(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to the Cookie Conundrum, A Recipe For Success an industry conference and summit from Quancast on the demise of third-party cookies. We've got a great industry panel here to break it down. Chris Guenther, senior vice president global head of Programmatic at News Corp. Chris, thanks for coming on. Xiao Lin, managing director solutions at Xaxis, and Somer Simpson, vice president of product at Quancast stellar panel. Looking forward to this conversation. Thanks for coming on and chatting about the cookie conundrum. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, Chris, we'll start with you at News Corp obviously major publisher. Deprecation of third-party cookies affects everyone. You guys have a ton of traffic, ton of audience across multiple formats. Tell us about the impact to you guys and the reliance you guys had on them. And what are you going to do to prepare for this next level change? >> Sure. I mean, I think like everyone in this industry there is a, you know, a significant reliance and I think it's something that a lot talk about audience targeting, but obviously they realize that third party cookies pervasive across the whole ad tech ecosystem, MarTech stack. And so, you know, we have to think about, you know how that impact, you know, our vendor the vendors we work with, what it means in terms of our use cases across marketing, across advertising across site experience. So, you know, without a doubt, it's significant. But you know, we look at it as listen. It's disruptive in disruption and change is always a little scary, but overall it's a it's a long overdue reset. I mean, I think that, you know, our perspective is that the the cookies, as we all know, is it was a crutch, right? It's sort of a technology being used in way it shouldn't. And so, as we look at what's going to happen presumably after Jan 2022, then it's a good way to kind of fix on some bad practices practices that lead to data, leakage, practice sort of devalued for our perspective. Some of the, you know, we offered as, as publishers. And I think that this is a key thing is that we're not just looking to as we look through post gen world, not just kind of recreating the prior world. Because the prior world was flawed or I guess I could say the current world since it hasn't changed yet. But the current world is flawed. Let's not just replicate that. You know, let's make sure that third party cookies goes away other work around like fingerprinting and things like that, you know, also go away. So, you know, philosophically that's where our head's at. And so, you know, as we look at how we are preparing you look at sort of what are the core building blocks of preparing for this world. Obviously one of the key ones is privacy compliance. Like how do we treat our users with consent? You know, obviously are we aligned with the regulatory environments? You know, in some ways we're not looking just to Jan 2022 but Jan 2023, where there's going to be the majority of our audiences, we covered by regulation. And so I think from regulation up to data gathering, to data activation, all built around an internal identifier that we've developed that allows us to have a a consistent look at our user is whether they're logged in or obviously, anonymous. So it's really looking across all those components, across all our sites, and all in a privacy compliant way. So a lot of work to be done, a lot of work in progress but you know, we're excited about what's going on. >> I like how you framed it, you know, old world or next gen kind of the current situation is kind of flawed. And as you think about Programmatic, the concept is mind blowing and what needs to be done. So we'll come back to that because I think that original content view is certainly relevant. It's a huge investment, and you've got great content and audience consuming it. Xiao, from a major media standpoint get your perspective on the impact because you've got clients who want to get their message out in front of the audience at the right time, at the right place and the right context. Right? So yeah, privacy, you got consent and all of these things kind of boiling up how do you help clients prepare? Because now they can go direct to the consumer. You know, everyone, everyone has a megaphone now everyone's you know, everyone's here, everyone's connected. So how are you impacted by this new notion? >> You know, if the cookieless future was a tik tok dance, we'd be dancing right now and at least until the next year. This has been top of mind for us and our clients for quite some time. But I think as each day passes the picture becomes clearer and more in focus. The end of the third party cookie does not mean the end of Programmatic. So clients work with us in transforming their investments into real business outcomes based on our expertise and based on our tech. So we continue to be in a great position to lead, to educate, to partner, and to grow with them along this cookieless future. The impact will be all encompassing in changing the ways we do things now and also accelerating the things that we've already been building on. So we take it from the top. Planning will have a huge impact because it's going to start becoming more strategic around real business outcomes. We're omni-channel. So clients wants to drive outcomes through multiple touch points of a consumer's journey. Whether that's programmatic, whether that's as a cookie free environment like connected TV, out of home, audio, gaming, and so forth. So we're going to see more of these strategic holistic plans. Creative will have a lot of impact. It will start becoming more important with Creative testing, Creative insights, you know, Creative in itself is cookieless. So there will be more focus on how to drive a brand dialogue, to connect to consumers with less targeting, with less cookies. With the cohesiveness of holistic planning, Creative can align through multiple channels. And lastly, the role of AI will become increasingly important. You know, we've always looked to build our tech, our products, to compliment new and existing technology as well as the client's own data and tech stack to deliver these outcomes for them. And AI in its core is just taking inputted data and having an output of your desired outcomes. So input data could be DSP data beyond cookies such as browser, such as location, such as contextual, a publisher taking client's first party data, first party CRM data like store visitation sales site activity. And using that to optimize in real time regardless of what vendor or what channel we're on. So as we're learning more about this cookieless dance, we're helping our clients on the steps of it, and also introducing our own moves. >> That's awesome. Data is going to be a key value proposition, you know connecting in with content real time. Great stuff. Somer, with your background in journalism and you're the tech VP of product at Quancast. You have the keys to the kingdom over there. It's interesting, journalism is about truth you know, good content, original content. But now you have a data challenge, problem, opportunity on both sides, brands and publishers coming together. This is a data problem in a way. It's a tech stack, not so much just, you know getting the right ads to show up at the right place, the right time. It's really bigger than that now. What's your take on this? >> You know, I, so first I think that consumers already sort of accept that there is a reasonable value exchange, you know, for their data, in order to access free content. Right? And that's a critical piece for us to all kind of understand. Over the past. Yeah, probably two years, since even before the GDPR, we've been doing a ton of discovery with customers, both publishers and marketers. And so, you know, we kind of known this this cookie going away thing is, has been coming and you know, Google's announcement just kind of confirmed it. And it's been really really interesting since Google's announcement how the conversations have changed with our customers and other folks that we talk to. And I've almost gone from being like a product manager to a therapist because there's such an emotional response. From the marketer perspective, there's real fear there. There's like, Oh my God, how you know, it's not just about delivering ads. It's about how do I control frequency? How do I measure, you know, success? You know, because the technology has grown so much over the years to really give marketers the ability to deliver personalized, you know, advertising good content to consumers and be able to monitor it and control it so that it's not too, too intrusive. On the publisher perspective side, we see a slightly different response. It's more of a yes. Right? You know, we're taking back control and we're going to stop the data leakage. We're going to get the value back for our inventory. Both things are a good thing. But if it's not managed, it's going to be like ships passing in the night. Right? In terms of, you know, them coming together. Right? And that's the critical pieces that they have to come together. They have to get closer. You got to cut out a lot of like that LUMAscape in the middle so that they can talk to each other and understand what's the value exchange happening between marketers and publishers and how do we do that without cookies? >> Yeah. It's a fascinating, I love your insight there. I think it's so relevant. And it's got broader implications because, you know, if you look at how data is impacting some of these big structural changes and refactoring of industries look at cybersecurity, you know no one wants to share their data but now if they share, they get more insight more machine learning, benefit, more AI benefit. So now we have the sharing notion but that goes against counter the big guys that want a walled garden. They want to hoard all the data and control that to provide their own personalization. So you have this confluence of, hey I want to hoard the data and then now I want to share the data. So Chris and Homer, in the wheelhouse you've got original content and there's other providers out there. So is there the sharing model coming? with privacy and these kinds of services is the open come back again? How do you guys see this? The confluence of open versus walled gardens. Because you need the data to make machine learning good. >> I'll start off. I mean, listen, I think you have to give credit to the walled gardens I've created. And I think as we look as publishers, what are we offering to our clients? What are we offering to the buy-side? We need to be compelling. We shouldn't just be, obviously, as journalists I think that there is a case of, you know the importance of funding journalism. But ultimately we need to make sure we're meeting the the KPIs and the business needs of the buy-side. And I think around that, it is, you know there's sort of three core pillars to that. It's ease of access, it's scope of activation and targeting, and finally, measurable results. So as I think, as us, as an individual publisher of so we have multiple publications so we do have scale, but then in partnership with other publishers perhaps organizations like Prebid, you know I think we can, we're trying to address that. And I think we can offer something that's compelling and transparent in terms of what these results are. But obviously, you know, I want to make sure it's clear that transparent terms of results, but obviously where there's privacy in terms of the data. And I I think we've all heard about like data clean rooms, a lot of them out there flogging those wares. And I think there's something valuable, but you know I think it's who is sort of the right partner or partners, and ultimately who allows us to get as close as possible to the buy side. And so that we can share that data for targeting shared for perhaps for measurement, but obviously all in a privacy compliant way. >> Somer, what's your take on this? Because you talk about the future of the open internet democratization. The network effect that we're seeing in virality and across multiple omni-channels as Xiao pointed out, it's happening. That's the distribution now. So that's almost an open garden model. So it's like >> Yeah. And yeah, it's, it's, you know back in the day, you know, Nightrider who was the first group that I, that I worked for, you know each of those individual properties were not hugely valuable on their own from a digital perspective. but together as a unit, they became valuable. Right. And got a scale for advertisers. Now we're in a place where, you know, I kind of think that each of those big networks are going to have to come together and work together to compare in size to the, to the walled gardens. And yeah, this is something that we've talked about before, an open garden. I think that's the definitely the right route to take. And I agree with Chris. It's about publishers getting as close to the marketers as possible, working with the tech companies that enable them to do that, and doing so in a very privacy centric way. >> Xiao how do we bring the brands and agencies together to get ready for third-party cookies? Because there is a therapist moment here of it's going to be okay, the parachute will open. The future is not going to be as grim. It's a real opportunity, but if managed properly. What's your take on this? Is it just more first party data strategy? And what's your assessment of this? >> So we're collaborating right now with ball grants on how to distill very complex cookieless future you know, what's going to happen in the future. To six steps that we can take right now and marketers should take. The first step is gather Intel on what's working on your current campaign analyzing the data sets across cookie free environment. So you can translate those tactics eventually when the cookies do go away. So we have to look at things like temporal or time analysis. We can look at log level data. We can look at site analytics data. We can look at brand measurement tools and how Creative really impacts the campaign success. The second thing we can look at is geo-targeting strategies. The geo-targeting strategy has been underrated because the granularity and DL data could go down all the way to the local level, even beyond zip code. So for example, the census block data. And this is especially important for CPG brands. So we're working closely with the client teams to understand not only the online data, but the offline data and how we can utilize that in the future. We want to optimize investments around markets that are working, so strong markets, and then test in underperforming markets. The third thing we can look at is contextual. So contextual by itself is cookie free. We could build on small-scale usage to test and learn various keywords and content categories based sets, working closely with partners to find ways to leverage their data, to mimic audiences that you are trying to target right now with cookies. The fourth one is publisher data or publisher targeting. So working with your publishers that you have strong relationships with who can curate similar audiences using their own first party data and conducting RFIs to understand the scale and reach against your audience and your future roadmap. So work with your top publishers based on historical data to try to recreate your best strategies. The fifth thing, and I think this is very important, is first party data. That's going to matter more than ever in the cookieless future. Brands will need to think about how to access and develop the first party data starting with the consumer, seeing of value in exchange for the information it's a goldmine and understanding your consumer their intent, their journey. And you need a really great data sciences team to extract insights out of that data, which will be crucial. So partner with strategic onboarding vendors and vet their ability to accept first party data into a clean room environment for targeting, for modeling, for insights. And lastly, the sixth thing that we can do is begin inform prospecting by dedicating test budget to start gaining learnings about cookieless. One, one place that we can start, and it is under invested right now, is Safari and Firefox. They have been cookieless for quite some time. So you can start here and begin testing here. Work with your data scientist team to understand the right mixes to target and start exploring other channels outside of just programmatic cookies. Like CTV, digit auto home, radio, gaming, and so forth. So those are the six steps that we're taking right now with our clients to prepare and plan for the cookieless future. >> So, Chris, let's go back to you. What's the solution here? Is there one, is there multiple solutions? What's the future look like for a cookieless future? >> I think the one certain answer is there definitely is not just one solution. As we all know right now, there seems to be endless solutions, a lot of ideas out there, proposals when the W3C, work happening within other industry bodies, you know, private company solutions being offered. And you know, it's a little bit, it's enough to make everyone's head spin and to try to track it to understand it and understand the impact. And as a publisher, we're obviously, you know, a lot of people are knocking on our door, you know they're saying, hey, our solution is one that it's going to bring in lots of money. You know, all the buy-side is going to use it. This is the one like unlock all the spend. And it's our experience so far is that none of these solutions are, cause I think everyone's still testing and learning. No one on the buy side from our, from our knowledge is really committed to one or a few. It's all about a testing stage. I think that, you know, putting aside all that noise I think what matters the most to us as publishers, actually something Somer mentioned before. It's about control. You know, if we're going to work with a, you know, again outside of our sort of independent internal identifier work that we're doing, if we're going to work with an outside party or an outside approach, does it give us control >> As a publisher to ensure that it is, you know we control the, the data from our users, you know there isn't that data leakage, it's privacy compliant. You know, what information gets shared out there? What is it what's released within, you know within the bitstream? If it is something that's attached to a, someone, a declared user, a registered user that if that then is not somehow amplified or leverage off in another site in a way that is leveraging bit stream data or fingerprinting and going again. And so I think that the spirit of what we're trying to do in a post third party cookie world. And so those controls are critical. And I think to have those controls as publisher we have to be collectively be disciplined. And you know, what solutions that we sort of we test out and what we eventually adopt. But even when that adoption point arrives it definitely will not be one. There will be multiple because there's just too many cases to address. >> Great, great insight there from you guys at News Corp. Somer, let's get back to you. I want to get your thoughts. You've been in many waves of innovation, ups and downs. We're on a new one now. We talked about the open internet and democratization. Journalism is under a lot of pressure now but there's now a wave of quality people, really leaning in towards fighting misinformation, understanding truth and community and data is at the heart of it. What do you see as the new future for journalists to reward journalism? Is there a way, is there a path forward? >> So there's what I hope is going to happen. And then I'm just going to ignore what could, right. You know, there's a trend in market right now at a number of fronts, right? So there are marketers who are leaning in to wanting to spend their marketing dollars with quality journalists, focusing on BiPAC owned and operated, really leaning into supporting those businesses that have been and those publishers that have been ignored for years. I really hope that this trend continues. We are leaning into helping marketers curate that supply, right. And, and really, you know, speak with their dollars about the things that they support and value in market. So I'm hoping that that trend continues. And it's not just sort of like a marketing blip but we will do everything possible to kind of encourage that behavior and give people the information that they need to find. You know, truly high quality journalism. >> That's awesome. Chris, Xiao, Somer, thanks for coming on and sharing your insight on this panel on the cookieless future. Before we go, just quick summary, each of you if you don't mind just giving a quick sound bite or bumper sticker of what we can expect. If you had to throw a prediction for what's going to happen in the next 24 months. Chris, we'll start with you. >> It's going to be quite a ride. I think that's an understatement. I think that there, I wouldn't be surprised if if Google delays the change to the Chrome by a couple months. And may give the industry some much needed time. But no one knows, I guess, I guess I'm not except for someone somewhere, we are deep within Chrome. So I think we all have to operate in a way that changes that happen, changes that happen quickly. And it's going to cover across all facets of the industry, all facets of, you know, from advertising and marketing. So just be prepared. >> Okay. Xiao. Along those same lines, be prepared. Nobody knows what's going to happen in the future. You know, we're all dancing in this together. I think for us, it's planning and preparing and also building on what we've already been working on. So omni-channel, AI, Creative, and I think clients will lean more into those different channels. >> Awesome. Somer, take us home. Last words. >> I think we're in the throwing spaghetti against the wall stage, right? So this is a time of discovery of leaning and trying everything out learning and iterating as fast as we possibly can. >> Awesome. And I love the cat in the background over your shoulder. I can't stop staring at your wonderful cat. Somer, thanks for coming on. Xiao, Chris, thanks for coming on this awesome panel industry breakdown of the Cookie Conundrum, a Recipe for Success data AI open the future is here. It's coming. It's coming fast. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

>>what? Hello, I'm john free with the cube. I want to welcome Conrad Feldman, the founder and Ceo of Kwan cast here to kick off the quan cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. The events called the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. The changing advertising landscape, super relevant conversation just now. More than ever. Conrad welcome to your own program kicking this off. Thanks for holding this event. It's a pleasure. Great to chat with you today. So a big fan been following your company since the founding of it. Been analytics is always the prize of any data driven company. Media. Anything's all data driven now. Um, talk about the open internet because now more than ever it's under siege. As I, as I mentioned in my open, um, we've been seeing the democratization, a new trend of decentralization. We're starting to see um, you know, everyone's present online now, Clay Shirky wrote a book called, here comes everyone in 2005. Well everyone's here. Right? So you know, we're here, it's gonna be more open. But yet people are looking at as close right now. You're seeing the big players, um, or in the data. What's your vision of this open internet? >>Well, an open internet exists for everyone. And if you think about the evolution of the internet, when the internet was created for the first time really in history, anyone that had access to the internet could publish the content, whatever they were interested in and could find an audience. And of course that's grown to where we are today, where five billion people around the world are able to engage in all sorts of content, whether that's entertainment or education, news, movies. What's perhaps not so widely understood is that most of that content is paid for by advertising and there's a lot of systems that support advertising on the open Internet and some of those are under siege today certainly. >>And what's the big pressure point? Is it just more control the data? Is it just that these walled gardens are wanting to, you know, suck the audience in there? Is that monetization driving it? What's where's the friction? >>Well, the challenges is sort of the accumulation of power into a really small number of now giant corporations who have actually reduced a lot of the friction that marketers have in spending their money effectively. And it means that those companies are capturing a disproportionate spend of the ad budgets that fund digital content. So the problem is if more of the money goes to them, less of its going to independent content creators. It's actually getting harder for independent voices to emerge and be heard. And so that's the real challenges. That has more power consolidates into just a limited number of tech giants. The funding path for the open Internet becomes constrained and there'll be less choice for consumers without having to pay for subscriptions. >>Everyone knows the more data you have the better and certainly, but the centralized power when the trend is going the other way, the consensus is everyone wants to be decentralized more truth, more trust all this is being talked about on the heels of the google's news around, you know, getting rid of third party cookies and others have followed suit. Um, what does this mean? I mean, this cookies have been the major vehicle for tracking and getting that kind of data. What is gonna be replaced with what is this all about? And can you share with us what the future will look like? >>Sure, Well, just as advertising funds the open Internet is advertising technology that supports that advertising spend. It supports sort of the business of advertising that funds the open Internet. And within all of that technology is the need for different systems to be able to align around um the identification of for example, a consumer, Have they been to this site before? Have they seen an ad before? So there's all of these different systems that might be used for advertising for measurement, for attribution, for creating personalization. And historically they've relied upon the third party cookie as the mechanism for synchronization. Well, the third party cookie has been in decline for some time. It's already mostly gone from actually apple safari browser, but google's chrome has so much control over how people access the internet. And so it was when Google announced that chrome was going to deprecate the third party cookie, that it really sort of focus the minds of the industry in terms of finding alternative ways to tailor content and ultimately to just simply measure the effectiveness of advertising. And so there's an enormous amount of um innovation taking place right now to find alternative solutions. >>You know, some are saying that the free open internet was pretty much killed when, you know, the big comes like facebook and google started bringing all this data and kind of pulls all sucks all the auction in the room, so to speak. What's this mean with cookies now getting, getting rid of um, by google has an impact publishers because is it helpful? I mean hurtful. I mean, where's the where is that, what the publisher impact? >>Well, I don't think anyone really knows right now. So first of all, cookies weren't necessarily a very good solution to the sort of the challenge of maintaining state and understanding those sorts of the delivery of advertising and so on. It's just the one that's commonly used, I think for different publishers it may mean different things. But many publishers need to be able to demonstrate the value and the effectiveness of the advertising solutions that they deliver. So they'll be innovating in terms of how they use their first party data. They'll be continuing to use contextual solutions that have long been used to create advertising relevant, relevant. I think the big question of course is how we're going to measure it that any of this is effective at all because everyone relies upon measuring advertising effectiveness to justify capturing those budgets in the first place. >>You know, you mentioned contextual come up a lot also in the other interviews we've done with the folks in the around the internet around this topic of machine learning is a big 12 What is the impact of this with the modernization of the solution? You mentioned cookies? Okay cookies, old technology. But the mechanisms in this ecosystem around it or not, it funds the open internet. What is that modern solution that goes that next level? Is it contextual metadata? Is that shared systems? What's the it's the modernization of that. >>It's all of those and and more. There's no there's no single solution to replace the third party cookie. There'll be a combination of solutions. Part of that will be alternative identity mechanisms. So you know, you will start to see more registration wars to access content so that you have what's called a deterministic identify there will be statistical models so called probabilistic models, contextual has always been important. It will become more important and it will be combined with we use contextual combining natural language processing with machine learning models to really understand the detailed context of different pages across the internet. You'll also see the use of first party data and there are discussions about shared data services as well. I think there's gonna be a whole set of different innovations that will need to inter operate and it's going to be an evolutionary process as people get used to using these different systems to satisfy the different stages of the media fulfillment cycle from research and planning to activation to measurement. >>You know, you put up walled gardens. I want to just touch on the on on this kind of concept of walled gardens and and and and compare and contrast that with the demand for community, open internet has always fostered a community vibe. You see network effects mostly in distinct user communities or subnets of sub networks. If you will kind of walled gardens became that kind of group get together but then became more of a media solution to make the user is the product, as they say, facebook's a great example, right? People talk about facebook and from that misinformation abuse walled garden is not the best thing happening right now in the world, but yet is there any other other choice? That's how they're going to make money? But yet everyone wants trust, truth community. Are they usually exclusive? How do you see this evolving, what's your take? >>Well, I think the open internet is a, is a forum where anyone can have their voice, uh, put their voice out there and have it discovered and it's in that regard, it's a it's a force for good look. I think there are there are challenges, obviously in terms of some of the some of the optimization that takes place with inside the walled gardens, which is, is sort of optimized to drive engagement can have some unintended consequences. Um obviously that's something that's, that's broadly being discussed today and the impact on society, but sort of more at a more pointed level, it's just the absorption of advertising dollars. There's a finite amount of money from advertisers. It's estimated to be $400 billion this year in digital advertising. So it's a huge amount of money in terms of funding the open Internet, which sounds great except for its increasingly concentrated in a tiny number of companies. And so, you know, our job at Quan cast as champions of the free and open Internet is to help direct money effectively to publishers across the open internet and give advertisers a reliable, repeatable way of accessing the audiences that they care about in the environment they care about and delivering advertising results. >>It's a publisher, we care a lot about what our audience wants and try to serve them and listen to them. If we could get the data, we want that data and then also broker in the monetization with advertisers, who might want to reach that audience in whatever way. So this brings up the question of, you know, automation and role of data. You know, this is a huge thing to having that data closed loop, if you will for for publishers. But yet most publishers are small, some niche. And even as they can become super large, they don't have all the data and more, the more data, the better the machine learning. So what's the answer to this as it goes forward? How do we get there? What's the dots that that we need to connect to get that future state? >>So I think it takes it takes companies working together effectively. I think a really important part of it is, is a more direct conversation with consumers. We've seen that change beginning to happen over the past few years with the introduction of regulations that require clear communication to consumers about the data that's captured. And y and I think that creates an opportunity to explain to your audience is the way in which content is funded. So I think that consumer that consumer conversation will be part of the collective solution. >>You know, I want to as we wind down this kickoff segment, get your thoughts and vision around um, the evolution of the internet and you guys have done some great work at quan Cast is well documented, but everyone used to talk about traffic by traffic, then it became cost of acquisitions. PPC search. This is either mechanisms that people have been using for a long, long time, then you know, your connections but audience is about traffic, audience traffic. If this if my family is online, doesn't it become about networks and the people. So I want to get your thoughts and your vision because if community is going to be more important than people agree that it is and things are gonna be decentralized, more openness, more voices to be heard. You need to dress ability. The formation of networks and groups become super important. What's your vision on that? >>So my vision is to create relevance and utility for consumers. I think that's one of the things that's often forgotten is that when we make advertising more relevant and useful for consumers, it automatically fulfils the objectives that publishers and marketers have, everyone wins when advertising is more relevant. And our vision is to make advertising relevant across the entire open internet so that that ad supported model can continue to flourish and that five billion and hopefully many more billions in the future, people around the world have access to high quality, diverse content. >>If someone asked you Conrad, what is quant cast doing to make the open internet viable now that cookies are going away? What's the answer? >>So well, the cookie pieces is a central piece of it in terms of finding solutions that will enable sort of planning activation and measurement post cookies and we have a lot of innovation going on. There were also working with a range of industry bodies and our and our partners to build solutions for this. What we're really trying to do is to make buying the open internet as straightforward for marketers as it is today and buying the walled gardens. The reason the walled gardens capture so much money is they made it really easy for marketers to get results, marketers would like to be able to spend their money across all of the diverse publishes the open internet. You know, our job at Comcast is to make it just as easy to effectively spend money in funding the content that they really care about in reaching the audiences that they want. >>Great stuff. Great Mission. Conrad, thanks for coming on. Conrad Feldmann founder and Ceo here at the cookie conundrum recipe for success event, Quant Cast Industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. Thank you. Conrad appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, I'm john ferrier, stay with us for more on the industry event around the middle cookies. Mhm Yeah, yeah, thank you. Mhm. Welcome back to the Qantas industry summit on the demise of third party cookies, the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. I'm john furrier host of the cube, the changing landscape of advertising is here and shit Gupta, founder of you of digital is joining us chief. Thanks for coming on this segment. Really appreciate, I know you're busy, you've got two young kids as well as providing education to the digital industry, you got some kids to take care of and train them to. So welcome to the cube conversation here as part of the program. >>Yeah, thanks for having me excited to be here. >>So the office of the changing landscape of advertising really centers around the open to walled garden mindset of the web and the big power players. We know the big 34 tech players dominate the marketplace so clearly in a major inflection point and we've seen this movie before Web mobile revolution which was basically a reply platform NG of capabilities. But now we're in an error of re factoring the industry, not re platt forming a complete changing over of the value proposition. So a lot at stake here as this open web, open internet, global internet evolves. What are your, what's your take on this, this industry proposals out there that are talking to this specific cookie issue? What does it mean? And what proposals are out there? >>Yeah, so, you know, I I really view the identity proposals and kind of to to kind of groups, two separate groups. So on one side you have what the walled gardens are doing and really that's being led by google. Right, so google um you know, introduce something called the privacy sandbox when they announced that they would be deprecating third party cookies uh as part of the privacy sandbox, they've had a number of proposals unfortunately, or you know, however you want to say they're all bird themed for some reason, I don't know why. Um but the one, the bird theme proposal that they've chosen to move forward with is called flock, which stands for Federated learning of cohorts. And essentially what it all boils down to is google is moving forward with cohort level learning and understanding of users in the future after third party cookies, unlike what we've been accustomed to in this space, which is a user level understanding of people and what they're doing online for targeting tracking purposes. And so that's on one side of the equation, it's what google is doing with flock and privacy sandbox now on the other side is, you know, things like unified I. D. Two point or the work that I. D five is doing around building new identity frameworks for the entire space that actually can still get down to the user level. Right? And so again, unified I. D. Two point oh comes to mind because it's the one that's probably got the most adoption in the space. It's an open source framework. So the idea is that it's free and pretty much publicly available to anybody that wants to use it and unified, I need to point out again is user level. So it's it's basically taking data that's authenticated data from users across various websites you know that are logging in and taking those authenticated users to create some kind of identity map. And so if you think about those two work streams right, you've got the walled gardens and or you know, google with flock on one side and then you've got unified I. D. Two point oh and other I. D. Frameworks for the open internet. On the other side, you've got these two very differing type of approaches to identity in the future. Again on the google side it's cohort level, it's going to be built into chrome. Um The idea is that you can pretty much do a lot of the things that we do with advertising today, but now you're just doing it at a group level so that you're protecting privacy, whereas on the other side of the open internet you're still getting down to the user level. Um And that's pretty powerful. But the the issue there is scale, right? We know that a lot of people are not logged in on lots of websites. I think the stat that I saw is under five of all website traffic is authenticated. So really if you if you simplify things you boil it all down, you have kind of these two very differing approaches. >>I guess the question it really comes down to what alternatives are out there for cookies and which ones do you think will be more successful? Because I think, you know, the consensus is at least from my reporting, in my view, is that the world agrees. Let's make it open, Which one is going to be better. >>Yeah, that's a great question, john So as I mentioned, right, we have we have to kind of work streams here, we've got the walled garden work streams, work stream being led by google and their work around flock, and then we've got the open internet, right? Let's say unified I. D to kind of represents that. I personally don't believe that there is a right answer or an endgame here. I don't think that one of them wins over the other, frankly, I think that, you know, first of all, you have those two frameworks, neither of them are perfect, they're both flawed in their own ways. There are pros and cons to both of them. And so what we're starting to see now is you have other companies kind of coming in and building on top of both of them as kind of a hybrid solution. Right? So they're saying, hey, we use, you know, an open I. D. Framework in this way to get down to the user level and use that authenticated data and that's important. But we don't have all the scale. So now we go to google and we go to flock to kind of fill the scale. Oh and hey, by the way, we have some of our own special sauce, right? We have some of our own data, we have some of our own partnerships, we're gonna bring that in and layer it on top. Right? And so really where I think things are headed is the right answer, frankly, is not one or the other. It's a little mishmash of both. With a little extra something on top. I think that's that's what we're starting to see out of a lot of companies in the space. And I think that's frankly where we're headed. >>What do you think the industry will evolve to, in your opinion? Because I think this is gonna, you can't ignore the big guys on this because these programmatic you mentioned also the data is there. But what do you think the market will evolve to with this, with this conundrum? >>So, so I think john where we're headed? You know, I think we're right now we're having this existential existential crisis, right? About identity in this industry, because our world is being turned upside down, all the mechanisms that we've used for years and years are being thrown out the window and we're being told they were gonna have new mechanisms, Right? So cookies are going away device ids are going away and now we got to come up with new things and so the world is being turned upside down and everything that you read about in the trades and you know, we're here talking about it, right? Like everyone's always talking about identity right now, where do I think this is going if I was to look into my crystal ball, you know, this is how I would kind of play this out. If you think about identity today. Right? Forget about all the changes. Just think about it now and maybe a few years before today, Identity for marketers in my opinion has been a little bit of a checkbox activity. Right? It's been hey, um, okay, uh, you know ad tech company or a media company, do you have an identity solution? Okay. Tell me a little bit more about it. Okay, Sounds good. That sounds good. Now can we move on and talk about my business and how are you going to drive meaningful outcomes or whatever for my business? And I believe the reason that is, is because identity is a little abstract, right? It's not something that you can actually get meaningful validation against. It's just something that, you know. Yes, You have it. Okay, great. Let's move on, type of thing. Right. And so that, that's, that's kind of where we've been now, all of a sudden The cookies are going away, the device ids are going away. And so the world is turning upside down in this crisis of how are we going to keep doing what we were doing for the last 10 years in the future. So everyone's talking about it and we're trying to re engineer right? The mechanisms now if I was to look into the crystal ball right 2 3 years from now where I think we're headed is not much is going to change. And what I mean by that john is um uh I think that marketers will still go to companies and say do you have an ID solution? Okay tell me more about it. Okay uh Let me understand a little bit better. Okay you do it this way. Sounds good. Now the ways in which companies are going to do it will be different right now. It's flock and unified I. D. And this and that right. The ways the mechanisms will be a little bit different but the end state right? Like the actual way in which we operate as an industry and kind of like the view of the landscape in my opinion will be very simple or very similar, right? Because marketers will still view it as a tell me you have an ID solution. Make me feel good about it. Help me check the box and let's move on and talk about my business and how you're going to solve for my needs. So I think that's where we're going. That is not by any means to discount this existential moment that we're in. This is a really important moment where we do have to talk about and figure out what we're going to do in the future. My just my viewpoint is that the future will actually not look all that different than the present. >>And I'll say the user base is the audience. Their their data behind it helps create new experiences, machine learning and Ai are going to create those and we have the data you have the sharing it or using it as we're finding shit Gupta great insight dropping some nice gems here. Founder of you of Digital and also the Adjunct professor of Programmatic advertising at Levi School of Business and santa Clara University professor. Thank you for coming dropping the gems here and insight. Thank you. >>Thanks a lot for having me john really appreciate >>it. Thanks for watching. The cooking 100 is the cube host Jon ferrier me. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Hello welcome back to the cookie conundrum recipe for success and industry conference and summit from Guanacaste on the demise of third party cookies. Got a great industry panel here to break it down chris Gunther Senior Vice president Global Head of programmatic at news corp chris thanks for coming on Zal in Managing Director Solutions at Z axis and Summer Simpson. Vice president Product at quan cast stellar panel. Looking forward to this conversation. Uh thanks for coming on and chatting about the cookie conundrum. Thank you for having us. So chris we'll start with you at news corp obviously a major publisher deprecation of third party cookies affects everyone. You guys have a ton of traffic, ton of audience across multiple formats. Um, tell us about the impact to you guys and the reliance he has had on them. And what are you gonna do to prepare for this next level change? >>Sure. I mean, I think like everyone in this industry there's uh a significant reliance and I think it's something that a lot of talk about audience targeting but obviously that reliance on third party cookies pervasive across the whole at tech ecosystem Martek stack. And so you know, we have to think about how that impact vendor vendors, we work with what it means in terms of use cases across marketing, across advertising, across site experience. So, you know, without a doubt, it it's it's significant, but you know, we look at it as listen, it's disruptive, uh, disruption and change is always a little scary. Um, but overall it's a, it's a long overdue reset. I mean, I think that, you know, our perspective is that the cookies, as we all know was it was a crutch, right sort of a technology being used in way it shouldn't. Um, and so as we look at what's going to happen presumably after Jan 2022 then it's, it's a good way to kind of fix on some bad practices practices that lead to data leakage, um, practice or devalue for our perspective, some of the, you know, we offered as as publishers and I think that this is a key thing is that we're not just looking to as we look at the post gender world, not just kind of recreating the prior world because the prior world was flawed or I guess you could say the current world since it hasn't changed yet. But the current world is flawed. Let's not just not, you know, let's not just replicate that. Let's make sure that, you know, third party cookie goes away. Other work around like fingerprinting and things like that. You know, also go away so philosophically, that's where our heads at. And so as we look at how we are preparing, you know, you look at what are the core building blocks of preparing for this world. Obviously one of the key ones is privacy compliance. Like how do we treat our users with consent? Yeah, obviously. Are we um aligned with the regulatory environments? Yeah. In some ways we're not looking just a Jan 2022, but Jan 23 where there's gonna be the majority of our audiences we covered by regulation. And so I think from regulation up to data gathering to data activation, all built around an internal identifier that we've developed that allows us to have a consistent look at our users whether they're logged in or obviously anonymous. So it's really looking across all those components across all our sites and in all in a privacy compliant way. So a lot of work to be done, a lot of work in progress. But we're >>excited about what's going on. I like how you framed at Old world or next gen kind of the current situation kind of flawed. And as you think about programmatic, the concept is mind blowing and what needs to be done. So we'll come back to that because I think that original content view is certainly relevant, a huge investment and you've got great content and audience consuming it from a major media standpoint. Get your perspective on the impact because you've got clients who want to get their their message out in front of the audience at the right time, at the right place and the right context. Right, So your privacy, you got consent, all these things kind of boiling up. How do you help clients prepare? Because now they can go direct to the consumer. Everyone, everyone has a megaphone, now, everyone's, everyone's here, everyone's connected. So how are you impacted by this new notion? >>You know, if if the cookie list future was a tic tac, dance will be dancing right now, and at least into the next year, um this has been top of mind for us and our clients for quite some time, but I think as each day passes, the picture becomes clearer and more in focus. Uh the end of the third party cookie does not mean the end of programmatic. Um so clients work with us in transforming their investments into real business outcomes based on our expertise and based on our tech. So we continue to be in a great position to lead to educate, to partner and to grow with them. Um, along this uh cookie list future, the impact will be all encompassing in changing the ways we do things now and also accelerating the things that we've already been building on. So we take it from the top planning will have a huge impact because it's gonna start becoming more strategic around real business outcomes. Uh where Omni channel, So clients want to drive outcomes, drew multiple touch points of a consumer's journey, whether it has programmatic, whether it has uh cookie free environment, like connected tv, digital home audio, gaming and so forth. So we're going to see more of these strategic holistic plans. Creative will have a lot of impact. It will start becoming more important with creative testing. Creative insights. You know, creative in itself is cookie list. So there will be more focused on how to drive uh brand dialogue to connect to consumers with less targeting. With less cookies, with the cohesiveness of holistic planning. Creative can align through multiple channels and lastly, the role of a. I will become increasingly important. You know, we've always looked to build our tech our products to complement new and existing technology as well as the client's own data and text back to deliver these outcomes for them. And ai in its core it's just taking input data uh and having an output of your desired outcome. So input data could be dSP data beyond cookies such as browser such as location, such as contextual or publisher taking clients first party data, first party crm data like store visitation, sales, site activity. Um and using that to optimize in real time regardless of what vendor or what channel we're on. Um So as we're learning more about this cookie list dance, we're helping our clients on the steps of it and also introducing our own moves. >>That's awesome. Data is going to be a key value proposition, connecting in with content real time. Great stuff. Somewhere with your background in journalism and you're the tech VP of product at quan cast. You have the keys to the kingdom over there. It's interesting Journalism is about truth and good content original content. But now you have a data challenge problem opportunity on both sides, brands and publishers coming together. It's a data problem in a way it's a it's a tech stack, not so much just getting the right as to show up at the right place the right time. It's really bigger than that now. What's your take on this? >>Um you know, >>so first >>I think that consumers already sort of like except that there is a reasonable value exchange for their data in order to access free content. Right? And that's that's a critical piece for us to all kind of like understand over the past. Hi guys, probably two years since even even before the G. D. P. R. We've been doing a ton of discovery with customers, both publishers and marketers. Um and so you know, we've kind of known this, this cookie going away thing has been coming. Um And you know, Google's announcement just kind of confirmed it and it's been, it's been really, really interesting since Google's announcement, how the conversations have changed with with our customers and other folks that we talked to. And I've almost gone from being like a product manager to a therapist because there's such an emotional response. Um you know, from the marketing perspective, there's real fear there. There's like, oh my God, how you know, it's not just about, you know, delivering ads, it's about how do I control frequency? How do I, how do I measure, you know, success? Because the technology has has grown so much over the years to really give marketers the ability to deliver personalized advertising, good content, right. The consumers um and be able to monitor it and control it so that it's not too too intrusive on the publisher perspective side, we see slightly different response. It's more of a yes, right. You know, we're taking back control and we're going to stop the data leakage, we're going to get the value back for our inventory. Um and that both things are a good thing, but if it's, if it's not managed, it's going to be like ships passing in the night, right? In terms of um of, you know, they're there, them coming together, right, and that's the critical pieces that they have to come together. They have to get closer, you got to cut out a lot of that loom escape in the middle so that they can talk to each other and understand what's the value exchange happening between marketers and publishers and how do we do that without cookies? >>It's a fascinating, I love love your insight there. I think it's so relevant and it's got broader implications because, you know, if you look at how data's impact, some of these big structural changes and re factoring of industries, look at cyber security, you know, no one wants to share their data, but now if they share they get more insight, more machine learning, benefit more ai benefit. So now we have the sharing notion, but that goes against counter the big guys that want to wall garden, they want to hoard all the data and and control that to provide their own personalization. So you have this confluence of, hey, I want to hoard the data and then now I want to share the data. So so christmas summer you're in the, in the wheelhouse, you got original content and there's other providers out there. So is there the sharing model coming with privacy and these kinds of services? Is the open, come back again? How do you guys see this uh confluence of open versus walled gardens, because you need the data to make machine learning good. >>So I'll start uh start off, I mean, listen, I think you have to give credit to the walled gardens have created, I think as we look as publishers, what are we offering to our clients, what are we offering to the buy side? We need to be compelling. We shouldn't just be uh yeah, actually as journalists, I think that there is a case of the importance of funding journalism. Um but ultimately we need to make sure we're meeting the KPI is and the business needs of the buy side. And I think around that it is the sort of three core pillars that its ease of access, its scope of of activation and targeting and finally measurable results. So as I think is us as an individual publishers, so we have, we have multiple publications. So we do have scale. But then in partnership with other publishers perhaps to organizations like pre bid, you know, I think we can, you know, we're trying to address that and I think we can offer something that's compelling um, and transparent in terms of what these results are. But obviously, you know, I want to make sure it's clear transparent terms of results, but obviously where there's privacy in terms of the data and I think the form, you know, I think we've all heard a lot like data clean rooms, a lot of them out there flogging those wears. I think there's something valuable but you know, I think it's the right who is sort of the right partner or partners um and ultimately who allows us to get as close as possible to the buy side. And so that we can share that data for targeting, share it for perhaps for measurement, but obviously all in a privacy compliant >>way summer, what's your take on this? Because you talk about the future of the open internet democratization, the network effect that we're seeing in Vire al Itty and across multiple on the on the channels. Is that pointed out what's happening? That's the distribution now. So um that's almost an open garden model. So it's like um yeah, >>yeah, it's it's um you know, back in the day, you know, um knight ridder who was who was the first group that I that I worked for, um you know, each of those individual properties, um we're not hugely valuable on their own from a digital perspective, but together as a unit, they became valuable, right, and got scale for advertisers. Now we're in a place where, you know, I kind of think that each of those big networks are going to have to come together and work together to compare in size to the, to the world gardens. Um, and yeah, this is something that we've talked about before and an open garden. Um, I think that's the, that's the definitely the right route to take. And I and I agree with chris it's, it's about publishers getting as close to the market. Is it possible working with the tech companies that enable them to do that and doing so in a very privacy centric >>way. So how do we bring the brands and agencies together to get ready for third party cookies? Because there is a therapist moment here of it's gonna be okay. The parachute will open. The future is not gonna be as as grim. Um, it's a real opportunity. But if managed properly, what's your take on this is just more first party data strategy and what's your assessment of this? >>So we collaborated right now with ball grants on how did this still very complex cookie list future. Um, you know what's going to happen in the future? 2, 6 steps that we can take right now and market should take. Um, The first step is to gather intel on what's working on your current campaign, analyzing the data sets across cookie free environment. So you can translate those tactics eventually when the cookies do go away. So we have to look at things like temperature or time analysis. We could look at log level data. We could look at site analytics data. We can look at brand measurement tools and how creative really impacts the campaign success. The second thing we can look at is geo targeting strategies. The geo target strategy has been uh underrated because the granularity and geo data could go down all the way to the local level, even beyond zip code. So for example the census black data and this is especially important for CPG brands. So we're working closely with the client teams to understand not only the online data but the offline data and how we can utilize that in the future. Uh We want to optimize investments around uh markets that are working so strong markets and then test and underperforming markets. The third thing we can look at is contextual. So contextual by itself is cookie free. Uh We could build on small scale usage to test and learn various keywords and content categories based sets. Working closely with partners to find ways to leverage their data to mimic audiences that you are trying to target right now with cookies. Um the 4th 1 is publisher data or publisher targeting. So working with your publishers that you have strong relationships with who can curate similar audiences using their own first party data and conducting RFs to understand the scale and reach against your audience and their future role maps. So work with your top publishers based on historical data to try to recreate your best strategies. The 15 and I think this is very important is first party data, you know, that's going to matter more than ever. In the calculus future brands will need to think about how to access and developed the first party data starting with the consumers seeing a value in exchange for the information. It's a gold mine and understanding of consumer, their intent, the journey um and you need a really great data science team to extract insights out of that data, which will be crucial. So partner with strategic onboarding vendors and vet their ability to accept first party data into a cleaner environment for targeting for modeling for insight. And lastly, the six thing that we can do is begin to inform prospect prospecting by dedicating test budget to start gaining learnings about cookie list 11 place that we can start and it is under invested right now is Safari and Firefox. They have been calculus for quite some time so you can start here and begin testing here. Uh work with your data scientist team to understand the right mix is to to target and start exploring other channels outside of um just programmatic cookies like CTV digital, out of home radio gaming and so forth. So those are the six steps that we're taking right now with our clients to uh prepare and plan for the cookie list future. >>So chris let's go back to you. What's the solution here? Is there one, is there multiple solutions? What's the future look like for a cookie was future? >>Uh I think the one certain answers, they're definitely not just one solution. Um as we all know right now there there seems to be endless solutions, a lot of ideas out there, proposals with the W three C uh work happening within other industry bodies uh you know private companies solutions being offered and you know, it's a little bit of it's enough to make everyone's head spin and to try to track it to understand and understand the impact. And as a publisher were obviously a lot of people are knocking on our door. Uh they're saying, hey our solution is one that is going to bring in lots of money, you know, the all the buy side is going to use it. This is the one like I ma call to spend um, and so expect here and so far is that none of these solutions are I think everyone is still testing and learning no one on the buy side from our, from our knowledge is really committed to one or a few. It's all about a testing stage. I think that, you know, putting aside all that noise, I think what matters the most to us as publisher is actually something summer mentioned before. It's about control. You know, if we're going to work with a again, outside of our sort of, you know, internal identifier work that we're doing is we're going to work with an outside party or outside approach doesn't give us control as a publisher to ensure that it is, we control the data from our users. There isn't that data leakage, it's probably compliant. What information gets shared out there. What is it, what's released within within the bid stream? Uh If it is something that's attached to a somewhat declared user registered user that if that then is not somehow amplified or leverage off on another site in a way that is leveraging bit stream data or fingerprinting and going against. I think that the spirit of what we're trying to do in a post third party cookie world so that those controls are critical and I think they have those controls, his publisher, we have collectively be disciplined in what solutions that we we test out and what we eventually adopt. But even when the adoption point arrives, uh definitely it will not be one. There will be multiple because it's just too many use cases to address >>great, great insight there from, from you guys, news corp summer. Let's get back to you. I want to get your thoughts. You've been in many waves of innovation ups and downs were on a new one. Now we talked about the open internet democratization. Journalism is under a lot of pressure now, but there's now a wave of quality people really leaning in towards fighting misinformation, understanding truth and community and date is at the heart of it. What do you see as the new future for journalists, reward journalism is our ways their path forward. >>So there's uh, there's what I hope is going to happen. Um, and then I'm just gonna ignore what could write. Um, you know, there's there's a trend in market right now, a number of fronts, right? So there are marketers who are leaning into wanting to spend their marketing dollars with quality journalists, focusing on bipac owned and operated, really leaning into into supporting those businesses that have been uh, those publishers that have been ignored for years. I really hope that this trend continues. Um We are leaning into into helping um, marketers curate that supply right? And really, uh, you know, speak with their dollars about the things that that they support. Um, and uh, and and value right in market. So I'm hoping that that trend continues and it's not just sort of like a marketing blip. Um, but we will do everything possible to kind of like encourage that behavior and and give people the information they need to find, you know, truly high quality journalism. >>That's awesome chris Summer. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insight on this panel on the cookie list future. Before we go, just quick summary each of you. If you don't mind just giving a quick sound bite or bumper sticker of what we can expect. If you had to throw a prediction For what's going to happen in the next 24 months Chris We'll start with you. >>Uh it's gonna be quite a ride. I think that's an understatement. Um I think that there, I wouldn't be surprised if if google delays the change to the chrome by a couple of months and and may give the industry some much needed time, but no one knows. I guess. I guess I'm not except for someone somewhere deep within chrome. So I think we all have to operate in a way that changes to happen, changes to happen quickly and it's gonna cover across all facets of the industry, all facets of from advertising, marketing. So just be >>prepared. >>Yeah, along the same lines, be prepared, nobody knows what's going to happen in the future. Uh You know, while dancing in this together. Uh I think um for us it's um planning and preparing and also building on what we've already been working on. Um So omni channel ai um creative and I think clients will uh lean more into those different channels, >>awesome. So we'll pick us home, last word. >>I think we're in the throwing spaghetti against the wall stage. Right, so this is a time of discovery of leaning in trying everything out, Learning and iterating as fast as we possibly >>can. Awesome. And I love the cat in the background over your shoulder. Can't stop staring at your wonderful cat. Thanks for coming on chris, Thanks for coming on. This awesome panel industry breakdown of the cookie conundrum. The recipe for success data ai open. Uh The future is here, it's coming, it's coming fast. I'm john fryer with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm. Welcome back to the Quant Cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. The cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. We're here peter day. The cto of quad cast and crew T cop car, head of product marketing quad cast. Thanks for coming on talking about the changing advertising landscape. >>Thanks for having us. Thank you for having >>us. So we've been hearing this story out to the big players. Want to keep the data, make that centralized control, all the leverage and then you've got the other end. You got the open internet that still wants to be free and valuable for everyone. Uh what's what are you guys doing to solve this problem? Because cookies go away? What's going to happen there? How do people track things you guys are in this business first question? What is quan cast strategies to adapt to third party cookies going away? What's gonna be, what's gonna be the answer? >>Yeah. So uh very rightly said, john the mission, the Qantas mission is the champion of free and open internet. Uh And with that in mind, our approach to this world without third party cookies is really grounded in three fundamental things. Uh First as industry standards, we think it's really important to participate and to work with organizations who are defining the standards that will guide the future of advertising. So with that in mind, we've been participating >>with I. A. B. >>Tech lab, we've been part of their project Triarc. Uh same thing with pre bid, who's kind of trying to figure out the pipes of identity. Di di di di di pipes of uh of the future. Um And then also is W three C, which is the World Wide Web Consortium. Um And our engineers and our engineering team are participating in their weekly meetings trying to figure out what's happening with the browsers and keeping up with the progress they're on things such as google's block. Um The second uh sort of thing is interoperability, as you've mentioned, there are lots of different uh I. D. Solutions that are emerging. You have you I. D. Two point oh, you have live RAM, you have google's flock. Uh And there will be more, there are more and they will continue to be more. Uh We really think it is important to build a platform that can ingest all of these signals. And so that's what we've done. Uh The reason really is to meet our customers where they are at today. Our customers use multiple different data management platforms, the mps. Um and that's why we support multiple of those. Um This is not going to be much different than that. We have to meet our customers where we are, where they are at. And then finally, of course, which is at the very heart of who contrast is innovation. Uh As you can imagine being able to take all of these multiple signals in including the I. D. S. And the cohorts, but also others like contextual first party um consent is becoming more and more important. Um And then there are many other signals, like time, language geo location. So all of these signals can help us understand user behavior intent and interests um in absence of 3rd party cookies. However, uh there's there's something to note about this. They're very raw, their complex, they're messy all of these different signals. Um They are changing all the time, they're real time. Um And there's incomplete information isolation. Just one of these signals cannot help you build a true and complete picture. So what you really need is a technology like AI and machine learning to really bring all of these signals together, combine them statistically and get an understanding of user behavior intent and interests and then act on it, be it in terms of providing audience insights um or responding to bid requests and and so on and so forth. So those are sort of the three um fundamentals that our approach is grounded in which is industry standards, interoperability and and innovation. Uh and you know, you have peter here, who is who is the expert So you can dive much deeper into >>it. Is T. T. O. You've got to tell us how is this going to actually work? What are you guys doing from a technology standpoint to help with data driven advertising in a third party cookie list world? >>Well, we've been um This is not a shock, you know, I think anyone who's been close to his space has known that the 3rd Party Cookie has been um uh reducing inequality in terms of its pervasiveness and its longevity for many years now. And the kind of death knell is really google chrome making a, making the changes that they're gonna be making. So we've been investing in the space for many years. Um and we've had to make a number of hugely diverse investment. So one of them is in how as a marketer, how do I tell if my marketing still working in the world without >>computers? The >>majority of marketers completely reliant on third party cookies today to tell them if they're if they're marketing is working or not. And so we've had to invest heavily and statistical techniques which are closer to kind of economic trick models that markets are used to things like out of home advertising, It's going to establishing whether they're advertising is working or not in a digital environment actually, >>just as >>often, you know, as is often the case in these kind of times of massive disruption, there's always opportunity to make things better. And we really think that's true. And you know, digital measurement has often mistaken precision for accuracy. And there's a real opportunity to kind of see the wood for the trees if you like. And start to come with better methods of measuring the affections of advertising without third party cookies. And in fact to make countless other investments in areas like contextual modeling and and targeting that third party cookies and and uh, connecting directly to publishers rather than going through this kind of bloom escape that's gonna tied together third party cookies. So if I was to enumerate all the investments we've made, I think we'll be here till midnight but we have to make a number of vestments over a number of years and that level investments only increasing at the moment. >>Peter on that contextual. Can you just double click on that and tell us more? >>Yeah, I mean contextual is unfortunately these things, this is really poorly defined. It can mean everything from a publisher saying, hey, trust us, this dissipated about CVS to what's possible now and has only really been possible the last couple of years, which is to build >>statistical >>models of the entire internet based on the content that people are actually consumed. And this type of technology requires massive data processing capabilities. It's able to take advantage of the latest innovations in there is like natural language processing and really gives um computers are kind of much deeper and richer understanding of the internet, which ultimately makes it possible to kind of organize, organized the Internet in terms of the types of content of pages. So this type of technology has only been possible the last two years and we've been using contextual signals since our inception, it's always been massively predictive in terms of audience behaviours, in terms of where advertising is likely to work. And so we've been very fortunate to keep the investment going um and take advantage of many of these innovations that have happened in academia and in kind of uh in adjacent areas >>on the ai machine learning aspect, that seems to be a great differentiator in this day and age for getting the most out of the data. How is machine learning and ai factoring into your platform? >>I think it's, it's how we've always operated right from our interception when we started as a measurement company, the way that we were giving our customers at the time, we were just publishers, just the publisher side of our business insights into who their audience was, were, was using machine learning techniques. And that's never really changed. The foundation of our platform has always been, has always been machine learning from from before. It was cool. A lot of our kind of, a lot of our core teams have backgrounds in machine learning phds in statistics and machine learning and and that really drives our our decision making. I mean, data is only useful if you can make sense of it and if you can organize it and if you can take action on it and to do that at this kind of scout scale, it's absolutely necessary to use machine learning technology. >>So you mentioned contextual also, you know, in advertising, everyone knows in that world that you've got the contextual behavioural dynamics, the behavior that's kind of generally everyone's believing is happening. The consensus is undeniable is that people are wanting to expect an environment where there's trust, there's truth, but also they want to be locked in. They don't wanna get walled into a walled garden, nobody wants to be in the world, are they want to be free to pop around and visit sites is more horizontal scalability than ever before. Yet, the bigger players are becoming walled garden, vertical platforms. So with future of ai the experience is going to come from this data. So the behavior is out there. How do you get that contextual relevance and provide the horizontal scale that users expect? >>Yeah, I think it's I think it's a really good point and we're definitely this kind of tipping point. We think, in the broader industry, I think, you know, every published right, we're really blessed to work with the biggest publishers in the world, all the way through to my mom's vlog, right? So we get to hear the perspectives of publishers at every scale. I think they consistently tell us the same thing, which is they want to more directly connected consumers, they don't wanna be tied into these walled gardens, which dictate how they must present their content and in some cases what content they're allowed to >>present. >>Um and so our job as a company is to really provide level >>the playing field a little bit, >>provide them the same capabilities they're only used to in the walled gardens, but let's give them more choice in terms of how they structure their content, how they organize their content, how they organize their audiences, but make sure that they can fund that effectively by making their audiences in their environments discoverable by marketers measurable by marketers and connect them as directly as possible to make that kind of ad funded economic model as effective in the open Internet as it is in social. And so a lot of the investments we've made over recent years have been really to kind of realize that vision, which is, it should be as easy for a marketer to be able to understand people on the open internet as it is in social media. It should be as effective for them to reach people in the environment is really high quality content as it is on facebook. And so we invest a lot of a lot of our R and D dollars in making that true. We're now live with the Comcast platform, which does exactly that. And as third party cookies go away, it only um only kind of exaggerated or kind of further emphasizes the need for direct connections between brands and publishers. And so we just wanna build the technology that helps make that true and gives the kind of technology to these marketers and publishers to connect and to deliver great experiences without relying on these kind of walled >>gardens. Yeah, the Director Director, Consumer Director audience is a new trend. You're seeing it everywhere. How do you guys support this new kind of signaling from for for that's happening in this new world? How do you ingest the content and just this consent uh signaling? >>Uh we were really fortunate to have an amazing, amazing R and D. Team and, you know, we've had to do all sorts to make this, you need to realize our vision. This has meant things like, you know, we have crawlers which scan the entire internet at this point, extract the content of the pages and kind of make sense of it and organize it uh, and organize it for publishers so they can understand how their audiences overlap with potential competitors or collaborators. But more importantly, organize it for marketers. So you can understand what kind of high impact opportunities are there for them there. So, you know, we've had to we've had to build a lot of technology. We've had to build analytics engines, which can get answers back in seconds so that marketers and publishers can kind of interact with their own data and make sense of it and present it in a way that's compelling and help them drive their strategy as well as their execution. We've had to invest in areas like consent management because we believe that a free and open internet is absolutely reliant on trust and therefore we spend a lot of our time thinking about how do we make it easy for end users to understand who has access to their data and easy for end users to be able to opt out. And uh and as a result of that, we've now got the world's most widely adopted adopted consent management platform. So it's hard to tackle one of these problems without tackling all of them. Were fortunate enough to have had a large enough R and D budget over the last four or five years, make a number investments, everything from consent and identity through context, your signals through the measurement technologies, which really bring advertisers >>and Publishers places together great insight. Last word for you is what's the what's the customer view here as you bring these new capabilities of the platform, uh what's what are you guys seeing as the highlight uh from a platform perspective? >>So the initial response that we've seen from our customers has been very encouraging, both on the publisher side as well as the marketer side. Um I think, you know, one of the things we hear quite a lot is uh you guys are at least putting forth a solution, an actual solution for us to test Peter mentioned measurement, that really is where we started because you cannot optimize what you cannot measure. Um so that that is where his team has started and we have some measurement very, very uh initial capabilities still in alpha, but they are available in the platform for marketers to test out today. Um so the initial response has been very encouraging. People want to engage with us um of course our, you know, our fundamental value proposition, which is that the Qantas platform was never built to be reliant on on third party data. These stale segments like we operate, we've always operated on real time live data. Um The second thing is, is our premium publisher relationships. We have had the privilege of working like Peter said with some of the um biggest publishers, but we also have a very wide footprint. We have first party tags across um over 100 million plus web and mobile destinations. Um and you know, as you must have heard like that sort of first party footprint is going to come in really handy in a world without third party cookies, we are encouraging all of our customers, publishers and marketers to grow their first party data. Um and so that that's something that's a strong point that customers love about us and and lean into it quite a bit. Um So yeah, the initial response has been great. Of course it doesn't hurt that we've made all these are in the investments. We can talk about consent. Um, and you know, I often say that consent, it sounds simple, but it isn't, there's a lot of technology involved, but there's lots of uh legal work involved as it as well. We have a very strong legal team who has expertise built in. So yeah, very good response. Initially >>democratization. Everyone's a publisher. Everyone's a media company. They have to think about being a platform. You guys provide that. So I congratulate Peter. Thanks for dropping the gems there. Shruti, thanks for sharing the product highlights. Thanks for, for your time. Thank you. Okay, this is the quan cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. And what's next? The cookie conundrum. The recipe for success with Kwan Cast. I'm john free with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mm

>>Trump and low park California in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 brought to you by Silicon angle media. Now here's Sonya to garden. >>Hi and welcome to the cube. I'm your host Sonia to Gary. And we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo park, California covering cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in cloud innovation awards. Joining us today is modest to get day, the cofounder of branch motto. Welcome to the cube. Thank you so much for having me. So you're receiving an award today for being a top female entrepreneur in cloud innovation. How does that feel? >>It feels awesome. I'm humbled to be in such amazing company with some great ladies that have started really great companies, so pretty excited to be here. >>Great. So just give us a brief overview of your background. >>Sure. Uh, my background, well, I probably don't have the regular Silicon Valley background. I was born and raised in communist Romania, uh, in a pretty small town called Barco, uh, in the Rijo Romania called Moldavia. I was very good at math. Um, and my parents, uh, pushed me to explore applying to schools in the United States, which I did. Um, and I applied to 23 colleges and the DOB, uh, getting a full scholarship from Cornell where I studied computer engineering. Um, I dreamt of working for big companies, which I did for a while, uh, until one day when I remember I was doing a master's to Stanford and one professor told me I was, I told him, I was like, I don't think I could ever start a company. And he was like, what if you don't? Like, who do you think? Well, so I was like, Oh, I never thought about it that way. Um, and that's when I think my entrepreneurial dream started. And a few years later I started, um, phone co-founders and started a few different companies that eventually ended up being branch. That's a long answer to your question. >>No, that's perfect. So what inspired you to start branch and how did you navigate getting funding? >>Um, it's a, it's an interesting story. I think we came together, my cofounders and I were in business school, Stanford, we all want to start a company and we did what all business school students do. We just started something that sounded cool but maybe it didn't have such a big market. Um, and uh, then pivoted and ended up building an app. So we worked on an app or the mobile photo printing app called kindred. We worked on the Apple for quite some time. It was, um, over a year we sold over 10,000 photo books. I've seen a lot of images of babies and pets and we reviewed manually every single book and we had a really hard time growing. So if you think about the mobile ecosystem today, and if you compare it to the web on the web, the web is a pretty democratic system. >>You, um, you have the HTTP protocol and you are able to put together a website and make sure that the website gets found through social media to research to all this other platforms. Apps are much harder to discover. Um, the app ecosystem is owned by the platforms. And we had a really hard time applying. I was coming from the web world and all the things I had done to market websites just in the work with the apps. And it was hard. Uh, you know, you could only Mark at the top and how out all the content inside the app. That's a lot more interesting than the app itself. So we, we felt that we were like really, really struggling and we would need it to kind of shut the company down. And then we realized that one of the things that we were trying to build for us to a disability to allow people to share and get to content within the app, which is in our case was photo books was actually something that everyone in the ecosystem needed. >>So we, we asked a lot of people and it seemed like this was a much bigger need. Uh, then, you know, the photo books. And, uh, we had started to already build it to solve our own problem. So we started building a linking and attribution platform, um, to help other app. And mobile companies grow and understand their user journey and help build like interesting connections for the user. So, you know, our mission is to, um, to help people discover content within apps, uh, through links that always work. Uh, and it's been a wonderful, like an F pretty exciting journey ever since. That's really inspiring and, and solving a real world problem, a real world problem. >> So it's interesting when you ask about fundraising. Uh, it was so hard to raise money for the photo book app. And we raised actually from, uh, uh, pay our ventures and they actually, even now I remember, uh, the guy patch man sat us down in a very Silicon Valley fashion at the rosewoods and was a very hot day and there was like Persian tea being served and he gave us money and he said, you know, I just want to do something. >>I am not investing in the idea. I'm investing in you as a team. Uh, and if you pivot away from photo books, you know, uh, which we did and I think we pivoted the way because we ended up finding a much, much bigger problem. And we felt that, you know, we could actually make a, an actual change into the mobile cloud ecosystem. And that's how, that's how it all started. Uh, and it wasn't actually was easier to raise money after we had a really big problem. We had a good team that had been working together for almost two years. We had product market fit. >> So, uh, so yeah. So what are some things that have influenced you in your journey to become an entrepreneur? Um, some things interesting. Um, well I would say the Stanford design school. Um, I think I came from working for Siemens, which is a giant company. >>And I started doing this project and I remember one of the projects was we built, um, an, uh, a toolbar we were supposed to where we're doing a project for, um, Firefox, which, you know, Mozilla was utilize browser, uh, which was in some ways the precursor to Chrome. And we're trying to help it grow. And we didn't know. And one of the ideas was we, we built this toolbar for eBay and eBay hadn't had a toolbar for Firefox. And we, you know, we were some students for two weeks. We build this toolbar bar and then someone bought the car to our toolbar. And I was like, wow. Like how incredible is it that you can just kind of put your thoughts on something and just get something done and make an actual impact someone's life. And I think that's when the spark of the entrepreneurial spark, it was during that time that, um, Michael Dearing course, a professor and one of my D school courses also told me the thing that if I don't do it, who will? >>And I think that's when, that's when it all started. I think the things that have helped me along the way, I mean, my cofounders, I think I've been incredibly lucky to find cofounders that are incredibly eager to be good at what they do and also very different from me. So I think if you think about why many companies implode, it's usually because of the founding team. We've been together for almost seven years now. Uh, and it's been an interesting way to find balance through so many failed companies. So many stages of growth branches over 400 people now. So you know, our roles have shifted over time and it's been like, uh, an interesting journey and I think recently more in the past few years, I think one of the things that has helped me find balance has been having a group of female founder friends. Um, it's really interesting to have a peer group that you can talk about things with and be vulnerable with. >>And I didn't have that in the first few years and I wish I did. My cofounders are amazing, but I think in some ways we are also coworkers. So having an external group has been incredibly helpful in helping me find balance in my life. So I think a lot of women feel that way. They feel that it's really difficult to navigate in this male dominated workspace. So what advice would you give to female entrepreneurs in this space? Yeah, I mean it is really hard and I think confidence is something that I've noticed with myself, my peers, the women that I've invested in. I do investing on the side. Uh, I would say believe that you can do it. Uh, believe that the only, the sky's the limit believe that, um, you can do more than you think you can do. I think sometimes, uh, you know, our, our background and the society around us, um, doesn't necessarily believe that we can do the things that we can do as women. >>So I think believing in ourselves is incredibly important. I think the second part is making sure that we build networks around us. They can tell us that they believe in us. They can push us beyond what we think is possible. And I think those networks can be peers. Like my funeral founder group, we call each other for ministers or, uh, I think investors. Um, I think it can be mentors. And I've had, I've been lucky enough to have amazing women investors, uh, women mentors. Um, and I, it's been a really incredible to see how much they helped me grow. So I think the interesting thing is when I was just getting started, I didn't look for those communities. I didn't look for a guy. I just kinda felt, Oh, I can do it. But I didn't actually realize that being part of a community, being vulnerable, asking questions can actually go help me go so much further. Um, so the advice would be to start early and find a small group of people that you can actually rely on, and that can be your advocates and your champions. So, yeah. Well, thank you so much for those words of wisdom. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being on the cube. I'm your host, Sonia to Gary. Thanks for watching the cube. Stay tuned for more.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Magento. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. We are at the Wynn, Las Vegas with Magento at their Imagine 2018 Conference 3000 plus people here, really cool day we've been talking about all things commerce and digital commerce innovation. Excited to be joined by Peter Sheldon, the VP of Strategy from Magento, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, yeah. >> So this has been really fun, there's a lot of merchants behind us here in the marketplace, we've been talking to some of your customers who, a direct consumer, we just had Coca-Cola on. But we also see a lot of businesses here. Talk to us about what you guys are doing to help, not just the retailers, you started, right, being building this reputation as Magento, helping retailers to target online shoppers, but there's a lot more opportunity that you guys have been successful in, in the business, B2B space. Talk to us about, the vision, the strategy, on both sides. >> Yeah, so I think what's fascinating about Magento is their diversity of our client base, and I think it's a little bit of a testament to the flexibility and agility of the platform, but you're absolutely right, we started out primarily serving the B2C market, working with retailers, CPG firms, branded manufacturers and so forth, luxury goods. But commerce has really evolved and moved on, and I think what we see today is a lot of opportunity in B2B, and so when I think about B2B, these are typically manufacturers and distributors wholesalers who are looking to digitally transform their businesses, and really make the buying process more efficient. So whether it's a distributor who's buying products from a manufacturer, or an end-buyer might be a contractor, especially in home improvement, or something, who needs to buy tools and materials from either a manufacturer or distributor. Traditionally, it was a very traditional sort of, retail based buying experience. You would go to a branch, a distributor's branch face to face, engagement over sales person, or the sales rep would come visit you, and you would through a paper catalog. >> Relationship based. >> Relationship building. >> Exactly. >> And so forth, and that's a high cost of acquisition channel, and so I think what a lot of B2B firms are realizing is there's significant, first of all, there's demand from the buyers because all buyers have their consumer life as well, e-commerce is so mature and the B2C space with Amazon, that buyers are incredibly frustrated if in their business life they don't get that great ease of e-commerce experience, and instead they're still faxing and picking up the phone or even if it is a digital order entry experience, it's really terrible, and it's not intuitive to use, it's not easy to use. So, there's a real demand to digitize that ordering process, but more importantly, I think for B2B firms, there's some real operational savings and putting margin back into the bottom line by creating a lower cost of doing business and serving customers, and it's e-commerce and so I think we see one of the areas where a lot of firms first start out is in the spare parts business, so we work with a lot of manufacturers. It just makes so much sense to move their spare parts and warranty business online, so it's very easy to re-order spare parts, I don't need to pick up and call my sales rep to do that, I can do it in a digital manner. But I think what's really fascinating us is just the diversity of different B2B clients, their backgrounds, there's not a vertical that's immune to this. We see pharmaceutical companies, we see agriculture, we see traditional heavy manufacturing, light manufacturing, life sciences, you name it. And so the diversity of clients we see wanting to use our platform for digitizing their selling relationship that they have, it's really fascinating. >> We've heard a lot today that commerce is limitless, and it sounds like that's kind of what you're talking about, is that this day and age, every buyer is a consumer at some point, right, or everyday. We have these expectations, Amazon set the bar really high and every company to be successful has to be a technology company. So, from your standpoint as the VP of Strategy, some great exciting things have been announced at this year's Magento Imagine Conference. Share with us some of those, and especially I'm curious what you're seeing in the mobile space. >> Yeah, so mobile's really fascinating and I think it actually continues on to what we were talking about a moment ago in B2B. So, if we think about that B2B buyer, often the B2B buyer is an engineer, a contractor, a field service representative. They don't live in an office, they don't have ready, convenient access to either a laptop or desktop. They are out on a site, they are, if it's agriculture, they're out at a farm. >> In a field, yeah. >> Or in a field, or they're in a construction site, or they're inside a plant, and their primary means, or their only means of digital access is their smartphone. And typically they're having a slightly larger screen, phablet type smartphone, probably in a hard case if it gets dropped and so forth. But the way that they're going to engage with a brand digitally and to make a B2B commerce order, to look up the status of their order etc. It's not, we often talk about mobile first, it's not mobile first, it's mobile only. They don't have easy access anymore to desktop, laptop. If you're not serving them through mobile, they're not able to buy from you and they're going to buy from one of your competitors. And we see this thing across the board. Perhaps less so here in the US, but in some of the merging markets where we operate and where we have great success, markets like India. They again, it's very much a mobile only society now, and certainly in mainland China and other sort of emerging markets. So I think we're rapidly going down a path where if you think even in our day to day consumer lives, as we're thinking about making purchases, we're sitting on the couch, we're multitasking or watching television, but it's our phone that we're interacting with. >> Right. >> And if we think about the challenge today about buying through a phone, traditionally commerce purchase experience, it's really not that great. In fact in some cases it's pretty awful. Typical sort of page load time on a mobile can be five, six seconds, and as you want to navigate around using your thumb and scroll through and do some product research, every time you make an action, every time you touch that screen, the page reloads again, and it's actually frustratingly slow. If you actually get to the point of buying, obviously you've got to enter your shipping address, and that's just- >> Can imagine that conversion rates, and things and attrition. >> Exactly. And so- >> What have you guys done to change the game? >> Right, right exactly. So, those conversion rates on the mobile web today are pretty bad. They're about sort of, 1.7% and on a traditional desktop, it's 3.5% but yeah 70% of all traffic and visitors are coming on mobile devices, it's actually quite a profound sort of issue in the marketplace around us. So what are we doing about it? Well there's a really exciting new, and I call it technology, but it's really just a set of standards around open web technologies, Javascript, CSS, HTML, called PWA, or Progressive Web Apps. Now, Progressive Web Apps is not a proprietary technology, it's just open web technologies, but what's changed and evolved are the browsers themselves, so Chrome and Safari, Firefox, they've evolved and they now support what we call service workers, which is the ability for the browser to do more backbone processing. And the end result of all of this are a lot of brands are now rebuilding their websites away from responsive websites, which is the big investment we've had over the last five years to now building Progressive Web Apps. And a really nice thing about Progressive Web Apps is that they perform like a native app, they're very very fast, the page load times are typically around a second or so, and there's no refresh. Every navigation and action is almost instant gratification, so very fast, very slick to use. It feels like you're using an native app, but you're not, you're actually using a web experience in a browser. And so there's a couple of really important things for merchants around that. One, much, much better conversion rates. So all of the KPIs that a VP of e-commerce is ultimately responsible for, they're measured by there's a conversion rate, average order value, bounce rates. They all see significant improvements. And I never say there's some merchants always sort of facing a little bit of a dilemma, should we build native apps, or what should our native app strategy be? And the problem with native apps is they're incredibly expensive to develop, incredibly, a lot of maintenance with all the updates to iOS and Android. And many merchants really didn't see success because consumers will only download and give you real estate on their phones for an app that you really engage with on a very frequent, on a multiple times a day basis. Most of our customers are retailers that perhaps only have two or three transactions a year with their clients, with their end shoppers, and so a native app strategy just doesn't work. So the real exciting thing I think with merchants are, you can actually almost put the need for an app strategy to bed, they don't need one anymore. They invest there in PWA. So here at the conference we announce Magento's support for Progressive Web Apps. We've launched a new development toolkit we call the PWA Studio, and it's really a native capability for our merchants and our system integrators to be able to build Progressive Web Apps on the Magento platform. So we're super excited about it. >> Yeah, sounds super exciting and also really the consumer, the convenience is that consumers are demanding, and you're really reacting to the mobile only experience there. >> That's right. >> Has a huge potential, upside, for the merchants. How are you seeing that being used or use cases for that in the B2B space? >> Yeah, so if anything, it's almost kind of, more applicable in B2B than it is in B2C, although they're both going to adopt PWAs. So what's interesting about B2B is that there is a much more frequent transaction or interaction with the end buyer. B2B buyers are frequent purchasers, they are buying in bulk and they're making purchases perhaps multiple times a day, perhaps multiple times a week. And so they are power users and they do have a great deal of engagement with the brand, with their distributor, so again, it's starkly, I think the B2B firms have built native apps and have done so on top of Mangento, it's very easy to build a native app and integrate it into our Rest APIs etc. But again it's expensive and often it can be a seven figure front sum to initially develop an app strategy and to continue to maintain it, so there's a real there's a real TCO advantage of actually switching that strategy to do a PWA. The adoption can be higher because you don't need to install the app, and just the cost and support of building and supporting a PWA is significantly lower than a native app, and so again there's a lot of use cases for using PWAs in the B2B commerce space as well. >> Awesome. So besides what you announce with Progressive Web Apps, what are some of the exciting announcements you guys have made at Imagine? >> Yeah, so I think product announcements, we got an exciting new product we're calling Page Builder, it's a content management and page building tool. So what this really does is it allows the marketer merchandiser the real control over building and maintaining the pages on their site, and that's mobile web, mobile desktop and building able to do that, and it really alleviates any dependency on having to a front end developer where there's a true wiz with drag and drop capability, gives them complete creative to build very sophisticated content pages, but to do and have complete control over their publishing schedule, being able to preview that. So we're very excited about that. I think it empowers the marketers and merchandisers to be more creative and to get more done in the day, we're empowering them to be, act independently of needing to work with a front end developer. >> Awesome, and you guys speaking of developers, have a very large community. >> We do, we do. >> Of 300,000+ developers. >> It's quite incredible, I mean here at the conference, it's sort of their main annual get together of what we call the community. I'll come here to Las Vegas every year and to the Wynn and the community is here, and a lot of that community is made up of developers, and those developers, many of them work for our merchants, many of them work for system integrators, many of them work for other technology partners, and some are contractors, self-employed specialists and so forth. But as you say, that community is over 300,000 developers strong, that's 300,000 people who make a livelihood doing development on Magento. So it's really an amazing community, and they're incredibly passionate about Magento, and they contribute back to Magento. We are, have our roots as being an open source platform, one of the great differentiative benefits of that is that our community help us innovate and they help us, they contribute code, they contribute features and capabilities back into the platform that means that we can extend our R&D team to be this much, much greater force where we can develop new capabilities and deliver value to our clients at a far faster pace than any competitors do. So it's a really interesting aspect of our business. >> Well Peter, thanks for stopping by theCUBE and sharing the great announcements that you guys have made today and this week, and the direction you're able to go in and help take best practices and things learned in the consumer space, and apply it to businesses. We wish you the best of luck, and we look forward to being back at the Magento Imagine next year. >> Yeah, great. Love to have you back. Thanks so much for chatting with me today. >> Our pleasure. We wanted to thank you for watching theCUBE again, we are live at the Wynn in Las Vegas with Magento at Imagine 2018. I am Lisa Martin, stick around, we're back with one more guest after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. This is theCUBE, live here in Mountain View, California, heart of Silicon Valley for Cisco's DevNet Create. This is their Cloud developer event. It's not the main Cisco DevNet which is more of the Cisco developer, this is much more Cloud Native DevOps. I'm joined with my cohost, Lauren Cooney and our next guest is Christine Yen, who is co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Honeycomb.io. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Great to have an entrepreneur and also Chief Product Officer because you blend in the entrepreneurial zeal, but also you got to build the product in the Cloud Native world. You guys done a few ventures before. First, take a minute and talk about what you guys do, what the company is built on, what's the mission? What's your vision? >> Absolutely, Honeycomb was built, we are an observability platform to help people find the unknown unknowns. Our whole thesis is that the world is getting more complicated. We have microservices and containers, and instead of having five application servers that we treated like pets in the past, we now have 500 containers running that are more like cattle and where any one of them might die at any given time. And we need our tools to be able to support us to figure out how and why. And when something happens, what happened and why, and how do we resolve it? We look around at the landscape and we feel like this dichotomy out there of, we have logging tools and we have metrics tools. And those really evolved from the fact that in 1995, we had to choose between grep or counters. And as technology evolved, those evolved to distribute grep or RDS. And then we have distribute grep with fancy UIs and well, fancy RDS with UIs. And Honeycomb, we were started a couple years ago. We really feel like what if you didn't have to choose? What if technology supported the power of having all the context there the way that you do with logs while still being able to provide instant analytics the way that you have with metrics? >> So the problem that you're solving is one, antiquated methodologies from old architectures and stacks if you will, to helping people save time, with the arcane tools. Is that the main premise? >> We want people to be able to debug their production systems. >> All right, so, beyond that now, the developer that you're targeting, can you take us through a day in the life of where you are helping them, vis a vis the old way? >> Absolutely, so I'll tell a story of when myself and my co-founder, Charity, were working together at PaaS. PaaS, for those who aren't familiar, used to be RD, a backend form of mobile apps. You can think of someone who just wants to build an iOS app, doesn't want to deal with data storage, user records, things like that. And PaaS started in 2011, got bought by Facebook in 2013, spun down very beginning of 2016. And in 2013, when the acquisition happened, we were supporting somewhere on the order of 60,000 different mobile apps. Each one of them could be totally different workload, totally different usage pattern, but any one of them might be experiencing problems. And again, in this old world, this pre-Honeycomb world, we had our top level metrics. We had latency, response, overall throughput, error rates, and we were very proud of them. We were very proud of these big dashboards on the wall that were green. And they were great, except when you had a customer write in being like, "Hey, PaaS is down." And we look at our dashboard we'd be like, "Nope, it's not down. "It must be network issues." >> John: That's on your end. >> Yeah, that's on your end. >> John: Not a good answer. >> Not a good answer, and especially not if that customer was Disney, right? When you're dealing with these high level metrics, and you're processing tens or hundreds of thousands of requests per second, when Disney comes in, they've got eight requests a second and they're seeing all of them fail. Even though those are really important, eight requests per second, you can't tease that out of your graphs. You can't figure out why they're failing, what's going on, how to fix it. You've got to dispatch an engineer to go add a bunch of if app ID equals Disney, track it down, figure out what's going on there. And it takes time. And when we got to Facebook, we were exposed to a type of tool that essentially inspired Honeycomb as it is today that let us capture all this data, capture a bunch of information about everything that was happening down to these eight requests per second. And when a customer complained, we could immediately isolate, oh, this one app, okay let's zoom in. For this one customer, this tiny customer, let's look at their throughput, error rates, latency. Oh, okay. Something looks funny there, let's break down by endpoint for this customer. And it's this iterative fast, highly granular investigation, that is where all of us are approaching today. With our systems getting more complicated you need to be able to isolate. Okay, I don't care about the 200s, I only care about the 500s, and within the 500s, then what's going on? What's going on with this server, with that set of containers? >> So this is basically an issue of data, unstructured data or have the ability to take this data in at the same time with your eye on the prize of instrumentation. And then having the ability to make that addressable and discoverable in real time, is that kind of? >> Yeah, we've been using the term observability to describe this feeling of, I need to be able to find unknown unknowns. And instrumentation is absolutely the tactic to observability of the strategy. It is how people will be able to get information out of their systems in a way that is relevant to their business. A common thing that we'll hear or people will ask, "Oh, can you ingest my nginx logs?" "Can you ingest my SQL logs?" Often, that's a great place to start, but really where are the problems in an application? Where are your problems in the system? Usually it's the places that are custom that the engineers wrote. And tools need to be able to support, providing information, providing graphs, providing analytics in a way that makes it easy for the folks who wrote the code to track down the problem and address them. >> It's a haystack of needles. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> They're all relevant but you don't know which needle you're going to need. >> Exactly. >> So, let me just get this. So I'm ducking out, just trying to understand 'cause this is super important because this is really the key to large scale Cloud ops, what we're talking about here. From a developer standpoint, and we just had a great guest on, talking about testing features and production which is really the important, people want to do that. And then, but for one person, but in production scale, huge problem, opportunity as well. So, if most people think of like, "Oh, I'll just ingest with Splunk," but that's a different, is that different? I mean, 'cause people think of Splunk and they think of Redshift and Kinesis on Amazon, they go, "Okay." Is that the solution? Are you guys different? Are you a tool? How do I understand you guys' context to those known solutions? >> First of all, explain the difference between ourselves and the Redshifts and big queries of the world, and then I'll talk about Splunk. We really view those tools as primarily things built for data scientists. They're in the big data realm, but they are very concerned with being 100% correct. They're concerned with fitting into big data tools and they often have an unfortunate delay in getting data in and making it acquirable. Honeycomb is 100% built for engineers. Engineers of people, the folks who are going to be on the hook for, "Hey, there's downtime, what's going on?" And in-- >> So once business benefits, more data warehouse like. >> Yeah. And what that means is that for Honeycomb, everything is real time. It's real time. We believe in recent data. If you're looking to get query data from a year ago we're not really the thing, but instead of waiting 20 minutes for a query over a huge volume of data, you wait 10 seconds, or it's 3:00 AM and you need to figure out what's happening right now, you can go from query to query, to query, to query, as you come up with hypotheses, validate them or invalidate them, and continue on your investigation path. So that's... >> That makes sense. >> Yeah. >> So data wrangling, doing queries, business intelligence, insights as a service, that's all that? >> Yeah. We almost, we played with and tossed the tagline BI for systems because we want that BI mentality of what's going on, let me investigate. But for the folks who need answers now, an approximate answer now is miles better than a perfect one-- >> And you can't keep large customers waiting, right? At the end of the day, you can't keep the large customers waiting. >> Well, it's also so complicated. The edge is very robust and diverse now. I mean, no-js is a lot of IO going on for instance. So let's just take an example. I had developer talking the other day with me about no-js. It's like, oh, someone's complaining but they're using Firefox. It's like, okay, different memory configuration. So the developer had to debug because the complaints were coming in. Everyone else was fine, but the one guy is complaining because he's on Firefox. Well, how many tabs does he have open? What's the memory look like? So like, this a weird thing, I mean, that's just a weird example, but that's just the kinds of diverse things that developers have to get on. And then where do they start? I mean. >> Absolutely. So, there's something we ran into or we saw our developers run into all the time at PaaS, right? These are mobile developers. They have to worry about not only which version of the app it is, they have to worry about which version of the app, using which version of RSDK on which version of the operating system, where any kind of strange combination of these could result in some terrible user experience. And these are things that don't really work well if you're relying on pre-aggregated 10 series system, like the evolution of the RDS, I mentioned. And for folks who are trying to address this, something like Splunk, these logging tools, frankly, a lot of these tools are built on storage engines that are intended for full text search. They're unstructured text, you're grepping over them, and then you're build indices and structure on top of that. >> There's some lag involved too in that. >> There's so much lag involved. And there's almost this negative feedback loop built in where if you want to add more data, if on each log line you want to start tracking browser user agent, you're going to incur not only extra storage costs, you're going to incur extra read time costs because you're reading that more data, even if you're don't even care about that on those queries. And you're probably incurring cost on the right time to maintain these indices. Honeycomb, we're a column store through and through. We do not care about your unstructured text logs, we really don't want them. We want you to structure your data-- >> John: Did you guys write your own column store or is that? >> We did write our own column store because ultimately there's nothing off the shelf that gave us the speed that we wanted. We wanted to be able to, Hey, sending us data blogs with 20, 50, 200 keys. But if you're running analysis and all you care about is a simple filter and account, you shouldn't have to pull in all this-- >> To become sort of like Ferrari, if you customize, it's really purpose built, is that what you guys did? >> That is. >> So talk about the dynamic, because now you're dealing with things like, I mean, I had a conversation with someone who's looking at say blockchain, where there's some costs involved, obviously writing to the blockchain. And this is not like a crypto thing it's more of a supply chain thing. They want visibility into latency and things of that nature. Does this sounds like you would fit there as a potential use case? Is that something that you guys thought of at all? >> It could absolutely be. I'm actually not super familiar with the blockchain or blockchain based applications but ultimately Honeycomb is intended for you to be able to answer questions about your system in a way that tends to stymie existing tools. So we see lots of people come to us from strange use cases who just want to be able to instrument, "Hey I have this custom logic. "I want to be able to look at what it's doing." And when a customer complains and my graphs are fine or when my graphs are complaining, being able to go in and figure out why. >> Take a minute to talk about the company you founded. How many employees funding, if you can talk about it. And use case customers you have now. And how do you guys engage? The service, is it, do I download code? Is it SaaS? I mean, you got all this great tech. What's the value proposition? >> I think I'll answer this-- >> John: Company first. >> All right. >> John: Status of the company. >> Sure. Honeycomb is about 25 people, 30 people. We raised a series A in January. We are about two and a half years old and we are very much SaaS of the future. We're very opinionated about a number of things and how we want customers to interact with us. So, we are SaaS only. We do offer a secure proxy option for folks who have PII concerns. We only take structured data. So, at our API, you can use whatever you want to slurp data from your system. But at our API, we want JSON. We do offer a wide variety of integrations, connectors, SDKs, to help you structure that data. But ultimately-- >> Do you provide SDKs to your customers? >> We do. So that if they want to instrument their application, we just have the niceties around like batching and doing things asynchronously so it doesn't block their application. But ultimately, so we try to meet folks where they're at, but it's 2016, it was 2017, 2018-- >> You have a hardened API, API pretty much defines your service from an inbound standpoint. Prices, cost, how does someone engage with you guys? When does someone know to engage? Where's the smoke signals? When is the house on fire? Is it like people are standing around? What's the problem? When does someone know to call you guys up at? >> People know to call us when they're having production problems that they can't solve. When it takes them way too long to go from there's an alert that went off or a customer complaint, to, "Oh, I found the problem, I can address it." We price based on storage. So we are a bunch of engineers, we try to keep the business side as simple as possible for better, for worse. And so, the more data you send us, the more it'll cost. If you want a lot of data, but stored for a short period of time, that will cost less than a lot of data stored for a long period of time. One of the things that we, another one of the approaches that is possibly more common in the big data world and less in the monitoring world is we talk a lot about sampling. Sampling as a way to control those costs. Say you are, Facebook, again, I'll return to that example. Facebook knew that in this world where lots and lots of things can go wrong at any point in time, you need to be able to store the actual context of a given event happening. Some unit of work, you want to keep track of all the pieces of metadata that make that piece of work unique. But at Facebook scale, you can't store every single one of them. So, all right, you start to develop these heuristics. What things are more interesting than others? Errors are probably more interesting than 200 okays. Okay. So we'll keep track of most errors, we'll store 1% of successful requests. Okay. Well, within that, what about errors? Okay. Well, things that time out are maybe more interesting than things that are permissioning errors. And you start to develop this sampling scheme that essentially maps to the interesting ness of the traffic that's flowing through your system. To throw out some numbers, I think-- >> Machine learning is perfect for that too. They can then use the sampling. >> Yeah. There's definitely some learning that can happen to determine what things should be dropped on the ground, what requests are perfectly representative of a large swath of things. And Instagram, used a tool like this inside Facebook. They stored something like 1/10 of a percent or a 1/100 of a percent of their requests. 'Cause simply, that was enough to give them a sketch of what representative traffic, what's going wrong, or what's weird that, and is worth digging into. >> Final question. What's your priorities for the product roadmap? What are you guys focused on now? Get some fresh funding, that's great. So expand the team, hiring probably. Like product, what's the focus on the product? >> Focus on the product is making this mindset of observability accessible to software engineers. Right, we're entering this world where more and more, it's the software engineers deploying their code, pushing things out in containers. And they're going to need to also develop this sense of, "Okay, well, how do I make sure "something's working in production? "How do I make sure something keeps working? "And how do I think about correctness "in this world where it's not just my component, "it's my component talking to these other folks' pieces?" We believe really strongly that the era of this single person in a room keeping everything up, is outdated. It's teams now, it's on call rotations. It's handing off the baton and sharing knowledge. One of the things that we're really trying to build into the product, that we're hoping that this is the year that we can really deliver on this, is this feeling of, I might not be the best debugger on the team or I might not be the best person, best constructor of graphs on the team, and John, you might be. But how can a tool help me as a new person on a team, learn from what you've done? How can a tool help me be like, Oh man, last week when John was on call, he ran into something around my SQL also. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. So how can I learn from the sequence of those things-- >> John: Something an expert system. >> Yeah. Like how can we help build experts? How can we raise entire teams to the level of the best debugger? >> And that's the beautiful thing with metadata, metadata is a wonderful thing. 'Cause Jeff Jonas said on the, he was a Cube alumni, entrepreneur, famous data entrepreneur, observation space is super critical for understanding how to make AI work. And that's to your point, having observation data, super important. And of course our observation space is all things. Here at DevNet Create, Christine, thanks for coming on theCUBE, spending the time. >> Thank you. >> Fascinating story, great new venture. Congratulations. >> Christine: Thank you. >> And tackling the world of making developers more productive in real time in production. Really making an impact to coders and sharing and learning. Here in theCUBE, we're doing our share, live coverage here in Mountain View, DevNet Create. We'll be back with more after this short break. (gentle music)

(digital music) >> Welcome, everyone. Donald Klein here with CUBE Conversations, coming to you from our studios at theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. And today I'm fortunate enough to be joined by Paul Makowski, CTO of PolySwarm. PolySwarm is a fascinating company that plays in the security space, but is also part of this emerging block chain and token economy. Welcome, Paul. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Great, so why don't we just start and give everybody an understanding of what PolySwarm does and how you guys do it? >> Sure, so PolySwarm is a new effort (audio fading in and out) to try to fix the economics around how threat (missing audio) >> Donald: Okay. >> So, we see a lot of shortcomings with (audio fading in and out) I think it's more of a economic concern rather than (missing audio) (laughs) Rather than a concern regarding (missing audio) >> Donald: Okay. >> So, what PolySwarm is (missing audio) and change how (missing audio) >> Okay. >> So, it is a blockchain project (missing audio) will govern tomorrow's threat-intelligence base and perhaps, ideally, generate better incentives (missing audio) >> Okay, so, generally if I'm understanding right, you're playing in this threat-intelligence area, which is commonly know as bug-bounties. Correct, yeah? But you guys have kind of taken this in a new direction. Why don't you just explain to me kind of where this threat-intelligence distributed economy has been and where where you see it going in the future. >> Sure, so bug bounties are, we had spoke earlier about HackerOne, for example. Bug bounties are an effort to identify vulnerabilities, and open vulnerability reports to arbitrary people across the internet. And incentivize people to secure products on behalf of the product owner. >> So, I can be an independent developer, and I find a vulnerability in something, and I submit it to one of these platforms, and then I get paid or rewarded for this. >> Yeah, and so the likes of HackerOne is a player in the space that conducts these bug bounties on behalf of other enterprises. >> Donald: Got it. >> Large enterprises such as Google and Microsoft and Apple, even, run their own bug bounties directly. >> Donald: Interesting. >> But, there's also these centralized middle men, the likes of HackerOne. Now, PolySwarm is a little bit different. We've discussed perhaps distributing the bug bounty space, but what we're focusing on right now at PolySwarm 1.0 is really just determining whether or not files, URLs, network graphics are either malicious or benign. >> Donald: Interesting. >> There's this boolean determination to start with, and then we're going to expand from there to metadata concerning, perhaps, the malware family of an identified malicious file. And then from there we'd also like to get into the bug bounty space. >> Okay. >> So, by PolySwarm being a fully decentralized market, us, as Swarm Technologies, will not be the middle man. We will not be in the middle of these transactions. We think that is going to make everything a bit more efficient for all the players on the market. And will best offer precision reward to be both accurate and timely in threat-intelligence. >> Interesting, okay, alright so I want to talk to you just a little bit more, because not everybody out there may be fully familiar with how a kind of decentralized app works. Talk to us a little bit about how blockchain fits in, how smart contracts fit in, and maybe just a little about, like, if I were to work on the PolySwarm platform, would I set up my own smart contract? Would somebody set it up for me? How would that work? >> Great question. So, in general, we see smart contracts as a new way to literally program a market. And I think this concept is applicable to a lot of different spaces. My background and the PolySwarm team background is in information (missing audio). >> Donald: Okay. >> So, we're applying smart contracts and market design specifically to a problem area that we are experts in. >> Okay, and what kind of smart contracts are these? What platform are you running on? >> We're running on Ethereum. We had previously discussed possibly expanding to Bezos, although there are perhaps some reasons not to do that anymore right now. But yeah, on Ethereum, we've been publishing our proof of concept code for our smart contracts right now which is available on github.com/polyswarm. More directly to your question concerning developing applications that plug into our platform or plug in to any platform, we've also released a opensource framework called Perigord. Which is a framework for developing Ethereum distributed applications using Go, which is a language developed by Google. So, I hope that answers a little bit, but >> So, you're really pioneering this whole world of moving to a decentralized, distributed app framework. >> Yeah, so, we're not the first people in this space, but we are expanding the ease of development to the Go language space, away from strictly programming in JavaScript. A lot distributed applications today are programmed in JavaScript. And there's pros and cons to each language, but we're hoping to get the Go language engaged a little more. >> So, let's go back now around to the people that are going to be participating in this marketplace, right. You were talking about unlocking the economic potential that's latent out there. Talk a little bit more about that. >> Exactly, so we had a spoken a little bit ago about HackerOne, and one of the things that I think is really cool about HackerOne is the fact that it's offered globally. What makes that really cool is that HackerOne gets a lot of great submissions from people in locales that may not indigenously offer sufficient jobs for the amount of talent that the local economies are producing. So, that's a sort of latent talent. HackerOne is particularly popular in India, China, Eastern European countries, we'd like to also direct that talent toward solving the threatened intelligence problem, namely accurately and timely identifying threats in files or graphic files. So, we'd like to-- We are operating in a eight and a half billion dollar per year space, the antivirus space, and we'd like to unlock this latent talent to broaden what threats are detected and how effectively enterprises defend themselves through a crowdsourced contributed manner that will cover more of the threats. >> Interesting, and so why don't you just talk a little about URLs and why those are important. We've seen a lot of hacks in the news recently, people going to sign up for a token sale and then being rerouted to the wrong place, et cetera. So, talk about malicious URLs. I think that might be an interest for people. >> Sure, everyone is trying to determine what URLs are malicious. Google has built into Chrome their safe browsing program that's also present in Firefox, Microsoft in some equivalent. Everyone's trying to determine and prevent people from being phished. You mentioned there were a few ICOs in this space that unfortunately had their websites hacked and their Ethereum contribution address changed, the hackers made off with some money. What PolySwarm does at a base level is it creates a market for security experts, again, around the world, to effectively put their money where their mouth is and say I think to the tune of 10 Nectar, for example, Nectar is the name of the PolySwarm note, that this URL or this file is malicious or benign. And those funds are escrowed directly into the smart contracts that constitute PolySwarm. And at a later time, the security experts who are right, receive the escrowed rewards from the security experts who were wrong. So, it's this feedback loop. >> It sounds like participants are kind of betting on both sides of whether something's malicious or not? >> Yeah, in effect. Legally, I definitely wouldn't say betting. (laughs) But it's >> Donald: Fair enough. >> The correct answer is there, right? The way that PolySwarm works is and enterprise has a suspect file or URL and decides to swarm it and what they do on the backend for that is they can either directly post this file or URL to the network, the network being the Ethereum blockchain. Everyone that's watching it and is cognizant of PolySwarm will be aware that there's a suspect file that perhaps I want to decide whether or not it's malicious as a security expert. Again, around the world, security experts will make that decision. If this is a particular file that I think I have insight into, as a security expert, then I might put up a certain amount of Nectar because I believe it is one way or the other. The reason why I say it's more of a-- The correct answer is in the file, right? It is in fact either malicious or benign. But what PolySwarm's economic reward is both timeliness and accuracy in determining that mal intent, whether or not that file is (missing audio). >> Interesting. And so the use of the smart contract is pretty novel here, right? Because the smart contracts then execute and distribute the bounties directly to the participants based on answer, is that right? >> That's correct. And that's the real key part. That eliminates the middle man in this space. A lot of the talk around blockchain in general is about restlessness, about not having middle men. In PolySwarm the core smart contract, again which are on github.com/polyswarm, they are able to actually hold escrowed upon. Though we're not in the middle and those escrowed funds are release to people who effectively get it right through the cost of people who got it wrong. So, we think >> And this is all automated through the system? >> This is all automated through the system. If I could take a step back real quick here, some of the shortcomings we're trying to address in today's market are if you imagine a Venn diagram, there's a rectangle that has all of the different threats in this space and you have large circles that cover portions of the Venn diagram and those large circles are today's large antivirus companies. Those circles overlap substantially. And the reason for that is pretty straight forward. Did you hear about perhaps WannaCry? It was a ransomware-- >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> If you're an antivirus company and you're not cognizant, you're not detecting WannaCry, then it's real easy to write you off. But the difficulty there is on the backend what that incentivizes is a lot of security companies doing duplicated work trying to detect the same threat. So there's a little bit of a clumpiness, there's a little bit of overlap, in what they detect and further it's very difficult although we've been speaking with people at those companies. They're always interested in the latest threat and uniquely detecting things, but it's sometimes very difficult to make Dell's argument that hey I detect this esoteric family of power >> Donald: Malicious URL, or et cetera. >> Exactly and by the way you're also going to get hit with it. That's a very difficult argument. >> So, you're sort of addressing the under served areas, then, within security. >> Precisely, so the way that PolySwarm will look in that Venn diagram, is instead of large, mostly overlapping ovals, we'll have thousands of micro-engines written by security experts that each find their specialty. And that together this crowdsourced intelligence will cover more. >> Interesting, very good, very good, okay. So, just last question here. Talk around a little bit of the background. How did PolySwarm come together? I know you talked about Narf Industries, et cetera. Why don't you just give us a little of the background here? 'Cause it's impressive. >> Sure, so again my background, and the entire PolySwarm technical team's background, is information security. We also run and work for a computer security consultancy called Narf Industries. Our more public work has been for DARPA, as of late. There was a large competition that DARPA ran called the "Cyber Grand Challenge" that was the-- they were trying to create the autonomous equivalent of a human capture the flag competition, which is a hacking competition. Anyway, we helped develop the challenges for that program and otherwise helped in that phase. So that's a public-facing project. >> And you won part of that competition, is that correct? >> Yeah, so we weren't competing in DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge, but in the human capture the flags, we have won those. All the members of the core PolySwarm, and also Narf Industries, technical team have won DEF CON's capture the flag competition at least once. And some of us have helped run that competition. That's considered the world series of hacking (laughs). So, that's our background, and we're also all we've all previously worked directly for the U.S. government, so we're very much embedded in the cutting edge of cyber security. And, finally, the last thing I'll say, is Narf was recently awarded a contract with the Department of Homeland Security for investigating how to build confidentiality controls into a blockchain environment. The Department of Homeland Security was concerned about identity management. They wanted to apply a blockchain phase. But part of that, is obviously, you want to protect people's private information. So, how do you do that phase that, by default, is purely public. >> Got it, okay look we're going to have to end there, but let me just say, we would be remiss without mentioning the fact that your ICO's starting. When's that going to happen? >> So, we have an ICO that's going to go live February 6. Right now, we're just trying to generate buzz, talking to great people like yourself. After that lead up to the ICO, we'd like to encourage people to check out our website at polyswarm.io, we have a Telegram group that's growing everyday. And, again, a large part of what we would be funded by this ICO to accomplish is building the community around using PolySwarm. Fortunately, again, this is our space. So, we know a lot of people in this space, but we're always happy to be meeting people, so we'd love for all your viewers to join the conversation and engage with us. Our DMs on Twitter are open, et cetera. >> Okay, we hope they do. Probably just want to make one final point is that you guys are actually publishing all your code on GitHub ahead of the ICO, right? That kind of makes you unique in a very difficult space. >> It, unfortunately, does make us unique. I wish more projects did do that. But, yes, we are publishing our code in advance of the token sale. PolySwarm, if you're familiar with the conversation between securities and utility tokens, PolySwarm is very much a utility token. People will grade Nectar, which is the name of our Token, for threat intelligence. And part of that is we want to have a usable ecosystem on day one when people buy tokens. We want to make sure that you're not investing in some future thing. Obviously we're going to improve on it, but it will be usable from day one (missing audio). >> Alright, fantastic, so thank you, Paul. I appreciate you coming in. Alright, well thanks, everyone. Thank you for watching. This is Donald Klein with CUBE Conversations coming to you from Palo Alto, California. Thank you for watching. (digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from New York City It's TheCube. Covering CyberConnect 2017. Brought to you by Centrify and the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> It got out of control, they were testing it. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in New York City for CyberConnect 2017. This is Cube's coverage is presented by Centrify. It's an industry event, bringing all the leaders of industry and government together around all the great opportunities to solve the crisis of our generation. That's cyber security. We have Cricket Liu. Chief DNS architect and senior fellow at Infoblox. Cricket, great to see you again. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, nice to be back John. >> So we're live here and really this is the first inaugural event of CyberConnect. Bringing government and industry together. We saw the retired general on stage talking about some of the history, but also the fluid nature. We saw Jim from Aetna, talking about how unconventional tactics and talking about domains and how he was handling email. That's a DNS problem. >> Yeah, yeah. >> You're the DNS guru. DNS has become a role in this. What's going on here around DNS? Why is it important to CyberConnect? >> Well, I'll be talking tomorrow about the first anniversary, well, a little bit later than the first anniversary of the big DDoS attack on Dyn. The DNS hosting provider up in Manchester, New Hampshire. And trying to determine if we've actually learned anything, have we improved our DNS infrastructure in any way in the ensuing year plus? Are we doing anything from the standards, standpoint on protecting DNS infrastructure. Those sorts of things. >> And certainly one of the highlight examples was mobile users are masked by the DNS on, say, email for example. Jim was pointing that out. I got to ask you, because we heard things like sink-holing addresses, hackers create domain names in the first 48 hours to launch attacks. So there's all kinds of tactical things that are being involved with, lets say, domain names for instance. >> Cricket: Yeah, yeah. >> That's part of the critical infrastructure. So, the question is how, in DDoS attacks, denial-of-service attacks, are coming in in the tens of thousands per day? >> Yeah, well that issue that you talked about, in particular the idea that the bad guys register brand new domain names, domain names that initially have no negative reputation associated with them, my friend Paul Vixie and his new company Farsight Security have been working on that. They have what is called a -- >> John: What's the name of the company again? >> Farsight Security. >> Farsight? >> And they have what's called a Passive DNS Database. Which is a database basically of DNS telemetry that is accumulated from big recursive DNS servers around the internet. So they know when a brand new domain name pops up, somewhere on the internet because someone has to resolve it. And they pump all of these brand new domain names into what's called a response policy zone feed. And you can get for example different thresh holds. I want to see the brand new domain names created over the last 30 minutes or seen over the last 30 minutes. And if you block resolution of those brand new domain names, it turns out you block a tremendous amount of really malicious activity. And then after say, 30 minutes if it's a legitimate domain name it falls off the list and you can resolve it. >> So this says your doing DNS signaling as a service for new name registrations because the demand is for software APIs to say "Hey, I want to create some policy around some techniques to sink-hole domain address hacks. Something like that? >> Yeah, basically this goes hand in hand with this new system response policy zone which allows you to implement DNS policy. Something that we've really never before done with DNS servers, which that's actually not quite true. There have been proprietary solutions for it. But response policy zones are an open solution that give you the ability to say "Hey I do want to allow resolution of this domain name, but not this other domain name". And then you can say "Alright, all these brand new domain names, for the first 30 minutes of their existence I don't want-- >> It's like a background check for domain names. >> Yeah, or like a wait list. Okay, you don't get resolved for the first 30 minutes, that gives the sort of traditional, reputational, analyzers, Spamhaus and Serval and people like that a chance to look you over and say "yeah, it's malicious or it's not malicious". >> So serves to be run my Paul Vixie who is the contributor to the DNS protocol-- >> Right, enormous contributor. >> So we should keep an eye on that. Check it out, Paul Vixie. Alright, so DNS's critical infrastructure that we've been talking about, that you and I, love to riff about DNS and the role What's it enabled? Obviously it's ASCII, but I got to ask you, all these Unicode stuff about the emoji and the open source, really it highlight's the Unicode phenomenon. So this is a hacker potential haven. DNS and Unicode distinction. >> It's really interesting from a DNS standpoint, because we went to a lot of effort within the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, some years ago, back when I was more involved in the IETF, some people spent a tremendous amount of effort coming up with a way to use allow people to use Unicode within domain name. So that you could type something into your browser that was in traditional or simplified Chinese or that was in Arabic or was in Hebrew or any number of other scripts. And you could type that in and it would be translated into something that we call puny code, in the DNS community, which is an ASCII equivalent to that. The issue with that though, becomes that there are, we would say glifs, most people I guess would say characters, but there are characters in Unicode that look just like, say Latin alphabet characters. So there's a lowercase 'a' for example, in cyrillic, it's not a lowercase 'a' in the Latin alphabet, it's a cyrillic 'a', but it looks just like an 'a'. So it's possible for people to register names, domain names, that in there Unicode representation, look like for example, PayPal, which of course has two a's in it, and those two a's could be cyrillic a's. >> Not truly the ASCII representation of PayPal which we resolve through the DNS. >> Exactly, so imagine how subtle an attack that would be if you were able to send out a bunch of email, including the links that said www.-- >> Someone's hacked your PayPal account, click here. >> Yeah, exactly. And if you eyeballed it you'd think Well, sure that's www.PayPal.com, but little do you know it's actually not the -- >> So Jim Ruth talked about applying some unconventional methods, because the bad guys don't subscribe to the conventional methods . They don't buy into it. He said that they change up their standards, is what I wrote down, but that was maybe their sort of security footprint. 1.5 times a day, how does that apply to your DNS world, how do you even do that? >> Well, we're beginning to do more and more with analytics DNS. The passive DNS database that I talked about. More and more big security players, including Infoblox are collecting passive DNS data. And you can run interesting analytics on that passive DNS data. And you can, in some cases, automatically detect suspicious or malicious behavior. For example you can say "Hey, look this named IP address mapping is changing really, really rapidly" and that might be an indication of let's say, fast flux. Or you can say "These domain names have really high entropy. We did an engram analysis of the labels of these". The consequence of that we believe that this resolution of these domain names, is actually being used to tunnel data out of an organization or into an organization. So there's some things you can do with these analytical algorithms in order to suss out suspicious and malicious. >> And you're doing that in as close to real time as possible, presumably right? >> Cricket: That's right. >> And so, now everybody's talking about Edge, Edge computing, Edge analytics. How will the Edge effect your ability to keep up? >> Well, the challenge I think with doing analytics on passive DNS is that you have to be able to collect that data from a lot of places. The more places that you have, the more sensors that you have collecting passive DNS data the better. You need to be able to get it out from the Edge. From those local recursive DNS servers that are actually responding to the query's that come from say your smart phone or your laptop or what have you. If you don't have that kind of data, you've only got, say, big ISPs, then you may not detect the compromise of somebody's corporate network, for example. >> I was looking at some stats when I asked the IOT questions, 'cause you're kind of teasing out kind of the edge of the network and with mobile and wearables as the general was pointing out, is that it's going to create more service area, but I just also saw a story, I don't know if it's from Google or wherever, but 80% plus roughly, websites are going to have SSL HTBS that they're resolving through. And there's reports out here that a lot of the anti virus provisions have been failing because of compromised certificates. And to quote someone from Research Park, and we want to get your reaction to this "Our results show", this is from University of Maryland College Park. "Our results show that compromised certificates pose a bigger threat than we previously believed, and is not restricted to advanced threats and digitally signed malware was common in the wild." Well before Stuxnet. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And so breaches have been caused by compromising certificates of actual authority. So this brings up the whole SSL was supposed to be solving this, that's just one problem. Now you've got the certificates, well before Stuxnet. So Stuxnet really was kind of going on before Stuxnet. Now you've got the edge of the network. Who has the DNS control for these devices? Is it kind of like failing? Is it crumbling? How do we get that trust back? >> That's a good question. One of the issues that we've had is that at various points, CAs, Certificate Authorities, have been conned into issuing certificates for websites that they shouldn't have. For example, "Hey, generate a cert for me". >> John: The Chinese do it all the time. >> Exactly. I run www. Bank of America .com. They give it to the wrong guy. He installs it. We have I think, something like 1,500 top level certification authorities. Something crazy like that. Dan Komenski had a number in one of his blog posts and it was absolutely ridiculous. The number of different CA's that we trust that are built into the most common browsers, like Chrome and Firefox and things like that. We're actually trying to address some of those issues with DNS, so there are two new resource records being introduced to DNS. One is TLSA. >> John: TLSA? >> Yeah, TLSA. And the other one is called CAA I think, which always makes me think of a California Automotive Association. (laughter) But TLSA is basically a way of publishing data in your own zone that says My cert looks like this. You can say "This is my cert." You can just completely go around the CA. And you can say "This is my cert" and then your DNS sec sign your zone and you're done. Or you can do something short of that and you can say "My cert should look like this "and it should have this CA. "This is my CA. "Don't trust any other one" >> So it's metadata about the cert or the cert itself. >> Exactly, so that way if somebody manages to go get a cert for your website, but they get that cert from some untrustworthy CA. I don't know who that would be. >> John: Or a comprimised-- >> Right, or a compromised CA. No body would trust it. No body who actually looks up the TSLA record because they'll go "Oh, Okay. I can see that Infoblox's cert that their CA is Symantech. And this is not a Symantech signed cert. So I'm not going to believe it". And at the same time this CAA record is designed to be consumed by the CA's themselves, and it's a way of saying, say Infoblox can say "We are a customer of Symantech or whoever" And when somebody goes to the cert and says "Hey, I want to generate a certificate for www.Infoblox.com, they'll look it up and say "Oh, they're a Symantech customer, I'm not going to do that for you". >> So it creates trust. So how does this impact the edge of the network, because the question really is, the question that's on everyone's mind is, does the internet of things create more trust or does it create more vulnerabilities? Everyone knows it's a surface area, but still there are technical solutions when you're talking about, how does this play out in your mind? How does Infoblox see it? How do you see it? What's Paul Vixie working on, does that tie into it? Because out in the hinterlands and the edge of the network and the wild, is it like a DNS server on the device. It could be a sensor? How are they resolving things? What is the protocol for these? >> At least this gives you a greater assurance if you're using TLS to encrypt communication between a client and a web server or some other resource out there on the internet. It at least gives you a better assurance that you really aren't being spoofed. That you're going to the right place. That your communications are secure. So that's all really good. IOT, I think of as slightly orthogonal to that. IOT is still a real challenge. I mean there is so many IOT devices out there. I look at IOT though, and I'll talk about this tomorrow, and actually I've got a live event on Thursday, where I'll talk about it some more with my friend Matt Larson. >> John: Is that going to be here in New York? >> Actually we're going to be broadcasting out of Washington, D.C. >> John: Were you streaming that? >> It is streamed. In fact it's only streamed. >> John: Put a plug in for the URL. >> If you go to www.Infoblox.com I think it's one of the first things that will slide into your view. >> So you're putting it onto your company site. Infoblox.com. You and Matt Larson. Okay, cool. Thursday event, check it out. >> It is somewhat embarrassingly called Cricket Liu Live. >> You're a celebrity. >> It's also Matt Larson Live. >> Both of you guys know what you're talking about. It's great. >> So there's a discussion among certain boards of directors that says, "Look, we're losing the battle, "we're losing the war. "We got to shift more on response "and at least cover our butts. "And get some of our response mechanisms in place." What do you advise those boards? What's the right balance between sort of defense perimeter, core infrastructure, and response. >> Well, I would certainly advocate as a DNS guy, that people instrument their DNS infrastructure to the extent that they can to be able to detect evidence of compromise. And that's a relatively straight forward thing to do. And most organizations haven't gone through the trouble to plumb their DNS infrastructure into their, for example, their sim infrastructure, so they can get query log information, they can use RPZs to flag when a client looks up the domain name of a known command and control server, which is a clear indication of compromise. Those sorts of things. I think that's really important. It's a pretty easy win. I do think at this point that we have to resign ourselves to the idea that we have devices on our network that are infected. That game is lost. There's no more crunchy outer shell security. It just doesn't really work. So you have to have defensive depth as they say. >> Now servs has been around for such a long time. It's been one of those threats that just keeps coming. It's like waves and waves. So it looks like there's some things happening, that's cool. So I got to ask you, CyberConnect is the first real inaugural event that brings industry and some obviously government and tech geeks together, but it's not black hat or ETF. It's not those geeky forums. It's really a business community coming together. What's your take of this event? What's your observations? What are you seeing here? >> Well, I'm really excited to actually get the opportunity to talk to people who are chiefly security people. I think that's kind of a novelty for me, because most of the time I think I speak to people who are chiefly networking people and in particular that little niche of networking people who are interested in DNS. Although truth be told, maybe they're not really interested in DNS, maybe they just put up with me. >> Well the community is really strong. The DNS community has always been organically grown and reliable. >> But I love the idea of talking about DNS security to a security audience. And hopefully some of the folks we get to talk to here, will come away from it thinking oh, wow, so I didn't even realize that my DNS infrastructure could actually be a security tool for me. Could actually be helpful in any way in detecting compromise. >> And what about this final question, 'cause I know we got a time check here. But, operational impact of some of these DNS changes that are coming down from Paul Vixie, you and Matt Larson doing some things together, What's the impact of the customer and they say "okay, DNS will play a role in how I role out my architecture. New solutions for cyber, IOT is right around the corner. What's the impact to them in your mind operationally. >> There certainly is some operational impact, for example if you want to subscribe to RPZ feeds, you've got to become a customer of somebody who provides a commercial RPZ feed or somebody who provides a free RPZ feed. You have to plumb that into your DNS infrastructure. You have to make sure that it continues transferring. You have to plumb that into your sim, so when you get a hit against an RPZ, you're notified about it, your security folks. All that stuff is routine day to day stuff. Nothing out of the ordinary. >> No radical plumbing changes. >> Right, but I think one of the big challenges in so many of the organizations that I go to visit, the security organization and the networking organization are in different silos and they don't necessarily communicate a lot. So maybe the more difficult operational challenge is just making sure that you have that communication. And that the security guys know the DNS guys, the networking guys, and vice versa. And they cooperate to work on problems. >> This seems to be the big collaboration thing that's happening here. That it's more of a community model coming together, rather than security. Cricket Liu here, DNS, Chief Architect of DNS and senior fellow of Infoblox. The legend in the DNS community. Paul Vixie amongst the peers. Really that community holding down the fort I'll see a lot of exploits that they have to watch out for. Thanks for your commentary here at the CyberConnect 2017 inaugural event. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube covering Interconnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay welcome back everyone. We are live at the Mandalay Bay for IBM Interconnect 2017, The Cube's exclusive coverage. I'm John Frower, Dave Vellante, my co-host. Our next guest is Jim Casey and Michael Gilfix. Michael's the VP of process transformation and Jim is offering manager at IBM. Guys, welcome back to The Cube. >> Both: Thank you. >> So you guys had a big announcement on Monday, the digital assistant, so I've been craving a digital assistant since the little Microsoft little, you know, icon would pop up. >> Michael: You're talking about Clip, aren't you? >> The clip man. >> Don't talk about that. >> We don't like that. >> To me that was once called the digital assistant. It was a help button, but this is now, digital assistant is real automation, and you guys got a whole other take on this. It's totally cloud, cloud first. What's the digital assistant product that you announced? Take us through that. >> So here was our vision. What we found was in the modern, digital workplace, everyone is struggling to just keep up pace. Too many sources of information, and the information is buried everywhere. It's buried in emails, in spreadsheets, in documents. Many corporations have undertaken a BI project. In fact, there's an explosion of all these different dashboards that has all kinds of business data that they could go and see, so no one has the time to read all these things. Meanwhile, everyone in the modern world is trying to do 50 things at once and it's hard to figure out what is the best time to progress something and make progress? Our vision, so what we thought is wouldn't it be great if I could program this assistant, programmable by everyday business users, to watch for the things that matter to me and figure out when I should take action or take automated action on my behalf to save me time. >> So it's an interface, so it's software interface, cloud-based SAS, and the back end, does the user have to, what's the persona of the user that's using your product? >> Well, we want them to be used by non-developers, non-technical users, and so we thought really carefully about how you can teach your assistant these notions of skills, really point to tasks that can really make your life easier on a daily basis and they can pick anything that they like working with, that they can connect to, get the information from, and effectively assemble into these point-to tasks. >> Host: And the data sources are whatever I want them to be, explain how that works? >> Yeah, it can connect to common SAS applications. Those could be things like productivity suites, like G-Suite, they can be things like CRM systems, like Sales Force, campaign management systems like Marketo, and that's just in the beta that we just launched. And of course in the future, they'll be able to connect into their on-premise systems as well. >> So is it to replace the dashboards and all the wrangling that goes on? Most business users will have either a department that does all the data science or data prep for them, wrangling data sets, and then they get reports or spreadsheets or some BI dashboard. >> Yeah, we wanted the assistant to push the work to the user instead of the user having to go and spend time watching all these dashboards that really, they just didn't have time to do. And so the assistant takes all the heavy lifting of watching the data for you, figures out when action is needed, and then taps you on the shoulder. >> So Ginny Ramete was talking about that your customers want to own the data. So that's a great purpose, we buy into that mission, but a lot of the data is spread all over the place, so one of the problems that we're seeing in the big data world, now IOT complicates even further, is that data's everywhere, scattered, and the tools might have stacks and data wrangling within tools so you have complexity out there just on the scaffolding of how the data's managed. Is that part of the problem that you guys help solve? Because that seems to be a pain point. >> Yeah, and I think the amount of time that people spend just searching and aggregating and gathering information so they can figure out what to do, it's staggering. And when you think about the, it takes about two the three hours often for people to gather all the information that they need in order to make a real significant decision, every day, daily, you know operations. You're spending time in your email, you're building spreadsheets. Think of all the time you spend building a spreadsheet, wrangling data, you know. It's a productivity killer, and so a lot of the use cases that we look for, we'll ask our clients show me the ugliest spreadsheet that you use on a day-to-day basis for business operations. That's usually a starting point, or show me how many dashboards are you looking at and what are the decision you make off that? That's the stuff that we want to collapse into what the assistant can provide. >> So I got a use case for you, I'm a walking, I'm like everybody, right, so I've got my email, I've got five or six spreadsheets, Google Docs that I'm in every day all day, maybe there's a base camp, maybe there's a slack. I'm in Sales Force, all right, and then I got my social. >> Tool overdose. >> You just described the typical modern environment. All fragmented tools. >> And I'm in there and I'm like which browser is it, oh is it in Firefox, I'll put my Safari stuff I'll put over here, and I'll put my email in Mozilla, okay. It is just awful, it's a bloody nightmare, I get lost. I got to back up, hit the escape key, and go, okay, where am I, how do I find it again? >> Jim: It's connecting the dots. >> Okay, explain now how you can help me. >> So think of the things that you're looking for in all those different data sources. We're seeing the trend now. It's not about how can I just connect with things, it's how can I connect the dots? It's the actual business data inside of there, and how do I put that in a context that's relevant to you, what you're trying to do? You know, and a great example, we're working with one client who, they're moving, and a lot of people are doing this, they're moving from a point in time sale to being as a service, and in that kind of scenario, relationships with your clients really matter. And preventing customer churn is really important. So they have people who are responsible for making sure that people are not going to churn. That's a lot of dots to connect, right? So with the Digital Business Assistant, what we do is we look for those patterns that are really common that predict churn, but those things are scattered across your sales systems, your marketing systems, the website traffic, social media even, and we're able to combine all those things into a really consumable component called a skill. And then that individual person that's responsible for this set of customers can tailor it to their needs. So it's kind of like how you would buy a suit. When you go in and buy a suit, you don't get just the fabric laid out on a table and they cut it, right? You, most people don't anyway. (they laugh) >> I buy what's on the rack. I say "I want that one." >> Yeah, you walk in and you say that. >> I want what that is. >> 42 long, right? And they make a couple adjustments and then it's yours. >> All right, I'll take that suit up there, what's on the mannequin. >> They make a few adjustments and it's yours. Software should be the same way. You should be able to configure software in a few clicks. >> That's the whole thing, I mean, I joke about the mannequin but that's really kind of what hangs the perfect use case so that would be an automated example of an assistant model for you guys. Sometimes you just want everything to hang together for you, and sometimes you might want to go in and go look at the data. >> Yeah, and we see this across a lot of different industries, so things like customer service and sales and marketing, but we also see it in, let's say I'm a field technician, right? And I got to go out to an oil field. How do I know all the different patterns of information that might predict whether or not I need to, what I need to do when I'm out there. >> So you monitor my patterns, my behavior, and then ultimately train the model, or? >> Well you program it. You tell it what to watch for for you. So to give you an example of the kind of use case, to pick a specific use case, and we shared this again in sort of our unveiling on Monday. We shared the idea of a sales rep who is pursuing a given opportunity, and thinking about all the factors that went into their success and, you know, that sales rep has several different things they need to use to really maximize their chance of closing that deal. So one is they need to be responsive do their customer, and you know, like many different corporations out there who sell many different products and services, while you're busy working on the new opportunity, you've got to service the old. So when some issue comes up, you have to be responsive to it. Well, it's really hard while you're busy working on all these opportunities, to make sure that the issue's being resolved, that you're being responsive to your customer. Meanwhile, everybody in the corporation is coming up with new opportunities, new marketing brochures, new values in the product. And so is your rep knowledgeable about the latest and greatest products? So we imagine that you could teach your assistant how to watch some of this stuff for you and really help you to close your opportunity. And a very pointed example of the kinds of things that it should watch for you, I should be able to say something like hey, if I can have an active opportunity and then my customer goes and opens a service support ticket and that service support ticket hasn't been resolved in a week and meanwhile, I got a bunch of email coming from that client, of tone angry, notice the cognitive part there, about this particular product, and meanwhile I'm on the road and I'm not checking my email. Well, I have a catastrophe waiting to happen. So I can program my assistant to watch for these kinds of things. >> Does it do push notifications? >> Exactly, so you can then have it push to you, look, here's all the information about the active service thing, here's how long it was sitting there waiting for resolution, this is what's happened since, and you can immediately take action. >> So you're orchestrating basically signals that the user connects, like a Google alert on search is a trivial example, right? Someone types, a result comes on Google, you get an email. Here, you're kind of doing that-- >> But it's proactive. You tell your assistant to proactively watch it for you, and that's a unique technology that we developed in-house. Because it's watching all these events happening in the enterprise and figuring out when that thing becomes actionable. >> And the user would know where to look, because like Dave's spreadsheet might say "hey, cash balance" or you know, sales trend, this rep and then something happens, and he can get that pushed to him from three different disparate side-load apps, that's pretty much what it is. >> That's right. >> Okay, so give us the status on the beta right now. It's a beta, so it's sign-up required. Okay, and the requirements to implement it, if you get through the beta, is just log in to a portal? It's a SAS model and then do the connectors? >> So the first thing you do, you go to IBM.com/assistant. You can sign up to. >> That, by the way, might be the easiest URL I think we ever came up with. I'm pretty sure that one's going to be memorable. >> Yeah, so you just go to that site, you sign up, you give us a little bit of information, your email, how to contact you and we'll put you on the waiting list, and what we're going to be doing is opening up more seats as we go through over the next couple weeks, and then we plan in the near term here to make it available as an open beta that you could see, and you'll see that inside of Bloomix as a tile inside of Bloomix. >> And here's the thing, we're doing something really different in the marketplace. This is a very different kind of offering, really targeting, again, non-technical people, this proactive situational awareness that your assistant can do, uses your data, built-in intelligence, intelligence that can customize to the way you work, guide you to the next best action. We have an incredible vision for this. The idea behind the beta is to start getting feedback. We worked very closely with early customers in the initial design and development. We want to open that up and get even more feedback and ideas on this kind of technology. >> So how is this different from Watson's discovery services that they have? I can imagine that you're building on Watson. Is it the cognitive piece within IBM, or is this kind of, I mean how would a customer figure that out, or just more of a-- >> Yeah, so I can give you an example. So we have one of our prototypes that we're actually taking some of the components of Watson discovery service and we package that up as a skill inside of your assistant, and it's a specific implementation, so what it allows you to do in this case is it'll look at your email and it'll look for specific entities, like a customer that matters to you, and if I get three emails of negative sentiment from a customer where I also have an open opportunity in the last week, that's a pattern I want to know about, right? Or we can start to correlate with all sorts of different things, so I think what you're going to see is these skills that we make available with the digital business assistant really up, take consumability of these really, really powerful technologies around cognitive and cloud. We take that to the next level. >> That's the key, how do we make Watson tailorable and put in the hands of every knowledge worker in every company? >> Host: So I presume you guys are dog fooding this personally, is that right? >> We have plans to do that, yes. >> Host: Oh, you haven't started yet? >> Sampling our own champagne. >> But we are, yes. >> He always gets called on that. >> We will be using it, yes. >> We created that champagne. >> We're beer drinkers, that's it, beer. >> We're going back to dog food, we eat beer, we should drink our own beer now. We created that with all our boost men, remember? (laughs) >> So get back to the status of the product. So it's got some Watson capability, but this is for the user to use. I don't have to get IT involved? >> Jim: That's right. >> This is where the user takes a personal productivity approach, and you bring in some Watson-- >> A user may not even know that they're using some of these Watson capabilities. To the end user, what do you want it to do for me? Well, I want it to tell me if, uh, if I think a customer might be upset with me. Well, that might be a combination of a lot of different things, but it just makes it really consumable and easy for people. >> So where do you guys sit within IBM? Because now there's like, because this is a really cool user tool, so is this part of Watson? >> Jim: We think so. >> Is it part of the Watson team? >> Well, honestly our organization doesn't really matter, I mean, we're working with teams across IBM as a whole. It's a great opportunity to take this technology and really reach a whole set of new use cases, I think, across the company, and we want to integrate Watson technology to, like we were saying, really make it easy for the end-user to go and access it. >> Any plans around developer outreach? >> Well, we will, I think, later this year, one of the things we envisioned really early on is that people are going to want to have pre-built skill sets, and that's a great opportunity to build an incredibly powerful ecosystem and we've been in discussion with a lot of our partners about how to do that. >> Well you guys are API based, so this is a beautiful thing, right? >> Well we're going to start to open up some SDKs to our partners, to others, and that's going to allow them to extend the assistant and really create even more powerful industry content. >> You know, the business model of reducing the steps it takes to do something and saving people time, making it easy to use is a magical formula of success. >> And not even just less steps, it's less time reading things, less time sifting through information so you can spend time on stuff that matters. >> Just email by itself, I mean, Dave, your example was the best, because I know, we live that. But we have a multitude of tools and sometimes it just organically goes, because the one guy like, you know, this tool set, or now I got-- >> So do you want to do the deal now or? >> Right, that's what I'm saying, they should be signing up. >> So do we get paid? (they laugh) >> We're already both signed up. We have a testimonial. >> If you can't get it, how can we get it? >> We'll kick the tires on it, and uh, but the thing that gets my excitement is potential for API integration. Because if I know I can the automation to a whole other level and the use cases start to patternize in the enterprise, then it can get interesting. All right guys, thanks so much. What's going on here with the show, what else is happening for you guys? Share some stories for the folks that aren't here, that are watching on IBM Go right now. What's the vibe at the show this week? >> Well, it's been a great vibe. We've had a chance to share some incredible success stories, so in addition to the unveiling of this particular product, on Monday we had a chance for one of our marquee clients to share their story, and I'll tell you a little bit about what they did. It was at the National Health Service of the UK. Part of their blood and transplant, and we were fortunate enough to have Aaron Powell, who's the chief digital officer there, share their story of using process technology to improve the speed at which they get organs in the hands of recipients, and they did it on the cloud. And the results they obtained were unbelievable. So the before and after, they had staff at 2am, writing lists of high-risk patients and how to map their donors and he kidded us not, that when someone's priority changes, they would wipe the board and reset things. And these are people's lives that are at stake in the matching process. >> And they're tired, human error is huge. >> Human error, absolutely, and by the way, when you look at the end-to-end process, there was something like 90 steps if I remember, 96 steps I think end-to-end. All of which were very manual and error-prone, and error-prone means risk. And they were able to improve organ allocation by 3x, so 3x faster, they automated something like 58% of the steps, reducing propensity for manual error, and what he shared in his story is, they successfully a few months ago did the first heart transplant on the cloud. >> Host: Wow, that's amazing. >> So it's an amazing, amazing story. >> That's a great story, yeah. Did he say that in the session? >> He did, actually, he said that. >> That's actually a good thing to chase down for a great blog post, that would be phenomenal. It would have been covered yet on the news? >> So we're going to post actually the video of it online so people can also see him live presenting his story, it was unbelievable. >> Make sure you send me the link. The other thing that they could apply there is two-block chain, I mean some of the block chain stuff coming out is going to be really interesting. >> Absolutely, and we're working very closely with that team to really leverage this kind of process technology, take people's business operations and connect that in to this feature network that's going to power businesses. >> CRM is the human supply chain, I mean, but now extend it out to the internet of things. I mean, it's interesting how this could play out. Guys, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Thanks for sharing the insight, congratulations on the launch. I just signed up for the beta while we were talking. >> Dave: Me too, so let us cut the line. >> Done. >> We need it. Perfect use case, we need help. It's The Cube, of course, no help here, great guests here on The Cube. I'm John Frower, Dave Vellante, more great coverage, stay with us. Day three of Interconnect 2017, we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. It is Data Privacy Day which I just found out has been going on for about 20 years, or 30 years, but we're happy to be at our very first one. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Twitter headquarters, it's a full day event that's actually happening around the world, but we're here in San Francisco and excited to have some of the guests come down that are doing the panels and the discussions and the breakout sessions, and we're excited for our next guest Denelle Dixon, Chief Legal and Business Officer from Mozilla, welcome! >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> So there was a spirited panel to kick off the day, I wonder if you could share some of your thoughts as to some surprises that came out of that conversation? >> So not so many surprises, but we talked a lot about IOT and just the Internet of Things, the web of things, whatever we're going to call it, and the data that's available as a result of that to companies, to governments, to lots of different entities and whether consumers understand that, and the responsibilities that both the consumers and the technology companies have with respect to that data. >> And Mozilla, obviously, was right there at the big change to go to, you know, graphical web interface, which was a sea change really in the internet and how it would interact with people. IoT represents that same kind of thing, and oh, by the way, people are things too, as we like to say on theCUBE, so as you kind of look at the new challenges faced by IoT, what are some of the things that bubble onto your priority list in terms of things that need to really be thought of that really people aren't thinking enough of now? >> I think that one of the most important things about IoT and the idea that this is information that's collected and used by devices and technology companies because of the fact that it can be wearable, it can be things that you have in your house that collect data as you're talking to it. One of the most important things, and just keeping Data Privacy Day in mind, is that we make sure that consumers are aware that this is actually happening, that data is being collected and sent, and how that data is being used. It used to be, back in the day, we could have privacy policies, so we put them up, 15 pages long, and assumed that users understood that. Well, that can't be used with respect to these kinds of devices, so we need to be innovative, we need to be creative, we need to be able to ask questions of these devices and have them tell us what's going on with the data that they collect and how they're doing that. So it's just as incumbent upon the technology companies that create these devices to ensure that users understand that, as it is upon the users to understand that these kinds of actions are happening and these trade offs with respect to it. Really interesting, crazy, exciting in terms of the different technologies that we can use, but really important that we get this right. >> It just strikes me that, I think, so many people just click, yes I accept. Are people really, I mean I'm sure some people are that are paying attention, but it just seems that most people just click and accept, click and accept, click and accept, especially if you've kind of got into that behavior pattern and haven't really thought about the way these applications are evolving, haven't really thought about Facebook on your laptop or on your PC at home, is different from Facebook on your mobile, they haven't really thought about, wow, what are these connected devices now collecting data, that as you said didn't even get the chance to opt in, so how do you educate people to make intelligent choices, and how do we, like, break the EULA up, maybe, so that I can opt in for if I want to share A, B, and C, but not D, E and F, and oh, I forgot, I really need F to make this thing function. It seems like a really complicated kind of disclosure problem. >> It is complicated, and that doesn't mean that we don't have to crack it. So you said the word EULA, that's the End User Legal Agreement, and I don't think we can live in a world of EULAs. I think we live in a world where we put in context notices we have to actually create so that your interface, or whatever small thing that you have, is able to alert you that this data is actually transpiring, so it has to be in context, it has to be creative, it has to be part of product development, it can't be an afterthought. Before it used to be that they would hand this over to the lawyers and say, hey, can you help us figure out how to notify our users. This has to be part of our innovative process today. We're seeing more and more of it. We're seeing technology companies take this seriously and include privacy by design in their product development, make these in context notices part of the way that they think about the product, and not just about the afterthought, and so the more we do this the better it's going to be for all of us, but it's actually, just because it's hard it means that it's a creative, thoughtful amazing process that we all need to engage in. >> So one of the hot topics that we cover a lot is diversity in tech, and women in tech specifically, and not only is it the right thing to do, but there's very clearly defined positive business outcomes when you have a diversity of opinions when you're making decisions. Is there a corollary to what you're describing in terms of being more forthright in your privacy policy that's really not only the right thing to do question, which is fine, but is there a real business benefit that you can see or that you project that's going to be even a better motivator for people to start changing the behavior in the way in which they disclose or interact with people on the privacy issue? >> Yeah, I love the way you introduced that, because from my standpoint one of the things that we don't like to do, that we don't like to be in life is surprised. And so, one of the most important things is, if you think about everything, is a no surprise rule. So if we start thinking about business and our engagement with our users as creating a no surprises opportunity, it actually creates trust, it fosters deeper engagement, it makes it so that we are all going to be happier in terms of that relationship, maybe the users actually give more to the product, maybe the product can actually give more then to the user, so this no surprises rule, and the way that we can operate, creates really nice business cycles and really nice interesting dynamics between consumers and the businesses that they use. >> It's great, the trust word in it, it also plays into kind of the services, in that everything is a service. Because when everything is a service you have to maintain a solid, ongoing relationship, it's not a one time purchase, adios, we're never going to see you again, and so that really plays into this. If it's a trusted service provider that you feel good about, you continue to pay that $9.95 to Spotify or whomever that service provider is, so it's a really different way of looking at the world. >> It is, and it's one of the things that we actually encouraged from the very outset, is this kind of creation of trust. Trust is really easy to lose with respect to your consumer base, and it's the most important thing as you're engaging. We created these initiatives called the lean data practices and then we also have privacy initiatives that we put out there for start ups and other entities that they can utilize and hopefully create for their businesses. Part of it is the no surprises rule, but it's also think about what data you want to collect, so that you actually are collecting what you need, throw away what you don't, anonymize it. Like really create that trusted relationship because you can always grow. If you think, I actually need more data today than I did when I started a year ago, then it's a great way to have that conversation with your consumer base. So it's one of the things, trust starts it all. So from Mozilla's standpoint, we operate that through our products, because we definitely have that in our Firefox browser and the other products that we have on mobile, but one of the things that we care about is creating this awesome opportunity for the web to continue to grow, and so we care about how other companies are approaching this too. >> So you mentioned Firefox, and you guys have a new product coming out today, Firefox Focus, so explain to folks what is Firefox Focus, why should they care, what's different than just kind of traditional Firefox? >> Right, so we've had Focus in iOS before, and today we actually launched it in 27 languages to 27 different areas that you can get it. It's a privacy focused browser, but it can also be performance focused. So that you actually have content you can exclude, some content doesn't get pushed through so that your performance is faster, and you can really focus on what kind of data that you want to share with companies. So try it out, I think that it's an awesome experience, certainly from the standpoint of privacy but also from performance. >> So Denelle, 2017, we just flipped the calendar a few weeks ago, as you look forward in the year you probably went through your annual planning process, what are some of your priorities for 2017, what are you looking forward to that are top of your list for the next 12 months? >> So it's really the top, I run the policy, business and legal teams at Mozilla from a policy standpoint, really focused on encryption, security, privacy, looking at the new administration here in the US as well as what's happening in Europe. I think it's a really important area for us to focus on from a business standpoint. I want to see us really dive into growth with respect to Firefox as our desktop browser. I want to see our mobile space grow, and grow even outside the browser. So I'm really excited about what we can do there. And then from the legal side, I want to continue to push the envelope on this no surprises with respect to doing that in more areas that we can with respect to our products and pushing that idea side too. >> I love that, no surprises, it's like a bumper sticker. (laughs) She's Denelle, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, see you next time.