>> Male Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by, IBM. >> Welcome back, we're live here in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is theCUBE's coverage of InterConnect, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante my co-host. Our next guest is Deon Newman, CMO of IBM Watson IoT, and Slava Rubin, the founder and Chief Business Officer of Indiegogo, great keynote today, you're on stage. Welcome to theCUBE. Deon, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I got to first set the context. Indiegogo, very successful crowd-funder, you guys pioneered. It's pretty obvious now looking back, this has created so much opportunity for people starting companies, whether it's a labor of love or growing into a great business, so congratulations on your success. What's the IBM connection? Because I don't want, you know, there was some stuff on the tweets, I don't want to break the news, but you guys are here. Share the connection. What's the packaging, why is IMB and Indigogo working together? >> Yeah, so back up to 2008. We launched to be able to get people access to funding. And over the last several years, we've done a pretty good job of that. Sending over a billion dollars to over half a million entrepreneurs around the world. And more recently, we've had a lot more requests of Indiegogo can you do more? And we knew that we couldn't do it all on our own. So we partnered first with Arrow to be able to bring these ideas more into reality around components and engineering and supply chain. And we knew we needed more in terms of these IoT products, so they need to be smart and they need software. So we were really excited to be able to announce today, the partnership with IBM, around everything IoT Cloud, security, and being able to provide all the block chain and any other elements that we need. >> Deon I want to ask you, get your thoughts on, we had the Watson data platform guys on earlier in the segment, and the composability is now the norm around data. This brings the hacker-maker culture to IoT. Which if you think about it as a sweet-spot for some of the innovations. They can start small and grow big. Is that part of the plan? >> Yeah, I mean, if you look at what's going on we have about 6000 clients already with us in the IoT space. They tend to be the big end of town, you know whether it be a Daimler or an Airbus or whether it be a Kone, the world's biggest elevator company. Or ISS, the world's biggest facilities management company. So we were doing a lot of work up there really around optimizing their operations, connecting products, wrapping services around them so they can create new revenue streams. But where we didn't have an offering that was being used extensively, was in the start-up space. And you know when we saw what Indiegogo had been doing in the marketplace, and when our partner Arrow, who as Slava has said, has really built up an engineering capability and a component capability to support these makers. It was just a match made in heaven. You know, for an entrepreneur who needs to find a way to capture data, make that data valuable, you know, we can do that. We have the Cloud platform, we have the AI, et cetera. >> It's interesting, we just hit the stride of dude, we have our big data Silicon Valley event just last week, and the big thing that come out of that event is finally the revelation, this is probably not new to Slava and what you're doing, it that, the production under-the-hood hard stuff that's being done is some ways stunting the creativity around some of the cooler stuff. Like whether it's data analytics or in this case, starting a company. So, Slava I want to get your thought on, your views on how the world is becoming democratized. Because if you think about the entrepreneurship trend that you're riding, is the democratization of invention. Alright, there's a democracy, this is the creative, it's the innovation, but yet it's all this hard stuff, like what's called production or under-the-hood that IBM's bringing in. What do you expect that to fuel up? What's your vision of this democratization culture? >> I mean, it's my favorite thing that's happening. I think whether it's YouTube democratizing access to content or Indiegogo democratizing access to capital. The idea of democratizing access to entrepreneurship between our partnership, just really makes me smile. I think that capital is just one of those first points and now they're starting to get the money but lots of other things are hard. When you can actually get artificial intelligence, get Cloud capabilities, get security capabilities, put it into a service so you don't need to figure all those things out on your own so you can go from a small little idea to actually start scaling pretty rapidly, that's super exciting. When you can be on Indiegogo and in four weeks get 30,000 backers of demand across 100 countries, and people are saying, we want this, you know it's good to know you don't need to start ramping up your own dev team to figure out how to create a Cloud on your own, or create your own AI, you can tap right into a server that's provided. Which is really revolutionizing how quickly a small company can scale. So it proliferates more entrepreneurs starting because they know there's more accessibility. Plus it improves their potential for success, which in the long run just means there's more swings at the bat to be able to have and entrepreneur succeed, which I think all of us want. >> Explain to the audience how it works a little bit. You got the global platform that you built up. Arrow brings it's resources and ideation. IBM brings the IoT, the cognitive platform. Talk about how that all comes together and how people take advantage of it? >> Sure, I mean you can look at it as one example, like Water Buy. So Water Buy is an actual sensor that you can deploy against your water system to be able to detect whether or not your water that you're drinking is healthy. You're getting real-time data across your system and for some reason it's telling you that you have issues, you can react accordingly. So that was an idea. You go on Indiegogo, they post that idea and they're able to get the world to start funding it. You get customer engagement. You get actual market validation. And you get funding. Well now you actually need to make these sensors, you need to make these products, so now you get the partnership with Arrow which is really helpful cause they're helping you with the engineering, the design, the components. Now you want to be able to figure out how you can store all that data. So it's not just your own house, maybe you're evaluating across an entire neighborhood. Or as a State you want to see how the water is for the whole entire State. You put all of that data up into the Cloud, you want to be able to analyze the data rapidly through AI, and similarly this is highly sensitive data so you want it to be secure. If Water Buy on their own, had to build out all of this infrastructure, we're talking about dozens, hundreds, who knows how many people they would need? But here through the partnership you get the benefit of Indiegogo to get the brilliant idea to actually get validated, Arrow to bring your idea from the back of a napkin into reality, and then you get IBM Watson to help with all the software components and Cloud that we just talked about. >> And how did this get started? How did you guys, you know, fall into this, and how did it manifest itself? >> So can I tell the story? >> Go for it. >> So I love this story, so as Slava's explained at the front end of this it was really a partnership of Arrow and Indiegogo that came out of the need of entrepreneurs to actually build their stuff. You know, you get it funded and then you say, oh boy, now I've got a bunch of orders how do I now make this stuff? And so Arrow had a capability of looking at the way you designed, you know looking at it deeply with their engineers, sourcing the components, putting it together, maybe white-boxing it even for you. So they put that together. Now, we're all seeing that IoT and the connective products are moving for disconnection, which is actually generating data and that data having value. And so Arrow didn't have that capability, we were great partners with Arrow, you know when we all looked at it, the need for AI coming into all these products, the need for security around the connection, the platform that could actually do that connection, we were a logical map here. So we're another set of components, not the physical. You know, we're the Cloud-based components and services that enable these connected devices. >> If you think about like the impact, and it's mind-boggling what the alternative is. You mentioned that the example you gave, they probably might have abandoned the project. So if you think about the scale of these opportunities what the alternative would have been without an Indiegogo, you probably have some anecdotal kind of feeling on this. But any thoughts on what data you can share around, do you have kind of reference point of, okay, we've funded all this and 90% wouldn't have been done or 70% wouldn't have been done. Do you have any flavor for? >> It's hard to know exactly. Obviously many of these folks that come to Indiegogo, if they could've gotten funded on another path earlier in the process, they would have. Indiegogo became really a great choice. Now you're seeing instead of being the last resort, Indiegogo is becoming the first resort because they're getting so much validation and market data. The incredible thing is not to think about it at scale when you think about 500 or 700 thousand entrepreneurs, or over a billion dollars, and it's in virtually every country in the world. If you really just look at it as one product. So like, Flow Hive is just one example. They've revolutionized how honey gets harvested. That product was bought in almost 170 countries around the world and it's something that hadn't been changed in over 150 years. And it's just so interesting to see that if it wasn't for Indiegogo that idea would not go from the back of a napkin to getting funded. And now through these partnerships they're able to realize so much more of their potential. >> So it's interesting, the machine learning piece is interesting to me because you take the seed-funding which is great product-market fit as they say in the entrepreneurial culture, is validated. So that's cool. But it could be in some cases, small amounts of cash before the next milestone. But if you think about the creativity impact that machine learning can give the entrepreneur, with through in their discovery process, early stage, that's an added benefit to the entrepreneur. >> Absolutely. Yeah, a great example there is against SmartPlate. SmartPlate is trying to use a combination of a weight-sensing plate as well with photo-detection, image detection software. The more data it can feed its image detection, the more qualified it can know, is that a strawberry or a cherry, or is that beef? And we take that for granted that our eyes can detect all that, but it's really remarkable to think about instead of having to journal everything by hand or make sure you pick with your finger what's the right product and how many ounces, you can take a photo of something and now you'll know what you're eating, how much you're eating and what is the food composition? And this all requires significant data, significant processing. >> I'm really pumped about that, congratulations to you on a great deal. I love the creativity and I think the impact to the globe is just phenomenal. Thinking about the game-changing things that are coming up, Slava I've got to ask you, and Deon if you could weigh in too, maybe you have some, your favorites. You're craziest thing that you've seen funded and the coolest thing you've seen funded. (laughter) >> I mean, who is hard because it's kind of like asking well who's your favorite child? I have like 700,000 children, I'm not even Wilt Chamberlain (laughter) and I like them all. But you know it's everything from an activity tracker to security devices, to being able to see what the trend is 24, 36 months ahead. Before things become mainstream today, we're seeing these things 3, 5 years ago. Things are showing up at CES, and you know these are things we get to see in advance. In terms of something crazy, it's not quite IoT but I remember when a young woman tried to raise $200,000 to be able to get enough money for her and Justin Bieber to fly to the moon. (laughter) >> That's crazy. >> That didn't quite get enough funding. But something that's fresh right now is Nimuno Loops is getting funded right now on Indiegogo live. And they just posted less than seven days ago and they have Lego-compatible tape. So it's something that you can tape onto any surface and the other side is actually Lego-compatible so you actually put Legos onto that tape. So imagine instead of only a flat surface to do Legos, you could do Legos on any surface even your jacket. It's not the most IoT-esque product right now but you just asked for something creative. >> That's the creative. >> I think once you got Wilt Chamberlain and Justin Bieber in the conversation, I'm out. (laughter) (crosstalk) >> Well now, how does Indiegogo sustain itself? Does it take a piece of the action? Does it have other funding mechanisms for? >> Yeah, and that's the beautiful thing about Indiegogo. It's a platform and it's all about supply and demand. So supply is the ideas and the entrepreneurs and the demand is the funders. It's totally free to use the website and as long as you're able to get money in your pocket, then we take a percentage. If you're not taking any money into your pocket, then we get no money. As part of the process, you might benefit from actually not receiving money. You might try to raise a hundred grand, only raise thirty-one and learn that your price-point is wrong, your target audience is wrong, your color is wrong, you're bottom cost it too high. All this feedback is super valuable. You just saved yourself a lot of pain. So really it's about building the marketplace we're a platform, we started out just with funding, we're really becoming now a springboard for entrepreneurs. We can't do it all ourselves which is why we're bringing on these great partners. >> You know we've done, just to add to that, I think it's a relevant part here too. We've actually announced a premium-based service for the entrepreneurs to get onto the Cloud, to access the AI, to access the services as a starting point to the complete premium model so they can get started very low barrier to entry and overseeing scale as they grow. >> What do you call that? Is it IBM IoT Premium or? >> It hasn't got a name specifically to the premium element of the, it's just the Watson IoT platform. Available on Blue Mist. >> So it's a Watson sort of, right. So it's like a community edition of Watson. So Deon, new chapter for you. You know I saw a good quarter for mainframes, last quarter. It's still drafting off your great work and now you've shifted to this whole new IoT role, what's that been like? Relatively new initiative for IBM, building on some historical expertise. But give us the update on your business. >> Yes, so about 15 months ago, we announced a global headquarters that we were going to open in Munich, and we announced the Watson IT business. Which brought together a lot of IBM's expertise and a lot of our experience over the years through smarter cities, through the smarter planet initiative. You know we've been working The Internet Of Things, but we made a 3-billion dollar commitment to that marketplace, that we were going to go big and go strong. We've built out a horizontal platform, the Watson IoT platform. On top of that we've got market-leading enterprise asset management software, the Maximo portfolio, TRIRIGA for facilities management. And then we have a whole set of engineering software for designing connected products as well. So we've built out a very comprehensive industry-vertical-aligned IoT business. We added last year, we went from about 4000 to about 6000 clients. So we had a very good year in terms of real enterprises getting real outcomes. We continue to bring out new industry solutions around both connected products and then operations like retail, manufacturing, building management, telco, transportation. We're building out solutions and use-cases to leverage all that software. So business is going well. We officially the Watson IoT headquarters three weeks ago in Munich. And we're jam packed with clients coming through that building, building with us. We've got a lot of clients who've actually taken space in the building. And their using it as a co-laboratory with us to work on PSE's and see the outcomes they can drive. >> Alright, Deon Newman with IoT Watson, and IoT platforms. Slava Rubin, founder of Indiegogo, collective intelligence is cultural shift happening. Congratulations outsourcing and using all that crowdfunding. It's real good data, not just getting the entrepreneur innovations funded but really using that data and your wheelhouse IoT. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you John. >> More live coverage after this short break, with theCUBE live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect. We'll be right back, stay with us. (upbeat music)