Robert Scoble & Sascha Pallenberg on Wearables & the State of Tech

Hey, guys, Sascha from Mobile Geeks here. I think it is day two, three, four, five of CS. It feels like week 27 already. I'm here with Robert Scoble, and you know what? Even though that we wanted to rant about what's going on here at ces, we started to talk a little bit about what's happening in. In advertising, because I remember that you had an interview with the guy from AdBlock a couple of months ago. And I've been running this huge research in Germany last summer to reveal what these guys are doing and how they kind of created a huge gatekeeper on the Internet and kind of putting pressures on publishers, which is something where I have a fundamental problem with. Right. Because.

And I didn't even know. They don't tell you what they're really doing. They pitch it as, oh, run the ad block club. So that you don't get any ads, you know, and your page loads faster and you don't get all that visual stuff. And what they're really doing is shaking down publishers.

It's basically a secret advertisement network. You know, the idea of blocking ads is getting turned into their own little ad network. So they have this white list and they're getting. When you're paying to get on this whitelist, you can run your ads through there. And that's how it works. And I truly believe in this.

And you guys are seeing what, 50%.

Yeah, we have 50%. Over 50% of our readers are using AdBlock on our site. So this is basically a 50% of the revenue is gone. Yeah, that would be.

Well, that's weird because does it block on, like an iPhone or an iPad?

You know what? They even figured out ways to block pre vault ads on YouTube with this adblock. Plus they're even into YouTube already. And it's just absolutely insane. It's happening. So, yeah, 50% of the revenue gone. You know, that's why I can't buy myself this new Mercedes S Class. I would even do that. Which is also, like, owned. I think Mercedes has, like a 30% stake in Tesla. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they love this guys. But, yeah, I truly believe. I think this is from this electronic frontier. Guys, they were always bragging about information has to be free. And I think it has to be free. Right. This is also.

Who just left the Wall Street Journal is doing.

Whatmosphere.

No, no, no, they're doing a free site. Yeah, Information. There's a. Oh, God, I forget her name.

Okay.

But she's running a site called the Information and she's charging $400 a year to read the content.

And if this is your business model. Right. Then this is perfectly fine. But you know what, at the end of the day, let's face it, somehow we're creating trivial content. Right. There's so many other outlets you've made this. Was it on Twitter when you said, you know what? There are too many tech media outlets for not enough tech news.

Now Yahoo is investing in tech news, David Pogue is out there, and Kara and Walt left the Wall Street Journal and started a new brand. And they say, oh, it's the same thing. No, it's not the same thing. It's a whole new brand.

Yeah.

And now. And now the Wall Street Journal has another brand. Yeah. So there's two now where there used to be one.

Crazy. It's getting more and more.

Mashable just got, what, $13 million.

Yeah.

For funding. So there's gonna be more. It's like, oh, my God, how do you keep up? And how do you find a unique story when there's like, we're here at Consumer Electron show and there's teams of 40 people from CNET and TechCrunch and then. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And Gadget and Gizmoto and Verge and they're running it. There ain't that many stories, is there?

Yeah, yeah. You know, we're all running the same stories.

What have you found at CES Worth? And yeah, we're doing a blog post that.

That's a good question. How many have you done?

Or we did.

We did already 120 videos. And this is day two now. So most of that is crap, right? Most of that is crap. But you. You know what?

I just called your show a crap.

You're absolutely right, Robert. But you have to. You have to go with the flow somehow. If Samsung is releasing a new phone or Sony is releasing a new phone, of course we have to cover it. These are these huge OEMs. It's like saying, you know what? If we wouldn't cover it, we wouldn't get the traffic on the side. Plus, we are also interested to see the next generation. But what's going to happen with the phone? Nothing is going to happen with the phone anymore. It's evolved and now this year, it will be all about 2k displays. Who needs 2k displays in a phone? That was such the cheapest way for the marketing machineries of the premium OEMs to come up with something new to make us want a new phone. It's complete, absolute bullshit to have a 2K display in there. A 2K display, if you compare this to a 1080p, 2K has to move 70% more pixels on the screen. And we already have these problems with battery life. Good luck with that. I want to see something like finally a screen that I can use in the bright sunlight. The technology is out there, but no one of the premium. And I want to have a goddamn battery life of a week on a phone. Where's that happening? Right?

Keep dreaming, man.

Yeah, let it stay at least two or three days, I guess.

You know, if you carry a Mophie pack around with it, you'll get at least three days.

That's a shame. How is it called Mophie? Oh, yeah. Nice. That looks great. That's so rugged, huh?

Yeah. But you got to carry a big ass pack to keep your phone charged, right?

Wow.

You know, it's.

I, I think I have like four or five battery packs in my backpack.

I mean, I, I was, I, I got up at 6 this morning and started reading all the vlogs and on my phone, not plugged in. And my battery in one hour went from 100% to 35%.

That is insane.

The cell towers are just overloaded here and not close. Right. It's crazy.

But you know what? I think you raised a very interesting point. We have so many tech media outlets there. We are all covering the same stories. And now you have with weaker Walt Mossberg and Keras Brazil. I mean, they have this huge event infrastructure and conference infrastructure, right. And they're doing this like for 10, 20 years. Well, Wolfsburg is probably doing it already for 30 years. Don't want to offend him with this. But I mean, they're competing with all these guys like Engadget, the Verge. The Verge got so used even covering politics right now, I think this is all about establishing a media brand. This is not about tech anymore. This is the next media brand that.

They want to sell. Tech is covered out, you know, and that's why like I don't. I'm not doing a whole lot of press stuff anymore because I can just sit on Facebook and retweet something and add my 2 cents to it, which is an analyst.

Right.

So I'm, I'm seeing all the stuff and I'm watching it in real time. But I'm trying to play a different game for Rackspace. I'm building Malaysia. I mean, hell, you know, Andy's behind the camera. He helped build the iPhone, and Palm software.

Yeah.

And I was building a startup and we're trying to build relationships with.

Right.

You know, we just met with the CTO of Panasonic and. Interesting conversation. I met with CTO of Ford.

Yeah.

We want to know where the world is going and it certainly needs more. More data center space. Right. We call that cloud computing.

Right.

And because your car, if it's going to be spraying data from 40 sensors, Ford today collects what, 100 megabytes per second of data. Right. And it throws most of that data away. There's a sensor for the tires.

Yeah.

Tire pressure and sensor for the airbag that Collecting data. But you know, it might keep it for a couple minutes and then it goes away.

You know what? That's a good point. Let's forget all about this. I had this great talk with Julian Blinn before about smartwatches and smart glasses and what do you make out? Let's talk a little bit about Google Glass because I think the both of us can rant about this a little bit now after using it for quite a while. I'm using it for three months right now and I'm starting to get a little bit annoyed by it.

I need a glamour shot. The glass holes, the two glass holes. There's a few people with glass here. And it's interesting. It causes interesting conversations. I think for the first time somebody walked by me and goes, that. That makes you look like an asshole.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're constantly changing your sticker. Oh, no, it's a 49er sticker. There you go.

But let's talk about where. Yeah, this is. I have an Oakley ski goggle with a recon instrument.

Yeah. I love the recon jets. Yeah.

And there's a whole bunch that are coming. It's just. It's just. It's like being in 1976 and seeing the prototype for the Apple II and knowing it's going to be a big deal and it's going to kick off an interesting industry for my entire life. Right. I knew that. But there was no software there. It was command line. There was no Macintosh.

Right, right, right, right.

Yeah. The command line, you know, and.

And you had to program on a green screen. Oh, there you go. That was a fancy one.

It was really expensive. It was like $3,000 in 1977.

Oh, yeah.

The full package. I remember my dad bought a CPM memory card. I think it had 64K, not megs, not K of RAM. And it cost $2,000 for that card.

Right. I've had a ZX81. And for Christmas I got the 16 kilobyte RAM extension.

Yeah.

Because it originally had only one kilobyte of RAM.

Now we're losing the entire audience.

I know, I know, I know. Let's forget about this. Let's talk about Google Glass and the way, I mean, so many people are using them over here on the shuffle and I think it makes sense to use a device that is on the shuffle. I'm using. I have the Google Hangout app running on here. Our whole team is in a hangout. So I constantly know where they are and I can. The voice recognition is perfect. No, almost perfect.

But you have to plug in a battery.

No. Yeah, that's the problem.

Sucks the battery in less than an hour.

It's getting so hot.

So there's a whole bunch of things. Even I want to use it as a journalist to take a picture.

Yeah.

But then what do you do, you know, how do you edit it? How do you put a wrapper around it and put the tags and the title and the.

And that's not rocket science. To get it on my phone. Right. This is a very simple process.

You know, why the picture over here. But they're.

No, they want you, they want you to auto enhance it on Google. That's what they want to do.

You know, that's going to limit the market size and it's the kind of crap that Microsoft did for the tablet PC that let Apple take over the world because Microsoft had that kind of attitude. Oh, we're going to run Windows, oh, we're going to run Office. We're going to make you use our stupid software and it's not going to work very well and we're going to lock you into our ecosystem. Ecosystem and not fix anything. This thing has a lot of broken things to it.

That's quite interesting because I can see this. I think this is a change in Google's attitude, like saying, you know what? We are Google, we can tell you that you can only use it this way, you can only use it that way.

It's a prototype. We haven't seen the launch. I hope they're sandbagging us and just holding back all this cool stuff, you know, that they're going to release on launch day, let's say launch day's end of February at the Mobile World Congress. Right?

Yeah.

If they show me a great photo app that does that. If they show a great SDK where I like. I have a friend who built video game that aliens come to the ceiling and you shoot them by looking at.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like that. Right But Google was kind of saying, you know, we don't want to have any augment reality apps on on Glass, which kind of sucks.

Absolutely. That kind of thing is a killer use case. It's a little weird, but it's like.

It'S fun to play and yes, it's going to distract you, but you can't.

Get the damn app on my phone on my glass. I had one developer spend two hours hooked up to my glass trying to get an app side loaded on my Glass and it still didn't work. And so if you can't as developer, get other people to try your stuff. Yeah, you're never going to build a company in an industry. Right. So there's so many problems with it that are unanswered. We don't know the store, we don't know the price. You know, is this going to be a thousand dollars? That's 200.

That's not going to work.

Bill Gates and me, he'll buy it.

Yeah, yeah.

You will buy it. But the normal person, my dad's never going to buy it unless it's 300. Right.

Process still looks pretty weird.

It looks very weird. And it doesn't have the utility to get them over the, the fashion cost of it. The speaker still doesn't work very well. The microphone doesn't work. I can't.

You're still waiting for your 2.0 version of the Explorer edition. Okay, cool.

Still didn't fix much. You know, it made the speaker a little bit better. This thing breaks right here, right?

Oh, shoot. If you hit.

It's really weak. So they need to redesign the plastic to be more indestructible. The mirror, if you get salt water on it, it peels off. Or if I put a sticker on, it peels off. It's just. And also we need prescription lenses. Those are.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, but it's just, it's early.

It's a prototype. This is, this is 2020 for me. Yeah, this will be.

I mean the sensors are getting smaller. The coolest thing I think here at the S. Electronic show with the new intel of microprocessor.

Oh, the Edison. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What do you think?

I. I love it. This is, this is their reaction to whatever Qualcomm was doing in the last years. Right.

But also the Raspberry PI.

Yeah.

Or the Raspberry PI.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What's the other one?

There's all these Arduino boards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's so many.

Your Arduino board is basically this big Right. So.

Plus, I think it's even x86. Right.

So.

So you can really make the statement that we have a real proper computer. Right. You can sign up whatever operating system. This is going to be a game changer. I wonder about the price point of.

Should be pretty cheap.

Well, I hope so. I hope so.

And intel can make a lot of silicon very, very cheap.

I agree.

I think it's $20.

Yeah. And I truly believe that hardware is the next thing anyways.

A raspberry appliance. What, $80, 29, 20, 30. So it has to be in that price.

Yeah.

Let's say it's $40.

Yeah.

Because it's small. Right. But I was talking to Scott Jordan, who makes the.

The Scotty vest, and I was like.

Oh, you're gonna put a little processor in one pocket.

I would like that.

I was just over at Seagate and they're showing me wireless hard drives.

Okay.

That are pretty good.

Yeah.

And the hard drives keep shrinking. So they're putting a hard drive in phones now, which you don't even realize. The hard drive gets smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper. Put that in a little pocket and put a couple sensors.

You know, what Scott should do is. Because, I mean, you've been showing us this huge ruggedized battery pack here. What Scott should do is he should build a Scotty vest, not only with a little processor in there, but with batteries. I want to see flexible batteries on my back. Because, I mean, we have. We have two directions where the whole industry is moving. When my devices are getting more powerful, I just need more batteries. The more batteries I have, the more computing power I can add.

I forgot to wear my study vest today, but I usually have this in a pocket.

So it works out if you can just get it into the garment and you have a flexible one that is connected to your little Edison. And it's basically over some sensors figuring out how hot and how cold it is. And if it's getting too cold, it's actually even heating it up. And that's going to happen. There are some companies or some battery manufacturers working on this. So if you're ever thinking about moving to Alaska or, I don't know, northern Scandinavia, this might be.

I don't know if you notice, but most of the country is like under zero right now.

Welcome to Miami. I saw it on the news yesterday. So this is getting so interesting.

This is a big deal. Right now. You have a pebble watch. That was a pretty cool thing.

And the basis, the coolest thing about pebble Is. And I think this is very important for each and every company that is going to create smart watches, smart glasses, smart clothes, whatever. Never, ever compromise on battery life. It starts with battery life. This is a variable. And there's a reason why watches became so successful. Because of jewelry. And I don't have to recharge them all the time. What's the point of recharging a device that I want to wear?

At intel, they had a little pole that you could put your.

Yeah, yeah, I like that. Recharge.

Interesting idea. And that's where wearables have to go. Because I'm going to unclip my sensor, my Edison and put it in the bowl and it's all going to have to charge up.

I like it. I mean, there are standards around. The QI standard for wireless recharging is like five or six years old, right? And it's been around. But I would love to see, like, companies like Ikea say, you know what, each and every new Billy, whatever cupboard or table that we are, that we're going to sell now, they will have a wireless QIWI charger in there. I think Starbucks announced this about two years ago together with Nokia, that we will have some Starbucks cafes where we have this wireless recharging. It never really happened. I think it was a paper lounge, which kind of sucks. I will always remember this.

What else have you seen?

I think that.

Okay, in general, home automation, are you interested?

Finally? I mean, you've been working for Microsoft. I saw my first connected house from Microsoft about 12 years ago. Where are we at? You know what? At that time, it was as cool as each and every home automation that is running over here. Nothing really changed because all these manufacturers are the big ones, the big premium OEMs. They want to give us the full load. Right? You need to have. I need to have my Samsung refrigerator. I need to have my Samsung smart tv, my Samsung smartphone. Otherwise it's just not working together. There are no real standards, even though there are wireless standards out there, but they're not working together. So it's more interesting to look at these guys that are building ecosystem systems and infrastructures and modular systems. I think it's all about modular system. In the future. I want to see something.

Booth was packed over there, and it's a $300 device that the Nest thermostat, your Phillips lights, your security cameras and all sorts of stuff hook in. And then it's all controllable from the phone. I can turn on and off my Nest right now.

Nest is huge. I love That I, I love that. This is so smart. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the thermometer, thermostat. So that's kind of the central hall. So it's all about TVs.

Wow. TVs. Here they are again. They have TVs. I'm, I'm impressed.

They're a little sharper than that. Oh, and they're curved.

Yeah.

And, and LG, they can go flat or.

Right. 4K, 8K, it's been around like for almost half a decade. Of course they are beautiful. But you know, this is what's interesting when it comes to 4K devices with the announcement from, from Lenovo and from Dell. Lenovo at this 28 inch 4K for 799 and yesterday, Dell 699. I'm all in. That's going to be my next, next screen on my desk.

Seven inches.

It's. It's a money. No, no.

You know, I have two great Apple monitors that are. What's the resolution on an Apple monitor?

Oh, that, that might be. Yeah, 2500.

And what's the 4K all the way across?

3800 or 3600 by something a little bit sharp.

Yeah, I don't know. I, I don't have the sixteen hundred dollars to upgrade much. Well, I guess I could sell them on ebay for, you know.

Right.

400.

So, yeah, screens. Okay. I'm getting this. 4K is getting more affordable, but still you need to make sure that you're sending like 40 or 50 million of these devices into the market before content producers are actually starting to produce content. It's a chicken and egg problem. Let's go to Northrop. Because this is so predictable here. I think that's the next big thing. I think the car is the next supercomputer. I truly believe in this.

You saw the Mercedes. I re. Shared your video on the contextual part.

Yeah.

What does that do?

I mean, it's a bunch of sensors that they pack into a Mercedes and it's learning from your behavior. For example, when you're driving to your office, you're stopping at the same cafe to get your coffee in the morning. And it's kind of learning from, so a sensor measuring your weight. They know which person, which profile they can connect to the person that is sitting there. And it's changing the whole dashboard, the content that you're getting in the car. And I think that this is what you're talking about for the last two years. Right? We're in this contextual age right now.

Yeah, well, we're at the beginning and most of the car. I had dinner with the CTO from Ford, and. And then we've met the guy who does the autonomous car.

Yeah, yeah.

BMW.

Yeah.

It's a lot of fun, but they're scared of their own shadow. They're scared of privacy.

They're.

They're. Their lawyers are just like, hell no. Are you gonna make the car drive itself? And so their answer is, we're doing that research to make little assistive technologies, like, maybe it'll park itself but not drive. Know, not. Not be on the freeway driving. Or maybe it'll help you drive in traffic so you don't have to pay attention so much. But on the freeway, you'll have to drive. You'll have to actually be driving it at least until 15 or 20 years from now, you know, when the full, full autonomous gets trusted enough by the lawyers and by the. By the people. Because most people are like, I like driving. You know, I'm like, what do you call it? Joey Bag of Donuts. Joey Bag of Donuts, who's like a nascar, you know, Go nascar.

You know, he wants to drive his own car.

He doesn't want a car that drives. Right.

Well, I'm sitting in an autonomous train each and every morning to go to the office, right. It's completely computer driven. We have a free WI fi in there. And I like it. It's always on time. It's in Taipei. So whenever people are telling me I'm late because the MRT was late, I said, you've got a liar. Right? It's never happening.

So did you see the light rail here in Las Vegas?

Yeah. Yeah.

Las Vegas should have the best public transportation of any city in the world because it's one long strip, right?

Right. Right.

They can. And they can build on it, right?

Yeah.

From here to nowhere, right?

Yeah.

And it stops like a mile from the airport.

Why? Because the taxi.

The taxi union said, hell no. Are you gonna put light rail into the airport? We want to have that Disney to go pick people up and charge them $30 to go to the. Go to the wind. And it's worse than that. The taxi union also blocked Uber and Flywheel and all the. And Lyft.

This would never happen in. In Asia, no. You can build whatever you want, right? If it's cool. But here, it's actually even getting built by the governments over there.

Here, they're, you know, they get started by the mob, and it always has been corrupt.

That makes sense.

So whoever goes and puts $10 million down from the city council, greases the palms, gets the light rail stopped a mile short.

You know what's interesting? We've had this launch of this new Google open car alliance where they want to get car manufactured. I've heard a little bit of a secret. I'm not going to say which car manufacturer told me this, but there were only like three or four of them joining them.

Google.

When they were telling me that Google was quite pushy to have something to show here at CES to announce something. But the biggest problem was they wanted to get 100% of the data. And the big guns are telling them, no, that's not going to happen. We want to have 100% of the data. Right. But we're going to use your system. How's that? And that's going to be an issue.

Google is an intent satisfaction company.

Yeah.

Google wants to know when you have an intent to do something and when you're in the car. That's a lot of intent. I want to drive to church, I want to go to a shopping mall, I want to go to a ski resort, I want to go to my friend's house. That's a lot of intent to know. And the data is very, very valuable in that situation. I think that's why Google was playing or is playing around with this class, because this can study intention a new way. I, I wanted, I really wanted to say, hey, can I somebody bring me a beer right now? $20 a beer shows up. Yeah, I'm happy. Google gets $2, right? The guy who delivers the beer gets paid and the beer vendor gets come in.

I love that idea. You know, that might going to be quite expensive after show.

I pay for Uber because of the service.

Right.

Uber is, you know, usually $15 more than a taxi ride, right. Or maybe more if it's surging.

But you have a proper service dollars.

More than a taxi. Right? But I pay it because I don't have to wait in the taxi line. That's why I'm so pissed off that the city government here blocked Uber because I stood in a line for an hour yesterday, right? And I had, it's like no choice.

It's like they have no idea what's happening. Cs, why can't you. Whoever is in charge of this taxi union over here, why can't you just get another 10,000 caps into Vegas so.

That it's gonna more taxis in town than ever?

Well, it's still not working.

And also, you know, somebody who can pay more should, should be able to hire a Limo, Right. I agree, you can sort of hire one if you know how to call, but Right. Every other city I just look at my screen. Is there an Uber available and what's the price I pay?

Yeah, right. I like that. This is great. Let's go back to the car as the next big supercomputer. Once again, I think it's the next big thing, which is interesting that we see this. Well, Nicole, my co founder, she said this like a year ago when I said, you know what, Nicole, I think we need to start an automotive channel. Something is happening in this industry. And I remember Ford, they've been the first one about four or five years ago here at ces. Exactly. And at that time I got an email from Ford and they asked me, could you record a little video and talk about the future of mobile? Where is it going? I was quite surprised that a company like Ford would reach out. And I think they nailed it. They've been here, they got their whole industry over here at CES and Ford is at each and every show. They're here at ces, they're at Mobile World Congress, they're at cbit, they're even at Computex in Taiwan. Then they're at IFA in Berlin. They're at every tech show and it works out. Right now readers are sending me emails saying, you know what, I bought a new Ford and I'm not embarrassed about it, which is cool.

They gave me one to drive here. We drove it 600 miles.

Yeah, I like this.

And I love the front facing radar.

Yeah.

So they have radar facing this way and front facing radar and I have adaptive cruise control and keep assist and it, I try to make a lane change. It tells me there's a car in my blind spot. It's really, I think these technologies are life changing and life saving and I wish we would get to a fully autonomous car because I'm quite convinced a fully autonomous car is going to be safer. Do you see BMW took people out on the racetrack and we're sliding the car and having the computer do all sorts of funny nice skidding and sliding and it's faster reacting than a race car driver.

Well, you have to keep in mind they're doing this in Formula One already for 20 years. Right. When all this telemetry that you've been using about 20 or 25 years ago, they were capable of running a autonomous Formula one car around the tracks much better than any driver that was out there. And then the FIA was just kind of limiting it down. You weren't allowed to send data to the car any more. Right. And to control this.

Did you see the new BMW electric car, the i3?

Yeah.

It only has a range of 80 miles. You know, if I'm driving it, yeah, I have a little lead foot.

There are studies, especially when you're living in a metropolitan area, so that the average range that we, that we actually use is about like 40 or 50 miles. And you can cover about 90% of the user scenario with it. But still it's 24 miles from my.

Office to my studio in San francisco. So that's 50 right there.

That would work out.

But if I do an extra side trip, I have to make sure I have a plug somewhere.

And then you need to make compromise again.

They do have. And I went over there and I understood why they're doing this. If you want a white carpool pass in California, it has to apply to very specific rules. So you have to have all electric, like a Tesla gets the white pass. Or you can have a little bit of a gas engine, but it can't be more than double what the electric is.

Okay.

Electric is 80 miles. They, they have a little gasoline motorcycle engine with 2.06 gallons of fuel and it extends it to another. I, if I buy that car, that's what I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to do. But even that, okay, that gets you to 100 and something miles.

Right.

Pretty safely. I, sometimes I do more driving down here. I drove 600 miles, so it wouldn't work for me on a long trip. Get a different car for long trip.

I think it's quite interesting to see what happened with the Tesla guys in the recent years. Right. These are real pioneers and I just love how ambitious they are and how they're trying to build up an ecosystem. Plus, I love to read the reviews from Tesla owners. I think this is the most passionate breed that is out there. They are almost on this level of, you know, a kind of supercar owners club. So like some Ferrari guys that are meeting up for track days, the Tesla guy, exactly on the same level. And the car is a very emotional device. This is probably next to our house, this is the most expensive product that we would ever buy in our lives. And therefore, when you see a luxury brand and there's so many people out there that they're saving for 10 or 20 years to get this car right. And then they're signing the check, they're getting into the car, they're saying, you know what? This is my car. And it's a very Very personal connection that you're building.

I come from a German family and my godfather would order his car when he picked up the car. So he would. Because it took two years to get like a new Mercedes.

Yeah, yeah.

He would order his next Mercedes.

That could have been my grandpa. You did the same.

I'm gonna drive my Prius for six years or seven years to get, you know, get some value out of it because I can't afford to keep upgrading these cars. So that takes us to the car.

But now he's. He's a popular author right now. You're making a shitload of money with your book. There you go.

Yeah.

So you're going all in on the new S class. Yeah, that's fine.

The adage that you don't get rich writing a book is absolutely true. You write it so you can get it. Speaking gigs that may be making some money.

Three days ago, Nvidia did a huge announcement over here. They were launching the Tecra K1, which is 192Core SoC and it's faster than an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3. And they will aim at the automotive industry. So, I mean, it's that big. It's a 5 watt TDP. And could you imagine, you have like 20 of them in your car. You will have like a 2000 core supercomputer. And this is going to happen when we're talking about autonomous cars in the future. These Mercedes was using this last morning for the media briefing. They were basically saying, you know, we want to create a hundred million mobile offices. And when the car also has this computing power and you need a lot of computing power, I don't even want to know what kind of computer is in the back of the Google car. You need a lot of computing power for this.

It's about $300,000 because of the lidar. That is spinning lidar and the computing power and the other sensors that you need on the camera car.

Now we can get it in a device that big and it has this amazing performance. They were running Unreal Engine 4 on it in a little tablet. Of course, it will never make it to a tablet because the battery tray would be too high. But 5 watts is amazing.

I was over at the Hilton over here, and that's where you go for fun stuff.

Stuff, you know.

Yeah, that's sort of futuristic and, you know, more startup.

Yeah. Oh, the. The Shiny Soul is also there. Right. We're the north hall and the.

And I've done interviews with Meta. Meta makes a glass with two 1080. Sorry, two 720p screens.

Yeah, yeah.

With a front facing 3D sensor.

Yeah.

The guys who did the sensor. And the Sensor is about $20. So the sensors are coming down in price every year. It was $100 last year right now. And they are building a new operating system that maps the world as you look at it. So it builds a virtual model of what you're looking at so it can overlay information on the real world. And it's gesture control so you point in the air to click on.

So here we go. That's the manoratory report.

Grab something you could grab. We actually designed a, an object in space and then they 3D printed it out on a 3D printer. It was awesome.

Oh my God. That is. That is too cool.

So that's the future.

Yeah, that's.

I think that's four, three, four, five years away.

Yeah, yeah.

Google Glass is a lighter weight thing.

Yeah.

Even though it has a lot of promises, I think it's a little bit closer one to three years away. Right. You know, for normal people, maybe four.

But you're not going to Detroit to the auto show. Right. And you know what? Actually I think that the, that the north hall is bigger than the Detroit auto show. I've been there last year for the very first time and I arrived at noon and at 12:15 I was asking. So I'm gonna do with the rest of the day. That's it here. That's the international auto show in Detroit. That's just like. It's not even a haul at the IIA in Frankfurt in Germany where each and every manufacturer has a whole haul to show their latest cars. It was so small.

The thing I was jealous of, the Verge. They got out in the BMW self driving car, which actually is a car that isn't announced yet. They're announcing it on Monday.

Yeah, yeah.

So if you look at that video, really you get a little taste of what's coming. But they were taking you out on the racetrack and doing, you know, high speed maneuvers.

That's cool.

That's what I wanted. Take me on the racetrack and show me something new.

So in general, just to sum it up a little bit, see the little.

Projectors, which ones the Texas instruments, They're about this big.

I know that they're working on a fairly bright image. Okay, we need to check this out. I saw the previous generation that they were using with an iPhone. It almost looked like an iPhone. It's a little case and so it got even smaller. Now it's this Big. That's the only thing that they're doing right now to this instrument. They're so out of the SOC market now they're doing project. I like that.

And then we saw lots of drones.

Yeah, yeah.

Everybody wants to build a drone.

Wasn't this the best marketing stunt for the last 10 years to get Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose? And just six hours before the Cyber Monday started, he was talking about Amazon prime drone delivery. Said I really love my asshole. Each and every media out there was covering it. That's not going to happen in the next five or six years, not in the next 20.

First of all, the FAA is going to shut down drone delivery. There's no way they're going to allow moving things in the air without an infrastructure to, to control moving things. Second of all, most of the time it's not efficient enough.

I just saw, logistically it makes no sense.

Yeah, that's another. So I saw an 8, 8 blade octocopter. It's all carbon fiber, very lightweight. They can grab a five pound octocopter. Five pound cost $5,000 and it can only fly for 20 or 30 minutes. Right, because otherwise you have to carry more battery, which means your payload. You know, if you're only carrying a little GoPro, that's great. But then you start thinking about, okay, like we live in Half Moon Bay, right? And there's a community, so maybe you can deliver a drone in that community. But why wouldn't a truck just bring it to your house?

Exactly.

They can't leave it on the front porch.

Nobody's gonna steal your stuff.

Yeah, right.

And that's going to happen anyways. They got to shoot them.

And right now it's a five pound payload with fiber, with a carbon fiber blades and with a what?

Bezos was saying that 80% of our products actually meeting this weight range. But then you have the problem of the range of the drone, where I'm going to build these warehouses and 80% of the Amazon products, I mean we're talking about 10, tens of thousands of products. Logistically, it just makes no sense right now. It's cool, you know, it's gonna work out for.

I live right by the street where everybody drives. I watch the FedEx trucks, FedEx trucks. I mean, you know, and I'm in a small little neighborhood with how many people is there? 400 people? I don't know.

Could you imagine like 500 drones going that way? Plus you will have competitors and that's how you can tell that this was a marketing stunt. The next day UPS announced it. And like three days later DHL in Germany had invited like journalists over and he was kind of delivering a little medical pack somewhere. I said, oh my God, that's bull. Hey listen guys. Drones are around for four decades. We know that they can carry weight from A to B.

Now there's one product I think might work as a drug delivery.

Yeah.

Marijuana. Because that, that exactly one. When you want a drug.

Yeah.

You want it now. You don't want to go down to the store.

It's light, it's expensive. There's a business plan or condoms.

Things that have, things that have, you know, you don't want to go down the store and buy a pack of condoms. You know, can you just deliver it? You know, I don't want to talk to anybody about it. Stuff that has social taboo or. Yeah, or like that. Right. And you know, Taco Bell had a taco copter. No, you're not going to deliver food on a.

You know, there was a condom.

It's really.

Yeah, yeah.

And you could drop those off and nobody would steal them from your front door anyways because why would you steal a condom box lying on a floor?

Yeah. And luxurious. It makes sense. When you're running a business that only produces one product then this could work out. If it's only one product, if it's.

Light, particularly in a high density, if you can fly into windows and stuff.

But once again, it will be a problem with M2M communication especially to have standards so that they can also talk to all the drones of your competitors that are out there. So this world won't happen in the next 20 or 30. And actually I don't want this world to happen. Do you want to have like 500 drones constantly flying around and people, people will shoot them down. You will, you will be able to buy like I have here like drone catching nets on, on ebay or whatnot. That's good. But it was just so smart, right? You know, doing all the time. It was the most successful Cyber Monday in the history of Amazon. Right. And all the media really believe in this. Oh my God. Amazon is building drone delivery. So. Yeah, good luck with that. Right, so again, to sum it up, Robert, to be honest, this wasn't once again, not really a mind blowing cs. I think what we saw with cars is cool. We have a couple of really innovative smaller companies but the big guys didn't.

Have this on our face last year.

Right.

There are some trends that are changing and.

But it, it I saw 100 people wearing Google glasses, they're not mind blowing, right? Yeah.

And it's a long way from being a product where my dad has it. Right. Maybe I don't know that he ever does journalism.

Absolutely.

A surgeon. Absolutely. You know, a cop maybe is going to wear one of these. In fact, there was a study done with one police department that found that people who have to wear a camera behave better. Right. So cops behave better, are nicer to the community. And there's proof of what went down because there's a video recording, right?

Yeah.

I don't know.

There are fun things here, but you really have to find them, you really have to look for them. If you're just going into Central, how, where the big OEMs are, right. They're doing the same show each and every year. Right.

The reason really you come here is like last night we had a table at the Cosmopolitan.

Okay.

And we had somebody from Oakley at the table. We had a couple guys from Google, a couple startups. JBL was there.

It's a networking event. This is great because everybody is here. I agree with you. The real deal is happening after the show. Floor closed down, behind closed doors. We can see the next generation of devices that we might see at CES 2015 or even 2016. I think it's becoming so predictable because all what we do each and every day for 12, 14, 16 hours is just constantly looking for the next big thing. So when you're looking at development of fundamental technologies, it is predictable that there will be a product in two, three, four, five years. And that's why we're not blown away anymore. But still, I think the biggest statement of this is, of course it is wearables. They will be all over the place. It's about sensors, it's about tracking and it's about cars. And of course, maybe TVs. When you're into TV, they are still around. Right. So, Robert, thank you so much. We've been talking like for an hour or so again, right.

That saves us from walking around the show floor looking at an ipod case.

Oh, yeah. You know what? I'm going to do this on the very last day. I'm doing the Shiner hall, taking a look at all the ipod, iPad cases, styluses, smart styluses. A lot of Kickstarter startups are in this hall, which is quite interesting. And once again, I want to bow down to the guys at Kickstarter. You guys completely changed the whole world with the Kickstarter idea. This was the right platform that we need. Of course there's also Indiegogo out there, all the other guys. Right. But we needed to have proper crowdfunding platform where I can find all these cool projects. I even have like five or six hundred followers on Kickstarter that are constantly, you know what, Backing the same stuff that I'm backing right away. This is just so smart, and it made hardware so disruptive. Now we have this hardware startups while we've had only software startups for so many years. But, you know, somehow you need to start with a piece of hardware and then, you know, we're adding some software to it, and therefore, Kickstarter. Rock and roll. I love it. I spent more money on Kickstarter than I spent on new laptops a year, definitely. So it works. Once again, thank you, Robert. Thank you guys for watching.