 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering South by Southwest 2017. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. Hello and welcome to a special broadcast of Silicon Angles theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal and the noise and we're here for a special broadcast kicking off South by Southwest. This show is the center of the entertainment media universe and we are here in the Intel AI lounge, the hashtag Intel AI and of course hashtag theCUBE, hashtags South by Southwest. And again, South by Southwest, I call it the burning man for the tech industry, the music industry. It is where all the creative, the talented and the innovators, the bomb throwers, the disruptors and also the innovators building the next generation technology is going to have wall to wall coverage all day interviews here. And our theme this week at South by Southwest is really powered by Intel AI and that is AI for social good. We're going to be unpacking all the cutting-edge technology that's taking us into the next generation. What's this world look like with AI? What's this world look like with autonomous vehicles? These are significant shifts that we've never seen in the computer industry before. We're going to be breaking them down and here to kick off day one of our CUBE coverage is my friend, Brian Fonzo. I, Social Fonzo, is the founder, great guy, young guy. Younger than me, but still, he's in the front lines. And Brian, welcome to the car kick off. Oh, thanks for having me. I'd like to be here. First time on this show is 2013 VMworld. So we were inside VMworld 2013 and now outside the Intel lounge at South by. Pretty exciting. So it's high noon here. We got our sunglasses on. High noon in Texas. I'm wearing my Ray-Bans, but you have your Snapchat spectacles on. What's going on? Do you like them or what? Give us the update. Yeah, so I actually, I'm a new user of them. I'm one that likes to jump on new technology, you know, embrace the FOMO. And I kind of waited a little bit on the specs. I also wanted to have something cool to release them with. So I, after I got them, I decided to keep them in wraps till South by Southwest, but it's kind of funny. It's interactive. They are definitely, you know, now that you can buy them online, I think they're going to be seen a little bit more frequent, but here at South by, you know, just walking down the streets, people are still stopping and saying, you know, hey, take a picture of me and how does it work? But I've been impressed. The quality has been pretty good and it's really easy to use. I think battery life has a long way to go, but we'll see, I think battery life and everything mobile has a long way to go. Well, let's speak to our whole theme here. We're going to have Robert Scobalon, good friend. He's been doing a lot in virtual reality and AR, Ben Parr and a lot of scientists from Intel, really folks talking about this kind of movement. There's a shift going on, user behavior shifting. You're seeing actually entrepreneurship, young companies coming out and changing the world and not changing the world to go public and some of those vanity things that around money, but really around social change. And that's our theme. You have been really prolific over the past couple of years. This year in particular, going out and pounding the pavement. You've been at a zillion events. We see each other all the time. Of course, we do over a hundred events last year. You see a lot of stuff. What are you, what's the pattern that you're seeing out right now? I mean, in this new world order, there's certainly a couple of key trends and the big ones are autonomous vehicles, smart cities, media and entertainment is changing. The home, Alexa, Google Home, automation, but a paradigm shift is happening. What is your take on this? So I think it comes down to a lot of it is, we've been, I think we've all realized that we want an experience. Experience is extremely important. But what does an experience mean? And then how do you make an experience stand out? I think that's one of the bigger problems today is with so much noise, so many things that are out there. I think a lot of people that, the idea of social good, people want to know that what they're working with, what they're working on has a greater purpose. And I think, today's world, you're connected with no limitations, no silos and not only being connected at all times, but how can you be connected at the right time and reach the right audience? And I think technology like AI and some of the things, especially cognitive, the idea that machines are learning with us. So it's not just machines learning and leaving the humans behind, but it's humans teaching machines, machines teaching humans and then moving forward together. I think that's some exciting change and it's from TV entertainment to enterprise tech even the social media space where I do a lot of work in. We're here in the Intel AI lounge. We're on 77 Rainy Street. So come by if you're watching here in South by Southwest, always on Twitter at the hashtag is Intel AI at the Cube, ping us. Brian, the whole theme is here at Intel and it's South by Southwest is real progressive thinkers. Intel's tagline is your amazing starts with Intel. And you start to see even Intel, which is a, you know, powered the PC revolution servers are starting to make chips not just for machines anymore for the cloud, for cars. And just think about autonomous vehicles, for instance. If you think about what that does for the younger generation coming in, the computing landscape isn't about a device anymore. It's about an integrated experience. And one of the things that we've been talking about on the Cube and we're going to talk about this year is my vision of counterculture. Every single movement, if you go look at the 60s, the computer industry was impacted by the counterculture of the 60s. You look at the PC revolution with Steve Jobs in the 80s. That was a counterculture. We're starting to see a counterculture now around new amazing new things. With software, machine learning, AI, it's mind boggling. It is. So what is this counterculture? Do you have any thoughts on that? Do you agree? Do you have any thoughts on that? I like to say, when Henry Ford said that if he would have asked them what they wanted, they would have said faster horses, not cars. And I think today's generation has a bigger megaphone. It's not afraid to say what they want. And because now we have all of the data, they're not afraid to share that data. We're being much more transparent, allowing people to be a little bit more authentic with what they're sharing. I think we now have the opportunity to really shape new technology based on more data than we've ever had, more understanding of our consumers than we've ever had. And I like to say the consumer's no longer dumb. Therefore, we have to start really pushing the boundaries. And I love the tagline with awesome, because I think we are now creating awesome experiences and connecting things probably in ways we would have never imagined. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we've been unpacking on Silicon Angle of theCUBE is this notion of all these trends that we're watching. A couple things we can talk about. Uber, Delete Uber campaign came out of nowhere. The company is reeling because of one blog post by a woman who worked there accusing the CEO of having a sex, a misogynist culture. Fake news during the election. Global communication now network with instant sharing. You start to see these points where the voices of the internet of people is now part and disrupting traditional sacred cows, whether it's government, play, academic, academia. So you can almost see it. If you look at it and zoom out, you can say, whoa, a new set of amazing things are happening. Good and bad. Yeah, for sure. And I think also in that same realm where now it's kind of this idea where I think for the longest time, technology was taking us further away from the human condition and we were able to be fake online, throw up a website and really distance ourselves from the consumer and the community. And I believe now because people are kind of seeing through that and the idea where people are faking profiles, we're now coming full circle where live video and a lot of these other things are saying, hey, we want humans. And then we want to be able to connect and come together. And I love the idea that we don't need a movement, doesn't require a resume, doesn't require to live in the same location. You can come together around a shared purpose, a shared passion, leveraging technology and you can do it anywhere in the world. I mean, especially from a mobile perspective, it's exciting to see people being able to have their voice heard no matter where they are in the world. I mean, they literally, I hate to use the phrase democratization, but that is really what's happening here. And if you look at like how politics is changing and media and the gatekeepers used to be a few parts of the world, whether it's a group of guys or a group of media companies or whatever, they were the gatekeepers. That's now leveled. You have now a leveling of that where you have these voices. So what's happening in my mind is this whole AI for social good is super interesting to me because if you think about it, the younger generation that's coming online right now and growing up into adulthood and teens is post-911 generation. You think about 9-11, what that meant for our world. And now you're seeing the whole terrorist thing. These are people who are digital natives. There's a sense of, I won't say philanthropy, but societal thinking. And I think part of it is all of that. I think everyone has always wanted the ability to make a bigger impact on the world, but they also now I believe chapter three of my upcoming book is actually the future of marketing and social good because I believe people want to know that what they're investing their money, their time in, has a greater purpose than themselves. And I think because they're able to be connected and we're able to expose cultures. I mean, my daughter says goodnight to Alexa when she goes to bed and as if it's a human and she's like, well, I got to say goodnight to it. And it's this idea where we're able to share, connect and computers are as much a part of that as humans are online and it's exciting movement because I think it's going to highlight and amplify the good and we're going to start to be able to drown out the noise and the bad that before oftentimes had a larger microphone and now we're able to kind of equalize that. And this is what I like about what Intel's doing. If you think about AI for social good, first of all, Intel benefits. Thanks to Intel for sponsoring the Cube here. Appreciate that plug for Intel. But if you think about what they're doing under the hood, Intel makes chips. Moore's law has been one of those things that for the folks who don't know, look up on Google Moore's law, doubling the power every X number of months, that creates really good processing power. That powers your glasses. That powers the car. The car is now a data center. The car is now an internet device. A human might have implants, chips someday. So this notion of the power, the computing power and now software is creating an amazing thing. But if you look at what you just said, there's nothing to do with computers. Right. So computers are enabling us to do things and be connected. But if you think about that next generation of impact, it's going to come from human beings. Human beings part of communities. And I think if you look at the community dynamic, which has always been kind of like, oh yeah, I'm part of a community, but now that this intercommunication, your glasses are doing streaming of video, we're doing a live broadcast, Twitter's out there, people can talk all over the place. You have a self-forming governance, a network. Which as a human, which is awesome because now it's connecting great people no matter where you're at, you're not limited by your resume or where you grew up. And I also think there's an element here where if you look at collaboration, I believe collaboration is this key for the future of innovation. I think it's the idea of chips coming together with hardware and software working together, not only in the post product stage, but in the innovation stage. And also, R&D teams working together to now make things faster and smaller and able to kind of really push the envelope. And things like in the glasses having sound and video and having connected to my phone and transmitting with very little human input, we're now able to get perspectives that we would have never imagined, especially from just a regular person walking the streets. So one of the things I want to get your thoughts on because you're in the front lines and also I look at you and you're not a young guy, you're an adult, but you're part of the new generation. I was talking with some folks at Stanford just last week around algorithms and it's kind of an AI conversation and something popped up. There's actually an issue of gender bias in algorithms. Who would have ever thought? So now there's kind of like algorithms for algorithms. This is kind of this AI for social good where we don't want to actually start bringing our biases into the algorithm. So we have to always be monitoring that. But that brings up the whole point of, okay, we're living in a world of first time opportunities and problems and challenges. In the old days in the tech, we knew what the processes were. Automate accounting software, automate this, automate some IT department with unknown technology and the technology would come out like Intel and others. Now we have unknown processes and problems and known technology developing faster. So what that's going to require is the human involvement, the communities to be very agile. Without question, I mean, not only embrace change, but I think you also have to look at communities now where I don't believe we're doing things massively different as humans today than we were years ago. We just now have more transparency and more exposure and access to all of our lives. And I think with that becomes, okay, as technology exposes more of our vulnerabilities, we as humans have to start to realize that people are more vulnerable and no one's perfect and things are migrating in a different pattern. I think it's giving me that collaboration because we have to be able to trust the algorithms. There has to be that transparency there. But we also want some version of our own privacy but I kind of live in a space where I don't think of privacy anymore. I think of things as, you know, transparently sharing, engaging and then hopefully technology amplifying that and giving us the controls. And that's why I like how the AI for social good with that Intel is doing here at South by because it's not just the tech, it's the humanization of it and South by Southwest represents a global culture of tech creative, tech practitioners, tech visionaries, futurists, kind of all kind of coming together. So give us the update so far. You've been on the streets. You've been seeing folks last night. I've been on the influencer list last night on Facebook as a special group there. All our friends are on there. What's the update so far at South by Southwest? What's the current vibe? How do you see it going this week? What are some of the themes that you see popping out of the woodwork for South by Southwest? So I think last year was interesting. This is my third year in a row at South by and I present and talk in a bunch of different topics but I think last year it was a lot about what is VR and VR was shiny and fancy and the conversations now seem to be, what is VR doing? What's the content look like? And then where is it's going and how do I get there? I think that's an exciting conversation because I think instead of it being a shiny object it's now VR and AR and AI. How do they intertwine into our lives? The idea of interactive, South by Southwest interactive really what these tools and technology are is connecting that interactive capabilities. And it's interesting to see different, the car brands here. You have Intel, you have Dell, you have IBM but then you also have some of these other brands that are trying to push the, I'd say the startup agenda that's exciting because I remember I wasn't here for Twitter when you were here for Twitter but Meerkat two years ago for me was the darling live streaming app that launched here and it died a year later but I'm glad to see that innovation and the startup culture is now mixing kind of hand in hand with the enterprise. Well I'm going to see some of my old peeps from the web 2.0 days and a lot of people were like, oh the web 2.0 days didn't happen just like the bubble burst and the internet bubble and that burst but it all happened. Everything that was put out there, pets online, everything online went online. Everything that was promoted in web 2.0 is happening now so I believe that you're seeing now the absolute operationalizing, the globalization of democratization. The technology has now come with software for that democratization and now what's exciting is with machine learning, data sets and all the stuff that's happening with the cloud technology and 5G, it's going to get faster now. Which is exciting because I think real time is a powerful element but if you're able to get multiple senses of data, interact with machines and ultimately push that forward at the right time, I think that collaboration of machine, human and experience at the right time is where we start pushing new innovations and AR and VR, even some of this, I would say cognitive type learning starts hitting the mainstream which I'm excited about because I think we're getting into this culture now where we look at change and we're hopefully now embracing the opportunities rather than looking and saying what you do because I think now we're realizing no one cares what the product is or what it actually, we want to know how does it impact us and why should we care? Brian Fonz, so new generation and millennial making things happen out there, checking things out. Of course, iSocialFonz is his Twitter handle, check him out, always great content, always out there, the Canary in the coal mine, poking at the new stuff, analyzing it and sharing it, over sharing as some people would say but not in my book, always great to have you on. Good to see you, thanks for spending the time kicking off our AI lounge. Happy South by Southwest. All right, we're back with more Intel AI lounge after this short break, hashtag Intel AI. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, we'll be right back.