(upbeat music) >> Hi, this is Peter Burris with another Wikibon Action Item Quick Take. George Gilbert, everybody's talking about AI, ML, DL, as though, like always, the stack's going to be highly disaggregated. What's really happening? >> Well, the key part for going really mainstream is that we're going to have these embedded in the fabric of applications, high volume applications. And right now, because it's so bespoke, it can only really be justified in strategic applications. But the key scarce resource of the data scientists, we can look at them as the new class of developer, but they're very different from the old class of developer. I mean, they need entirely different schooling and training and tools. So, the closest we can get to the completely bespoke apps are at the big tech companies for the most part, or tech-centric companies like Adtec and Fintec. But beyond that, when you're trying to get these out to more mainstream, but still sophisticated, customers, we have platforms like C3 or IBM's Watson IoT, where they're templates, but you work intensively between the vendor and the customer. It's going to be a while before we see them as widespread components of legacy enterprise apps, because those apps actually are keeping the vendors and the customers busy trying to move them to the cloud. They were heavily customized and you can't really embed the machine learning apps in those while they're sort of, so customized, because they need a certain amount of data, and they evolve very quickly, where as the systems of record are very, very rigid. >> All right, once again, thank you very much George. This has been Peter Burris with another Wikibon Action Item Quick Take. (upbeat music)

>> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Node Summit 2017 in downtown San Francisco at the Mission Bay Convention Center. About 800 hardcore developers talkin' about Node and really the crazy growth and acceleration in this community as well as the applications. We're excited to have our next quest. He's Nick O'Leary, Developer Advocate from IBM for Watson IoT, and you're workin' on somethin' kind of cool called Node-REDS. First off, welcome. >> Thank you, thank you very much for havin' me. >> Absolutely, so what is Node-RED? >> So, Node-RED is an open source project we started working on about four years ago now in the Emerging Technologies group in the UK parts of IBM, and it's a Node.js application that gives you a visual programming tool for Internet of Things-type applications. So when you run it, you point your web browser at it, and it gives you this visual workspace to start dragging in nodes into your canvas that represent some sort of functionality, like connect to Twitter and get some tweets or save something to a database or read some sensor data, whatever it might be, and you start drawing wires between those nodes to express how you want your application to flow, how you want data to flow through your application. So it's quite a lightweight tool and really accessible to a wide range of developers whether sort of seasoned, experienced Node developers or your kids just learning how to program because it hides complexity. And, yeah, it's Node.js-based, so it runs down on a Raspberry Pi, it runs up in the cloud like IBM Bluemix, wherever you want to run it. So really flexible developer platform. >> Pretty interesting 'cause we just had Monica on from Intel, and she was talking about one of the interesting things in this development world of Node.js is so much of the code was written by somebody else. I think she said in a lot of projects the actual original code may be 2% because you're using all these other stuff, and libraries have already been created. And it sounds like you're really kind of leveraging that infrastructure to be able to do something like this. >> Absolutely, so, one of the key things we enabled very early on was to, 'cause we recognized the power of our tool, is those nodes in our palette that you drag on. So we built the system so that people could write their own nodes and extend the palette, and we used the same node packaging as the standard MPM ecosystem. And as of a couple weeks ago, we have over a thousand third party nodes people have written, so there's probably already a module for most hardware devices, online APIs, databases, whatever you want. People are creating and extending the platform in all sorts of ways just building on top of that incredible ecosystem that Node.js has. >> And then how does that tie back to Watson? You said you're involved in Watson. So Watson people don't think of necessarily a simple, simple interface but not necessarily a simple application. So what's the tie between Watson and Node.js and Node-RED? >> So, Node-RED is a development tool. I say it all hinges on those nodes and what they connect to, so we have got nodes for the Watson IoT platform, so that's great for getting, if you're running node-RED on a Raspberry Pi, connected up to our IoT platform, connect to applications in the Bluemix space. But we also have nodes for the Watson cognitive services, like the machine learning things, visual recognition, text to speech, all of those services we have nodes for. So, again, it allows people to start playing with the rich capabilities of the Watson platform without having to dive straight into understanding lines of code and you can start being productive and create real meaningful solutions without having to understand whether it's Node.js or Java, whatever language you would normally write to access low-level APIs. >> And can the visual tool connect to things that are not necessarily Node specific? >> So, anything that provides some sort of API. If it's got a programmatic API, then it's easier to do with Node 'cause we are in a Node ecosystem. But we've got established patterns for talking to other languages but also things often provides like a rest API, HTTP, MQTT, many other protocols, and we have all of that support built straight into the platform. >> Right, and so what was the motivation to build this, just to have an easier development interface? >> Yeah, it was twofold really. One was in the Emerging Technologies where I was, we do proof of concepts for clients we have to turn around really quickly, so whereas we're more than capable of writing individual lines of code, having that tool that lets us experiment much quicker and solve real client problems much quicker was a great value to us. But then we also saw the advantage for the developers who don't understand individual lines of code for educational purposes, whatever it might be. Those great motivators there in the various communities we're involved with, in IoT home hobbyists, all that sort of space as well, it's found a real incredible user community across the board. >> And when it started, was it designed to be an open source project or that kind of realization, if you will, kind of came along the way? >> I think on day one it wasn't the first thing to mind. You know, we were just experimenting with technology, which is kind of how we operated. But we very quickly got to the point where we realized we didn't have the time and resource to write all the nodes that could be written, and there was a much broader audience than just us doing our day job that this tool could tap into. So, maybe not on day one but maybe on a month in we thought this has to be open source. So, it was about six months after we started it we moved to an open source project, and that was September 2013. And then in October last year, IBM contributed the project to be a founding project of the JavaScript Foundation. Whereas it's a project that has come from IBM, it's now a project that is independently governed. It's not owned by IBM, it's part of the foundation. So, look at the wide range of other companies getting involved, making use of it, contributing back, and really good to see that ecosystem build. >> Oh, that's great, so I'm just curious, you said you deal with a lot of customer prototyping. Obviously you're involved in Watson, which is kind of the pointy end of the spear right now with IBM, with the cognitive and the IoT. As you kind of look at the landscape and stuff you're workin' on over the next, I would never say multiple years 'cause that's way too long, six months, nine months, what are some of your priorities, what are some of the things you're seeing, kind of that customers are doing today that they couldn't do before that gets you excited to get up out of bed and go to work every day? >> From my perspective, with our focus on Node-RED, which is kind of where my focus is right now, it's really that developer experience. We've gone so far with our really intuitive to use tooling, but we recognize there's more to do. So, how can we enable better collaboration, better basic workflows within our particular tooling, because there are people using Node-RED, in particular happily in production today, but it's funny 'cause we don't have a 1.0 version number because, for us, that wasn't interesting to us because we are delivering meaningful function. But in the project, we have just published our road map to a one point zero to really give that firm statement to people who are unsure about it as a technology that this is good for production. And we've got a wealth of use cases of companies who are using it today, so, that's very much our focus, my focus within Node-RED, and all of it does then tie back to yes, it's a JS foundation project, but then with my developer advocate hat on, making sure that draw from Node-RED into the Watson platform is as seamless and intuitive as possible because that helps everyone. >> Right, right, okay, so before I let you go, two things: One begs the question what version are you on, and where can people go to find more information so they can see when that 1.0 and obviously contribute? >> So as a Node project, we've stuck to Symantec versioning, so we are currently version naught dot 17. So we've done 17 major releases over the last about three and a bit years, and that's where we're moving forward. We've got this road map to get to 1.0 first quarter of next year. And if you want to find out more, nodered.org is where we're based, or you can find us through links by the JS Foundation as well. >> Alright, well, Nick, thanks for takin' a little bit of your time and safe travels home at the end of the show. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright, he's Nick O'Leary from IBM. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watchin' theCUBE. Thanks for watchin', see ya next time. (bubbly electronic music)

>> 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)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> OK, welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is theCUBE's coverage of InterConnect. I'm John Furrier, 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 havin' me. >> I got to first set the context. Indiegogo, very successful crowdfunder you guys pioneered. It's pretty obvious now, looking back, this creates 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 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 IBM and Indiegogo working together? >> Yes, 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 a 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 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, clouds, security, and being able to provide all the block chain and any other elements that we need. >> Deon, I want to ask you or get your thoughts on, we have the Watson data platform guys on earlier in the segments, and the composability is now the normal around data, brings the hacker-maker culture to IoT, which, if you think about it, is a sweet spot for some of the innovations. They can start small and grow big. Is that part of the plan? >> I mean, if you look at what's going on, we have about 6,000 clients already working with us in the IoT space. They tend to be the big end of town, whether it be a Daimler or a Airbus, whether it be a KONE, the world's biggest elevator company, or ISS, the world's biggest facilities management company, so we were doin' a lot of work up there, really around optimizing their operations, connecting products, wrapping services around them so that they can create new revenue streams, but where we didn't have an offering that was being used extensively was in the start-ups place, and when we saw what Indiegogo had been doing in the marketplace, and when our partner, Arrow, who, as Slava said, has really built up an engineering capability and a component capability to support these makers, it was just a match made in heaven. For an entrepreneur who needs to find a way to capture data, make that data valuable, we can do that. We have the cloud platform, we have the AI, et cetera. >> It's interesting, we just had the Strata Hadoop, we have our own big data Silicon Valley event last week and the big thing that came out of that event, finally, the revelation, this is probably not new to Slava, what you're doin' is that the production under the hood hard stuff that's being done is, in some ways stunting the creativity around some of the cooler stuff, like whether it's data analytics, or in this case, the startin' a company, so, Slava, I want to get your thoughts on your views on how the world is becoming democratized, because if you think about the entrepreneurship trend that you're riding, there's a democratization of invention. This is the creative, it's the innovation, but yet, there's all this hard stuff, that's called, like, production, or under-the-hood, that IBM's bringin'. What do you expect that to feel up? What's your vision of this democratization culture? >> 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," it's good to know that 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 has really revolutionizing how quickly a small company can scale, so it proliferates more entrepreneurs starting, 'cause 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 an entrepreneur succeed, which I think all of us want. >> Explain for the audience how it works a little bit. You got the global platform that you built out, Arrow brings its 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 WaterBot. So WaterBot 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 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 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 WaterBot, on their own, had to build out all 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 back of the napkin into reality, and then you get IBM Watson to help with all of the software components and cloud that we just talked about. >> Great, and how did this get started? How did you guys fall into this and how did it manifest itself? >> Take it, I tell the story? >> Go for it. >> So, I love this story. So, Slava's explained that 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, looking deeply with their engineers, sourcing the components, putting together, maybe whiteboxing it even for you, and so, they put that together. Now, we'll all seeing that IoT and the connected products are moving for disconnection, it's 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, you know, the need for AI coming into all these products, the need for security around the connection platform, that can actually do that connection, we were a logical map here, so we're another set of components, not the physical. We're the cloud-based components and services that enable these connected devices to sync. >> If you think about the impact, it's mind-boggling with the alternative. You mentioned, 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 feeling on this. Any thoughts on what data you can share, do you have any kind of reference point of like, OK, we funded all this and 90% wouldn't have been done, or 70% wouldn't have been done, do you have any flavor for what's... >> Hard to know exactly. Obviously, many of these folks that came to Indiegogo, if they could have 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's becoming the first resort because they're getting so much validation and market data. The incredible thing is not the thing that adds scale, when you think about 500 or 700,000 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 hasn'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 the napkin to getting funded, and now, through these partnerships, they're able to really 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, and 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. >> Slava: Right. >> On their discovery process, early stage, that's an added benefit to the entrepreneur. >> Absolutely. Yeah, a great example bears against SmartPlate. SmartPlate is trying to use the combination of weight sensing plate, as well with photo detection, image detection, and 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?" Right? And we take that for granted that our eyes can detect all that, but it's really remarkable to think about that instead of having to journal everything by hand or make sure you pick with your finger what's the right product, how many ounces, you can take a photo of something and now it'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. >> Well, I'm really pumped about that, congratulations, Deon, on a great deal. I love the creativity. I think the impact to the globe is just phenomenal. I mean, by what the game-changing things that are coming out. Slava, I got to ask you, and Deon, if you could weigh in, too, maybe you have some, your favorites, the craziest thing you've seen funded, and the coolest thing you've seen funded. >> Cool is hard, because it's kind of like asking, "Well, who's your favorite child?" I have like 700,000 children, not even Wilt Chamberlain, (laughing) and I like them all. But, you know, it's everything from an activity tracker to security devices, to be able to see what the trend is 24, 36 months ahead. Before things become mainstream today, we're seeing these things three, five years ago. Things are showing up at CES, and 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 get quite enough funding, but something's that flush 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 then the other side is actually Lego-compatible, so you're actually putting Legos onto that tape. So, imagine, instead of only a flat surface to do Legos, you could do Legos on any surfacing, even your jacket. It's not the most IoT-esque product right now, but you just asked for something creative, there you go. >> That's a creative. >> I think once you got Wilt Chamberlain and Justin Bieber in conversation, I am out. (laughter) >> Keepin' it fresh. (voices overlapping) >> Slava, how does Indiegogo sustain itself? Does it take a piece of the action? Does it have other funding mechanisms for... >> The beautiful thing about Indiegogo is, it's a platform and it's all about supply-and-demand, so supply is the ideas and the entrepreneurs, and 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 100 grand, only raise 31, and learn that your price point is wrong, your target audience is wrong, your color is wrong, your bond cost is too high. All this feedback is super value. 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. >> And you know, we've done, just to add to that, I think it's a relevant part here, too. We've actually announced a freemium-based service for the entrepreneurs to get onto the cloud access, the AI, or to access the services as a starting point, it's a complete freemium model, so that they can get started, very low barrier to entry and obviously, scale as they grow. >> What do you call that? Is it IBM IoT Freemium or is it? >> Hasn't been a name specifically to the Freemium element of it, it's what in IoT platform, available on Bluemix. >> So, it's like a community addition of lots of, so Deon, a new chapter for you, >> Yeah. >> I saw a good quarter for mainframes last quarter, 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 up on some historical expertise, but give us the update on your business. >> It's about 15 months ago, we announced a global headquarters that we're going to open in Munich and we announced the Watson IoT 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, we'd been working the Internet of Things. We'd made a three billion dollar commitment to that marketplace, though 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 SF 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 4,000 to about 6,000 plants, so we had a very good year, in terms of real enterprises getting real outcomes. We continued to bring out new industry solutions around both connected products and then, operations like retail, manufacturing, building management, Tokyo, transportation. We're building out solutions and use-cases to leverage all that software, so business is going well, we officially opened the Watson IoT headquarters three weeks ago in Munich, and we're jampacked 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 they're using the co-laboratory with us to work on PSEs and see the outcomes they can drive. >> Deon Newman, with Watson IoT platforms. Slava Rubin, founder of Indiegogo. Collective intelligence as cultural shift happening. Congratulations. Crowdsourcing and using all that crowdfunding. It's really good data, not just getting the entrepreneur innovations funded, but really using that data and way in your wheelhouse, IoT. >> Yeah. >> John: Thanks for joining us in theCUBE, appreciate it. More live coverage after this short break. It's theCUBE, live in Las Vegas, for IBM InterConnect. We'll be right back. Stay with us. (theCUBE jingle)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube. Covering Interconnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here and live in Las Vegas. This is The Cube's coverage of IBM's Interconnect 2017. Three days of wall to wall coverage. Day two here. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Harriet Green, General Manager of Watson IoT, a Cube alumni. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on The Cube this year again, appreciate it. >> Oh it's my pleasure. I hope we're going to talk about Internet of Things, what's in customer engagement and education. Those are things that we hope to talk about. >> Congratulations. You guys have an IoT center now in Munich. You guys had that big launch there, but the real thing that's happening in context if you could zoom out on this is that we're seeing the trend of cloud and big data world being kind of accelerated together and IoT seems to be the center point of the action because it's industrial, it's business, it's people, it's cars, it's the world now. The data piece of it is really accelerating. Now combine that with machine learning, and the glam of AI, the sizzle of artificial intelligence and cognitive really kind of puts that at the center of the conversation. This is transformative. >> Oh totally and I mean you guys were at the Genius of Things so you know that there were 600 Cs: COs, Chief Innovation Officers, Chief Digital Officers from 400 different companies, accounting for about two trillion of revenues. You're exactly right. It's across every major industry, every major sector. I think there are kind of three critical elements. The first is that with the whole proliferation of sensors and the cost points, etcetera, the amount of data and information that is being created is absolutely suited for Watson. So all of those clients there, as you know, are working with us and we shared 22 major outcomes: things faster, cheaper, better, that clients are actually experiencing. Watson is the differentiator and from an IoT perspective, I think the other piece is for a very long time IBM has proven that we respect and keep people's data perfectly safe. We don't use it, we don't open it, we don't go into it, we're not taking it for a future world of knowledge graph. We consider client's data to be their DNA. People know that when you're doing IoT with IBM that deep level of security is imbued within our capability. Then thirdly, who's data is it? Which is a huge thing in Europe and we're able with our data centers to demonstrate if you want to keep that data within lower Bavaria, that's what we'll do. And those three elements, I think, are fundamental; cognitive, the protection of the data, and who's data is it? >> 'Cause who owns the data is really important. It's a big differentiator because the data informs the model. They're almost intertwined so who owns the model? The client owns the model? Is that correct? >> Yeah, but I think people have over-complicated this, those who perhaps do not have such a simple and clear answer to it. Who don't have written into their terms and conditions that it's actually their data and they can hang onto it for as long as they like. We have always to our clients said it's your data. It's absolutely your data. If we create something together with your data, it's still your data. People only start to confuse this when they have primary and secondary and tertiary levels of confusion to support their particular cause. There is no confusion with our clients. When you talk to the chief digital officers of Shaeffler, of ISS, of SNCF who are up on stage with us yesterday, people who are demonstrating amazing outcomes that they didn't have before with IoT, they will say to you there are three reasons why we went with IBM. The first, the platform. It is the best IoT platform. From an IDC, from a Gottner perspective that's what Forester, what the guys say. Secondly, our applications are very robust and help people get started on this IoT journey. Thirdly, that the digital transformation that is happening alongside this, back to your convergence point, we're also able to assist with our GPS IoT practice. >> And you're accelerating that too. Ginni Rometty on stage talking about how that Watson's learning faster by industry but it's not a silo thing. It's actually accelerating the transformation components. >> Well, you put your finger on that precisely because the amazing thing about the Internet of Things is it's not just consumer, it's not just one industry. We're interfacing 34 different industries who are represented at the Genius of Things. It's also affecting life. Yesterday you may have seen ISS and their amazing building that they've created, which now as you arrive at terminal five, wherever it is, a huge rush and suddenly the elevators don't work. Remotely these elevators are being fixed and the journey is absolutely amazing. It is kind of is industry. >> That social good angle is important is the cognitive for social good trend going on right now culturally. That's really important. But I want to ask you- >> But I do think on the ... Ginni announced in Davos our cognitive principle. There's no client working with us that doesn't know we're working from a cognitive perspective. We go to great levels to explain what we are doing, to whom it belongs and that charter is not something that we just came up with. That's IBM for 105 years. It's why I chose to come here around the Internet of Things. >> It's super inspirational for me personally and I want to ask you about a topic that's passionate for us as an organization. We've had the largest library of women in tech, going back to 2010, we've been interviewing some of the great leaders in the tech industry. This is really now going really amazing. You heard Mark Benning up on stage talking about all the goodness going on around equality and pay, everything else going on but there's more women now instrumental in all the computer science and business side. How are you continuing that? We talked a little bit about this last year with the mentoring. How do you attract the talent? How do you get that inspiration for the young women and girls out there from whether grade school, high school, college? What's the plan? >> Well, first of all I think IBM has on every level a proven history of diversity. 35 years before the equal pay act we were equal paying. We have an incredibly diverse cultural environment where regardless of your age, your sex, your color, your creed, your sexuality, or your physical ability if you're good you'll get on. IBM lives and breathes that in every sense. Now I think the challenge is in North America particularly, in the 80s 30% of young women were going into the STEM subjects and now it's dropped just below 18%. I think it's absolutely critical that investors in companies are thinking about this equality and measuring the power of diversity and innovation. That leaders inside of businesses do more than just pontificate on stage but live on breath it. as Ginni >> Walk the talk. >> Harriet: Does. And then also that all of us in our decision making, particularly, I did for International Women's Week last week a whole webx around inclusion and how we include, how we exclude, and I shared a particular story of a couple of weeks ago some said to me you're just such a left field candidate, Harriet. And maybe that's a compliment. He happens to be a very nice guy and maybe he's right but we want people to feel inclusive. One of the most amazing things that IBM has done for some time which is almost unique, up there with Watson, is we do this to attract millennials particularly, but anyone can participate. It's a program where we take people who go in a totally immersive six or seven weeks. It may be human trafficking in Thailand. It may be helping to train and educate in sub-Saharan Africa and they work with local bodies, local institutions, really helps build this collaborative capability. And then all of the work we're doing with Ptech around up-skilling and ensuring that the STEM subjects from a very wide range of young people are really embraced. >> Harriet, you're getting requested 'cause you got to move around the events so many places and your time is very scarce and you have to move to the next event. Thank you for taking the time to share that with us and also the awesomeness around IoT and Watson. Appreciate and good to see you. You look great. This is IBM Interconnect. Harriet Green the leader of Watson IoT Customer Engagement and Support. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)