>>: Okay, I’d like to welcome you to this talk today. For the two of you that don’t know who Robert
Scoble is I’ll read a brief introduction. Robert is one of the world’s best known Journalists. Scoble is best
known for his Blog Scobleizer which came to prominence during his tenure as Technology Evangelist
here at Microsoft. Currently he’s a Startup Liaison for Rackspace, the Open Cloud Computing Company.
Scoble travels the world looking for the latest developments on technology’s bleeding edge. He’s
interviewed thousands of executives and technology innovators, and reports for Rackspace TV and in
social media.
I’m thrilled to have him here. I know all of you are too. We look forward to hearing him talk about the
Age of Context. Let’s welcome Robert.
[applause]
>> Robert Scoble: Thanks, oh man it’s a big honor to be here. It’s been a while since I’ve been back at
Microsoft. Rackspace asked me just go and study the future and put that learning up online, and write
books, and stuff like that. It’s a fun job. It’s a real honor.
[laughter]
The book came out of a bunch of conversations I had almost two years ago, now. The book is starting to
need a little bit of an update. Because since then Beacons have come out and looked, we’ll talk about
some of the newer stuff I’ve seen. But I started seeing five trends that were all happening at the same
time. What was really interesting is these five things are fusing together to make a new kind of software
possible.
The first trend was Sensors. We’re just are seeing an explosion of sensors on us, around us, you know
I’m wearing a sensor on my wrist. There’s seven sensors on your phone. Some of the phones now have
nine or ten sensors. My Nest Thermostat has a couple sensors in it. My Drop Cam is really a sensor
every time somebody walks by my front door my phone has a notification, and on, and on.
The second trend was the amount of Wearable computers was exponentially growing. These are a, this
is a guy up in Vancouver who makes the guts of the Oakley Airwave Ski Goggle. He runs Recon
Instruments which has a, it show you where on the mountain you are, how fast you’re going, the hang
time of your last jump. There’s a sensor in this thing and there’s a screen here, it’s pretty cool. The
Basis Watch is wearable with a heart rate sensor underneath it. It can watch your sleep pattern. It
knows whether you’re really exercising or not which compares to this one which just is studying motion.
Then we have the Goggle Glass, which we can spend some time talking about later. Two kids from
Stanford put a HD video camera inside the sunglass frames. They’re pretty hard to recognize that you’re
being videoed.
Add onto that the data about our Location is getting sharper. We were just talking about Cortana and
how it compares to Siri. One of the real feature benefits is that it can do stuff as you move around the
world. Because it knows the context of the place you’re going past. You know if you’re going near a
hardware store maybe your app will say hey it’s time to go and pick up that screwdriver you put on your
to do list you know kind of thing.
The amount of data socially is growing exponentially. You know when I worked here at Microsoft eight
years ago Twitter didn’t exist. Facebook barely existed it was for college kids. Today we’re seeing
Twitter has half a billion tweets and it’s going up exponentially. That alone when you see exponential
numbers you know that businesses can start or thrive on that. We’ll talk about a few businesses that
are built on top of that.
Then I just keep seeing a bunch of database innovation partly because the datacenters changing from
hard drive based datacenters to SSD base datacenters. Partly because the costs are coming down on
datacenters and partly because the data flows are just getting so extraordinary. I just did a, I
interviewed yesterday the CTO from SunPower which puts solar panels all over the globe. They have,
and they’re already getting fifty million sensor readings from solar panels a day from around the world.
The data flows are getting crazy. You know Oracle is not the way you’re going to build your datacenter,
data system for that.
When I started talk, seeing these five things, each of which needs its own book, I mean there’s books on
big data. There’s books on social, I wrote one when I worked here at Microsoft called Naked
Conversations, and so on, and so forth. But when I sat down with several of the execs at Google and
other places they said there’s something happening where the software we’re able to build is changing
because of the computer we’re carrying in our hand.
Facebook just bought this company called Moves. I don’t know if any of you’ve used Moves. But it
already knows whether you’re walking, running, driving, or biking just based on the sensor patterns.
You know this lets us do a new kind of operating system. Particularly when if you have the data of
what’s on my calendar, and you have the data of what’s on my email you can build a new kind of system
that assists you as you go through your life.
Let’s talk about some of these products that are coming along and what it means for us as human
beings. What I’m seeing is products now are becoming highly personalized. The Oakley Ski Goggles a
great example. It has my ski data you put it on it’s not your data. It’s very personalized to me. When
we visited Oakley they were saying well you know we’re going to build products that are going to be
custom for you, custom three D printed, custom data. The product is going to change based on what
you’re using it for, what kind of conditions it’s going to be sensing, etcetera, etcetera.
This company’s is really interesting. It’s called Tapingo or Tap-in-go. How many people have heard of
this before? Yeah, how did you hear about it?
>>: I saw the product in Whistler.
>> Robert Scoble: Okay.
>>: Pretty impressive, yeah.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah, so this is for college kids right now. When I worked at Microsoft eight years ago
we kept hearing about this thing called Facebook. We could never use it because it was only for college
kids. We know the rest of the story there.
If you’re at Santa Clara University you use Tapingo to buy everything. You buy your coffee in the
morning. You buy your sandwich. You buy your books. You buy everything on it. Already seventy
percent of all transactions done by students are going through Tapingo. They’re taking up to ten
percent cut of each transaction. It’s pretty crazy.
This came out of Israeli intelligence. The guy was doing surveillance work in Israel at the time. He said
you know when we’re doing surveillance work in the military we’re looking for somebody who’s out of
pattern. You know if I go and buy a ton of diesel fuel, or a ton of fertilizer, and eight hundred gallons of
diesel fuel I’m out of pattern.
[laughter]
I don’t do that very often. Somebody will probably come and visit me right. It’s like what are you doing
with a ton of diesel, or a ton of fertilizer and some diesel fuel. He said this is switching it the other way
which is I’m looking for when you are in your pattern. When you wake up at eight in the morning on a
Monday morning and your first class is History 101, or whatever. It says would like your normal ice latte
on the way to class because it knows what you’ve bought every Monday for the last five Mondays. It’s
starting to recognize your pattern in life. It’s trying to assist you.
When you order it the order goes into a virtual queue. It’ll say your drink will be ready at eight twentythree. When you do that it sends the order into a box that’s in the Starbuck’s, or whatever coffee place
you go to. The box lights up and beeps, and spits out a receipt which goes into the workflow of the
restaurant. When you go to pick up your drink you don’t show any ID because they know you’re there
because your phone is there.
We can talk about that in a minute how that can be sensed. You don’t pay cash. It charges you like
Ubur you know when you take an Ubur ride it doesn’t, you don’t pay any cash. This is seeing some
pretty remarkable things already. They just got eight million dollars from Vinod Khosla. Let me just back
up here for a second and see, alright there. There was a Skully motorcycle helmet there too but, yeah.
The second thing that we’re seeing for humans is we’re going to see new kinds of anticipatory services
and products. You know Cortana’s a great example where when you’re next to the hardware store and
you told your to do list that you need a screwdriver. It reminds you of that fact because it knows
something about the context, the place, and it knows some of your intent.
This is tempo.ai. This is a calendar app on the iPhone if I remember right. I think they have it on
Android as well. It looks into your calendar, into your email. This came out of SRI where Siri came out of
and looks out on the internet for stuff. One day on my calendar I just put Flipboard, didn’t put anything
else. It found all the emails back and forth between me and Mike McCue at Flipboard. It also found the
correct address which they had just moved to a new office two weeks before that.
The apps themselves are trying to assist you by looking deep into your context. Google Now is a great
example of this if you’ve never played with it. It starts doing all sorts of fun stuff based on what’s on
your calendar, where you are. I think, Steve, you were at one of my talks where it actually tried to take
control of the TV in the room, right? That’s pretty crazy, right. It’s like you’re next to this TV would you
like to put some pictures up. It’s like wow that’s pretty crazy.
Why is Google buying Nest and buying Drop Cam? Well they want to be the default place you go to
interact with the people around you, the places around you, and the machines around you. Google Now
is doing that. It’s trying to get ahead of you and trying to predict what you need to do next. It’s trying to
help you.
For businesses we’re seeing to shifts because of this new contextual world. Businesses are being asked
to see everything about everything. The solar panel guys was a great example they’re building
contextual systems to understand what the sensor reading means. They’re comparing the context of
internet data like weather patterns to know what’s going on a solar panel that’s out in the middle of the
desert. Is it dirty? If it is it sends a little robot over to clean that section of solar panels, right, it’s pretty
cool.
I talked with Siemens head of R and B. The power grid itself is contextual. It knows pretty much what to
expect on load tomorrow. Because it’s already predicting what the changes of temperature and
changes of let’s say a Seahawk’s game might change the pattern of usage of power. It’ll gear up for
tomorrows power demand appropriately which makes it cheaper to buy power. Because if you can
predict what you need it makes it cheaper.
General Electric is putting sensors into jet airplane engines to understand when they’re, when they need
to be repaired. Union Pacific is putting similar sensors underneath the railways. They’re seeing forty
million hits a day off those sensors to understand whether the cars need to be repaired, and so on, and
so forth.
The second impact that we’re seeing on businesses that we’re going to need deep insights to our
customers. I’ve talked to Ritz and we went to Aspen, and quite a few places that talk about this. The
Ritz is a funny example. Did you know when the Ritz started a hundred years ago they use to have a
room where they had index cards on each of you. They would go through; a hundred years ago they use
to go through your trash looking for things that you would throw away. Like candy bar wrappers or
apples, or trying to look for, they’re surveyling you. They’re spying on you trying to figure out what you
like to do. Therefore they’ll have that waiting on the pillow the next time you come back to the Ritz.
This was a hundred years ago, right.
Today they don’t know a lot of that stuff because there’s four computers at a Ritz. One that runs the
spa, it’s a spa finder computer. One that runs the main restaurant, that’s an open table computer. One
that runs the main restaurant, I believe that’s an IBM computer. They really don’t talk to each other
very well. They certainly don’t know, they don’t know anything about me which is very apparent when
you start tweeting from the back deck of the Ritz.
They have a Social Media Team that listens to anybody who says Ritz on Twitter or Facebook. They get
back to you in a couple minutes. If you’re tweeting from the Ritz they’ll say oh thanks for coming to our
property and hope you’re having fun. But if you start having a conversation with them they go tone
deaf very quickly. They don’t know where on the property I’m sitting. They don’t know what my
favorite drink. They don’t know who I’m sitting with.
I’ve talked to the directors of Marketing and we predict in the next five years they’re going to know.
They’re going to know a lot that they don’t today. I talked with the CO of a big oil company up in
Canada. He’s building a loyalty program to, just for this. To understand his customers better and to be
able to serve them better when they come into an establishment.
Let’s talk about some of the businesses that are popping up. This is a PrimeSense sensor; Apple bought
PrimeSense last year for I think more than a billion dollars, right. The Connect Sensor is based loosely on
the technology that was invented here. I think you guys licensed some the technology from PrimeSense
for the sensor.
This sensor’s so sensitive by the way; well you guys know this you work with Connect. But they did a
demo where the sensor was up here aimed at a table. It could tell how hard I was pressing the table. It
was letting me do pressure sensitive writing on the table, right. Here they have a sensor over your head.
The sensor is so good it can tell when your hand is heading toward a box of Cheerios.
I got to demo this at CS last year, so this is already eighteen months old technology. It saw that I
touched the box of Cheerios. It saw that I pulled the box of Cheerios off the shelf in real time. It had a
display here and it was changing what the display was telling me based on what I touched or pulled off
the box, off the shelf. It’s pretty crazy. That’s what it’s doing here. They’re mostly using this for
analytics right now because there’s so much privacy concern on what this stuff does. But it’s not too
hard for me to conceive of a world where a Beacon in your pocket will be used to put a name on this
guy, and add it to your shopping cart, and on, and on, and on.
Let’s talk about, so this is Shopperception it’s a company name that’s building this for Wal-Mart down in
Brazil, testing it out. This is Shelfbucks, they won demo god of the year last year. This has a bunch of
little radios in it. You’re going to have twenty of these in a grocery store. You’re going to have an app
that, like the Safeway app on your phone. You’re going to tap in to one of these displays. Your phone is
going to tell you what you’re looking at. If you’re at the cookie aisle for instance, you tap in and it says
oh you’re a valued member of Safeway and you can save two dollars on a box of Oreo’s right now. Or
you know hey I put on my bucket list, you know or my intention list that hey I want to lose weight. I
don’t want to do carbs so it’s going to suggest now get out of this aisle and we’ll give you some incentive
to go to the other aisle, something like that, right.
[laughter]
They can tell that you’re there. By the way you don’t have to tap into it if you have a modern phone.
You do if you have a cheap ass you know flip phone kind of thing.
[laughter]
But if you want, if you, it has nine radios in there and it can see your iPhone going through the aisle, so it
can do, if there’s twenty of these in a store you can track somebody going through the store. You can
change the offers based on whether they’ve been to the milk already or not.
This company’s called Vintank. It’s a company in Napa California. They use all that Twitter data to see
what you are saying about wine in real time. If you say I love Chardonnay it’s putting you into a
database and building a profile on you, just by one tweet. They’re seeing one point one million tweets a
day about wine that we are all doing about wine. Probably half of those are coming from Steve Broback,
right.
[laughter]
Broback runs the Dent Conference used right here. They’re starting to put Geo-fences around the
wineries now. Think about what you could do in terms of understanding customers based on this data.
Let’s say you own the Caymus Winery. That’s a pretty good winery, two hundred dollar bottle generally,
right. Let’s say you own Sutter Home. That’s ten dollars a bottle. You’re far richer than that guy but
your wine sucks.
[laughter]
Let’s say Curtis goes to Napa and says oh I want to go to Napa. Well if Curtis goes to Caymus and tweets
I am at Caymus. I just bought a case of their Musar Red. Well I know he just spent three hundred
dollars a bottle on a case of wine. When he comes in to my place I’m going to take him right to my
reserve room and talk him out of some more of that cash that’s in his wallet, right.
[laughter]
But if you go to Sutter Home and you say man I’m having a great time drinking the Chardonnay here. I
know you’re drinking the eight dollar, nine dollar a bottle. That marks you as different kind of customer.
I’m going to take you a different kind of place in my winery. This is already happening without
technology.
If you go to Castello di Amorosa Winery in Napa there’s a sign. Are you a photographer? Are you an
Instagram user? Are you a, you know do you take pictures? If you do tell the clerk, well if you tell the
clerk you’re on a different tour than my dad is for instance. Because my dad doesn’t take pictures, he’s
not an Instagrammer. They have a photographic tour of the winery because they know you’re a brander
bastor. That you’re going to share the visual of that castle that they built. Yeah, they’re doing all sorts
of fun things and Vintank is hardly the only company that’s studying us in this new way that they’re
cataloging us with this new public data of social media that didn’t exist when I worked here.
Let’s talk about some of the toys that are coming along. These actually shipped after the book. This just
shipped this month. This is pretty new stuff. These are Bluetooth Smart Beacons. The Press calls them
iBeacons because Apples marketing is pretty good. But they’re not, that’s not an iBeacon. The beacon
is a piece of hardware that’s made to Bluetooth specs. You know lots of our phones have Bluetooth.
How many people have one of these here? Which ones, what do you have?
>>: I’ve got the Estimote.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: Yeah.
>> Robert Scoble: That’s the middle one. There are about thirty, so these are thirty dollars each, retail.
If you buy a bunch of them, like if you’re Wal-Mart and you need to buy thousands you can get them for
under ten dollars, probably even close to five dollars. They last for about two years on a coin battery.
This is Microsoft so this is going to be an interesting answer. How many people have an iPhone with iOS
7 on it? A few, you’re all carrying a beacon and you don’t even know it. It’s probably not turned on
because the software hasn’t been turned on. But if you have a newer app like Highlight that turns on
the beacon. The beacon spits three numbers into the air every second. If I have a phone like an Android
or an iPhone that can see this beacon I can know how close I am to you.
Let’s say we went drinking tonight and we’re sitting around for an hour and a half in a place. Well now
the system would know we’re in close proximity, Facebook, a new version of Facebook could ask hey
why don’t you friend that guy? He’s not on your friend list but you’re with him. He’s probably a friend,
right, suggestion, right. It probably can auto-check us in sort of like the new Foursquare Swarm is doing.
We’re going to see a lot of these things, the newer sport stadiums are getting these all over.
Sacramento Kings put thirty-five of these up. Apple actually paid for the baseball stadiums to have I
think up to sixty in a stadium. As you walk around with your phone the phone, the app that you’re
running will show you different information based on where in the stadium you are, and possibly even
who you are with. They’re already planning on ticketless entry to the stadiums, navigation, contextual
meals coming. Hey it’s the seventh inning and you always get you know a hot dog delivered, do you still
want that? Sort of like the Tapingo thing, etcetera, etcetera.
I bring in cars and other things in the book. We talk a lot about what’s going on with the car. This is my
friend, Andy who owns a Chevy Bolt. The Chevy Bolt has I think a hundred sensors on it. It generates I
think two hundred megabytes per second of data. Most of that data’s thrown away right at the point of
capturing it because it’s running an airbag sensor or a fuel sensor. But some of that data stuck around.
The car itself is changing to be an API. You guys know this. But the fact is the cars are biggest wearable
computers we got, right. Our phone is going to interact with the sensors in the car and do things.
Mercedes just announced a contextual car at CES this year. It’s going to know whether your kids are in
the car. If I say I need pizza, if I have an executive in my car that’s going to mean something a little
different than if my kids are in the car, right. Because if Curtis and I want to go to pizza we want to great
pizza and not you know some place where there’s a lot of kids, right.
They showed in live time how the system can switch based on the context of weather, driving
conditions, whose in the car, our requests, and other things. It goes all the way up to self driving car.
I’ve interview the guy who built the Light AR on top, David Hall at Velodyne, and all the way in, and
talked to the guys who run BMW. It’s a little bit off topic for the book. But it really is a contextual
system. It needs to know what’s coming ahead so that it can respond appropriately.
Way is a good example of this. Ways just the other day it really saved my bacon. Because it started
warning me there was bad traffic ahead and I turned a turn on the freeway and it was just dead stop. If I
hadn’t been paying attention and I didn’t have Ways yelling at me god knows, you know. This is how
accidents happen, secondary accidents based on dead stop traffic on a freeway. The self driving car can
know that from the contextual systems that we’re building and predict that it should start slowing down
going around the turn so it doesn’t have to do a panic stop.
Mobile is changing how we approach cities. You know when I grew up my dad never wanted to live
downtown San Jose, because that’s where the poverty was. It was where the crappy grocery stores
were. It was where the crime was. We just visited Curtis Wan’s office. He was showing me all the crime
statistics in Chicago on a Surface computer, it’s pretty cool. You should see his demo if you haven’t seen
it yet.
But now my son wants to live in the city. It’s changing into a newer; we call it a new urbanist. We
identified several of these people who want to live in cities. I think it’s partly due to the services that are
available in a high urban density neighborhood. For instance I have an office in San Francisco and my
house is in Half Moon Bay California, which is about forty-five minutes away. I can’t get Uber in my
house. I can’t get Instacart delivery use of groceries. I can’t get eBay Now. You know if I’m in my studio
and I lost my Apple power supply because I left it up here on the table. I can have one delivered to me
in less than an hour, right, in San Francisco. But I can’t in Half Moon Bay.
The government now is getting on the mobile phones, right. If I see a pot hole or a problem I can talk to
the mayor you know or the system and report that, right. The city is getting smarter and more fun to
live in. The services are out stripping the suburban neighborhoods. It’s causing a shift in our society
which I find is fascinating.
I think I put a drone video in here just to be gratuitous, geeky.
[laughter]
But this is my new DJ giant drone. Drones are turning contextual too because they need to understand
how to get back to home, how to fly around things. They’re, Apple computer is building this new
headquarters. They have a drone that sits on a robot that changes its battery and its memory card.
Then sends it back up and lets it see the process of building its headquarters. They have a time lapse off
their drone. But they also can see in real time, almost real time how the trucks are coming on, and is
everything moving smoothly. Do they need to make any adjustments in the work flow of building this
new building? It’s pretty interesting. It does bring into light another privacy problem which I’ll talk
about in a second.
We should spend some time talking about wearables on the face. I wore a Google Glass for a year last
year. I’m not wearing one obviously. I can talk to you about why. But it has a lot of deep flaws for
consumers around change of social contract. You know there’s a piece of glass between us and it lights
up, and I have to look at it. You can’t see what’s on it. It bothers a lot of people. I couldn’t figure out
what was bothering them. They kept saying you’re recording me. No, you can see that I’m not
recording you.
It’s the social contract that it changes. I wanted it to fold up, I can’t fold it up. They’re fixing some of
that. Oculus Rift is an interesting product. If you haven’t put it on yet you can, you put it on and you see
this three D world. You move your head and the sensors change what you’re seeing. It’s really
immersive. Meta is a company that’s sort of melding both ideas together into a very futuristic pair of
glasses.
It has a front facing three D sensor that builds a new model of the world as you look around it. It can lay
user interface elements or games on the floor, or change the floor, or put a stripe on the floor.
Whatever you want you know, its software so you can play around with the real world now. It’s an
augmented reality. It has two seven twenty P screens. I think a front facing camera. It’s pretty
interesting.
The problem is this is still too heavy, too expensive, and it’s three, four, five years out. I think you know
this year and next year is pretty much going to be about this, and maybe sensors in shirts and shoes.
This is a little bit further off. Glass is going to be used in vertical markets I think. But all of these are
really contextualisers. The Google Glass is the first consumer electronics gadget that knows where I’m
aimed and can change what it displays.
I use this app on my phone called Homesnap. If you use Homesnap you take a picture of the house that
you’re looking at. It tells you the MLS data. It tells you how much it sold for and all sort of fun stuff.
Just because it knows where you are and where you’re aiming. It doesn’t really need the camera at all,
but, right. Because it just needs the GPS data and it needs to know the plot of land that you’re aiming
at, and it can display stuff to you.
Usually after I give my talk we have a deep conversation about privacy. Are you all freaked out at all by
this world where, I mean go back to the cars? Do you know that the data that the Tesla is studying on
you if you turn it on?
[laughter]
You saw this when the New York Times gave it a bad review. They drove it from I think Boston, New
York to Boston. The reviewer said oh it ran out of power two thirds of the way through, or something
like that. Had a picture of it being towed away, and gave it a bad review. Elon Musk said; well let’s talk
about the data.
[laughter]
He had proof that the guy had done donuts in the parking lot. That he had turned the heat up all the
way and other things. In other words we’re heading into a world where we’re always going to be
surveilled. I mean we’re all holding phone, right. That sensor already knows whether it’s in your pocket
or in your hand. I’ve seen this software, or whether you’re walking around with it. It changes on the
screen say you’re walking around right now. Because it can sense that you’re you know, so the sensors
are already able to give it a lot of contextual data. Plus all the stuff that, I mean there’s a camera back
there that’s watching us. It’s being translated to thirty-five languages or something like that, thanks to
Skype, right.
[laughter]
Right, I mean it’s crazy the world that you guys are building. I assume that we’re going to do it. We’re
going to do it because there’s going to be utility. At this point I usually ask people how many people
don’t use credit cards. Is there anybody here doesn’t use a credit card? Yeah, I didn’t think so. It’s very
rare that somebody raises their hand says I don’t have a credit card. That’s the largest gifting of private
information to a public company that we’ve ever done. Far more than some of this stuff will do. We do
it because we get deep utility for doing it. We’re protected against being robbed. We get free credit or
credit that we pay a lot of money for.
I think this stuff is going to be the same way. These three D sensors are going to shrink down to point
where they’re going to be in your phone or in a gadget, right. We know that because this is the guy who
runs PrimeSense. He showed me a stick of gum and that’s the new sensor. That was a year and
something ago, year and a half ago already. Imagine what they’re doing at Apple to make that thing
smaller. What you guys are doing in your labs to make the Connect sensor smaller.
Soon it’s going to be in glasses and in walls, and advertising. You’re going to walk by an advertising sign
and it’s going to follow you around, well your things, right, in your lab you move around and its watching
where you are, and changes the data on the screen, right. It’s cool shit. But it comes at a cost of it’s
able to see your face in a far deeper way than just a little two D camera, right.
I don’t know where we want to go with this. That’s usually where I end up and have a conversation
about what else I’m seeing in the world, or whatnot. But, what do you guys think about this stuff? Are
you excited about this new world? Are you building the big data systems like Curtis is trying to, for
people who don’t know Curtis he has this visualization system that he can put something that looks like
an Excel Spreadsheet in, click a map, and it does a map, right, of that data. He lets you fly through it.
It’s pretty cool. You can see all the satellite data on another product you make. It’s pretty cool stuff.
>>: [indiscernible]
>> Robert Scoble: What’s that?
>>: It’s called [indiscernible] free maps.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah, I you know I remember, well you knew Jim Gray before he sailed out to never
be seen again. But I remember when he showed me the first terabyte; the largest database was a
terabyte Terraserver, right.
[laughter]
Today that seems pretty quaint, doesn’t it?
>>: You mentioned a lot about Twitter. But if you look at the student sticks like a small fraction of the
world is on Twitter, right.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: We just, we take this for granted. But what you really don’t see is both a [indiscernible] bias of all
the things that haven’t happened.
>> Robert Scoble: Oh, yeah.
>>: Because when we look at [indiscernible] just practically at the things that have happened. Also it’s
sort of hard to tell like which one is a mass market which is between what will end up being a total
niche.
>> Robert Scoble: It’s hard to tell that. Big companies are you know I remember having arguments
when I worked here at Microsoft you know should we pay attention to social? The answer then was no
from Bill directly, right, you know.
[laughter]
Maybe that was a mistake. Three hundred million people today are on Twitter. One point three billion
people are on Facebook. That’s a pretty nice number. I think Microsoft likes those kinds of numbers.
>>: [indiscernible]
>> Robert Scoble: They’re finally starting to affect, they’re finally starting to get to the numbers that you
know that move the needle at a company like Microsoft. I assume that if there’s utility that people will
adopt. I am seeing utility in better condors and in better shopping systems. Amazon, right, Amazon
published our book. When you buy just one book off of Amazon it starts recommending all sorts of
other things, because it puts you in a queue with people like you who bought that book. The
suggestions are so good, you know.
That’s stuff, that’s five, ten year old technology. It’s not really mind blowing new contextual technology
on your mobile phone using sensors to study me in some new way, right. Yeah?
>>: Do you think this is actually changing things that much or is it more bringing it to the broader
market? Like your Amazon example that was available a long time ago to the publishers. Where they
had all the data of what books were selling and so that’s who they would actually choose as their
authors. That would be what was available for purchase rather than saying buy this.
>> Robert Scoble: I…
>>: Is this really much different than what’s going on before?
>> Robert Scoble: I think it really is a change. You know talking to the, Google has a Contextual
Operating Team that’s like a future, future version of Android. They really say it is a shift in how you
think about software. Because you know when Microsoft started out it was put a computer on every
desk, right. The computer never moved. You didn’t need to write software that reacted and changed
based on what it was next to, and who it was with, and what kind of sensor reading it’s seeing as its
being moved around.
That’s a pretty big shift. I think it’s a pretty big shift. Start ups like Moves give you a little taste of what’s
coming. I saw a camera, a company that just uses two D cameras and just looks at faces, and already
can tell your age plus or minus five years. Just by looking at your face with a two D cheap ass camera, no
Connect you know kind of sensor. It can tell your gender and can tell your emotional state. At SRI I saw
another system where you just read two hundred words off of a card. It can already tell about seventy
percent of the time whether you’re suicidal or not.
[laughter]
But you think about the emotional experiments that Facebook’s been doing. Trying to see how addicted
do you get if I show you ten happy posts instead of ten sort of sad ones. This is, it’s a new level of
software that’s mixing social with sensors, with big data insights like what you guys are working on at
Microsoft Research, you know. Yeah?
>>: As an author and changing the subject just a little bit. What is your perspective on the pricing
pressure on you know these content delivery mechanisms have on the industry? Any…
>> Robert Scoble: Oh, that’s interesting. You mean from a book publisher standpoint?
>>: Yeah.
>> Robert Scoble: How many, of the people who bought a book in the last month who bought it on
Amazon? Yeah, I asked that question two years ago and that’s why I give up. My book is not available at
Barnes and Noble or on bookstore shelves unless they buy it from Amazon. Here’s, my first book was
published by Wiley. We’ve already made three times more money even though we sold about half the
copies.
For a book publish, for a book author this is a good thing. Plus I don’t need to deal with committees. I
hate committees, thank you Microsoft for teaching me that lesson.
[laughter]
I hate committees and I hate bureaucracy. With my first book if I wanted to give you a free copy I would
have had to convince a committee why it was worth giving you a free copy of my book. In this world it’s
my book I can give you a free copy. It costs five dollars, right, and if you buy it its twenty bucks. With
the old world you only got a paper copy. Today now you’ve got Kindle and Audible. Audible and Kindle
by the way are two thirds of the sales of the book. A third is paper. Most people are buying electronic
copies. The Audible I don’t know if you knew this. But I didn’t know this before I published this book. If
you read to page fifty-nine on Kindle and then you go in the car and start listening to Audible, it picks up
on page fifty-nine and starts reading it.
>>: That’s cool.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah it’s very cool. It sync’s up and you know, I’m a competitor of Amazon but
they’re smart people. Yeah, you have some questions?
>>: It’s a question from [indiscernible].
>> Robert Scoble: Online.
>>: Will there be a dominant context aggregator or can we expect each company to develop their own
private profiles for all the people?
[laughter]
>> Robert Scoble: Well, we’re in a silent world right now. I mean my Nest Thermostat has data on me,
my Drop Cam even though it’s owned by the same company doesn’t hook up to that, right. I assume it
will. I assume Google Now is going to be the aggregator for the Google data. But there’s still a lot of
shoes to come and wearable things, and things on your wrists. Soon we’re going to have a, yeah, oh,
yeah I took out a slide.
There’s going to be heath packs on us soon. I was in an R and B Lab in Dublin or in Cork Ireland that
makes silicon based needles. I put my finger on it and it felt like sandpaper. But the needle goes deep
enough in your skin to pull out a few cells of blood and do something with it. Like test is for glucose
level or whatnot. You could imagine you’re going to wear a little thing like this that’s going do all sorts
of stuff.
At SRI they have a sensor that today is this big, that senses whether you have pancreatic cancer out of a
few cells of blood, right. We’re going to you know ten years from now we’re going to wear things on
our skin that are going to tell us whether we’re having a heart attack tomorrow, whether we have,
seriously there’s a sensor coming that tells, that looks a certain chemicals when your heart gets under
stress is going to warn you that you’re going to, that you need to go to the doctor now.
>>: Most people [indiscernible] like a good certain of the population will get a heart attack and won’t
know about it.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah, I have two friends who have had quad bypasses, right. They were lucky enough
to get to the doctor in time; hours do matter in some of these situations, right. Having a sensor, that’s
what I’m saying there’s going to be deep utility to doing this stuff. It might save your life. It might tell
you, you need to go to see a psychiatrist if your words are coming out suicidal, right, like that card did,
right.
>>: Hey, I really love all the concrete examples you gave. Kind of like you know here’s location based
sensing. You can understand what wineries people have been doing market to them accordingly, right.
>> Robert Scoble: Yep.
>>: For the camera example you gave at the end. You know understanding facial expressions.
>> Robert Scoble: Yep.
>>: You know more broadly speaking automatically understanding every detail of what’s coming up, the
cameras, and what pictures online actually mean. What do you think the utility will be in that? What’s
some of the fallout we’ll see or branded be to that?
>> Robert Scoble: Well, the first one is marketers are going to use it to figure out how to arrange stores
to maximize their profits. Let’s just be honest. But we’re going to use this kind of data to understand
the Facebook newsfeed, right. Take that emotional experiment to the next level. If I show you a happy
poster do you actually smile, do you laugh? Does it make you have an emotional reaction in your face if
you read something about Gaza right now? Does your face change? I bet it does.
It could feed back that information that you didn’t even click like or dislike, or hide, your face showed it.
It could make the feed better. It might, we should spend a whole hour talking about Facebook. My
Facebook looks completely different than most of your Facebook. It’s, well let’s pull it up you know.
[laughter]
I mean we do have the internet here. You know but most people’s Facebook feeds are full of memes
and stuff like that. Well here, you know here is Jason taking a picture of me right there. But here’s Scott
Jordan, CEO, the guy who made my shirt, Antony McGregor Day is married to the Social Media VP at
indiegogo. Alex Fielding is a friend of Steve Wozniak’s and is running a few really interesting companies.
Okay, Lincoln Park, I like Lincoln Park, they like me too.
[laughter]
Alex Fielding again, Paul Mabry is the CEO of that Vintank Company. Twitter just doubled its revenues
he said, so let’s like that, yeah.
[laughter]
Teresa Valdez client who’s a friend of three of ours at least is there. The Verge, George Kliger, I forget
who he, what, he’s a photographer, Sam Levin runs PR for JBL. My feed is very different and has a lot of
tech on it, a lot of tech news most of the time. Where most of my friends feeds are full of memes and
cat photos, and cute videos, and stuff like that.
[laughter]
Because that’s what they clicked like on. They trained the filters to bring them more things to addict
them more, right. Yeah, this is already turning contextual. This is not one algorithm running this feed.
There’s hundreds of algorithms that are looking at popularity, sentiment, what might actually be in the
content. Is there a person there; is there a happy person, right? Because if they did their emotional
research properly they know how many happy posts to put in here to addict me to this thing and make
me click refresh again instead of going back to my normal life. You know, right.
[laughter]
Right, yeah.
[laughter]
>>: Can you talk about adoption patterns for some of this technology. You had Tempo for example
which I think is a great app.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: But it failed in the App Store; it didn’t do very well at all. A lot of companies end products that you
and a lot of people in this room would be jazzed by, but the general average user which doesn’t care.
Same thing with your Facebook feed…
>> Robert Scoble: I don’t agree with you there. I sat at a concert and I sat next to an insurance sale
person from Chicago. He did have no clue who I was. He was like poking on his Android phone. Then
I’d strike up a conversation with him and he’s like have you seen this thing called Google Now? I go
yeah, yeah, yeah. It is cool and I’m going to feed it more data because it keeps getting better the more I
tell it about myself. I’m like you’re an insurance sales person from Chicago.
[laughter]
Because you just said exactly what the Google executives would have said at the product lunch, right.
He already got it. I think the world is going to get it. Now I don’t know who the winner is going to be. I
mean if we go back to when Bill Gates was building basic compilers even he didn’t know he was going to
run the world of operation systems. Because he sent IBM twice down to DRI Research to get CPM from
this little company down in Pacific Grove. They fucked it up.
[laughter]
Big mistake, but I don’t know who the winners are going to be. This is early days. I mean the stuff I’m
seeing on Facebook newsfeed is just giving me a little taste of what it’ll be like in ten years, right, yeah,
Steve.
>>: Robert can you count on what’s been learned in eighteen months on expectations are on privacy, or
what’s changed.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: Specifically, should we be building some ridiculous control panel for those who are in charge of their
privacy, or should we just be building a giant ULA that people click through and never…
[laughter]
>>: We already have that.
>>: I like that controls better.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: Yes.
>> Robert Scoble: I think both. But, I don’t know, if I knew those answers I’d start a company or I’d
come back to Microsoft and run a product team.
[laughter]
Because you know Snapchat for instance has gotten popular. When I talk to kids about why because I go
to Coachella and see people on different social things, and I’m like why do you use that? Well, I, there’s
drama on Facebook. That’s how they talk, right. What do you mean about drama? Well if I click like on
the wrong persons post then my, then the other girl goes why are you liking her post, you know. I have
that drama at home.
[laughter]
Why are you clicking on that girl’s feed all the time, you know.
[laughter]
Snapchat took advantage of a need to remove drama and consequences from social behaviors online
because the post disappears so the other girl can’t see it for very long, if it can be seen at all, right.
There are product opportunities on both sides. I think there’s a new digital divide. Okay, there’s a new
digital divide not between people who can afford technology and can’t, like we’ve talked about for the
thirty years. But between people who are all in like me and that insurance sales person and people who
are all out.
I had dinner with Richard Stallman and he was wearing a button that says, pay cash for everything, stay
off the grid, no Facebook. You know in other words don’t be telling this company everything about you
because it’ll be used against you. We can talk about how it’s being used against you. But there’s a risk
to all technology, right. That new digital divide is going to, there’s going to be a lot of people on both
sides. You can design a product for the people who are all out. There’s plenty of examples of
companies that are doing new very private Skype types of things, like Silent Circle. Then there’s lots of
products that I think are going, I call it going over the freaky line that are going to bring utility in a new
way and ask people to give it a lot more data. I have a feeling there’s more money on, over the freaky
line than on this side, but I don’t know. If I knew those answers definitively I’d be building a company.
I’d be building a company, right.
>>: [indiscernible]
[laughter]
>>: I mean you go around and you give this talk to a lot of presumably tech companies.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: You talk to a lot of people. Do you find that people on average are sort of more excited or more
fearful, or is there sort of an even split?
>> Robert Scoble: Usually when I talk to regular audiences about a third of the people raise their hand
when I say are you freaked out. This stuff freaks people out. But then I ask who’s going to use Google
Now? Almost all the hands go up, right. Because there’s, if there is utility I think people are going to go
there. There is going to be a period of friction where we argue about it and we resist it. Because we’re
scared of, media scares us.
I’m seeing this all the time on Facebook that people have locked down their privacy too much. It’s
hurting them but they don’t know it. They because they’re freaked out by the media reports and their
friends saying oh, you’ve got to take off your location off of Facebook, or ah you’ve got to you know lock
down your privacy so nobody can see your page, you know stuff like that.
>>: What do you attribute to contextual apps and services you’re using on Facebook?
>> Robert Scoble: That’s a good question.
>>: Can you repeat the question?
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah, the question was what are my favorite contextual apps? Other than Google
Now I’m seeing a context in a lot of weird places like A Human is an app coming out in a couple of weeks
that you put your contacts into and you know other things. It starts telling me you know this guy is next
to you. Why don’t you say hi?
[laughter]
It also encourages you to join it which gets my contact list updated, pretty cool. I use Tempo. I actually
like Tempo because if there’s a conference call it tells me the pin number and I just can click on it. I
don’t have to type it in, stuff like that. It tells me a lot of data.
>>: Dark Sky?
>> Robert Scoble: What’s Dark Sky, because I don’t have that one?
>>: That’s the one that tells you it’s going to rain in ten minutes.
>> Robert Scoble: Oh.
>>: It’s the leading edge of…
>>: Which one?
>> Robert Scoble: Dark Sky’s a weather app that tells you it will rain in ten minutes.
>>: I have a convertible.
>> Robert Scoble: Oh, you have a convertible.
[laughter]
You know if you had an expensive convertible, yeah that would be…
>>: It’s eerie, it’s good.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah and the Micro Weather now is getting really good. As more and more sensors
get out more, and more Micro Weather can be reported back too. Because our behaviors change as
weather happens. Let’s go back here, yeah, let me lock into you.
>>: I think one thing you were talking about was like trust of sharing data.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: Do you feel like…
>> Robert Scoble: That’s a big word.
>>: Yeah, like with sharing all this data do you think that it’s, I should be putting my trust in these
companies to like keep my…
[laughter]
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah, trust is a big word. Ford CTO used that word, he, because we were talking
about Tesla and all the data that they’re collecting in Mercedes contextual car. He says you know I am
really freaked out by this world. I think my customer’s freaked out you know. Andy Grignon and him
call him you know NASCAR fans, or Joey bag of donuts average person doesn’t want their car surveyling
them when they go to a church or a strip club, or whatever, right.
I said there’s three things a company needs to do to earn trust in this world. The first thing is you need
to be transparent on the data you’re collecting. Google actually does a pretty good job of this. There’s a
data privacy dashboard if you do a Google search, Google.Data Privacy Dashboard you’ll probably find it.
It shows everything Google’s collecting on you and it’s a pretty long list. Kudos on Google on point
number one and I think you do similar stuff with Bing and other places where you’re collecting data.
Second thing is you need to make the data correctable. I use to use an app called Sage which was like a
Google Now competitor. It kept telling me all sorts of stuff about golf. It turns out I live on a golf
course. I’m on a golf course a lot. I hate golf.
[laughter]
I don’t ever want to see anything about golf. I don’t want to know about golf deals. I don’t want to
know about the golf pro teaching a class. I am not interested so shut up because it’s, and the fact that I
can’t make it shut up makes me trust that system less than if it had a way for me to correct the data and
say, yeah I live on a golf course. But I don’t like golf so stop showing me golf stuff.
The third thing is if you’re wearing one of these. My wife lost forty pounds with a Fitbit, right. This is an
accelerometer with a clock. If you have the Basis One with a temperature sensor, a perspiration sensor,
and a heart rate sensor. When I interviewed the CEO of Basis I said so basically you know when I’m
having sex don’t you?
[laughter]
He goes no I can’t see that data. I’m like yeah, but it’s there. Is there going to be a consequence of me,
of collecting that data, is there a way, Shel Israel wants to turn it off for a couple hours, you know. Just
say don’t study me. I disagree with him. I think I want to be studied in my life. But I don’t want the
consequence which is why Snapchat popped up and is all of a sudden a multibillion dollar company.
Because there was a consequence of doing it, of behavior, and the kids are like we don’t want that
consequence. We’re going to build another system that we can still talk with each without the
consequence. The guy who builds my shirts by the way he has a transmission proof pocket. You can put
your RFID. You could put your phone in there. It stops transmitting. You won’t get any phone calls
because of the Faraday Cage kind of thing.
I gave a talk at Maker Fair in New York. A kid in the front row said yeah I already built one. He had
already built something so he can hack the system and stay off the grid, and control the consequences
of this always surveilled world. I think we’re going to be, we’re going to be in a weird place for awhile
where we’re trying to figure out the consequences and figure out how to change them, and stuff like
that. Yeah?
>>: What is the one or two fundamental differences that you see between direct dual companies that
brand [indiscernible]? The startups that you see today like the ones that do sensors and other things. Is
there a fundamental difference in how they do an update and do things [indiscernible]? Are they going
to be in the same shape?
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah is there a fundamental difference between the Web Two Company sort of like
oh god, like Automatic who built WordPress or there’s a whole range of them.
>>: But the ones that use the [indiscernible].
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah, versus this new company. I think the major difference is these are people;
these are companies coming out of people who think about mobile all day long, and think about the
world of mobile that’s going to be around them. There are people like Tony Fadell who built Nest, right.
He came out of Apple the iPhone Team, right. He understood mobile at a deep level. He understood
how to make a beautiful great product that people would buy. He created a lot of value very quickly.
I think the next generation is going to be people who are adept at fusing data from multiple places.
Doing stuff like what Curtis is doing to visualize it or have a feature pop up that uses the fused data to
see something new in the world, right.
>>: But in a different, in terms of the valuation that these companies get. Even the reputable
companies [indiscernible], is there a different [indiscernible]…
>> Robert Scoble: Oh, differences in valuations I think how do we put that? In ninety-six ICQ came out
November first ninety-six. It took six weeks to get to sixty-five thousand users. Yo just came out and Yo
got to two million users in a few weeks. The speed at which companies can be built is much higher than
it used to be. The expectations for investors on adoption are higher. But when you do get something
that gets adopted it gets adopted at such a fast rate that the valuations go completely crazy really
quickly.
Uber is a good example. I’ve given speeches all over the world and every audience has had an
experience with Uber, right. How many people have used Uber here? Yeah, this is a worldwide brand
that is an only four year old brand, right. It’s a company that’s only four years old. It happened because
of Twitter and Facebook, and Google Plus, and Linkedin, and Snapshot. Because we can communicate
with each other and say there’s a hot new thing right now, try it out. Ideas spread a lot faster than they
did you know in the seventy’s, right.
>>: When you were mentioning about what’s already happened with the credit cards. I talked to
privacy with other friends that were tech savvy or whatever and they’re saying you know the world is
getting so scary.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: I say well imagine a world where every time you go and buy a video at Wal-Mart Walt Disney is
looking through the tampons you bought and the soap suds, and what isle you bought everything from.
That was my first job at Microsoft twenty-one years ago working with Disney tracking that data.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: It’s not new; we actually have more control over it, more awareness of it now. But this has been
going on ten, twelve years ago with you know…
>> Robert Scoble: Right, but what…
>>: Doing at Bing or MSN tracking people’s ads.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: Versus what like the porn people.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: You people on the [indiscernible] side. We’re tracking so much information so that one person visit
one site that tells them they’re interested in that. Suddenly they’re getting all their ads gone up; this
has been going on for dozens of years, so it’s just more awareness.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah, his point is that Microsoft has been doing this kind of contextual work for
twenty years. True and in fact the Google Glass was a thesis project in nineteen ninety-one, right, by
Thad Starner. I read his thesis paper. It delineates what Google Glass is word for word and it was in
nineteen ninety-one.
We’ve been doing research that’s pretty mind blowing for a long time. It’s just now it’s in your hand.
We didn’t twenty years ago you didn’t have a mobile phone that every single human being is carrying
around with seven sensors on it. You didn’t have a Nest Thermostat next to it, or a Drop Cam, or a
Lockitron Lock that’s going to unlock your locks. Hilton just announced that you’re going to unlocks with
it, with a phones, right.
That’s what changed. I think what’s also changed is we now have the data systems in place that are so
large and so fast that we’re now able to do real time products that are built on top of data, right. You
know a lot of new, well the newsfeed, right. I mean this is changing based on what we’re all doing
together. Ways is changing based on what we’re all doing together. It routes us around traffic. If you’re
up ahead of me in an accident it routes me around you, right.
That’s a difference. I mean when Jim Gray did the first Terraserver that was nineteen ninety, right,
terabyte. That was the largest database in the world here at Microsoft in nineteen ninety.
>>: You can take one more question [indiscernible].
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah, so things have changed. You’ve been doing the work but now it’s real and it’s…
>>: But part of it is, is that not just Microsoft but the world has been silently mining all this data for
years. People didn’t, weren’t aware of what was going on. They didn’t have any control over it. They
didn’t necessarily always benefit personally themselves because it was used against them.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: I think now the contract of trust and proctivity is different now.
>> Robert Scoble: Oh, yeah.
>>: The perception is there but in order to make that you have to now have a relationship where you’re
exposing, like you said transparency and trust.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: Because now I go and I see that Amazon warns me that this product is available from another
vendor at a lower price. But if you want Prime in two day shipping you click this button.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah.
>>: Now I can click the button because I know I don’t have to go look to see if they’re you know going to
gouge me.
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah, so let me see if I can wrap it up for the people listening. Yeah your point was
just that there’s now it’s a productizable, data is a productizable thing and it’s in our hand. I think that
really is a big shift. One last question, who had the last question?
>>: Robert’s going to be signing books in…
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah, we have books in the back and I’ll send them up front. Let’s get one last
question in the back, yeah?
>>: Yeah, a quick question for you. In the PC market we’ve seen certain form factors play out and
others not so much, for example Netbooks. Are there certain form factors or I guess you know
technology platforms that you think will be more abundant, or do really well? Then also were do you
think the pricings going?
>> Robert Scoble: First thing, what do you mean by form factor, you talking about like a watch or a?
>>: More like you know glass or wearable’s, like fitness trackers, or there’s certain categories, Smart
Watches that you’re more bullish on. What do you think pricing’s headed? Is it going to be repeated
history?
>> Robert Scoble: Yeah, we’re all, I think the whole industry is going to reconfigure around whatever
Apple announces on the watch.
[laughter]
If the Apple watch and there’s a reason for it. If the Apple watch sucks the whole industries going to
change its belief about itself, and is going to market differently. If the Apple watch if I get it and it’s
amazing, the whole industries going to have to readjust around that, right, because Apple owns a lot of
the influencers and a lot of the rich people. They’re the ones who are going to decide on how important
this is.
I don’t know, I can, I don’t know you know. I’ve heard hints; some of my friends have seen it and said
some say it’s amazing, some say it sucks. I don’t know I have to see the product and have it on my skin
for a week before I’m going to really have an informed option about that. Then the market is going to
do what it’s going to do.
Pricing is always going to come down. The guy at Meta, right now the Meta Glasses cost about three
thousand dollars. He, that company came out of military, just five years ago those were a hundred
thousand dollars. The cost is coming down at a pretty significant rate, Moore’s Law rate, half the price
every eighteen months. If you can’t afford three thousand dollars wait eighteen months it will be fifteen
hundred dollars, and wait eighteen more months it will be seven hundred and fifty dollars, and wait.
Then there’ll be a breakthrough and maybe it will be three hundred dollars. Also as the scales of the
sales go up, you see economy as a scale where things get a lot cheaper to produce you know, beacons
being a good example of that.
Anyways, thank you very much and I’ll be around.
[applause]
>>: Sorry to give you a hard time.
>> Robert Scoble: No, no that’s fine.