#68: CXOTalk featuring Robert Scoble

Hello, welcome to episode number 67 of CxOTalk. I'm Michael Krigsman and here with my friendly co host, Vala Afshar.

Vala, Michael, good to see you.

Fist bump.

We did a fist bump that no one can see.

Absolutely. That's a good thing.

And we're here today with Vala.

We are here today with some would consider one of the leading online technology community builder, a technology futurist, a best selling author, blogger, and someone who has probably the coolest title, one that I would love to have someday, which is a startup liaison officer. We're here with great Robert Scoville. How are you, Robert?

Doing really well. Thanks for having me on. Really honored. I've been looking through the list of people who've been on the show. It's really pretty crazy.

Well, can you tell us, I mean Michael, isn't that the coolest title, A startup liaison officer?

So what is that? What does that.

Well, really what they asked me to do is study the future. So for people who don't know what Rackspace is, cloud computing company, we're underneath like Ted or Oakley or Pabst Beer, we're the plumbing underneath a lot of these famous websites. And they asked me to go and study where the future is going so that they're not blindsided or broadsided by it.

That's fascinating.

So how do you do that? You talk with startups or how do you.

Yeah, I'm doing just what you're doing with me. I go around the world and interview tech executives. And last night I was hanging out here at a VIP party in Los Angeles. I'm here in Los Angeles this weekend and was talking to Mike Shinoda who runs the band Linkin park and hearing his view on the industry. So I get around the world and try to meet as many people as I can, mostly innovators, people who are running startups because those are typically the people who are pushing the future. You don't usually hear about something really crazy. Starting at an enterprise and then coming to consumer side, we study it the reverse way around.

So I mentioned you're an unbelievable blogger, incredible influence covering future technology, you're also an author and you recently co authored a book called Age of Context with Shel Israel. And it was about smart forward thinking companies and what they're doing in terms of improving contextual intelligence. And again, the title was Age of Context. Can you talk to us about what is context and why is it so important? And when did we enter the age of context?

Well, I think the iPhone really brought the age. That was the first smartphone that a lot of us were carrying around that had an easy to use interface and a bunch of applications that could talk to the sensors that are in the mobile phone. I think really that was a huge shift in what kind of computing we could do, because before then, Bill Gates ran the world and he made software that ran on a desktop computer or a laptop. When I worked at Microsoft, the vision was still put a computer on every desk in every home. Now it's changed a little bit because they've pretty much done that. So now they're trying to get it back into the mobile world, which they really did miss. In the United States, they have about 4% market share. But what's really happened is we now are carrying our computer, a device like this, and on that device it has sensors which can know where you are. That's a little bit of context. And then if you look at things like Google Now, Google now looks at your email and your calendar and even the Internet and even the Internet of things. So if you walk next to a nest thermostat, Google now might say, hey, would you like to take control of your nest thermostat? Something like that. So anyway, so the book is about sensors and wearable computers, which is the next wave of things coming, combined with social network data, location, network, and when you fuse those four things together plus big data, you can make a new kind of computing system, a contextual operating system, one that knows where you are, potentially who you're with. Like, I'm here at the Ritz in Los Angeles. That makes my context very different than when I'm home.

Sure, sure.

So the four things are social, mobile data and sensors. Is that it?

Social mobile wearables, which is really mobile plus, because soon we're going to be wearing watches. I have a couple around here or something on our face or something on our shirt. I saw the wearable Wednesday. The other night, somebody had a little pendant which is made for a piece of people. If they touch it three times, it'll call the police because maybe they're in trouble and they can't get to their phone. Something like that. Where it is, is the fusion, though. That's where the magic was for this book. The five things all have books on it. The Internet of Things has a book. Wearables should have like three or four books Soon, Social network. We had a book eight years ago called Naked Conversations, which was all about how blogging was being used by corporations. And then location data, foursquare, Ways Facebook, check ins, Google Maps, Apple Maps, NavTech, on and on. There's a lot of data about where we are all of a sudden. That was not true when we read our first book eight years ago.

Sure.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, I believe, wrote the forward for your book, Age of Context, and certainly a company that's been talking about mobile, social apps, data. Do you think Salesforce is positioning themselves to be maybe the default platform, especially with the Internet of things and sensors, in terms of capturing all this stuff and delivering insight to the enterprise and the consumer?

Yeah, Mark is very good. And actually, one of the reasons I wrote the book was to try to get ahead of Mark because I noticed what he does is at his big Dreamforce conference that has 100,000 people at it, he sort of comes out and says, oh, Salesforce is now for X. In fact, he just announced a bunch of wearable stuff a week ago. I'm sure this year when we go to Dreamforce, he's going to say Salesforce is for the mobile worker who's wearing things or something, the wearable worker. Really what he does is signal where his company is going to catch up over the next year and then the customers of his are really going to use that stuff two or three years later. And so he's really a brilliant marketer. He sets in everybody's head, oh, Salesforce is going to be in the wearable space and then two years later, when everybody's wearing an Apple watch at work or a Google watch, he's ready. Yeah, they're pretty well positioned if you look at the position. They're really well positioned if you look at the actual code and what they actually do. They have a lot of work to do.

Sure.

So a lot of the things that you're talking about are very future oriented. But tell us about context today, at this point in 2014, what are some of the more interesting examples?

Well, there's a whole bunch of them. I look at mobile apps and talk to the people building mobile apps and building the sensors, even for mobile phones. This year we got a fingerprint sensor on our phone. Well, that was interesting, but the cameras are getting sharper, the microphones are getting better, the accelerometers that are in the phones are getting better. Now, we saw a company like Moves, and very few people use Moves or know what Moves is. But Moovz is a mobile app that Facebook just bought. And Moves already knows whether you're walking, running, driving or biking just by watching the sensors on your phone. Nothing else that might be interesting to a future version of Facebook. It might just start the post for you automatically. Hey, I was running along the beach in Half Moon Bay. Well, it could write that for you and then you fill in the details and your post is already half done, which means that there's going to be more posts, which helps Facebook's business model out.

Yeah, I thought I read you had mentioned that some of the sensor technology that you get to see well in advance of any of us could be as much as eight to 10 years away from being product ready in the consumer hands. And when I read that, I was wondering, wow, 8 to 10, what is preventing this incredible. To go mainstream?

It's the same way when you first saw the first WI Fi radios, they were a big computer, like this big. And now it's a little tiny piece of your fingernail, that same radio. So it shrunk down in size and got dramatically cheaper and dramatically faster over the last decade or 15 years since Wi fi really was introduced. If you want to know where the world is going to be in around 15 years, you do the same thing. You say, well, what is this big today? Well, I visited sri, a famous research lab in Menlo Park. They invented the Internet and Siri and digital surgery and a whole bunch of other things. They showed me a sensor that can tell whether you have pancreatic cancer or not just by looking at a little piece of your blood, a little drop of your blood. That sensor today is pretty big and pretty expensive. You take that 15 years from now and it's going to be something that sits on your skin underneath a watch or something. Wow.

Robert, we have a question from Twitter, from Vishwas Monral, and I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly, and if not, I apologize. But he asks Scobalizer, you. Robert wants to talk to startups, but how can startups contact him? How can.

That is pretty easy. My phone number is on the Internet. It's 1-425-205-1921 and has been on the Internet for eight years. And my email is Scobalizer Gmail. So it's pretty easy to get a hold of me. The real question shouldn't be how do you talk to me? Because I'll talk to pretty much anybody. The real question is, how do you get to the top of the industry, which is really where you want to be? I just met with one of the Y Combinator companies that's going to be graduating in the next few months and there's 84 companies in just Y Combinator. And there's dozens of incubators like Y Combinator that are kicking out a large number of companies. So how do you get to be noticed when you're one of the 84 and the press all goes to Y Combinator, right? The TechCrunch goes a whole bunch of different companies, different brands, news brands go. But they can only cover five or 10 companies out of those 84. So that's the real question. How do you get noticed? How do you get to be important?

So how?

If I knew, I'd start a company. That's like asking a psychic, why don't you buy lottery tickets?

Well, everybody wants to know. So let's just talk about in your case. Okay? People pitch you endlessly. As a matter of fact, if somebody sends you an email, your automatic reply back says, sorry, I read everything, but I can only respond to 5% of the incoming emails. So what gets your attention?

If all my friends say, oh my God, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. Or particularly if somebody is good at doing that. Ron Conway or Esther Dyson, these are people who've been doing it for decades. Ron Conway was one of the first investors in Google, for instance. Google is a good example, actually. And this when I sit down with entrepreneurs and they're going into a crowded space, like Google went into search engines. They were the 17th search engine. And everybody in the industry thought, oh, AltaVista has this thing locked up. It's done. Let's move on to something else. No, no, no. Google came out and we very quickly figured out, oh, it's not done. And that's a lesson Google told me, just simply try your favorite search. And it took 20 seconds. And I said, there's no porn here. How did you do that? Because altavista always had porn in the result set when I did my favorite search. And that led to an hour long discussion of what PageRank was and how Google was going to make this happen and how they figured out how to do it. And that's really what you have to do. You have to have something so much better than all the other players that I can get it in about 20 seconds. And if it takes you 15 minutes to explain why you're better, it ain't going to happen. Because people are too resistant to change. If they can get it in 20 seconds, you have a shot.

Wow, that's amazing. I want to shift a little bit. You know, we talked about wearable technology and potentially entering a second wave with sensors and Shirts and all sorts of places. My company was working with a startup that's focusing on Google Glass.

Was it a vertical market startup like aimed at surgeons or something like that? Or is it aimed at CloudOptics?

Was the name of the company. And what they're looking at is capturing analytics from glass and, and being able to stream glass to glass. So one case study was you have a referee in a rugby match and you're streaming the referee's view through glass to other glass wearers. And also you're capturing analytics in terms of where you're looking. Because as you're in a stadium, if you can capture data in terms of where everyone is looking, you can now intelligently market to companies in terms of where digital signage could potentially go. So again, you can say better than 50% of the time everyone's looking here. This is a perfect placement for you to put your ad.

Well, let's take it away from ads because I hate the discussion of ads because it takes people off the discussion of utility. And if this thing has no utility, you won't have ads because you won't have any users.

That's right.

So if you have utility, and I right now Google Glass does not have enough utility. I have a pair and I keep trying it out. I wore it for almost a year and it just doesn't have enough utility for me to tell my dad, oh my God, you got to go buy one. Certainly not enough utility to get to over the fifteen hundred dollar price point that they're selling them right now. But let's say it did get to the utility and the price came down. And all of a sudden I was like, everybody should have one of these. Imagine walking into a football stadium and walking down the stairs to your seat and it shows you all sorts of stats about who's on the field. That would be cool. And if you knew where it's aimed, you could do that. The TV cameras already do that. They put lines on the field for you and they do other kinds of stats. At the America's cup, when there was a sailing race right on the bay, did you watch that? Because they showed the tide patterns. Because they had sensors of the tide and they showed the wind pattern and they showed where the boat was and who was sailing faster and stuff like that. That made the sport a lot more fun to watch. So imagine having something on your face that you're at a football game and you're watching the guy running down the field and it's telling you how fast he is going and how fast the other guy's going, you know, right away he's going to score a touchdown, because you can sort of see that. But you're going to have the data really quickly. In fact, at CES this year, I saw a sensor that the NFL players are going to be wearing, partly to help them figure out this concussion problem that they have. They have a real health problem where people are getting hit so much in their head that they're having health issues later on, and it's costing the the league a PR problem and a money problem. So they're trying to figure out how to fix that with sensors. But the sensors are also going to be streaming data live to the TV camera. So you're going to have a lot of when somebody does get hit, you're going to know how hard that hit was. You're going to know how fast they were running, you're going to know how many miles have they run in the game. Something like that. I mean, imagine World cup in four years, you're going to have so much data streaming off of the players.

But when Zuckerberg, in March when they bought Oculus Rift, I thought at the press event, he talked about, imagine courtside experience delivered through augmented reality. Wouldn't Google streaming from Glass to Glass be a good utility example?

Well, what I think Oculus is working on, and they're working on it with Samsung, is a version that's going to be very low cost that you put your phone into, and the phone becomes the projection screen, and then you have lenses that look at it so they can display stuff to you that way. The version I've seen is actually startups coming out with a phone, one that you put your iPhone into, and it has a hole for your camera, so it can see the real world and display that on your face. And then it can overlay all sorts of digital data on top of. So imagine you're at a basketball game and you're watching the basketball game. I think it's still more fun to be courtside and watch the real game, but you could use this to look around a little bit. And again, all the stats would be laid over the players in real time. And you would know if you're a new basketball fan that walks in the stadium for the first time, you probably don't know who all the players are. You probably don't know their stats. You probably don't know what position they're playing. You probably understand the strategy of the game at all. Well, here I could say, hey, wear this for about 20 minutes and watch what is shown on the screen and all of a sudden you're learning who all the players are and what their stats are and what they're good at and what their percentage of free throws are and all sorts of fun stuff, right?

Well, it's interesting. In a few weeks we are going to be doing a CxOTalk show with the CIO of the NFL. So maybe we'll have to ask her about context.

Well, one thing we learned in our book is they're losing a couple percent of the fans every year from the stadium to home because now we have these big. I have a 70 inch TV, a high def TV and that's pretty common even in my poor friends homes. They have big screens like that, right? Because that's they can't afford to go to the Ritz and stay in the Ritz and go out. So they'll put all their resources in buying a thousand dollar TV and then they can watch movies at home and music videos and all sorts of stuff like football. And they're losing fans to home because it's more fun to watch a football game at home than in the stadium, which is sort of counterintuitive. Right?

That's the real competition that all of the sports teams have these days.

So what the New England Patriots is doing is they're putting beacons throughout the stadium. And by the way, a lot of sports teams are doing this. I visited Sacramento Kings, they're putting these beacons. Have you talked about beacons on your show before?

No, we have not.

So these are. I have one on my key ring. Where's my key? Whatever. It's a little radio that spits three numbers into the air every second and it costs retail $30 wholesale, less than $10. The Sacramento Kings have put 30 of these around the stadium. So when you walk in with your iPhone or your Android phone, it knows how close it is to one of those beacons. So it knows exactly where you're standing or pretty close to where you're standing. So they're thinking about using it to do paperless tickets. When you walk in, it's going to know you're there. So why do you need a ticket? The ticket's on your phone. You bought it probably on a service on your phone. Why not just walk in the stadium and somebody could greet you at the door and say, hey Michael, welcome to the Sacramento Kings. Thanks for being a fan.

We've actually had Fred Kirsch, who is effectively the chief digital officer of the Patriots on our show and we'll Be seeing him at an event, actually, that you're sponsoring.

Yeah, on August 12th. We're actually asking. We've invited the CIOs of the Celtics, the Red Sox, the Bruins, the Patriots, all four teams from Boston, as well as the NFL cio. And this is exactly what we're talking about with them, Robert. It's at Gillette Stadium, and it's technology and digital business transformation to improve the fan experience. And it's really. How do you leverage mobile, social, app, cloud, technology?

All of them are doing. I mean, I was talking to the lead singer of Linkin park last night. He invited me to see what they're doing with tech. They're trying to do the exact same thing, give a fan a better experience for coming, even if they're 100 meters away in a stadium, because a lot of us don't get to sit up front. So how do you make this experience better? Well, everybody's carrying an iPhone. Why can't you put live video on the iPhone from special video cameras that are in the stadium so that you can see what Mike looks like? Because if you're 100 meters away, he's a little dot up there on the stage, right? And the New England Patriots is doing that. They're putting special video cameras in the stadium just for the fans in the stadium, not for the TV audience, for the people who actually paid $150 to come to the stadium.

We have another question from Twitter, and this is an interesting question, and it is from Gloria Lombardi. And Gloria asks, how will the age of context impact the world of work? Where will the future of communication at work sit?

It already is coming. Just yesterday, a calendar app that I use called Tempo got updated. So Tempo came out of the same lab that it was, the Internet, the SRI lab where Siri came out of and the Internet and all this stuff. And they're looking inside your calendar for context. Because if you're at work, you're probably using Exchange, and you're probably putting everything, every meeting on your Exchange calendar. I use Google Calendar, but one or the other, and it looks inside your email for context. So, for instance, one day I put a calendar item on my calendar, and it just said Flipboard. That's all it said. It didn't have an address. It didn't have anything else. And Tempo found all the email that Mike McHugh and I, he's the CEO at Flipboard, back and forth, setting up this meeting. And then it went out to the Internet and found the correct address because they had just changed to ops like two weeks before and put that on my calendar. And if you have a conference call, it puts the right way to do the numbers in there and stuff like that. It's pretty cool. That's an example of where an existing product gets better because of contextual systems underneath that are working to make your life better. Google now is another example. As I walk around like at Rackspace, once in a while it'll tell me, would you like to take control of this projector in the conference room? And how did I know that? Oh yeah, the projector has DLNA protocol, it's exposing itself as an API. And Google now on my phone comes along and says, hey, there's something here, why don't you take control of it? That's some of the things that I think are going to get better as businesses put beacons in their conference rooms and in their lobbies and stuff like that. Because when you walk into a conference room, all of a sudden that room is going to know you're standing right, you're sitting there and is going to be able to do stuff for you, make your life a little bit easier. That's one example.

You had said in a recent post that we will know 100 times more about our customers than we do today and the importance of data and analytical skills. So in terms of advice to future of work and companies, should companies invest more in terms of training staff or how do you develop the skill, machine learning and analytical skills to be effective?

Hire people, acquire companies that have those skills. It's a hard thing. It's a hard thing for startups. If you're a big data scientist right now and you know how to build machine learning systems, you have multiple job offers on the table at all times. Facebook wants you, Twitter wants you, Google wants you, Rackspace wants you, Amazon wants you, and on and on. And every little startup needs you because that's how you add features to your product. Back to the work thing. I don't know if you guys have had Brett Taylor from Quip on, but Quip is a new. I don't know that it's a word processor, but let's call it a word processor. It doesn't look like Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word usually is an entire document. You type it along and you formatting it and stuff like that. Here you might just added a little tiny piece and it just shoves that little piece over the network. To everybody else it's really pretty innovative. And that's an example. Mobile is changing how we work with each other. We're no longer sitting at desks. I was at a concert one time, and somebody, a friend of mine was always on her phone, and I said, do people bother you because you're always on your phone? She said, yeah, but the point is, because I can work while being at a conference or a concert, I can hang out with you. If I had to work the way I did 10 years ago, I'd have to stay at my desk in front of my screen, because that's where my work is.

Unbelievable.

What about driving? Let's talk about Waze.

Yeah, I love Waze.

I love Waze, too. So, first off, let's go back to basics. Explain why Waze is part of the age of context. What's the context about Waze?

So just start from the beginning. Waze couldn't exist before 10 years ago. Waze requires you to have your computing device in your hand. So once we have a computing device in our hand and we're driving with it now, we can have a map that shows what other users are experiencing. When I drove down to LA yesterday, I had Waze on the screen full time, and it showed me where accidents were, it showed me where the cops were, it showed me where other drivers sort of were, because the data about other drivers is obfuscated. But at least you could see that there's a bunch of drivers ahead of you. So you know that the data is pretty accurate and pretty new, and you could even click on them and send them a message. But that's pretty goofy to do when you're driving. But it does really awesome routing, and it was very accurate in predicting how long it would take to drive from San Francisco down to la. And that gives you an example of how our world has just changed in a decade. Let's talk about car. Waze is just a piece of what's happening in cars. Cars. The car is like the largest wearable computer you have. It wraps around you, basically. And a modern car has, I think, 30 sensors on it. The Chevy Volt, for instance, that my friend just bought creates 100 or 200 megabytes per second. Now, most of that data is thrown away because a lot of it is for the airbags and for the fuel control systems and all that stuff. And it's thrown away because it's needed for a couple microseconds and then not needed anymore. But look at what the Tesla studies did you catch when Elon Musk, who founded Tesla, was arguing with the New York Times, who had just given Tesla a bad review, he had all the data about what the car had been used for. He knew that the reviewer was doing doughnuts in the parking lot. He knew that the reviewer had turned up the heat full blast. He knew everything about the car. And that's one trend. The other trend is it's now being API. A friend of mine wrote a Google Glass app for his dad's Tesla where he can say something like, okay Glass, where is my Tesla? And it shows right there. Or okay, glass, how much power is in my Tesla? And it says 30%. So you can only drive 100 miles sitting in the car. Even OK, glass, open the moonroof, something like that, and the moonroof opened up. It's pretty crazy to think about the modern car as an API that you could write code against. But there's a company called Automatic that sells a little device I think for less than $100 that sticks underneath your dash. And there's an iPhone app or an Android app that goes along with it and it tells you all sorts of stuff about your driving and about the car. If the check engine light comes on, it knows the code for that check engine light and it puts it on your phone so you know what it means and that's pretty cool. Sorry about that. We won't even waste time talking about self driving cars because we're not going to get that.

Well, I'm about to talk. It was funny. So we don't have to remember phone numbers anymore. We don't have to learn direction to get to places. Soon we won't have to drive. Are we just going to become dumber as the contextual intelligence curve grows? Or do we just have more time to do things that only we can do and not machines?

Yeah, that's up to you. You could get dumber and watch the Kardashians on the screen in your car while the car drives on the ground. Right.

Do you remember phone numbers anymore? Do you remember phone numbers?

What's funny is I remember. Well, I remember my best friend's phone number from elementary school and I haven't called him for 30 years. It's still stuck in my head. Right. That's how your brain works when you're young. Your brain is forming and some things just stick there and take 50 brain cells away from doing something more useful with it. But yeah, I don't remember phone numbers. I don't even know my wife's phone number. I always have to look at my phone to remember her phone number. When somebody asks, what's your wife's phone number?

But is this Any different from the advent of calculators, when we stopped having to do mathematics, you know, addition, subtraction, division.

Well, I had a chemistry teacher who said, you're allowed to use whatever tool you want in my test in my class, but you're going to be timed. And if you didn't know the right formula and you had to look it up and waste your time looking through 50 formulas trying to remember which one was the right one for this problem, you were totally screwed. You were going to fail our class. I think I failed it once, so I learned that lesson. You better actually learn the formula even if you have the calculator, because if you're wasting time looking through your list of formulas for. For your molecular conversion or whatever, you're screwed. Actually, it's funny. I just talked to a guy who got hired by Apple as a lawyer, and he said part of the interview was they sat him in a room for an hour and said, okay, we want you to write up a contract with these attributes and have it done in less than an hour. That sort of the people who are productive and know their stuff are going to be able to do that, no problem at all. As somebody who faked it and relies on the computer too much is not going to be able to do that and not going to be able to react to new challenges very quickly.

Sure.

So context and data gives us the foundation for making decisions, but it's not a substitute for either intelligence or good judgment.

No. And we will have a filter bubble. I've seen that on Facebook. If you click, like on cat photos and nothing else, you're going to start seeing a lot of cat photos because it's going to find stuff that makes you happy. And yeah, their filters will stick in a random news event or something from your friends, but your feed is going to have a lot of cat photos on it. My feed has a lot of tech stuff because that's all I click, like, on and comment on and share. Right. And it's studying us and it's trying to addict us. So there is a filter bubble there, but that's why we also hang out with each other. I hang out with you on the show and learn a lot of stuff. But that's why we go to parties. That's why we go out with our friends who might not be into the same things we are. We're shoved into proximity with each other. Even people who are not in our filter bubble. And those friends are. What? What's going to bring some randomness to our lives and a New experience, a better experience. We get bored after a while with the same thing. I used to be really into cigars and whiskey, and lately I haven't been drinking that much because I got bored with it. Now I'm looking for a new experience. The filter bubble will take a couple weeks to figure that out. Oh, this guy's not drinking whiskey anymore. Maybe this wants Italian food now constantly or something like that. So it'll take a while to reconfigure and bring that. In fact, one of the problems with this contextual stuff is sometimes the sensors are right, but it brings you the wrong data. For instance, one of these contextual apps that competes with Google, now, I won't name it, so I don't get in trouble, but it kept telling me all sorts of stuff about golf classes and golf lessons and golf deals, stuff like that, because I live on a golf course. So the sensor was right. I do live on a golf course. I spend a lot of time on a golf course. But I personally hate golf. And so you need to be able to correct this stuff and say, no, no, no, the sensor was right, but wrong. And it's not serving me well anymore. Stop showing me that stuff. I wish all ads had that right.

Right?

Dude, that ad just is never going to get me. So stop showing that to me. Show me something else that might get me.

We have a question from Twitter. This is from Zachary Jeans. We're shifting gears here. Zachary Jeans says, should conferences stream live events? And maybe more importantly, do you decide on where to speak based on whether they stream or not?

Yeah, once in a while I still have to go someplace that doesn't stream. It really does bug me. You know, I've learned by I speak at a lot of events. And, you know, even at Le Web, you're speaking to maybe 500 people in the audience in front of you. Maybe a thousand, fifteen hundred people. But when you watch the video and it gets online and 5,000 people watch it, you're like, well, why not spend my time going to the place that makes a platform for me to reach the entire world instead of just the rich people that are sitting in the seats? That's one way to look at it. My wife and I used to run conferences and we used to have this argument all the time. And the argument went, well, if we streamed our content live, then no one would need to go to the conference. That's really not true, because really what conferences are for is the networking and meeting afterwards and saying, okay, you said something really outrageous on stage. And I Need to unpack that. I need more detail to localize it to my own company. That's what I get value out of going to conferences for. It's not necessarily just the content on the stage. The content on the stage does matter. But I was fortunate enough to go to the TED conference one time and the content on the stage is incredible. And it still is better live than it is on the video. When you see a music event, it's better live than watching it on even my 70 inch TV with surround sound. Right, but that's not the value of ted. The value of TED is during lunch, you get to talk to bill gates for 45 minutes. I haven't figured out any other way to talk to bill gates for 45 minutes. That's really cool. Or Meg Ryan or. I met the guy who started.

You.

Know, retail store, major retail store. You know, it's just the people you meet at lunch are really interesting and you learn things from them at lunch. And I know many people who have gotten their companies funded at TED because that's, you know, who goes to ted? Rich people. Oh, they have money to invest in companies. Hey, can I show you my company? A friend of mine walked away From Ted with 6 million doll. Not too bad of an investment for $7500 to go to the tech conference.

We have another question from Twitter from Phil Komarney, who has been a guest on CxOTalk. He's a former CIO and now CEO of Startup. And he asks, how do you see context changing the way we educate students?

That's an interesting one, because education is changing quite a bit thanks to online systems like Lynda.com or Creative Live or Khan Academy. There's a whole slew of them that are trying to do online education. Even Stanford University, right? They put their class. I know one professor who put his class online and he has 100,000 students now. That radically changed what he was able to do as an educator. The scale of that is just pretty incredible. I'm not so sure. The context systems, if we get to the place where we can learn online like that, then the contextual system can study us as we learn and as we take online tests and as we interact with other students and other professors. And it can say, okay, you're now ready for the next step. It can be almost like the gatekeeper, whether you move forward or not.

There's a professor at Suffolk University that wears Google Glass and students can type questions to him during lecture without having to raise their hand or bring attention to themselves. And he's actually improving engagement levels because people text him questions and he changes the lecture narrative based on the questions that are coming in. And he also, I believe, has ability to see the profile of the student who's asking the question while giving a lecture. So I know at least one example where technology is being used, wearable technology, to better engage in a classroom. But what I wanted to ask you is as all of this awareness and contextual intelligence grows, certainly privacy is going to dramatically chain in the future. And I read you talked about companies have to earn the trust in order for you to give them permission to learn more about you. And you used Uber as an example and you said give a utility first, ask for permission second. So I wanted to learn a little bit. And you used, I think you mentioned Mark and Dreesens used free ice cream as an example, metaphorical example of getting people to exchange information for ice cream. Can you talk a little bit about your views on privacy and answer fast.

Robert, because we're almost done and we have at least one more Twitter question.

Ask me the hardest question when I.

Was waiting.

Because privacy is such a deep thing. And when you say privacy, everybody has a different idea of what they mean. Keep in mind, even me, I'm all public. I don't mind giving you my phone number and my email, but I'm not going to give you the password to my bank account.

That was going to be the next question.

But to me, even in my world, always in, I call it the always in world. And in fact, there's a new digital divide coming between people like me and like I had dinner with Richard Stallman and he's wearing a button that says pay cash for everything, stay off the grid kind of thing. You know, don't be on Facebook, don't give any data to any company because they're going to study the the hell out of you and do stuff. I'm on the other side. I want the companies to study me and give me good stuff. TripIt, for instance, saved me a night in Chicago because I give it my credit card and access to my Gmail, which is a huge shift in privacy belief. If you told me 15 years ago that I would give access to my email system to a third party startup which now is owned by a big public company called Concurrent, I would say you're nuts. But 15 years later, now I'm like, rah, rah, let's go. Give me more.

That's amazing.

Privacy is really under a shift right now to this newer world where we're going to give it a lot of data to make it work. Well, I sat next at a concert, I sat next to an insurance salesman from Chicago who didn't know who I was. He was just like, hey, have you seen this Google now thing? And I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool, isn't it? I didn't tell him I wrote a book on it or anything. He's like, you know, this thing is so cool. I'm giving it more data so it works better. And I'm going, yes, you're joining the all in revolution. The problem is we're in a shift and the three things that I tell companies are one, be transparent with your data, what you're collecting on it. Google is actually doing a pretty good job of that. They have a privacy dashboard that you can search for and it shows you everything, be correctable. That's the golf example. And three is let me shut it off. The guys who make my jackets, scottevest actually makes a pocket that is transmission proof to try to hack that and or remove the consequences of studying my data. For instance, if I have a basis watch on it has a heart rate sensor and a perspiration sensor and a clock. Well, if my wife and I are having some fun in bed, all of a sudden that thing knows, what are the consequences of it knowing that? I don't know. And we have to discuss that and build systems to protect us from the consequences of data that we don't want other people to know. Maybe.

Okay, so we have one final question from Twitter and this is actually an important question, I think another one related to education. And this is from Steven DiFilippo who is another higher education CIO and actually a former guest on CxOTalk. He asks what about technologies like ibeacon in education? Any thoughts on that? And again, we're running out of time.

So that's a hard one because we're still figuring out what it means at a sports stadium, much less what it means in a classroom. Keep in mind, almost all the audiences I speak to, none of them know that your iPhone has a beacon in it. Android does not yet have beacon transmit capability. Android can see the beacon and sense how close it is to a beacon. But actually all the Apple products have a beacon built into the product. IBeacon is the software layer on top of the. The actual technical term is Bluetooth Smart beacon. Right. Anyways, where am I going with that? If you're in the classroom all of a sudden, you know you're in the classroom because your phones can see each other, the teacher can see that you're there. The attendance. Why do an attendance roll? You know, everybody's here. I already know that. And on and on. We haven't even yet started dreaming about what this new Beacon thing means because we don't even know we have one already. And we don't know that the sports stadium we're walking into has one already. And like, I went to Coachella, big music festival, they had several on the field set up and a lot of people are carrying iPhones. So we haven't even started thinking about how to use it at a sports stadium or a museum or a retail store yet. Retail stores are actually getting fairly built out already. But we haven't even started dreaming about this stuff yet because it's too new. And so even me, I need to think about that. That's not something I can come up with right away.

It's amazing. I believe in retail, it'll become. Apple will probably have an iWallet, an iBeacon, Bluetooth. Low energy technology will get you rebates and it'll combat showrooming. And you'll get. When Robert Scoble walks in, he's gonna get a bigger discount because the retailer will know immediately you have an influencer on premise get you a rebate. That's more than the average person.

And so we're gonna go shopping with Robert.

We're gonna go shopping. So I think Beacon in retail will is the only way you can combat showrooming and actually take advantage of revenue per person on premise. That's where the contextual stuff is going to absolutely matter in a big way, in my view.

Yeah, I don't think it's about discounts either. When I went to Castello di Amorosa Winery, a big winery up in Napa, next to me was the CEO and he was dealing with a famous actor. I had the vice president of comms showing me around. So there's a pecking order to. Everybody has a pecking order. You walk in and everybody can be serviced better because they know something about you. Oh, you like Skrillex? Let's talk about that.

Absolutely. And I'd love to go shopping with Robert.

All right, so we're going to go.

I hate shopping, actually.

All right, well, this has been a very interesting show. We've been talking with Robert Scoble, who is. His official title is the startup liaison officer at Rackspace. And he just. Well, it's not so recently anymore. When did your book Age of Context get released?

Last September. Yeah, there's still a lot to happen because we're just. We're in the beginning era of this stuff. We're still figuring out since the book got published, beacons came on scene. Right. So it's happening and it's quite exciting.

So time to update the book.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, hopefully you come back. This was one of the fastest hours of experience in a long time.

Very fast.

Thank you very much, Robert.

Thank you very much. And see you on the Internet, on the interwebs.

In the words of George Bush, see.

You in those tubes, man. The Internet's our tubes. Exactly.

The interwebs and the interseam. So next week, we are going to be joined by Sunny Hashimi, who is the Chief Information Officer of the General Services Administration. And it's going to be a fun show.

Amazing. He's a great cio.

It's good to see you.

Good to see you as well.

Let's do like a. The thing is, no one can see the camera where actually Vala and I sit in the same room. We're like three feet apart.

Yeah. Don't let the secret out that our hangout is really in the same room.

But anyway, well, thank you, everybody, for watching. Thank you, Robert Scobell, for being our wonderful guest this week, and we hope you have a great week and we'll see you next time.

Bye.