view, but we cover a lot of backend cloud and, you know, some heavy lifting going on, virtualization, flash. So you've got the big compute in the sky going to be powering essentially the edges of the network. So again, we're coming back to the, you know, it's been talked about in the elite circles for many, many years, the edge of the network where the action's going to be, and that's where it is, but now the edge is so multi-dimensional. How do you look at that? I mean, honestly, big day is a big part of it, and that's kind of mainstream now, but as you look at startups who are inventing the future, what is the intelligent edge look like? And you have your investment thesis and as you evaluate companies, how do you put that into different buckets? Is it possible? How do you get your mind around that? Well, I mean, I'm looking at companies that are going to enable non-internet companies to basically become connected. So, you know, Bose is not really equipped to create an internet-connected speaker, at least not one I think would work well or Herman Cardin or something like that. So I'd like to find companies that will sell components to them and bring any sort of device online. Electric imp is a great example of that. You know, all a company has to do is hook on an SD card-sized machine. The user can then grab an electric imp card, send it in. That's still way too complicated for non-geeks, but as they learn those use cases, it'll start to become simpler and it'll start to be that the moment you walk into your house, you're connected to this kind of cloud of sensors and actuators who can do things for you based on what you want. And Nest is another great example that you're bringing up right now where, you know, the Nest itself is kind of the killer app. Tell about Nest, because I really love this product. So, talk about Nest, introduce what it is and why is it so compelling? Well, so Nest is a learning thermostat from Tony Fidel, Tony who is one of the fathers of the iPod and it's very simple to use. It learns when you're home, it learns how hot you want your house to be and they've done incredibly well and raised a lot of funding. I don't have any inside knowledge on this, but you could see where suddenly I have this hub on my wall in my home and it's connected to my Wi-Fi network. You could imagine that the Nest itself becoming kind of a suite of devices that control your home and I think there's a lot of companies out competing for this space. Another company that I'm friendly with is Berg. That's Matt Webb and Jack Schultz's company. Berg, B-E-R-G. And they made a lot of waves when they created the Little Printer a couple of years ago and Little Printer is just an internet connected printer where you can send four square check-ins, crossword puzzles, notes to loved ones and it just sits there and if someone's had a message for you you can just grab that ticket and in the day and age of the phone it might not seem like that's really necessary but when you have ephemeral information that needs to be picked up one time and you wanna make sure it doesn't get missed, those little slits of piece of paper can be really handy and so they're trying to build out the Berg cloud that will connect devices around the world and they're rolling out some new services like the Benetton campus in Italy and they're trying to come up with killer applications. Little Printer is just the first one. The thing, I just come on Nest, the reason why I like Nest, I pulled up the founder is Tony Fidel, he mentioned his Apple iPod, University of Michigan grad and so it's with an alumni friend of mine and the thing about this product to me that amazes me is that because the software is so good it's adaptable and he's treating thermostats like an iPod, like a device you can interface with, taking the complexity out of the install so it's adaptive to your environment so it learns what kind of wiring you have your environment and then makes it a usable product not just I plugged it in, I gotta, so it's got all that learning thermostat stuff in terms of like smart metering but it's got this whole dimension that we haven't gone to, you mentioned those, these devices weren't built with user connected experiences and think about a thermostat and now you can do more with it so this notion of learning your Wi-Fi network, self-healing, all those things are software principles. Oh yeah, and I mean I think when we get to a place where we can iterate hardware as fast as software that's when my new gambit will have really paid off. Or you're the pioneer who crashes and burn and everyone else comes in the back door. Yeah, that's sometimes that is the way that it works. I think it's the arrows in the back. Being early sometimes isn't always good, I mean I was talking about the early, early guys can't get that worm but I think it's really good. I mean I think yesterday hearing Tim Cook at the D11 conference was talking about he was kind of down on the wearables because they're going to come out of the watch but I think he's just kind of like holding the line because they might not have anything but clearly that's where the market's going. You're going to have different devices. I remember, I mean I'm old enough where we get one watch when I was growing up then all of a sudden when I was in high school swatches came out and you had a watch for every outfit or any kind of situation. So I think that kind of computing is going to happen. The question is I don't think people can envision the use cases. So with that being said I want to ask you a question. What is the craziest coolest thing you've seen? Crazy being a good adjective. Well I mean this is where, I mean of course this is where Kickstarter and Indiegogo come up. Like that's where I see the craziest stuff and that's why we want to enable lots of people to come and make new hardware because the ideas aren't just in Google or Apple. They're all over the place and you're going to get the craziest ideas. I'm still waiting. I just ordered a melon which is a headband that's an EEG that will connect to my phone. So that's one thing. Yesterday I ordered a thunkit which is this fun little device. It's just, I don't even know how to describe it. You have to watch the video. It's like basically it's a tool for fiddling and it's got like a steel plunger and magnets around the barrel. Not a shake weight hopefully. No, no, no it's not a shake weight. And you can just, it's this fun little like toy you can play with. And I, you know, I think it will probably show up in like not sharp brains but one of those, you know, at the end of the mall store, like the Sky Mall, the Sky Mall catalog. But right now it's on Kickstarter and that's where I think those products are going to start showing up. They showed a man and then they have to figure out how to manufacture it. So Brady, talk a little bit about the startup showcase here. What is it? How many people are involved? What are kind of the ground rules? What have you seen it yet? When? Well, so I haven't seen the companies yet. I'm one of the judges for this and the way the startup showcase generally works is we try to bring in 10 or so startups, I believe it's 10 this year who are really, who are below two million in funding, less than two years old, have created a product that really try to push the edge of what the given technology can do. And then we have them all just get up and they're in their booths and the judges go around and pick one as the best use of technology in the community, the attendees of the conference get together and pick one. And then tomorrow we'll announce who the respective judges and attendees have picked on stage and the companies will get to present very quickly. And is there any type of hard criteria beyond just pushing limits or is it just kind of go with the feel? Yeah, just go with the feel. Like who do we think has done them? Well, we try not to pick the same one. So there is a little bit of an angling that way. But, you know, it's, I mean, I personally always go for who has found something new because this isn't like trying to pick the best business case. This isn't trying to pick the best entrepreneur. I want to celebrate the technology in this case and that's the point of this conference. So that's what I'm going to be looking for. And when I go around today, that's what I'll be asking the companies about. So Brady, I want to ask you a talk about something that's been on my mind. I haven't really talked about publicly yet. So I might sort of introduce it for the first time now. But, you know, we've been following the DevOps movement since the fore's DevOps. You saw that coming. Your AWS moment was, hey, you know, commoditization of infrastructure and platform. It's a really amazing thing. Spread all kinds of creativity with cloud. But that notion of DevOps, I'm a developer and I just want to make ops transparent. It's a mainstream now. It's hitting the private cloud and all that good stuff. So similar concept with hardware. Is there a DevOps model that you're seeing? I don't really know how to put a word around it. Like what developers and we're a developer conference and fluent, I'm a developer. I want to code hardware. Is there a dev hardware ops or equivalent? Cause that's really what this is heading towards, right? I mean that kind of abstraction of complexity. You know, it's not there yet, but there are certainly services that are trying to get there. So you've got Pinoco where you can upload designs and then they'll send it out. You've got Shapeways, which allows anyone to create, you know, physical store. Then you've got Quarky where I have an idea but I don't want a company. So I can upload that idea and share it with the community and then, you know, I mean, that flexible power strip that Ben Kaufman of Quarky has created sells tons. That thing sells like hotcakes. And then kind of at the higher end, you have someone like PCA, who does a lot of work for larger companies but then also tries to find ways for startups to get in there. And a startup's product is gonna be more complicated than what Quarky is trying to do. But they can have their team just focus on the product itself and not on the actual production. So you see a platform. And will there be a place converging? I think there are folks trying, but it's not there. So there's no yet reference architecture. So as a developer, I just don't want to deal with hardware stuff. Give me a common platform, that kind of thing. Yeah. Well, you've got, I mean, you do have Raspberry Pi, you've got Arduino, but you still have to deal with sourcing and. But even this Nest thing, I mean, clearly look at the opportunities for someone to build different apps that's on this connected device and sitting in someone's home with access to all this data. I mean, we see it time and time again, you start with a cool app like Amazon noted as a bookselling store and then it became a mall for other people's stuff and it became an infrastructure. One of our favorite quotes on theCUBE, Jeff, was ex-Netscape guy who developed the search engine now. He said, everything that we see so on Star Trek will be invented. And in a way, a lot of that control panel, mindset of the thermostat today is a control panel tomorrow is an interface to Google Glass. This kind of sci-fi is here. Yeah. How, Brady, how early are we? I mean, people want to try to peg, you know, peg kind of a number, you know, we top of the first inning, kindergarten. I mean, what level in this, you know, connected device wearable computers and or Star Trek like future, where are we? I mean, Google Glass is pretty impressive in that regard. Yeah, Google Glass is pretty amazing. I put it at like, so if you make the benchmark of a new technology coming out and how good it is and how easy it is to use, I peg the first generation iPhone. It was missing apps, but otherwise, everything that it shipped with was totally new and yet worked. Worked, I guess. I would put Google Glass at 80, 85%. You know, I was being taught how to use Google Glass and I accidentally deleted the Wi-Fi network. It just, it's a whole new paradigm with that stuff and I think that's why Google released it to developers first, because it was a further throw than the iPhone was. Yeah, yeah. iPhone was totally new, but it was much more grounded than kind of what they're trying to do with Google Glass. But then I left how already at Google I owe other people had different Glass. That was just a heads-up display for your Android phone. So they're already iterating on it. Oh yeah, they're other companies doing Google Glass right now, or the equivalent. I mean, will they be powered by Google's back end? No, will they be able to match the, well maybe they can match the industrial design, but I think it'll be a challenge to catch up with Google. Bring it back really far ahead. Bring it back to Fluent, right? We're here at Fluent. You've been involved in the conference. Again, you have a 20 mile stair on the industry and you're in a really progressive area with the hardware stuff. It's pretty cool. Developers still have a lot of work to do. Certainly on the stack side, it's developing into a full stack now. Node.js points through a lot of headroom on server side. A lot of low latency tech is out there. What does it mean, all that stuff, mean for the developers today? And what is Fluent today in your mind? So obviously it's grown from JavaScript. Where is it today and kind of where do you see it going? Well, I mean, I think in the future, it won't, right now, it's JavaScript. It's JavaScript focused. But there's a whole suite of tools around JavaScript and JavaScript is obviously not the only language developed for the web. So I think in the future, it will just be more focused on the web and language agnostic. And so as JavaScript continues to blow up and interfaces with Ruby, with Python, we'll start to bring in more of those frameworks and tools and try to figure out how people are pushing the limits with those other languages. Yeah, someone said this morning in the keynote, web platform, web platform, web platform. Really, it's a web platform. It's not just JavaScript anymore. I mean, developing from that point of view. Great to have you on theCUBE. It's startup scene is hot. It's early. You got your hands in a lot of different pies. Final question, shoot the arrow forward five years. What's the world going to be like? Software, devices, convergence, how does it all kind of come together? Well, I mean, I think all of your devices will be connected via a node-based cloud. You will be running a lot of JavaScript apps on your phone that's tied to your key fob that's tied to your car and your house knows where you are and you know what your dog is doing. Of course. And nevermind, no, I'm not gonna say it. Know where your dog is, take your dog out for a walk. People love dogs, you know? And that's the future of social. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE here on SiliconANGLE's coverage of Fluent Conference. Text us, tweet us on Twitter at Furrier at SiliconANGLE, join us. We've got more live coverage all day today and tomorrow. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest. Thanks, Jeff and John.