>>Oh, well, the back to the cubes coverage of ADA bus reinvent, 2021 executive seminar, I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. We've got a great segment here on the modernization. We were ringing in the success with Amazon web services, Vodafone digital in the UK, an example of modern engineering examples using Amazon, the cloud, looking at where we're cloud native is actually changing the game two great guests, Ben Collie, head, head of digital engineering, Vodafone UK, and Maynard Williams, managing director of center. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on the cube and sharing the story. >>Thanks, John. Appreciate it. So >>I gotta, I gotta ask you guys one of the main themes that we've been covering all year and even even pre pandemic, we, we saw the cloud native wave coming pretty hard containers. Great for modernization sets the table. You seeing things like Kubernetes and now serverless changing the game on all aspects of how modernization is happening. And everyone's talking about application modernization shift left all great for business, but you have to, you have to kind of take care of things under the, under the covers a little bit, the infrastructure, making sure the engineering teams are all set. So this has been a top topic. This is kind of what you guys are doing. Can you guys explain to me the needs that Vodafone has, um, that brought about this transformation? >>Yeah, sure. Um, so we we've been on this transformation for around four years, but you're absolutely right. The, uh, the pandemic has been a real catalyst for, for all kinds of organizations like ours around the world. Uh, so we were really driving a digital first agenda for quite a long time. Uh, and that, that came as, as you just said, John, it, it really did start with the, uh, the cloud hosted, uh, and then, uh, and then moving and realizing the difference between that and become native to the, to the cloud and really leveraging the services, uh, like AWS, um, in order to really drive pace, uh, and, and the outcomes that we needed for the business. Uh, we've seen a huge change over the last, uh, purely over the last 18 months, really. Um, our daily traffic, uh, these days is as it was on our highest ever, uh, uh, like an iPhone launch day, for example, um, before the pandemic, is I a daily traffic these days. And so that scalability and flexibility and that leveraging those services has been absolutely fundamental to supporting the, the changing needs and expectations of our customers. >>You know, back in the old days, uh, Maynard, you know, it's oh yeah, black Friday surge, you need the cloud to scale up and be flexible. Agile elastic, you know, scale is definitely now table stakes. And if you're not dealing with scale and some sort of either SRE fashion or whatever, you, you really ain't going to be behind the curve, but the next level that's being discussed is how do you leverage the scale for not just customer experience and business value, but we're talking about system architecture, kind of thinking there's kind of, this is our system design is now a big part of it. Can you talk about how this kind of threads together? Because we always talk about consumer experience, customer experience CX, but now there's a new system was mindset out there. Can you kind of share your vision on that >>Thing that stands out for me is if I look at digital, we've designed it to a point where the scale is just as you say, it's the table stakes, and only for launch with something that two years ago needed to be planned and thought about. And it's now absolutely routine. We think about the business side of it, but a big increase in scale really is seamless. But if I look at the full stack, we're still connected into some of the older backend systems, um, where any production, uh, they were on prime actually tasks. This is on AWS now, which is a big step forward, but when you've got to manage scaling in a way that translates from backend systems that are on premises on prime, and therefore we can't lastingly scale through to the front tab where we have to be able to scale up very seamlessly and balancing that across with, uh, an architecture that supports that level of scale and makes it so seamless on something like, as you say, iPhone launches or back Friday, any product coming out is actually key to the way we've architected that. >>So you're saying that essentially AWS combined with Vodafone worked on this solution that was more of a cloud native solutions that the innovation here, can you just summarize and unpack a little bit of what is the innovation, what problems did you solve together with essentially those and Vodafone? What was the core challenge? Yes. >>I think that the core is actually, how do you get to the point where, um, at the scaling is seamless, where you can move from being on the cloud to cloud native has been, just touched on what the same time you're actually connected into an enterprise state where the production systems are all on prem and don't have that ability to scale in the same fraction. So you can't, for example, push you to load into, uh, an on-prem backend system and, and simply expected to scale in the same fashion. So between our three organizations architecting something that is robust scales, we usable and takes away a load of pieces that actually were quite complex two years ago. And turns them into just routine has been a big step forward. >>And I want to get your reaction to this because, you know, you're, you're the you're on the, on the front line saying, Hey, be more agile at Basel saying, be agile, do different left, take that hill. Um, it's, it's easier said than done. Talk about what goes on when you have to implement and the stakes involved. Again, there's always the old way, new way. Can you just kind of give some color on what's going on? What's your perspective showing? >>And as I just said, that the real benefits and the story behind this was the ability to launch an iPhone. For example, as a event for Vodafone previously was weeks and months of preparation and design and testing and confidence building. And now it really is, it just happens. Uh, and we watched things scale and, and, and then down again, gracefully, um, and really do celebrate the, the another level up, if you like the leveling up of us as an organization, allowing our commercial colleagues to, to launch propositions or to launch campaigns without needing us to be involved anymore, because they're confident, we're all that things will, will flex like that. But you're absolutely right, that, that the changes and the demands of us as a, as a team, but also the, the expectations of our stakeholders, uh, have been changing for quite a long time now. Uh, and we're really excited now to be able to meet them by leveraging the services that we're discussing. >>Yeah. So the guys say said launched the iPhone, no big deal routine, hit the pub. Everyone's happy having a good day. >>Uh, >>Let's get into the solution, how it works. Talk about what's going on with the covers. How does this all work? Can you take us through, what's the state of the art of the, of the solution? Sure. >>Well, uh, as you mentioned earlier, we were very much inclined to serverless these days. So we rolled out fire gate, um, a few, uh, uh, started about 18 months ago. Um, and that really has, um, freed us up in, into all kinds of, um, uh, scalability, uh, measures, but also really about, about reusing and applying this across much more than just the, the engineering or the digital part of Vodafone, where we, where we began. So that's been a really big part of our agenda, uh, and that's, that's informed all kinds of things, the ability to scale and flex like that, and the architecture beneath us, um, and the containerization and orchestration that that goes along with that has really enabled us to, um, to flex that, uh, ability to, to reuse it across other areas. And because of that, now it's driven our hiring policy or tooling and, uh, technical, uh, our procedural approaches, uh, it all now leverages that ability to move a patient, to be able to scale, uh, not just in, um, uh, infrastructure or ability to serve customers, but in ability to deliver for the business commercially as well. Uh, and this is all now informed on our direction. I think, as an organization, >>It's interesting, you mentioned far you far gate than a trigger of events happens. People get excited, opens up new doors of opportunities as a chain reaction from that. Um, talk about the impact to the staff and the operations, because you almost, it's motivating at some level you get new things happening, but you're actually making things go better and faster, cheaper. >>Yeah. Uh, well, the, the impact is one, uh, because we're on a journey at Vodafone of this transformation, really becoming a technology business first and foremost, rather than a telco classically like our competitors, uh, we're able to really drive cultural change as well. So the impact on our people is a really, it's been particularly engaging. One with, we've also been part of, uh, a real recruitment drive. We've just announced 7,000 new, uh, roles, uh, joining our team across Europe and that these are engineering roles, um, driving more of the same, uh, behaviors and principles of a modern software engineering business like ours. Uh, and that really is fueled by our, our ability to experiment and try, but become cloud native and, and, uh, employ these services in the way that they're designed to be >>Maynard. I'd like to get your take on this and, and, and shift to a topic around how, what this all means. Um, if you zoom out and you say, okay, with the pandemic, it's become a mobile virtual hybrid. Now world around work play, all those lines are kind of blurring. It's not as clean as it used to be. Oh, the network segmented over here. This is over here. These legacy systems were built around the notion of things when nicely segmented. Um, now you have this whole kind of mashup, if you will, of how you just want to work, right. There's mobilization is a huge thing. So access identity, these are things that we're all kind of set up nicely before the pandemic, or at least, you know, not as, uh, stable, maybe not scalable, but what's your take on this? What's the big picture what's all happening. >>I think, I mean, the pandemic has accelerated a set of changes that were already happening anyway. And I'd say the other particles is under the covers. A lot of the work's been done has been to create the microservices that stitch together to produce those journeys, but, you know, running the containers. And so that, that opens up an omni-channel future that starts to move away from saying actually businesses are organized around the environment in which they're serving. Is it a retail store? Is it, is it online that additional and so on, and actually into much more of a space where you're building the best journeys and those journeys come and are served through digital or through a call center or through a store and so on. And that makes a huge difference because the focus on improving the customer's experience has been enormous. And I think that's one of the other parts that come out of the whole cloud native setup. >>And the ability to experiment has been iteratively and endlessly improving the experience for the customer. And that's, that's a, that's a massive step forward. So we can talk about the fact that we deploy a huge number of times more frequently than we did even a year ago, uh, or the, you know, our quality has improved by a massive percentage and so on. And I think the thing that's really interesting is the improvement in the experience and the endless improvement and iteration of that, because we can make lots and lots of small changes and do every day. That's a big one, >>You know, what's interesting Ben, and let's get your reaction on this. And if you don't mind to just add a little color to this, this is just another example of reports that we've been talking with folks on where it's not about just replatforming to the cloud. It's refactoring the business, uh, with, with the engineering, the modernization. And so there's two things that go on one, you see the efficiencies and new doors open up new things are happening. People are getting excited, good, some good Mo morale boosting things are becoming clear, but then there's actually new business, new business value being created or new propositions engineering propositions. Can you share from a digital standpoint, because this seems to be the new role of the digital person, whether it's engineering or on the business side, make things run faster, cheaper, and better, and then create new opportunities, new propositions, what's your >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's fundamentally around pace of delivery. Uh, being able to, as, as may not says, uh, moving from a world, uh, two or three years ago where we were deploying once every two or three months, uh, this is a website once every two or three months where we were, uh, to now it's happening all the time every day. Uh, it's, it's, it's a skill that we've given us as an organization that we couldn't have leveraged before. And what we're able to do with that now is experiment our way and iterate our way to new value streams, as you say, but also trial and error. What we already know, uh, or expects to be true with our customers much, much more easily and much, much more frequently, very little a barrier to production or friction between us and the customer these days, and the almost instant response and feedback we get from customers. Um, we, we learn constantly about because of that. And it's, uh, it's become much less of a stab in the dark with large business cases where they work well, they worked and are much more experimental initiative. Uh, we, most of the propositions we know about, but also to the experiments, um, and unknowns in our future. Um, that also now unlocked, >>That's a great point. You mentioned about the whole timing of, you know, the old way, months, weeks, just for website stuff, uh, Maynard. And if you guys can share this new world order is actually pretty exciting, but also daunting if you're not like in the water, so to speak, right? So, you know, some people are actually, you know, putting their toe in the water, they're experimenting, but it's a game changer. I mean, a significant step up of value. What's your advice about solutions and they're not easy. I mean, you just got to get your hands around the sensor. You guys have been doing a lot more of these projects is seeing more and more of these, these kinds of partnerships, uh, and the value is there. Can you guys share your, your, uh, opinion and advice to folks out there watching saying, how do I do this and is it going to be worth it? Is that bridge to the future there? >>I mean, I think there's a mechanical piece. How do I enable this? And we can talk about dev ops and moving to cloud native, and actually some of the, some of the process side of as an organization, how do I get really comfortable with deploying very frequently and it being low risk and routine. And so the other part for me, which we sort of haven't touched on is as much as we talk about experimentation, it's about the data and the analytics and the knowledge that we create of that. So the, the, the small changes we're making are highly scientific. And when we think about actually understanding how we're optimizing experiences, that's all about the whole set of data points that I'm pinning up. And so I'll take two parts is know the, the journey we've been on here is, is about enablement. It's about moving the architecture. It's about moving the ways of working so that a lot of things that were hard or required thinking about two years ago on that quality team. But the other part of it is understanding the data and having the analytics capability and being able to make a very scientific experiment where you can see the result in the day-to-day >>Ben, what's your reaction advice to folks watching as they modernize exciting, challenging. It's a lot of hard work, but what's it look, it's the end game, >>All of those things, yes. I'd say it's, um, more than anything, it's a necessity these days we have to embark on this journey. It is, it is daunting. And, and of course, a lot of large organizations like ours, we were successful for doing things in a particular way, uh, have built up a lot of, uh, protection mechanisms for doing, for making sure we protect that. And so to come at it from a new angle is, is obviously daunting. And it's very challenging as well. There is an immune system in all of our organizations that is real, but I'll deal with it. Um, but the, the real, um, success behind, uh, the real, I think the reasons behind a lot of our success has been beat by being able to quickly prove value to quickly prove that outcomes are deliverable and achievable. Um, and then to build on those and iterate on it. And as, as I said, it's, it's about being able to move at pace for us in Vodafone. It's about leveraging our scale. We're a huge organization. Um, and we're, we're now coming together as one to really make sure that we do just lean on that scale more than we have them. Yeah, that's really about iterating, as I said, and, and, um, finding things that work, keep doing it, finding things that hold you back and get rid of them as quickly as you can, uh, is what I would say for us. >>It's interesting. You mentioned the scale. The thing about the cloud is when I hear the common pattern is it takes advantage of the strengths of your environment. You know, so every environment is a bit different, but you guys have the scale. I have to ask you while you're here. What are some of the anecdotal comments that kind of, you hear from folks that make you happy? When about the results? I think saying, Hey man, I'm not even seeing this anymore, or, wow. This is faster. What's some of the sound bites that you guys take as proof points of the success of this project. >>Yeah. It's, uh, I'd say it's mainly an R there's two things I would say, uh, the ability to rely less on it delivery if you like. So empowering our commercial business to make changes for themselves in a safe and secure manner. So providing these self-service capabilities, we've started to see a real pace about our commercial business, as well as our technology business. Uh, but also the, the time it takes to get things out is probably one of the biggest, uh, really tangible results and outcomes for us at the moment. Um, just the sheer amount of things we can release to production, uh, in, in sorts of short space, space of time really does bring to life, our ability to now trial and error, to AB test a Canary deploy. Things like that is really, um, it's been a real superpower for our, um, transformation, I think yes. >>Kind of kidding about can't make time to go to the pub, but in reality, it's free time freeing up people from doing those tasks that were slower shifting that value. >>Yeah. Whereas as you mentioned, Johnny, it really is much more than a technical journey. This is a cultural one as well for a lot of organizations and, um, by being more connected, by being more connected to the outcomes or the value that you add into production, uh, it really does drive a new culture and engagement across our teams. You know, if it's six months between writing a line of code and seeing it in production by up no sense of ownership or pride in what I've done there, but if I can deploy code immediately see an impact good or bad, um, then, uh, I really do feel connected to the outcomes and the value that I'm driving to, to the business and to our customers. So there really is a great cultural, >>Yeah. I remember Andy Jassy last year when he was a sea of AWS on stage and talked about that dynamic of the teamwork, people rowing in the right direction. Um, feeling part of it may know this is a cultural shift on how companies do business. I know center I've covered probably a dozen or so killer projects that have just been awesomely new and kind of different, but successful built on the cloud. So a lot of replatforming refactoring you're in the front lines, working with, uh, companies that essentially what's the pattern that you see that's that's happening right now. What's the, what's your view of the current market? >>Um, I mean, I think there's a huge shift to this, that this journey too has been part of the move from being on the cloud to being proud nature. I'm really getting that value because there's a, um, a kind of, almost a example. I see there's a light bulb moment where ownership of what you put in production means that you move away from a model of we change code because either the business tell us too, because they have a functional requirement or because something's broken. When we get into the model of that, I want to improve the thing that I feel ownership of. That's not leave. And you suddenly see how much difference that makes to the experience of it, the quality of it, the stability, all of those things improving. And so if, if I look more generally that cultural shift is it is an evolution that organizations go through and it starts with actually delivering it in a more agile way. At some large scale, you see agility moving up into kind of business agility and starting to affect things like budgeting cycles and the kind of corporate functions. If you like that tend to sit around, uh, you know, supporting Pete pieces of delivery. And there's a lot more of that happening at the moment, a load with more organizations pushing into being properly cloud native and transforming rather than the kind of first wave, which was the shift onto the cloud. Now it's actually, that's really leveraged what we've got with the, >>Yeah. And you guys essentially have been riding on the wave of AWS and the cloud for many, many years. We've been covering it. Ben great success story. Thanks for coming on the cube, a head of digital engineering, Vodafone UK, great example of modern engineering at work using AWS in Europe. Uh, thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing your story. Maynor thank you for also coming on and the work you're doing at Accenture and AWS. Thank you. Thanks John. The cube coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 executive summit. I'm John furry, your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Reinvent 2021 Executive Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on the modernization, where we're ringing in the success with Amazon Web Services and Vodafone Digital in the UK. An example of modern engineering, examples using Amazon, the cloud. Looking at where cloud-native is actually changing the game. We got two great guests, Ben Connolly, Head of Digital Engineering at Vodafone UK, and Maynard Williams, Managing Director of Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing the story. >> Thanks John, appreciate the invite. >> So I got to ask you guys, one of the main themes that we've been covering all year, and even pre-pandemic, we saw the cloud-native wave coming pretty hard. Containers, great for modernization, sets the table. You seeing things like Kubernetes, and now Serverless changing the game on all aspects of how modernization is happening. And everyone's talking about application modernization, shift left, all great for business, but you have to kind of take care of things under the covers a little bit. The infrastructure, making sure the engineering teams are all set. So this has been a top topic. This is kind of what you guys are doing. Can you guys explain to me the needs that Vodafone has that brought about this transformation? >> Yeah, sure. So we we've been on this transformation program for years, but you're absolutely right. The pandemic has been a real catalyst for all kinds of organizations like ours around the world. So we were really driving digital first agenda for quite a long time. And that that came as you just said John, it really did start with the cloud hosted and then moving and realizing the difference between that and become native to the cloud and really leveraging the services like AWS in order to really drive pace and the outcomes that we needed for the business. We've seen a huge change purely over the last 18 months really. Our daily traffic these days is as it was on our highest ever like an iPhone launch day, for example, before the pandemic is daily traffic these days. And so that scalability and flexibility and that leveraging those services has been absolutely fundamental to supporting the changing needs and expectations of our customers. >> You know, back in the old days, Maynard oh yeah, Black Friday surge, you need the cloud to scale up and be flexible, agile, elastic. The scale is definitely now table stakes. And if you're not dealing with scale and some sort of either SRE fashion or whatever, you're really going to be behind the curve. But the next level that's being discussed is how do you leverage the scale for not just customer experience and business value but we're talking about system architecture, kind of thinking there's going to, this is our system design is now a big part of it. Can you talk about how this kind of threads together? Because we always talk about consumer experience, customer experience CX, but now there's a new systems mindset out there. Can you kind of share your vision on that. >> Yeah, I think the thing that stands out for me is if I look at digital, we've designed it to a point where the scale is just as you say, it's the table stakes. And iPhone launch was something that two years ago needed to be planned and thought about. And it's now absolutely routine. We think about the business side of it but a big increase in scale really is seamless. But if I look at the full stack, we're still connected into some of the older backend systems where we're in production they're on prime actually tests is on AWS now, which is a big step forward, but when you've got to manage scaling in a way that translates from backend systems that are on-premises or on-prem, and therefore we can't elastically scale through to the front tab where we have to be able to scale up very seamlessly and balancing that across with an architecture that supports that level of scale and makes it so seamless on something like, as you say, iPhone launches or Black Friday or any product coming out is actually key to the way we've architected that. >> So you saying that essentially AWS combined with Vodafone worked on this solution that was more of a cloud native solutions. Is that the innovation? Can you just summarize and unpack a little bit, what is the innovation? What problems did you solve together with Accenture and Vodafone? What was the core challenge? >> Yes well, I think that the core is actually, how do you get to the point where the scaling is seamless, where you can move from being on the cloud to cloud native, as Ben just touched on, when at the same time you're actually connected into an enterprise state where the production systems are all on-prem and don't have that ability to scale in the same fashion. So you can't, for example, push you to load into an on-prem backend system and simply expected to scale in the same fashion. So between our three organizations, architecting something that is robust scales, reusable and takes away a load of pieces that actually were quite complex two years ago and turns them into just routine has been a big step forward. >> And I want to get your reaction to this because you're on the front line saying, hey, be more agile, the boss that says, be agile, do different left, take that hill. It's easier said than done. Talk about what goes on when you have to implement and the stakes involved. Again, there's always the old way, new way. Could you just kind of give some color on what's going on? What's your perspective? >> Sure, and Maynard just said that the real benefits and the story behind this was the ability to launch an iPhone For example, as a non event for Vodafone previously was weeks and months of preparation and design and testing and confidence building. And now it really is, it just happens. And we watched things scale and then down again gracefully and really do celebrate the level up if you like, the leveling up of us as an organization, allowing our commercial colleagues to launch propositions or to launch campaigns without needing us to be involved anymore, because they're confident, we're all confident that things will flex like that. But you're absolutely right that the changes and the demands of us as a team, but also the expectations of our stakeholders have been changing for quite a long time now. And we're really excited now to be able to meet them by leveraging the services that we're discussing it. >> Yeah, so the guy said launched the iPhone, no big deal routine, hit the pub, everyone's happy. Having a good day. Let's get into the solution, how it works. Talk about what's going on under the covers. How does this all work? Can you take us through what's the state of the art of the of the solution? >> Sure. Well as you mentioned earlier, we were very much inclined to Serverless these days. So we rolled out fire gate a few, it started about 18 months ago and that really has freed us up into all kinds of scalability measures but also really about reusing and applying this across much more than just the engineering or the digital part of Vodafone where we began. So that's been a really big part of our agenda and that's informed all kinds of things. The ability to scale and flex like that and the architecture beneath us and the containerization and orchestration that goes along with that has really enabled us to flex that ability to reuse it across other areas. And because of that now it's driven our hiring policy, our tooling and technical, our procedural approaches, and it all now leverages that ability to move a pace and to be able to scale, not just in infrastructure or ability to serve customers, but in ability to deliver for the business commercially as well. And this is all now informed on our direction I think, as an organization. >> It's interesting, you mentioned you far gate then a trigger of events happens. People get excited, opens up new doors of opportunities, there's a chain reaction from that. Talk about the impact to the staff in the operations because you almost it's motivating. At some level, you got new things happening but you're actually making things go better and faster, cheaper. >> Yeah, well, the impact is one because we're on a journey at Vodafone of this transformation really becoming a technology business first and foremost, rather than a telco classically like our competitors. We're able to really drive cultural change as well. So the impact on our people is a really, it's been a particularly engaging one, we've also been part of a real recruitment drive. We've just announced 7,000 new roles joining our team across Europe. And these are engineering roles driving more of the same behaviors and principles of a modern software engineering business like ours. And that really is fueled by our ability to experiment and try but become cloud native and employ these services in the way that they're designed to be. >> Maynard, I'd like to get your take on this and shift to a topic around what this all means. You zoom out and you say, okay, with the pandemic, it's become a mobile virtual hybrid now world around work play, all those lines are kind of blurring. It's not as clean as it used to be. Oh, the network segmented over here, this is over here, these legacy systems were built around the notion of things were nicely segmented. Now you have this whole kind of mashup if you will, of how you just want to work, right? There's mobilization is a huge thing. So access, identity, these are things that we're all kind of set up nicely before the pandemic, or at least not as a stable maybe not scalable. But what's your take on this? What's the big picture? What's all happening? >> I think, I mean, the pandemic has accelerated a set of changes that were already happening anyway. And I'd say the other part of this is under the covers. A lot of the work has been to create the microservices that stitch together to produce those journeys that run in the containers and so that opens up an Omni-channel feature that starts to move away from saying actually, businesses are organized around the environment in which they're serving. Is it a retail store? Is it online, additional and so on? And actually into much more of a space where you're building the best journeys and those journeys can and are served through digital or through a call center or through a store and so on. And that makes a huge difference because the focus on improving the customer's experience has been enormous. And I think that's one of the other parts that come out of the whole cloud native setup and the ability to experiment has been intuitively and endlessly improving the experience for the customer. And that's a massive step forward. So we can talk about the fact that we deploy a huge number of times more frequently than we did even a year ago or that our quality is improved by a massive percentage and so on. And I think the thing that's really interesting is the improvement in the experience and the endless improvement and iteration of that because we can make lots and lots of small changes and do every day. That's a big step forward. >> You know, what's interesting, Ben and let's get your reaction on this and if you don't mind to just add a little color to this. This is just another example of reports that we've been talking with folks on where it's not about just re-platforming to the cloud. It's refactoring the business with the engineering, the modernization. And so there's two things that go on. One, you see the efficiencies, new doors open up, new things are happening, people are getting excited, get some good morale boost, things are becoming clear, but then this actually new business value being created or new propositions, engineering propositions. Can you share from a digital standpoint because this seems to be the new role of the digital person, whether it's engineering or on the business side, make things run faster, cheaper and better and then create new opportunities, new propositions. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, it's fundamentally around pace of delivery. Being able to, as Maynard says, moving from a world two or three years ago where we were deploying once every two or three months. This is a website once every two or three months, it's where we were. And so now it's happening all the time every day. It's a skill that we've given us as an organization that we couldn't have leveraged before. And what we're able to do with that now is experiment our way and iterate our way to new value streams, as you say, but also to trial and error what we already know or expect to be true with our customers much, much more easily and much, much more frequently. Very little a barrier to production or friction between us and the customer these days and the almost instant response and feedback we get from customers, we learn constantly because of that and it's become much less of a stab in the dark with large business cases where they work well, they work to now much more experimental initiative. That way both to the propositions we know about but also to the experiments and unknowns in our future that also now unlocked for us. >> That's a great point you mentioned about the whole timing of, the old way, months, weeks, just for website stuff. Maynard, if you guys can share this new world order is actually pretty exciting but also daunting if you're not like in the water, so to speak. So some people are actually putting their toe in the water, they're experimenting but it's a game changer. I mean, a significant step up of value. What's your advice about solutions? And they're not easy. I mean, you just got to get your hands around Accenture. You guys have been doing a lot more of these projects and seeing more and more of these kinds of partnerships and the value is there. Can you guys share your opinion and advice to folks out there watching saying, how do I do this and is it going to be worth it? Is that bridge to the future there? >> I mean, I think there's a mechanical piece. How do I enable this? We could talk about DevOps and moving to cloud native and actually some of the process side of as an organization, how do I get really comfortable with deploying very frequently and it being low risk and routine and so on. The other part for me, which we sort of haven't touched on is as much as we talk about experimentation, it's about the data and the analytics and the knowledge that we create out of that. So the small changes we're making are highly scientific. And when we think about actually understanding how we're optimizing experiences, that's all about a whole set of data points that underpin it. And so I'd say two parts. It's the journey we've been on here is about enablement. It's about moving the architecture. It's about moving the ways of working so that a lot of things that were hard or required thinking about two years ago on that are routine but the other part of it is understanding the data and having the analytics capability and being able to make a very scientific experiment where you can see the result in the day to day. >> Ben, what's your reaction advice to folks watching as they modernize exciting, challenging. It's a lot of hard work, but what is its the end game? >> All of those things, yes. I'd say it's more than anything, it's a necessity these days we have to embark on this journey and it is daunting. And of course, a lot of large organizations like ours, we were successful for doing things in a particular way and built up a lot of protection mechanisms for making sure we protect that. And so to come at it from a new angle is obviously daunting. And it's very challenging as well. There is an immune system in all of our organizations it is real and we will all deal with it. But the success behind, I think the real reasons behind a lot of our success has been by being able to quickly prove value, to quickly prove that outcomes are deliverable and achievable. And then to build on those and iterate on it. And as I said, it's about being able to move at pace. For us in Vodafone it's about leveraging our scale. We're a huge organization, and we're now coming together as one to really make sure that we do lean on that scale more than we have them. We're really about iterating, as I said and finding things that work, keep doing it, finding things that hold you back and get rid of them as quickly as you can is what I would say for us. >> It's interesting you mentioned the scale. The thing about the cloud is when I hear the common pattern is it takes advantage of the strengths of your environment. So every environment's a bit different but you guys have the scale. I have to ask you while you're here. What are some of the anecdotal comments that kind of you hear from folks that make you happy, what about the results? I think saying, hey man, I'm not even seeing this anymore or wow this is faster. What's some of the sound bites that you guys take as proof points of the success of this project. >> Yeah, I'd say it's mainly there's two things I would say, the ability to rely less on IT delivery if you like. So empowering our commercial business to make changes for themselves in a safe and secure manner. So providing these self-service capabilities, we've started to see a real pace about our commercial business, as well as our technology business. But also the time it takes to get things out is probably one of the biggest, really tangible results and outcomes for us at the moment. Just the sheer amount of things we can release to production in sorts of short space of time really does bring to life our ability to now trial and error, to AB test Canary deploy, things like that is really, it's been a real superpower for our transformation. >> Yeah, kind of kidding about having time to go to the pub but in reality, it's free time freeing up people from doing those tasks that were slower and shifting that value. >> Yeah, as you mentioned John, it really is much more than a technical journey. This is a cultural one as well for a lot of organizations. And by being more connected to the outcomes or the value that you add into production, it really does drive a new culture and engagement across our teams. If it's six months between rising line of code and seeing it in production, I have no sense of ownership or pride in what I've done there, but if I can deploy code immediately see an impact good or bad, then I really do feel connected to the outcomes and the value that I'm driving to the business and to our customers. So there really is a great cultural journey as well. >> Yeah, I remember Andy Jassy last year when he was the CEO of AWS on the stage and talked about that dynamic of the team where people run in the right direction, feeling part of it. Maynard, this is a cultural shift on how companies do business. I know Accenture have covered probably a dozen or so killer projects that have just been awesomely new and kind of different but a successful built on the cloud. So a lot of re-platforming refactoring. You're in the front lines working with companies at Accenture. What's the pattern that you see that's happening right now? What's your view of the current market? >> I mean, I think there's a huge shift in this journey too has bankrupted the move from being on the cloud to being cloud native. I'm really getting that value because there's a kind of almost example I see, there's a light bulb moment where ownership of what you put in production means that you move away from a model of we change code because either the business tell us to cause they have a functional requirement or because something's broken when we get into the model of but I want to improve the thing that I feel ownership of that's not alive. And you suddenly see how much difference that makes to the experience of it, the quality of it, the stability, all of those things improving. And so if I look more generally that cultural shift is an evolution that organizations go through and it starts with actually delivering it in a more agile way. At some large scale, you see agility moving up into that kind of business agility and starting to affect things like budgeting cycles and the kind of corporate functions if you like, that tend to sit around supporting peak pieces of delivery. And there's a lot more of that happening at the moment, aligned with more organizations pushing into being properly cloud native and transforming rather than the kind of first wave which was the shift onto the cloud. Now it's actually, that's really leveraged what we've got with the cloud. >> Yeah and you guys essentially have been riding on the wave of AWS and the Cloud for many, many years we've been covering it. Ben great success story. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, a head of Digital Engineering, Vodafone UK. Great example of modern engineering at work using AWS in Europe. Thanks for coming on theCUBE sharing your story. Maynard, thank you for also coming on and the work you're doing at Accenture and AWS, thank you. >> Thanks John, great to be here. >> It's theCUBE coverage of AWS Reinvent 2021 Executive Summit, I'm John Furrier your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe. It's The CUBE, with digital coverage of AWS public sector online, (upbeat music) brought to you by, Amazon Web Services. >> Everyone welcome back to The CUBE virtual coverage, of AWS public sector summit online. I'm John Furrier, your host of The CUBE. Normally we're in person, out on Asia-Pacific, and all the different events related to public sector. But this year we have to do it remote, and we're going to do the remote virtual CUBE, with Data Virtual Public Sector Online Summit. And we have two great guests here, about Digital Earth Africa project, Clive Charlton. Head of Solutions Architecture, Sub-Saharan Africa with AWS, Clive thanks for coming on, and Aditya Agrawal founder of D4DInsights, and also the advisor for the Digital Earth Africa project with AWS. So gentlemen, thank you for coming on. Appreciate you coming on remotely. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us, John. >> So Clive take us through real quickly. Just take a minute to describe what is the Digital Earth Africa Project. What are the problems, that you're aiming to solve? >> Well, we're really aiming to provide, actionable data to governments, and organization around Africa, by providing satellite imagery, in an easy to use format, and doing that on the cloud, that serves countries throughout Africa. >> And just from a cloud perspective, give us a quick taste of what's going on, just with the tech, it's on Amazon. You got a little satellite action. Is there ground station involved? Give us a little bit more color around, you know, what's the scope of the project. >> Yeah, so, historically speaking you'd have to process satellite imagery down link it, and then do some heavy heavy lifting, around the processing of the data. Digital Earth Africa was built, from the experiences from Digital Earth Australia, originally developed by a Geo-sciences Australia and they use container services for Kubernetes's called Elastic Kubernetes Service to spin up virtual machines, which we are required to process the raw satellite imagery, into a format called a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF. This format is used to store very large volumes of data in a format that's really easy to query. So, organizations can just use NHTTP get range request. Just a query part of the file, that they're interested in, which means, the results are served much, much quicker, from much, much better overall experience, under the hood, the store where the data is stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service, which is S3, and the Metadata Index in a Relational Database Service, that runs the Open Data CUBE Library, which is allows Digital Earth Africa, to store this data in both space and time. >> It's interesting. I just did a, some interviews last week, on a symposium on space and cybersecurity, and we were talking about , the impact of satellites and GPS and just the overall infrastructure shift. And it's just another part of the edge of the network. Aditya, I want to get your thoughts on this, and your reaction to the Digital Earth, cause you're an advisor. Let's zoom out. What's the impact of people's lives? Give us a quick overview, of how you see it playing out because, explaining to someone, who doesn't know anything about the project, like, okay what is it about, and how does it actually impact people? >> Sure. So, you know, as, as Clive mentioned, I mean there's, there's definitely a, a digital infrastructure behind Digital Earth Africa, in a way that it's going to be able to serve free and open satellite data. And often the, the issue around satellite data, especially within the context of Africa, and other parts of the world is that there's a level of capacity that's required, in order to be able to use that data. But there's also all kinds of access issues, because, traditionally satellite data is heavy. There's the old model of being able to download the data and then being able to do something with it. And then often about 80% of the time, that you spend on satellite data is spent, just pre processing the data, before you can actually, do any of the fun analysis around it, that really sort of impacts the kinds of decisions and actions that you're looking for. And so that's why Digital Earth Africa. And that's why this partnership, with Amazon is a fantastic partnership, because it really allows us, to be able, to scale the approach across the entire continent, make it easy for that data to be accessed and make it easier for people to be able to use that data. The way that Digital Earth Africa is being operationalized, is that we're not just looking at it, from the perspective of, let's put another infrastructure into Africa. We want this program, and it is a program, that we want institutionalized within Africa itself. One that leverages expertise across the continent, and one that brings in organizations across the continent to really sort of take the leadership and ownership of this program as it moves forward. The idea of it is that, once you're able to have this information, being able to address issues like food security, climate change, coastal resilience, land degradation where illegal mining is, where is the water? We want to be able to do that, in a way that it's really looking at what are the national development priorities within the countries themselves, and how does it also then support regional and global frameworks like Africa's Agenda 2063 and the sustainable development goals. >> No doubt in my mind, obviously, is that huge benefits to these kinds of technologies. I want to also just ask you, as a follow up is a huge space race going on, right now, explosion of availability of satellite data. And again, more satellites going up, There's more congestion, more contention. Again, we had a big event on that cybersecurity, and the congestion issue, but, you know, satellite data was power everyone here in the United States, you want an Uber, you want Google Maps you've got your everywhere with GPS, without it, we'd be kind of like (laughing), wondering what's going on. How do we even vote these days? So certainly an impact, but there's a huge surge of availability, of the use of satellite data. How do you explain this? And what are some of the challenges, from the data side that's coming, from the Digital Earth Africa project that you guys hope to resolve? >> Sure. I mean, that's a great question. I mean, I think at one level, when you're looking at the space race right now, satellites are becoming cheaper. They're becoming more efficient. There's increased technology now, on the types of sensors that you can deploy. There's companies like Planet, that are really revolutionizing how even small countries are able to deploy their own satellites, and the constellation that they're putting forward, in terms of the frequency by which, you're able to get data, for any given part of the earth on a daily basis, coupled with that. And you know, this is really sort of in climbs per view, but the cloud computing capabilities, and overall computing power that you have today, then what you had 10 years, 15 years ago is so vastly different. What used to take weeks to do before, for any kind of analysis on satellite data, which is heavy data now takes, you know, minutes or hours to do. So when you put all that together, again, you know, I think it really speaks, to the power of this partnership with Amazon and really, what that means, for how this data is going to be delivered to Africa, because it really allows for the scalability, for anything that happens through Digital Earth Africa. And so, for example, one of the approaches, that we're taking us, we identify what the priorities, and needs are at the country level. Let's say that it's a land degradation, there's often common issues across countries. And so when we can take one particular issue, tested with additional countries, and then we can scale it across the whole continent because the infrastructure is there for the whole continent. >> Yeah. That's a great point. So many storylines here. We'll get to climb in a second on sustainability. And I want to talk about the Open Data Platform. Obviously, open data, having data is one thing, but now train data, and having more trusted data becomes a huge issue. Again, I want to dig into that for a second, but, Clive, I want to ask you, first, what region are we in? I mean, is this, you guys actually have a great, first of all, we've been covering the region expansion from Bahrain all the way, as moves around the world, probably soon in space. There'll be a region Amazon space station region probably, someday in the future but, what region are you running the project out of? Can you, and why is it important? Can you share the update on the regional piece? >> Well, we're very pleased, that Digital Earth Africa, is using the new Africa region in Cape Town, in South Africa, which was launched in April of this year. It's one of 24 regions around the world and we have another three new regions announced, what this means for users of Digital Earth Africa is, they're able to use region closest to them, which gives them the best user experience. It's the, it's the quickest connection for them. But more importantly, we also wanted to use, an African solution, for African people and using the Africa region in Cape Town, really aligned with that thinking. >> So, localization on the data, latency, all that stuff is kind of within the region, within country here. Right? >> That's right, Yeah >> And why is that important? Is there any other benefits? Why should someone care? Obviously, this failover option, I mean, in any other countries to go to, but why is having something, in that region important for this project? >> Well, it comes down to latency for the, for the users. So, being as close to the data, as possible is, is really important, for the user experience. Especially when you're looking at large data sets, and big queries. You don't want to be, you don't want to be waiting a long lag time, for that query to go backwards and forwards, between the user and the region. So, having the data, in the Africa region in Cape Town is important. >> So it's about the region, I love when these new regions rollout from Amazon, Cause obviously it's this huge buildup CapEx, in this huge data center servers and everything. Sustainability is a huge part of the story. How does the sustainability piece fit into the, the data initiative supported in Africa? Can you share some updates on that? >> Well, this, this project is also closely aligned with the, Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, which looks to accelerate sustainability research. and innovation, really by minimizing the cost, and the time required to acquire, and analyze large sustainability datasets. So the initiative supports innovators, and researchers with the data and tools, and, and technical experience, that they need to move sustainability, to the next level. These are public datasets and publicly available to anyone. In addition, to that, the initiative provides cloud grants to those who are interested in exploring, exploring the use of AWS technology and scalable infrastructure, to serve sustainability challenges, of this nature. >> Aditya, I want to hear your thoughts, on this comment that Clive made around latency, and certainly having a region there has great benefits. You don't need to hop on that. Everyone knows I'm a big fan of the regional model, but it brings up the issue, of what's going on in the country, from an infrastructure standpoint, a lot of mobility, a lot of edge computing. I can almost imagine that. So, so how do you see that evolving, from a business standpoint, from a project standpoint data standpoint, can you comment and react to that edge, edge angle? >> Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that, the value of an open data infrastructure, is that, you want to use that infrastructure, to create a whole data ecosystem type of an approach. And so, from the perspective of being able. to make this data readily accessible, making it efficiently accessible, and really being able to bring industry, into that ecosystem, because of what we really want as we, as the program matures, is for this program, to then also instigate the development of new businesses, entrepreneurship, really get the young people across Africa, which has the largest proportion of young people, anywhere in the world, to be engaged around what you can do, with satellite data, and the types of businesses that can be developed around it. And, so, by having all of our data reside in Cape Town on the continent there's obviously technical benefits, to that in terms of, being able to apply the data, and create new businesses. There's also a, a perception in the fact that, the data that Digital Earth Africa is serving, is in Africa and residing in Africa which does have, which does go a long way. >> Yeah. And that's a huge value. And I can just imagine the creativity cloud, if you can comment on this open data platform idea, because some of the commentary that we've been having on The CUBE here, and all around the world is data's great. We all know we're living with a lot of data, you starting to see that, the commoditization and horizontal scalability of data, is one thing, but to put it into software defined environments, whether, it's an entrepreneur coding up an app, or doing something to share some transparency, around some initiatives going on within the region or on the continent, it's about trusted data. It's about sharing algorithms. AI is also a consumer of data, machines consume data. So, it's not just the technology data, is part of this new normal. What's this Open Data Platform, And how does that translate into value in your opinion? >> I, yeah. And you know, when, when data is shared on, on AWS anyone can analyze it and build services on top of it, using a broad range of compute and data to data analytics products, you know, things like Amazon EC2, or Lambda, which is all serverless compute, to things like Amazon Elastic MapReduce, for complex extract and transformation processes, but sharing data in the cloud, lets users, spend more time on the data analysis, rather than, than the data acquisition. And researchers can analyze data shared on AWS, without needing to pay to store their own copy, which is what the Open Data Platform provides. You only have to pay for the compute that you use and you don't need to purchase storage, to start a new project. So the registry of the open data on AWS, makes it easy to find those datasets, but, by making them publicly available through AWS services. And when you share, share your data on AWS, you make it available, to a large and growing community of developers, and startups, and enterprises, all around the world. And you know, and we've been talking particularly around, around Africa. >> Yeah. So it's an open source model, basically, it's free. You don't, it doesn't cost you anything probably, just started maybe down the road, if it gets heavy, maybe to charging but the most part easy for scientists to use and then you're leveraging it into the open, contributing back. Is that right? >> Yep. That's right. To me getting, getting researchers, and startups, and organizations growing quickly, without having to worry about the data acquisition, they can just get going and start building. >> I want to get back to Aditya, on this skill gap issue, because you brought up something that, I thought was really cool. People are going to start building apps. I'm going to start to see more innovation. What are the needs out there? Because we're seeing a huge onboarding of new talent, young talent, people rescaling from existing jobs, certainly COVID accelerated, people looking for more different kinds of work. I'm sure there's a lot of (laughing) demand to, to do some innovative things. The question I always get, and want to get your reaction is, what are the skills needed to, to get involved, to one contribute, but also benefit from it, whether it's the data satellite, data or just how to get involved skill-wise >> Sure. >> Yes. >> Yeah. So most recently we've created a six week training course. That's really kind of taken users from understanding, the basics of Earth Observation Data, to how to work, with Python, to how to create their own Jupyter notebooks, and their own Use cases. And so there's a, there's a wide sort of range of skill sets, that are required depending on who you are because, effectively, what we want to be able to do is get everyone from, kind of the technical user, that might have some remote sensing background to the developer, to the policy maker, and decision maker, to understand the value of this infrastructure, whether you're the one who's actually analyzing the data. If you're the one who's developing new applications, or you're taking that information from a managerial or policy level discussion to actually deliver the action and sort of impact that you're looking for. And so, you know, in, in that regard, we're working with ITC in the Netherlands and again, with institutions across Africa, that already have a mandate, and expertise in this particular area, to create a holistic capacity development program, that will address all of those different factors. >> So I guess the follow up question I want to have is, how do you ensure the priorities of Africa are addressed, as part of this program? >> Yeah, so, we are, we've created a governance model, that really is both top down, and bottom up. At the bottom up level, We have a technical advisory committee, that has over 15 institutions, many of which are based across Africa, that really have a good understanding of the needs, the priorities, and the mandate for how to work with countries. And at the top down level, we're developing a governing board, that will be inclusive, of the key continental level institutions, that really provide the political buy-in, the sustainability of the program, and really provide overall guidance. And within that, we're also creating an operational models, such that these institutions, that do have the capacity to support the program, they're actually the ones, who are also going to be supporting, the implementation of the program itself. >> And there's been some United Nations, sustained development projects all kinds of government involvement, around making sure certain things would happen, within the country. Can you just share, some of the highlights, or some of the key initiatives, that are going on, that you're supporting, to make it a better, better world? >> Yeah. So this is, this program is very closely aligned to a sustainable development agenda. And so looking after, looking developing methods, that really address, the sustainable development goals as one facet, in Africa, there's another program looking overall, overall national development priorities and sustainability called the Agenda 2063. And really like, I think what it really comes down to this, this wouldn't be happening, without the country level involvement themselves. So, this started with five countries, originally, Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and the government of Kenya itself, has really been, a kind of a founding partner for, how Digital Earth Africa and it's predecessor of Africa Regional Data Cube, came to be. And so without high level support, and political buying within those governments, I mean, it's really because of that. That's why we're, we're where we are. >> I need you to thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. Clive will give you the final word, for the folks watching Digital Earth Africa, processes, petabytes of data. I mean the satellite data as well, huge, you mentioned it's a new region. You're running Kubernetes, Elastic Kubernetes Service, making containers easy to use, pay as you go. So you get cutting edge, take the one minute to, to share why this region's cutting edge. Does it have the scale of other regions? What should they know about AWS, in Cape Town, for Africa's new region? Take a minute to, to put plugin. >> Yeah, thank you for that, John. So all regions are built in the, in the same way, all around the world. So they're built for redundancy and reliability. They typically have a minimum of three, what we call Availability Zones. And each one is a contains a, a cluster of, of data centers, and all interconnected with fast fiber. So, you know, you can survive, you know, a failure with with no impact to your services. And the Cape Town region is built in exactly the same the same way, we have most of the services available in the, in the Cape Town region, like most other regions. So, as a user of AWS, you, you can have the confidence that, You can deploy your services and workloads, into AWS and run it in the same in the same way, with the same kind of speed, and the same kind of support, and infrastructure that's backing any region, anywhere else in the world. >> Well great. Thanks for that plug, Aditya, thank you for your insight. And again, innovation follows cloud computing, whether you're building on top of it as a startup a government or enterprise, or the big society better, in this case, the Digital Earth Africa project. Great. A great story. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us, John >> I'm John Furrier with, The CUBE, virtual remote, not in person this year. I hope to see you next time in person. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) (upbeat music decreases)

>> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCube, covering CoinAgenda, brought to you by SiliconANGLE. (salsa music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to our special CUBE exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico. I've been here on the island all week, talking to the most important people, entrepreneurs, citizens of Puerto Rico, the entrepreneur, the students, connecting with Blockchain, investors, thought leaders, and the pioneers. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of theCUBE, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, and we're here with Crystal Rose, who is the CEO and co-founder of Sensay, doing something really cutting edge, really relevant, and kind of ahead of its time, but I think it's time to get it out there and get that token program. Crystal Rose, thanks for joining me and spending time with me. >> Thank you for having me. >> So one of the things I think that you're doing, and I want you to explain this because it's nuanced, and a lot of the super geeks get it and alpha geeks will get it, but the mainstream people are used to dealing in their silos. I use Facebook, I use LinkedIn, I use Twitter, I use chat, I use Telegram, I use these apps. The world's kind of horizontally being disrupted because of the network affect that Blockchain and Crypto is now the underpinnings of, and there's ICOs out there and other things happening, but it's a disruption at the technology stack with software. You guys are doing something with Sensay in the SENSE token that is changing the equation of how people come together, how people grow and learn, whether it's a nonlinear path of some proficiency or connecting with folks or just learning, whatever it is, it's a discovery mechanism. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing and why it's so important. >> Well we built Sensay to connect everyone together without any borders or intermediaries, and so really it's as simple as every phone has the capability to have a messenger. We have five billion phones that have SMS on them, and so we wanted to take the most basic messaging system, which is the most important thing that people do, and connect it to any other messenger, so Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Slack, anywhere where people are chatting, we wanted to create a system that is interoperable and can decentralize your contact list, essentially. >> Yeah, so this is important, so like most people when they go to social networks you got to find a friend, you get connected. In some cases I don't want to have to friend someone just to have a chat, I mean I may not want to friend them, or I might want to or it's a hassle, I don't know who to friend. Is that kind of where you guys come in? >> Yeah, that's one really great use case, because things like Facebook max you at five thousand friends, so if you friended everybody that you had a conversation with, if you needed to know something. Let's say that every Google search that you did was actually a conversation, you would cap the number of potential contacts. We have a circle of people around us that extends out with different tiers. But I think some of the most important people in our lives are actually strangers. So instead of building the social graph we wanted to build the stranger graph. Sensay cares more about what you know than who you know. Because if we can connect people together around similar interests and like-mindedness, we're connecting tribes, and that's really the innate human connection that we're all looking for. And it's also when you extend yourself outside of your social graph, you're most likely to educate yourself or to uplift yourself more. So the way to level up is to get somebody who's an eight or a 10 if you're a five or a two, and find someone outside of your current circle. >> And that also eliminates all this group think we've seen on some of these hate threads that have been on, whether it's Facebook or some IRC backchannel or Slack channel, you see the hate just comes in because everyone's just talking to themselves. This is the new way, right? Connecting out? Through the metadata of the chat. >> Exactly, we want people to seek out good connections, helpful connections, and so if you can both contribute what you know you get rewarded. And if you can ask people on the network you also get rewarded. So by asking something, you're receiving a reward. It's a two-way system. So it's not just the person who is helping, so we don't really encourage an economy of experts. We think that everyone is a sensei. A sensei literally means a person who's been there before. So we think of that as somebody who has had that life experience. And I think if we look at the internet, the internet democratized expertise. It gave us the ability for every single person to write what they were thinking, or contribute some kind of content in some way. But for 20 years the internet has been free. It's a really beautiful thing for consumption, and open source is the absolute right methodology for software. When it comes to your own content a reward makes sense, and so we wanted to create SENSE on top of the platform as a value exchange. It was a point system, so kind of like Reddit Karma. And we wanted to let people exchange it out for some value that they could transact in the world. >> So basically you're going to reward folks with a system that says, okay, first ante up some content, that's your SENSE token, and then based upon how you want to work with people in the network, there's a token transaction that could come out of it. Did I get that right? >> Exactly. So the person who contributes on the network gets rewarded for that data, and it can be anything that you've done in the past, too. So if you have a lot historical data on Facebook or on GitHub for instance. Let's say you're a developer and you have a bunch of repos out there that could be analyzed to see what kind of developer you are, or if you've contributed a lot to Reddit, all of that data is out there, and it's been something that defines you and your personality and your skills and who you are, so you can leverage that, and you can get a reward for it just by letting Sensay understand more about you, so the AI runs through it. You get more rewards, though, if you have real conversations. So it's almost like a bounty program on conversation. >> So we have the same mission. We love what you're doing. I'm really so glad you're doing it. I want to get to an example in Puerto Rico where you've reached out with strangers, I know you have. And get that, I want to get to that in a minute, but I want to continue on the Sensay for a second and the SENSE token. As you guys do this, what is the token going to be looking like to the user? Because you have a user who's contributing content and data, and then you have people who are going to transact with the token, it could be a bounty, it could be someone trying to connect. How is the token economics, just so I can get that out there, how does that work? >> Well right now in Sensay the transaction is peer to peer, so both users who are chatting have the ability to tip each other, essentially. They can give each other some coins within the chat. We have the concept that when you're having a conversation it's always a buyer and a seller. It's always a merchant and a consumer, and sometimes those roles flip, too. I'll be selling you something and eventually you're selling me something. But it's a natural way that we chat to transact. So that was the first way that the token could be used. We then realized that the powerful part of the platform is actually everything underlying the application. So the layer underneath really was the most powerful thing. And so SENSE network evolved as a way for developers who are creating apps or bots to be able to build on top of the network and leverage the access to the humans or to their data, and so now the token can be used to access the network. You get paid if you contribute data or users and vice versa, you can pay to access them. What that's doing is it's taking away the advertising model from being the only entity that's earning a profit on the data. So you, the user, when you're giving your data to Facebook, Facebook earns a lot of money on it, selling it over and over repeatedly to advertisers, and while it's technically yours in the terms you own it, you don't actually have any upside of that profit, and so what we're doing is saying, well why don't we just let a potential business talk to you directly on your consent and give you the money directly for that? So that two or five dollars for one connection would go straight to you. >> This is the new business model. I mean, this is something that, I mean first of all, don't get me started on my ad and tech rant because advertising creates a bad behavior. Okay? You're chasing a business model that's failing, attention and page views, so the content is not optimized the proper way. And you mentioned the Facebook example. Facebook's not optimizing their data for a user experience, they're optimizing for their monetization, which is counter to what users want to do. So I think you kind of are taking it in another direction, which we love 'cause that's what we do, we are open source content, but the role of the data is critical so I got to ask you the hard question. I'm a user, it's my data, how do the developers get access to it? Do they pay me coins or... You want developers because that's going to be a nice piece of the growth so what's the relationship between the developer, who's trying to add value, but also respecting the user's data? >> Exactly, so the developer pays the network and as a user you're a token holder, you own the network, essentially. So there is really no real middle layer since the token will take a small amount out for continuing to power the network, but a nominal amount. Right now the most expensive thing that happens is the gas that's on top of Ethereum because we're an ERC20 token. So we're looking to be polychain. We want to move onto other types of blockchains that have better, faster transactions with no fees and be able to pass that through as well. So we really want to just do a peer-to-peer connection. There's no interest in owning that connection or owning the repository of data. That's why the blockchain's important. We want the data to be distributed, we want it to be owned by the user, and we want it to be accessible by anyone that they want to give access to. So if it's a developer, they're building a bot maybe, or if it's a brand, they're using a developer on their behalf they have to pay the user for that data. So the developer's incentives are completely aligned with the peer-to-peer architecture that you have, users interests, and the technical underpinnings of the plumbing. Is that right? >> Exactly. >> Okay, good, so check. Now I got that. All right, now let's talk about my favorite topic, since we're on this kind of data topic. Who's influential? I mean, what does an influencer mean to you? Is it the most followers (mumbles) it's kind of a canned question, you can hear it coming. I'll just say it. I don't like the influencer model right now because it's all about followers. It's the wrong signal. 'Cause you can have a zillion followers and not be influential. And we know people are buying followers. So there's kind of been that gamification. What should influence really be like in this network? Because sometimes you can be really influential and then discover and go outside your comfort zone into a new area for some reason, whether it's a discovery or progression to some proficiency or connection, you're not an influencer, you're a newbie. So, context is very important. How do you guys look at, how do you look at influencers and how influence is measured? >> I think at the bare bones an influencer is someone who drives action. So it's a person who can elicit an action in another person. And if you can do that at scale, so one to many, then you have more power as an influencer. So that's sort of the traditional thinking. But I think we're missing something there, which is good action. So an influencer to me, a good influencer, is somebody who can encourage positive action. And so if it's one to one and you get one person to do one positive thing, versus one to a thousand and you get a thousand people to do something not so great, like buy a product that's crap because it was advertised to them for the purpose of that influencer making profit, that metric doesn't add up. So I think we live in a world of vanity metrics, where we have tons of numbers all over the place, we have hearts and likes and stars and followers and all of these things that keep adding up, but they have no real value. And so I think it's a really, like you said before, the behavior is being trained in the wrong way. We're encouraged to just get numbers rather than quality, and so what I think a really good influencer is is somebody who has a small group of people who will always take action. It can be any number of people. But let's say a group of followers who will take action based on that person's movements and will follow them in a positive direction. >> And guess what, its a network graph so you can actually measure it. That's interesting... >> Exactly, exactly. >> I can see where you're going with this. Okay, so I got to talk about your role here in Puerto Rico. You mentioned earlier about reaching out to strangers, the stranger graph, which is a way, people's outside of their comfort zones sometimes, reaching out to strangers. You came here in the analog sense, you're in person, but on the digital side as well, kind of blends together. Give an example where you reached out to strangers and how that's impacted your life and their life, because this is the heart of your system, if I can get that right. You're connecting people and creating value, I mean sometimes there might not be value, but you're creating connections, which have the potential for more value. What have you done here in Puerto Rico that's been a stranger outreach that turned into a wow moment. >> Our outreach has been so far an invitation. So we bought a space here that's turned into a community center. Even at the very beginning we had no power as most of the places around that have been sitting for a year or two or since the hurricane, and so we put a call out and said we'd like to get to know the community. We're doing something called Let There Be Light, which is turn the power on, and you know, we put it out to a public group and saw who would show up. So basically it's a community, central building, it's a historical building, so a lot of people know it. There's a lot of curiosity, so it was just a call, it was a call for help. It was really, I think the biggest thing people love is when you're asking them for help, and then you give gratitude in return for that help and you create a connection around it. So that's why we built Sensay the way that we did, and I think there's a lot of possibilities for how it could be used, but having that encouragement of the community to come and share, we've done that now this whole week, so this is restart week, and one of the other things that we've done is help all of the conferences come together, collaborate rather than compete, so go into the same week, and put all of these satellite groups around it. And then we blanketed a week around it so that we had one place for people to go and look for all of the events, and also for them to understand a movement. So we since then have done a dinner every single night, and it's been an open invitation. It's basically whoever comes in first, and we've had drinks every night as well, open. So it's really been an invitation. It's been an open invitation. >> Well congratulations. I really love what you're doing. You guys are doing great work down here. The event this week has been great. We've got great content. We have some amazing people and it's working, so congratulations on that. As you guys look forward, one of the things I've observed in my many years of history, is that there are a lot of waves, I've seen all the waves, this wave's the biggest. But what jumps out at me is the mission-driven aspect of it. So I mean I can geek out on what's the decentralize and the stacks and all the tech stuff happening, but what's most impressive is the mission oriented, the impact kind of thinking. This is now, society is now software driven. This is a new major thinking. Used to be philanthropy was a waterfall model. Yeah, donate, it either goes or doesn't go. Go to the next one, go to the next one. Now you have this integrated model where it's not just philanthropy, it's action, there's money behind it, there's coding, there's community. This is now a new era of societal entrepreneurship, societal missions. Let's talk about your vision on this mission and impact culture that's part of this ethos. >> I think impact is the important word there. So we think about, we think about bringing capital, like you said with normal philanthropy, you can bring capital and you can continuously pump capital into something, but if the model is wrong it's just going to drain, and it's going to go to inefficient systems, and in the end maybe do some help, but a very small percentage of the capacity of what it could do. So what we have the concept of is bringing funds here. We have a fund that was just launched called Restart Ventures, and the idea is instead of compounding interests, we want to make compounding impact, and so it's a social good focused fund, but at the same time all of the proceeds generated from the fund recycle back into other things that are making more impact. So we're measuring based on how much impact can be created with different projects. It could be a charity or it could be an entrepreneur. And if we're getting a multiple, most of that money is going back. So a very small percentage goes to the actual fund and to the fund managers, and the lion's share of the fund is going back into Puerto Rico. So I think if we look at how we can help in a way that is constantly regenerative, sustainable is good, regenerative is better. We want to at least elevate ourselves and get to the point of sustainability, but we're not improving at that point. We're still just fixing problems. We want regenerative. So if we can keep planting things that regrow themselves, if we can make it so that we're setting up the ecosystem to constantly mend itself, it's like a self-healing system of software, this is the right way to do it. So I think that's the new model. >> You built in some nurturing into the algorithm, I like that. 'Cause you're not going to do the classic venture capital carry, you're going to rotate in, but still pay some operators to run it, so they got to get paid. So I noticed in the announcement there was some money for managing directors to do it. So they get paid, and the rest goes into the compounding impact. >> Right. >> Okay, so I got to ask you what your view is these days on something that's really been important in open source software, which again, when I started it was a tier 2 citizen, at best, now it's running the world, tier 1. Open source ethoses are sprinkled throughout these new, awesome opportunities, but community made it happen. What is your current view on the role of the community, communities in general, to make this new compounding impact, whether it's software development, innovation, impact giving, regenerative growth. What's your view on community? >> If community operates with a mentality of giving or contribution over consumption we do a lot better. So when you have an open source network, if a community comes and they contribute to it more, that's something that regenerates. It keeps adding value. But if a community comes and they just keep consuming, then you have to continue to have more and more people giving. I think a really good example of this is Wikipedia. Wikipedia has hundreds of thousands of people who constantly contribute, and the only reward that they've ever gotten for that is a banner ad that says please donate because we don't do ads. So it's a broken model, because you want it to be free and you want it to continue to have the same ethos and you want it to have no advertising, yet the people who contribute most of the time also contribute most of the funding to keep it alive because they love it and care about it so much. So how could we change that model so that the community could give contributions while also receiving a way to make sure that they're able to keep doing that. And a reward system works, and maybe that's not the only solution, but we have to think about how we can keep creating more and more. >> Well I think transparency is one thing I've always loved. The thing that I always hear, especially with women in tech and these new important areas like underserved minorities, and also the bad behavior that goes on in other groups, is to shine the light on things. Having the data being open, changes everything. That is a huge thing. So community and open data. Your thoughts? I'm sure you agree? Open data and the importance of having the data exposed. >> One hundred percent. So our platform also has a layer of anonymity on the user by default, and part of the idea of being able to understand whether or not data is good. Because think of human data, we have to figure out quality. In the past there would be a validation system that is actually other humans telling you whether or not you're good and giving you some accreditation, some verification. This is our concept of experts on things. Now we would rather take consensus. So let's just crowdsource this validation and use a consensus mechanism that would see whether or not other humans think the data is good. If we're using a system like that, we have to have open data, it has to be transparent and it has to be able to be viewed in order to be voted on. So on our platform on just the first application on Sensay, we expose this consensus mechanism in a feature called Peek. So Peek basically lets you peek inside of conversations happening on the network. You can watch all the conversations that happen, the AI pulls out the good ones, and then you vote on them. >> It's kind of like when you walk into a nightclub, do I want to kind of hang out here? >> Yeah, you're kind of a voyeur but you get rewarded for doing it. It's a way for us to help classify, it's a way for us to help train the AI, and also it's a way for people to have passive ability to interact without having to have a conversation with an actual human. >> Well you're exposing the conversation to folks, but also you get signaling data. Who jumps in, who kind of walks away. I mean it's a gesture data, but it's a data point. >> Right, and it's completely private. So the beauty of the transparency is there's actually privacy baked in. And that's what I love about blockchain is it has all of the good things. >> Crystal, I got to ask you a final question. I know you're very busy, and thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me today here on theCUBE here in Puerto Rico. This week you've been super busy, you look great. I'm sure you've been up, burning the midnight oil, as they say. What is the, I won't say craziest thing because I've seen a lot of cool, crazy things going on here, it's been fun, what is some highlights for you? Conversations, meeting new people, can you just share a couple anecdotal highlights from restart week that have moved you or surprised you or just in general might be worth noting. >> I've been overall extremely surprised but the sheer number of people who showed up. I feel like a few months ago there was a small group of us sitting around wondering what it would be like if we could encourage our friends to come here and share the space. So just to see the thousands of people who have come here to support these several conferences has been amazing. My most surprising thing, though, is the amount of people that have told me that they bought a one-way ticket and have no intention of going home. So to make Puerto Rico your home I think is a really amazing first step, and I just did a panel earlier today with the person in government who had instituted Act 20 and 22, and that was the initial incentive-- >> Just take a minute to explain what that is for the folks that don't know what it is. >> Sure. So Act 20 and 22 are for the company and the individual respectively. They are a way for you to get a tax incentive for moving here as a resident or domiciling your company here. So you get 0% taxes. I think companies range up to 4% or something like that, and that incentive was created to bring more brilliant minds and entrepreneurs and different types of people with different vocations to the island. So basically, give them a tax incentive and encourage the stimulation of economy. So that has brought this wave of people in who have an idea that no taxes are great. At the same time they fall in love with the island. It's amazing because to me Puerto Rico is a combination of LA's weather, San Francisco's open-mindedness, and Barcelona's deep European history. It's just a really beautiful place. >> And it's US territory, so it's a short hop and a jump to the States if you need to, or Europe. >> Yeah exactly. And no customs and you have your driver's license to get here. Also it's a US dollar. And I say that because most people in America mainland don't realize that Puerto Rico is an American territory, and so they sort of think they're going to a foreign country because it's treated that way by our government. But what I've been really shocked about, though, is the sheer amount of innovation already here. The forward thinking ways of people and the embracing of things like open source and blockchain technology, because their minds are already in a mode of community, a mode of sharing, a mode of giving. >> We interviewed Michael Angelo from Edublock.ido, Edublock, they're connecting all the universities with blockchain. We also interviewed Damaris Rivera, with Puerto Rico Advantage. They'll move you down here. You can press a button, it's instant move. So folks in Silicon Valley who are watching who know us and around the world know theCUBE, there's a group of like-minded people here that have tech chops, there's capital flowing. There's capital people I know have moved here, setting up shop, as well as the Caymans and everywhere else, but it's nice. So it's kind of like LA. >> There is a lot of capital. I have just witnessed a couple hundred million dollars of funds that were established in the last couple of months. And this is around all different types of technology sectors. You don't have to be a blockchain company. You can be innovating in any way possible. One of my favorite projects is a machine that turns plastic bottles into diesel fuel. So one of the problems here is that the generators on the island, when we were here last time we met a guy that was working at a bar in a restaurant, and he was like, "Hey I saw you guys in New York Times "and I think you're like the Crypto people." And he had a conversation, and he said, "I was wondering if you could help my grandmother "who is stuck with no power, and it's been months, "and she's in her 90s, and she needs a generator to run "a machine that keeps her life supported." and so a couple of people went out to bring more fuel, bring a generator to donate. They started understanding that there are so many areas that still need this level of help, that there's a lot that we can do. So when I see projects like that, that's something I want to back. >> Yeah, it's entrepreneurial action taking impact. Crystal, thanks so much for coming out. Crystal Rose, CEO, co-founder of Sensay, real innovative company, pioneer here in the Puerto Rico movement. It's a movement, a lot of tech, entrepreneurs, capital, investors, and the pioneers in the blockchain, decentralized internet are all here. This is like the Silicon Valley of Crypto, right? >> I think they're calling it Crypto Island. >> Crypto Island, yes. It sounds like a TV show. We should be on it. It's not lost, it's Crypto Island. >> Exactly. >> Thanks so much for spending the time on theCUBE. >> Thanks John. >> John: I appreciate it. >> I appreciate it so much. Thanks for making sense of me. >> I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE here in Puerto Rico. Our coverage continues after this short break.

I'm from San Juan Puerto Rico it's the cube covering coin agenda brought to you by silicon angle hello everyone welcome to special cube covers we're here exclusive conversations at coin agenda we just had blockchain unbound Puerto Rico is where we're at and we'll covering all the trends and latest news and analysis and cryptocurrency blockchain decentralized internet my next guest is Dan Bates founder and president of impact PPA Dan great to have you on thanks John glad to be here so one of the trends I'm noticing is a couple things flight to quality on the ico side first of all lot of the Deadwood's being pushed aside by the community still some stuff out there that you know might not have a business model but good entrepreneurs doing it then you start to see real use cases emerging I interviewed Green Chain they're disrupting how produce grains movement between suppliers and buyers and other impact mission driven stuff like how do you solve the energy crisis right we're in Puerto Rico right the grids half alive everyone knows that you're doing something really compelling take a minute to explain what you guys are doing is you have a token up and running what are you guys doing what's your value proposition so what we do is we've created a system by which you can now have renewable energy delivered to developing nations and we've taken the intermediary out of the equation whereby the world bank historically would take years to fund a project if they would do that they're big trepidation was how do you get paid at the end of the day so what we've done is we've come up with a solution that allows for generation of rent you know with the energy using renewables and track it all the way through to a payment rail if you will that a user can now prepay for energy on their mobile device it's m-pesa if you know what end pace is in Africa 70% of the transactions in Africa are done on a mobile device we are decentralized and pace up for energy so ok mobile app I get out you everyone can think about BRR and all the benefits and Airbnb brings you just have stuff happened talk about what's under the hood what's actually disruptive about what you guys are doing give some specifics because you're tying into Isis and jittering energy using the blocks you have a token how does it all work okay so what we do is in in the in the ability to fund the project getting the World Bank getting USA USA ID out of the equation what we now allow for is the community typically we are very liberal or tend to skew liberal right we actually believe that climate change is real and we want to help support these economies and these new types of you know betterment of the planet right but we don't expect that to be a philanthropic effort so people will buy the impact token which will fund projects that will then create what we're doing right now it's an AR C 20 of what we call a gen credit not a secondary token it's a credit that allows people to access the ledger so a guy will go down to the store just like he does right now and he charges his phones with more minutes or with a data plan it's fiat to a plan a digital currency we do the same thing it's now fiat into a gen credit we call it that allows them and transact with the blockchain so we get identity we get reputation we get trust and honesty about those transactions using the blockchain okay so where does the energy come from because the energy sources now are interesting because you're seeing people do great amazing things solar panels wind farming they see an Asia top of the apartment buildings there's a lot of wind yeah generally but how do they move that power into the market all right so what we do is right now we're using wind and solar rooftop or micro grid for instance we just finished a project in Haiti doing 150 kilowatts for a town called les a wha they haven't had power in two years a hurricane matthew prior to Hurricane Maria coming through Puerto Rico Puerto Rico's in a similar situation right so we created this micro grid using their existing infrastructure of transmission to distribution then we put smart meters on the home that smart meter connects to the blockchain and now people can have power at their homes pay-as-you-go awesome so what I've been to some of the hurdles you guys have had obviously to me it's a no-brainer of energy being tokenized is that makes such sense why wouldn't you want to do that obviously these regulatory issues that are incumbent legacy Dogma or or specific legislation of paperwork what not where's the efficiencies being automated away with the blockchain and what are some of the hurdles that you guys have gone through to get to this point all right so we work in the emerging economies of the world oftentimes there is not the kind of regulation that we have in the US or in the developed world like the EU something like that so when we go out to remote we go out to remote places like you know in Kenya and Ethiopia Latin America wherever it might be we don't have some of the Institute's that you would have if you were trying to set this up in Palo Alto I don't have to worry about PG&E and an interconnect and an off take and all that so what we do is that we'll go out set up a micro grid we're giving power to people who may have never had it before so all those regulatory layers are stripped away they're grateful for it that can they pay for it yes they can't afford to go buy a solar panel and a wind turbine on batteries and inverters nor would they know how to hook it all up yeah but they know that if they can buy power on a cellphone like they're already doing for other goods and services now we've got a game-changer Dan talk about the token economics I get this the payment rail piece mobile app no-brainer I get that check okay easy to use now I want to as a buyer of energy there's a token I some children there where's the other side of the marketplace how does that token economics work do you just take us through a use case and walk us through that example sure so as I said the impact token is our base token that will be the the value token that purchasers will buy in order to fund projects once we go beyond that and we now have what we call a Jen credit it may not be a token in the traditional sense or a coin it's a credit that allows us to transact with the ledger that way we can know about these people one of the greatest opportunities that we feel that we have in the marketplace is identity and reputation you have a billion two people who don't have a connection what if we could learn about those billion too and understand how they use power and where they use power so Jen credits kind of off chain management that you're doing you write to the ledger for in term util access right for that Tran action I got to ask you about things like spoofing why can't I just take your energy this is where the tokens become interesting because I mean it should solve the spoofing problem well right and you know energy energy needs to be passed down copper it's got to go on a wire that doesn't mean somebody's not going to cut the wire and bootleg it and all that stuff smoothing is not going to be the problem in this case it is a physical connection that needs to be made our smart meters allow for us to turn on or off let that connection by the user right if he doesn't pay you don't forget it yeah you know there's vandalism they're stuffed all over the world and we have methods in place to try and mitigate that as much as possible you you saw our platform that we're building we're tokenizing our media business amazing you liked it was good thanks for the plug there I was an aspirin and we were talking last night about our you know generational gap between us and our kids and you have your son here and your son's working with you my sons Alex working with us we have a young team as well I want you to talk about someone who's so experienced in the business you've done a lot of variety adventures from you know film to entertainment technology us older veterans it's the polite way to say it have seen the movie before they've seen the waves this is a huge way but this wave is gonna be can surf a few of them hang ten on our boards but this wave is really gonna be powered and led by the younger generation what's your thoughts share your vision of the role that the younger generation has to take here and what makes them capable in your mind okay so I'm gonna answer that question two ways first of all I'm so enamored with what the younger generation is trying to do with this corruption let's change the existing paradigm and make something better that's what blockchain allows for all sorts of industries goods and services right it's gonna be amazing what these guys come up with that's one of the things I love about doing this thing right I'm an old guy and I get to hang around these young people makes me feel young again yeah but the other thing that we have and I think you share it as well as we have to offer to these young guys experience right it's not like we're gonna go out to a market that we don't know about and try and explore it for success you know I've been in the renewables business for ten years delivering projects to 35 countries I got my boots on the ground I got my hands dirty doing this for 10 years now and I think the other part of that building this project and making it successful is the team that we've put together behind it we have an advisor who advises presidents dr. Michael Dorsey that's really important that's valuable that he understands the global marketplace the way he does the other one is Vinay Gupta who has been in blockchain since the 90s and has always wanted to work in the developing world with a block came distributed ledger technology that's really important I think I want to just double down and we amplify that point this is not a young man's game only exclusively it's such this markets attracting alpha entrepreneurs older veterans because as you said earlier it disrupts every vertical that's right so experience and mentorship bringing people together that can help that's right celebrate the disruption that's right driven by the young guys cool I love that but it's not like Zuckerberg made this one comment oh if you're not under the age of 30 then you don't know such delivery he got his ass handed to him on that but in this case this market is open and willing to learn and the disruptions the mission that's right and this team matters that's our experience the makeup of your board makeup of your advisors since a roll for everybody look experiences capital right it is its own virtual currency having been in all these countries having worked with presidents having worked in the 90s you know since the 90s and what that is valuable it's intangible but it is valuable dan I think we just invented a new category in the ico category an advisor tokens [Laughter] cottage industry believe tokens anyway but imagine if you could actually measure an advisor yeah the quality of adviser and the roles that they play absolutely as a token that's coming up next in our our next I see oh hey I really appreciate what you're doing I love how you work with your son father-son team you recognize the role of how the generations can shift together love it love your mission thank you thanks for sharing the news coverage here in Puerto Rico been here on the island all week getting the best stories the best people sharing them with you were open content that's the cube doing our part here at coin agenda for one day we're not gonna be you tomorrow go to Vegas just came back from watching unbound great stuff John let me give you the the URL if you don't mind no problem please if you want to go learn more about us impact PPI calm great job impact PBA calm is the cube live coverage here in Puerto Rico more after this short break

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, It's The Cube! Covering Blockchain Unbound, brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to The Cube's exclusive coverage here in Puerto Rico. We are on the ground covering Blockchain Unbound, Restart Week, Coin Agenda, a variety of events happening here in Puerto Rico, where the world is converging from Silicon Valley, New York, across the globe, here for a long week of bitcoin, blockchain, cryptocurrency, the decentralized internet. We're here for two days, wall to wall coverage. Here with me, kicking off, and special guest Miko Matsumura, who's the founder of Evercoin, also a venture partner at Bitbull Capital, influencer. Been around the block in the industry, seen many waves. Miko, great to have you on The Cube. >> Terrific, great to be here. >> So one of the things I want to get with you, we've had many conversations off camera over the past year, about what makes this wave super different than others. I've been saying, with Dave Allant and our team, that it feels like all the waves combined. I mean, look at all the major inflection points in the industry. The PC revolution, the mini computer revolution, the PC revolution, inner-networking with TCPIP, the internet revolution. You kind of had a web 2.0 thing going on, with the beginning of democratization. But now, major inflection point with infrastructure change with blockchain, cryptocurrency, and decentralized applications, which is disrupting the developer community. So you have an entire stack being disrupted, and at the center of it is an opportunity. >> Miko: Yeah, I think what you described earlier in our conversation, about this notion of a killer app, right? There's a bunch of people kind of clowning around, saying like, "Oh what's the killer app for blockchain?" It's under our noses, it is open source money, right? So if you look at what happened with open source software, for the past 25 or more years, we've watched software eat the world. Software has eaten the world. We all know this. Mark Andreasen said it famously, right? So the point is, is that open source has eaten software. Right? So now, what do you think is going to happen next with open source money? Open source money is going to consume proprietary money. >> I completely agree with you, and you look at all the tell signs in the industry, a lot of people putting the brakes on Google banning ads on Google, you're seeing the SEC putting signals out there, but the problem is this is a global money marketplace. So you have a global ecosystem now, connected via the internet, you have disruptive technology that kills the gatekeepers and any central authority, and you have money. So you can put the big rock in the river and try to hold the stream, but the thing is just moving so fast that the dam can be broken no matter what's put in place, because moving money faster, running money, whatever you want to call it, makes a difference. And today, breaking news is that Coinbase got a license to support the UK's faster payment scheme, which will speed up time for faster payments. So essentially the UK is taking a pre-emptive move against the US government, this is a game changer. They could kind of go to the top of the pack in terms of sovereignty leadership in the financial world, because how they handle the money situation. If they tap the software market, if they make the open source money work, this is again, the game is on. This is a real data point, the UK government. This isn't some underground economy, this is a nation. >> Well, and there's no question that domicile competition creates an open playing field for a planetary establishment of protocol, right? So the thing that's amazing about it is absolutely that there's no national regulator that has a global footprint. And so at the end of the day, the thing that's fascinating about what's happening is that the reason why I'm so confident about open source money is that it competes for consent, right? So it's really trying to acquire users by providing better services. And what government entity can resist, for the long term, something that's actually trying to provide a better and better and better financial infrastructure? >> Miko, I've got to ask you, because I've seen your presentation, and we've talked many times about open source money. I want you to take a minute and describe, what is open source money? Also you mentioned software eating the world, that's the seminal Wall Street Journal article that Mark Andreasen wrote about around the 10X engineer, and how software, cloud, computing, all these big data technologies, can change the nature of enterprise competitiveness. You're kind of teasing that out with software and money, open source. What is open source money? >> So, if you go to the bitcoin.org website, you're going to see the title of the website, and it basically, title tag says "peer to peer open source money." So those aren't even my words, those are the words of Satoshi Nakamoto. Open source money. Open source money basically just means, So let's say that money is software, and it is software, so if you buy something with a credit card, what do you think is happening? It's all software. So money is already software. There's some money now, paper money, that's not software, but that's all going to become software. Once you accept that money is software, then what kind of software should it be, right? And what has happened is open source software has always eventually won with respect to closed source software. So proprietary money is probably back on its heels because open source money is coming, and I think that's really the power of developers and the power of consent. >> I think one of the nuanced points, just to kind of highlight that, to kind of take it one step further, is if you look at proprietary, you mentioned the word proprietary. If you look at the open source revolution with software, everything that was proprietary essentially got dismantled, down to either some irrelevant point, or a smaller role in whatever that system would be, whether it's a mini computer or a mainframe, or software. Open source always seemed to grow into the primary, first tier citizen of the mechanism. So there's history on our side. What, in your mind, makes this movement, with open source money, different? Is it the reshaping of the internet infrastructure stack? Is it the decentralized application developer? Is it the role of the currency? Because you now have three dimensions of change. >> Yeah, so to me, I love your mindset about this kind of combination, and I just want to characterize my position properly, which is that I'm not a crypto anarchist or even a crypto libertarian. And when people talk about proprietary money being back on its heels, if you watch what happened to open source and proprietary software, the proprietary software industry is larger and more valuable than it's ever been. So I'm not saying proprietary money goes away. It doesn't go away, it continues to grow and become valuable but what happens is open source money will essentially take over all of the commodity functions and become the platform. >> And certainly the alpha geeks, everyone that I know that's an entrepreneur, that I would call kind of pure entrepreneurship, whether they're old or young, are gravitating to this magnet of opportunity. What are you seeing? Obviously you're in a lot of advisory boards, and you really can't do all of them, but you're getting a lot of requests. We just had a conversation with some entrepreneurs here in the hallway. What are some of the conversations that you've had that really kind of point to the energy and the relevance of this new ecosystem that's emerging? >> I think one of the things that's extremely exciting to me is that there seems to be a race going on between basically three parties. I'd say one party is sort of what I call the blockchain for good. So there's actually a tremendous amount of NGOs, there's non-profits, there's the United Nations getting involved. Tremendous amount of folks working on beneficial foundation backed projects, ripple works. There's a tremendous, huge open source foundation feeling that's happening. Second party is really more of the commercial cryptocurrency and blockchain, represented in large part now by the ICO movement, about six billion dollars. But the third arm, which is actually the negative side, is that there actually are a lot of scammers, and a lot of, like, dark forces inside of the cryptocurrency movement. So that's why I think we welcome, kind of, more regulatory influence. Because, you know, none of us want to see bad actors in the space. >> And what's the coolest project you're involved in? Pick a favorite child. >> Well, at the moment, you know, the sponsor of this conference is actually lottery.com, which is tremendously exciting. A couple of others to mention that I think are exciting are Celsius Network, so that's a large scale lending platform, and then Hub Token. So Hub Token is building essentially a problem. It's a protocol that solves a problem of second party trust in the internet of value. >> Well, Miko, great to have you on. I really appreciate your friendship, and I really appreciate the feedback you've had for The Cube team so we can be better with our open content model, we're open sourced content, as everyone knows. Thanks for sharing your perspective in the data with the crowd. People can find you online, what's your twitter handle, how do they get ahold of you? >> So you can follow me on MikoJava on twitter, but my website is miko.com. Miko.com. >> Great URL, obviously an early pioneer of the domain name, land grab, great job. Miko.com. Miko Matsumura, thought leader, influencer, investor, advisor. Really in the front lines of this movement, this revolution. Legitimate revolution in the changing of the world for good and for businesses. This is The Cube coverage from Puerto Rico, we're back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)