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Speaker 1: I PC. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts
Speaker 1: on Boomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, I have
Speaker 1: professor a Nindia Ghosts of n y U Stern, where
Speaker 1: he focuses on mobile technology and information services. We spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time talking about his new book Tap
Speaker 1: Unlocking the Mobile Economy, and rather just repeat what we discussed,
Speaker 1: I want to give you a visual to think about.
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of science fiction and um anything
Speaker 1: that Philip K. Dick wrote that is subsequently turned into
Speaker 1: a movie, including Minority Report, and everybody focuses on the
Speaker 1: precog aspect of that movie, the ability to anticipate who's
Speaker 1: gonna cause a crime. There's a lot of very forward
Speaker 1: technologies in the movie. But there's a scene in the
Speaker 1: film where Tom Cruise The main character is running through
Speaker 1: a shopping district and is bombarded with advertisement, not general ads,
Speaker 1: not billboards, but three D holographic ads specifically tailored to him.
Speaker 1: The retailer identifies him as a unique individual. They have
Speaker 1: access to his prior um shopping preferences, and they're showing
Speaker 1: him specifically tailored advertisements as he passes through in pursuit
Speaker 1: of whatever it was. I don't remember the fascinating aspect
Speaker 1: of this, uh in our My conversation with Professor ghost
Speaker 1: wasn't that, hey, this is the future. This is a
Speaker 1: hundred years or fifty years off in the distance. But
Speaker 1: rather mobile technology are uniquely identified phones, all the data
Speaker 1: we generate when we shop, when we use apps, when
Speaker 1: we just move about in the city, means that that
Speaker 1: sort of minority report technology is only two or three
Speaker 1: years away. And I found that to be absolutely astonishing.
Speaker 1: It's a fascinating conversation about technology and the future, and
Speaker 1: it turns out the future ain't that far off in
Speaker 1: the future. It's practically here now. So with no further ado,
Speaker 1: my conversation with professor A Nindia Ghosts. My special guest
Speaker 1: today is a Ninda Ghosts. He is a professor of
Speaker 1: Information Operations and Management Science and n y used Stern
Speaker 1: School of Business. He is the youngest ever recipd being
Speaker 1: of the prestigious Informs I S S Distinguished Fellow Award.
Speaker 1: He has been named by Business Week as one of
Speaker 1: the top forty professors under forty worldwide. Analytics Week called
Speaker 1: him one of their top two hundred thought leaders in
Speaker 1: big data and business analytics. He's written more than a
Speaker 1: hundred peer reviewed papers and is the author of his
Speaker 1: first book, tap Unlocking the Mobile Economy and Ghosts. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Bloomberg. Thank you very much for having me. I'm
Speaker 1: very excited to be here. You cover some sections of
Speaker 1: the the economy and some sectors of technology that I
Speaker 1: find absolutely fascinating. In fact, you cover a broad range
Speaker 1: of topics consumer behavior, internet, digital marketing, big data, social media,
Speaker 1: and older related business analytics. How did that broad collection
Speaker 1: of topics come together for you as a as a searcher.
Speaker 1: So I first started working in this area in two
Speaker 1: thousand four, and you know, I was basically curious about
Speaker 1: all things Internet in two thousand four. You know, we
Speaker 1: were just about seeing the emergence of e commerce. You know,
Speaker 1: the likes of Amazon cropping up and people buying and
Speaker 1: selling books on the internet. Um, so that's how the
Speaker 1: journey started. Um, as the Internet evolved, you know, we
Speaker 1: saw the emergence of companies trying to use that as
Speaker 1: a platform to market their products. So that's why we
Speaker 1: saw the emergence of search engines like Google come in.
Speaker 1: We saw the emergence of you know, other kinds of
Speaker 1: digital marketing platforms on the Internet. And so I've always
Speaker 1: had this, you know, interest in figuring out what is
Speaker 1: it that consumers are doing on the Internet and how
Speaker 1: can companies leverage those differences in behavior, you know, to
Speaker 1: better accurate products and market products and so on. And
Speaker 1: as the Internet eventually moved into mobile, by two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, the first smartphone was already out there, that
Speaker 1: really sort of got me thinking more and more deeply
Speaker 1: about consumer behavior and mobile And on the mobile phone,
Speaker 1: you're doing social media. You know, you're responding to ads.
Speaker 1: If you're responding, you're creating a lot of data. And
Speaker 1: that's how all these things come together. So so let's
Speaker 1: talk about the smartphone essentially the intersection of all those
Speaker 1: different technology sectors we just mentioned. Is this the single
Speaker 1: most transformative consumer device ever to be created. I would
Speaker 1: say so. In fact, in my book I actually mentioned
Speaker 1: this that you know, by two thousand and eight, when
Speaker 1: I first started thinking about this topic, it was pretty
Speaker 1: clear to me that the smartphone would be, in fact
Speaker 1: the most transformative thing that we've ever seen. And you know,
Speaker 1: in ten years after that, now we do see, in fact,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of evidence it is, because it's almost embedded
Speaker 1: on us. And you know, there's people often ask me,
Speaker 1: is there's a tipping point. I don't necessarily see that
Speaker 1: the smartphone is going to become a more remote control button,
Speaker 1: smart home, smart cars, everything is going to be controlled
Speaker 1: by the smartphone. I have to tell you when you
Speaker 1: look at the amount of tech analogy today that exists.
Speaker 1: So you can control your nest, you can control your car,
Speaker 1: you can start your car remotely, you can control the
Speaker 1: temperature of your pool remotely, your security system, your video camera.
Speaker 1: At what point does the phone just simply stop being
Speaker 1: a phone and just becomes a mobile computer? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I think it's already kind of getting there, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, by now, the phone is much more than
Speaker 1: a phone. You know, it's a camera, it's a flashlight,
Speaker 1: you know, it's my television, it's my book as well,
Speaker 1: it's everything, right, So I think the convergence of various
Speaker 1: digital phenomena on the smartphone has already happened. In my
Speaker 1: prediction I mentioned this in my book, is that a
Speaker 1: lot more is going to happen. And and by by
Speaker 1: what I mean by that is exactly what you said,
Speaker 1: which is people are going to start controlling their appliances,
Speaker 1: their homes, their cars, other sorts of things. Let's let's
Speaker 1: put let's put a number on some of the venture
Speaker 1: capital investing in the space. In two thousand and ten,
Speaker 1: less than four percent of all venture capital funding was
Speaker 1: going to mobile startups as of fourteen, which is already
Speaker 1: a good couple of years ago. It's now about eight percent,
Speaker 1: So we're up a hundred percent or so from Is
Speaker 1: mobile just going to consume the lion share of all
Speaker 1: these new tech startups? I think that number is going
Speaker 1: to only keep increasing, right, And and there's a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons for that. One is, over the last five years,
Speaker 1: we have consumers have been spending more and more time
Speaker 1: on mobile devices. You know, from from two thousand twelve
Speaker 1: to two sixteen, the last five years We've come from roughly,
Speaker 1: you know, about ten percent of our time to about
Speaker 1: time on these devices. And what's as telling companies that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of opportunity for monetization because right now
Speaker 1: advertisers are only putting in twelve percent of the ad
Speaker 1: dollars and mobile phones. So there's a disconnect. You know,
Speaker 1: consumers sure spending twice that time, companies are spending half
Speaker 1: the money. So does a disconnect. Let's let's look at
Speaker 1: the jobs a little bit. The Boston Consulting Group came
Speaker 1: out and said that mobile technologies are going to be
Speaker 1: or or just about at a three point three trillion
Speaker 1: dollar investable sector over the next few years, and they
Speaker 1: expected to create eleven million new jobs. Is this the
Speaker 1: next boom sector or or currently the biggest sector that
Speaker 1: we should expect new jobs from. I think certainly at
Speaker 1: least one of the top two or top three biggest sectors.
Speaker 1: You know, those eleven three point three trillion dollars is
Speaker 1: only four point two percent of the world's GDP and
Speaker 1: so you can only imagine it has to grow from here.
Speaker 1: The other thing that's going to propel jobs is, you know,
Speaker 1: one thing is that the mobile app economy is growing
Speaker 1: by leaps and bounds, and so every time you've got
Speaker 1: a new app, you know you need an entire army
Speaker 1: of employees. But also aside from the fact is the data.
Speaker 1: So I talk a lot about how you know, consumer
Speaker 1: tapping on the phone to create stata. So they need
Speaker 1: data scientists and need business analytics, not not just tapping
Speaker 1: on the phone, but where they physically are, what else
Speaker 1: they're running, what else they had previously been doing. There's
Speaker 1: an enormous stream of data that we will create just
Speaker 1: carrying the phones around exactly. Let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about mobile you referenced earlier, the ad spends. Some of
Speaker 1: the numbers are just astonishing. One estimate claims mobile ad
Speaker 1: spending will top a hundred billion dollars by next year.
Speaker 1: How effective is this advertising? And what alternatives do marketers
Speaker 1: have other than mobile? So my studies and projects over
Speaker 1: the last ten years, in across three different continents, across
Speaker 1: multiple countries have actually demonstrated very rigorously than mobile advertising
Speaker 1: is very effective if you do it right, How do
Speaker 1: you do it right? And what do people who do
Speaker 1: it wrong? What are they doing wrong right? So one
Speaker 1: of the things I talked about my book is companies
Speaker 1: who are doing it right are the ones who are
Speaker 1: creating in a concierge or a butler in your smartphone.
Speaker 1: And the companies who do it wrong are the ones
Speaker 1: who are creating this creepy stalker. Okay, so if it's
Speaker 1: some like Uber managed to do both, yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: full concierge. And then we've just found out they were
Speaker 1: stalking people even after they deleted, uh deleted the app. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they're going to get into trouble. And you know,
Speaker 1: but I mean for a number of reasons. They've been
Speaker 1: in trouble for a long time. No one episode of another.
Speaker 1: But you know, just from a brand advertiser's perspective, um,
Speaker 1: there's a thin line dividing the coolness and the creepiness.
Speaker 1: And you know, in my book, I talked about a
Speaker 1: lot of the case studies where have you've been actually
Speaker 1: been very successful in remaining cool and not digressing into
Speaker 1: the creepy stuff. And the book is tap unlocking the
Speaker 1: mobile economy. So what can a app provider do to
Speaker 1: stay on the right side of the cool creepy divide? Right?
Speaker 1: So two things. One is you want to reduce the
Speaker 1: frequency of how often your message your consumer through an
Speaker 1: offer our ad, and you want to increase the relevancy
Speaker 1: of that messaging. Okay, right now, if you have the opposite,
Speaker 1: we are getting inundated by ads which are not necessarily
Speaker 1: very relevant and redundant. Absolutely, So how does the company
Speaker 1: do that? How do you focus in on what is relevant?
Speaker 1: And how do you avoid haranguing um? Because you know,
Speaker 1: I use an a service called limail because I'm loath
Speaker 1: to give anybody my real email address because you know,
Speaker 1: if I buy something, it's not an invitation to send
Speaker 1: me a daily update. In fact, you know what once
Speaker 1: a month is plenty for most of the retailers or
Speaker 1: what have you I'm interested in. But it seems to
Speaker 1: be all right, we have this person's email address, let's
Speaker 1: let's bang on their head daily and hopefully they'll buy something.
Speaker 1: Usually I unsubscribe, I delete the app, and limail allows
Speaker 1: me to whether they actually unsubscribe him or not. It
Speaker 1: allows me to turn that email off so they can
Speaker 1: market to me all they want. I never see a
Speaker 1: single a single thing from them. So so where is
Speaker 1: that line and how do you stay on the right
Speaker 1: side of it? So basically, right now, what's happening is,
Speaker 1: you know, companies are sending like hitting dots in the
Speaker 1: air and hoping one will stick. Right. And the reason
Speaker 1: it's happening is even though this might seem very surprising,
Speaker 1: they actually don't have enough information on consumers on a
Speaker 1: given consumer. And this might seem astonishing given this world
Speaker 1: of data, right. The reason is because and I talked
Speaker 1: about this in the book a Lot, is the data
Speaker 1: is actually fragmented. It's all in silos, so somebody has
Speaker 1: to come and stitch it together. And absent that, what's
Speaker 1: going to keep happening is companies will keep in undating
Speaker 1: us with these offers. So you would think that Apple
Speaker 1: in iOS and Google with Android are the ones who
Speaker 1: can stitch all that data together. They have access to
Speaker 1: all the data that every app generates. Are they moving
Speaker 1: in that direction? And are we creating a monopoly or
Speaker 1: all a goopoly amongst the big players who have access
Speaker 1: to all our data? Right? So what's really fascinating is that,
Speaker 1: you know, Google and Facebook are sort of the two
Speaker 1: lead players who are essentially putting this infrastructors together. Meaning
Speaker 1: what meaning that between the publisher and advertiser, they have
Speaker 1: created these intermediaries called add exchanges and dsp s and
Speaker 1: SSPs and a lot of the technical jargon, but the
Speaker 1: basic job for these companies stitched the data together. And
Speaker 1: what's also fascinating is the next big challenge to these
Speaker 1: companies is going to come from telecom providers. So WIDD
Speaker 1: Verizon buy out, a O L wided Verizon buy out Yahoo.
Speaker 1: Verizon does not see itself as a telecom provider anymore,
Speaker 1: if they're not just the pipe there just say actually,
Speaker 1: if you ask their top management, they will say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we are actually the next big media tech company.
Speaker 1: We want to take on Google and Facebook and they
Speaker 1: can like us. They have so much data right that
Speaker 1: that's that's quite fascinating, you know, when we look at
Speaker 1: some of the data points that mobile is generated, I'm
Speaker 1: fascinated by this. After the launch of the iPhone, voice
Speaker 1: minutes amongst eighteen to thirty four year olds fell from
Speaker 1: twelve hundred to nine hundred minutes per month within two years,
Speaker 1: so that's a twenty drop over the same time period.
Speaker 1: Texting more than doubled from six hundred to four hundred
Speaker 1: messages per month over that same period. The impact of
Speaker 1: this is really quite enormous it is. I mean, look,
Speaker 1: first of all, there is a very you know, non
Speaker 1: trivial consumer behavioral chain. Right, if you're not talking on
Speaker 1: the phone anymore, you're tapping and texting, right, every tapping,
Speaker 1: every texting is creating data about our behavior. But more importantly,
Speaker 1: you know, coming back to the study comp providers, because
Speaker 1: that's how they get the services. They are not making
Speaker 1: that much money anymore on those products that they used
Speaker 1: to make money on, which is Internet advice and and
Speaker 1: text messaging. That's why, you know, whether it's Verizon or
Speaker 1: Telephonic and Germany or China Mobile Estelecom, they realize the
Speaker 1: next big bed is monetizing the user data, the user
Speaker 1: location data, our behavioral data, you know, all of the
Speaker 1: contextual data. And that's what they're moving into. Here's another
Speaker 1: fascinating data point from the book of text messages are
Speaker 1: read within ninety seconds of delivery. Are we at risk
Speaker 1: of never being disconnected? And what are the ramifications of that? UM? So,
Speaker 1: you know, I, I guess I belong to the group
Speaker 1: who does not think there's a problem in that. UM.
Speaker 1: I do not mind the fact that we are immersing
Speaker 1: our devices. UM And the reason is because you know,
Speaker 1: everything that I've seen is that there's actually a positive
Speaker 1: site of this as well, which is which is going
Speaker 1: back to my argument before that the reason company is
Speaker 1: sending us all these offers is they don't have enough information.
Speaker 1: But the more of immersals from the device, the more
Speaker 1: data generates, and the more information not companies will have,
Speaker 1: which will then let them reduce a frequency of the
Speaker 1: messaging increase the relevancy. Let's let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about mobile retail and what the impact is. A recent
Speaker 1: report from Credit Swiss estimated that there could be undred
Speaker 1: store closings this year, which would be higher than the
Speaker 1: peak in two thousand and eight and significantly higher than
Speaker 1: last year. What is the state of retailing in America? Okay,
Speaker 1: So this is a great question and one of my favorites,
Speaker 1: because mobile as a studio over the years is a
Speaker 1: double a sword for retailing. Okay, And here's why. On
Speaker 1: one side, you know, offline retailers have been petrified by
Speaker 1: the fact that consumers have been mobile showrooming, meaning that
Speaker 1: while they're inside a physical brick and model store and
Speaker 1: they found something they like, and yet they're actually looking
Speaker 1: for the same product online on their phone looking for
Speaker 1: a cheaper price. Let me interrupt you and ask you
Speaker 1: a question about that. I used to have an app
Speaker 1: on my phone called Amazon price Guard. I'm gonna actually
Speaker 1: have to take a quick look at it, and yet
Speaker 1: Amazon ended up. I don't want to say price check
Speaker 1: is the name of it. Amazon doesn't seem to be
Speaker 1: supporting that app anymore. Um, is showrooming still the problem
Speaker 1: that was a few years ago? Okay, so yes or
Speaker 1: no in the following sense. So showrooming was a massive
Speaker 1: problem up until recently. The likes of these physical brick
Speaker 1: and motor retailers were losing fifty of the traffic the
Speaker 1: likes of Amazon, and someone would go into Best Buy,
Speaker 1: look at the television or whatever, find it was fifty
Speaker 1: bucks treeper on Amazon, and walk out, it's right and
Speaker 1: buy it on Amazon. So you just lost one customer there,
Speaker 1: So one in two people were doing that. Now. The
Speaker 1: reason I say it's a double that sort is today
Speaker 1: the offline retailers have a tremendous resource in the same
Speaker 1: phone which was once a threat to them, because now,
Speaker 1: using these location based tagging technologies, they can send you
Speaker 1: a coupon in real time when you're invest buy to
Speaker 1: prevent you from walking out without buying the TV. And
Speaker 1: in my book, actually I talk a lot about these
Speaker 1: case studies where based on you know, whether it's the
Speaker 1: WiFi in the store or the beacon in the store
Speaker 1: or the GPS, these retailers are able to sense where
Speaker 1: you are and send you an offer and delight you
Speaker 1: and impression surprise you. So couldn't they simply have just
Speaker 1: matched the Amazon's price to begin with. And and you know,
Speaker 1: if Amazon is providing a lower price, or any online
Speaker 1: retailer is providing a lower price, Uh, what is the
Speaker 1: advantage of the coupon? Or is it that some people
Speaker 1: come in and pay the full price anyway and the
Speaker 1: price insor of people get the coupon and they go
Speaker 1: that way. That's exactly what it is. Basically. You know,
Speaker 1: any sort of location based mobile coupon strategy has to
Speaker 1: be intrementally useful to the company. You don't want to
Speaker 1: send a blanket price matching policy for everybody, right, because
Speaker 1: many people will just be happy to paying the higher
Speaker 1: price when they buy, they're out with they don't want
Speaker 1: to be bothered, right, It's the stragglers that really price
Speaker 1: as they folks the bargain hunters whom you don't want
Speaker 1: to lose. That's where the location based technology is, folks.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna I'm gonna move to advertising because it
Speaker 1: relates back to this. In the old days, we used
Speaker 1: to take ink and spray it on mashed up trees
Speaker 1: and and it was called the newspaper or magazine. Back
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties, there was something like fifty there
Speaker 1: was something like fifty four million paid subscriptions to newspapers.
Speaker 1: That number is under forty three million as of two
Speaker 1: thousand ten, but relative to population, it's a seventy decrease.
Speaker 1: So when I think of all these retailers, I remember
Speaker 1: it was always the best bicircular in the Sunday paper.
Speaker 1: There was always a target circular. I assume that still
Speaker 1: goes on. I just hardly read a print paper the
Speaker 1: way I used to. What does the the diminishing of
Speaker 1: print as a communication channel, how how does that impact
Speaker 1: retailers and what are they doing to overcome the loss
Speaker 1: of that channel? Right? So it means two things. One is,
Speaker 1: and if you're a retailer, you're still spending money on
Speaker 1: physical newspapers for advertising, You're wasting it. Now, people only
Speaker 1: spend six percent of the entire time reading a physical
Speaker 1: newspaper or magazine, right, Unfortunately, that's what it is. So
Speaker 1: what they should be doing is actually putting that money
Speaker 1: on that magic device, which is the smartphone. Right, So
Speaker 1: instead of spending money in print newspapers, you should actually
Speaker 1: spend money investing in these location based advertisement and locations
Speaker 1: cool pons, all of these technologies that enable companies to
Speaker 1: do so in real time. Let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about travel and what we see uh here in the
Speaker 1: United States there are about a hundred and fifty million smartphones.
Speaker 1: Of these are use location services. Is how is this
Speaker 1: data being shared and who has access to that data? So? Um,
Speaker 1: A lot depends on how the app is actually owned. Right.
Speaker 1: So if the company, the travel company or the travel
Speaker 1: site owns the app, then clearly you know the app
Speaker 1: Delapa belongs to the company and they own it. If
Speaker 1: it's a third body, a developper, then the abdulopper will
Speaker 1: have it and highly likely they will be sharing it
Speaker 1: with the company because that's how the arrangement is. Um.
Speaker 1: So those that happens for sure, and we were talking
Speaker 1: uh off air before, but let's let's bring this up.
Speaker 1: There seems to be a sort of ambiguous nous about
Speaker 1: what people say their concerns with privacy actually are and
Speaker 1: then what they actually do. So I'm pretty concerned about privacy.
Speaker 1: I don't like sharing my email address, or my location
Speaker 1: or a whole bunch of other data points with companies.
Speaker 1: But yet the generation that's younger than me, they seem
Speaker 1: to they could not possibly care less about these privacy issues.
Speaker 1: They share the data free, freely. What is the standard?
Speaker 1: What's going on with that? What should an app company
Speaker 1: reasonably expect from their users? So, you know, various studies
Speaker 1: we have done and others have shown that millennials are
Speaker 1: very willing to share their data as a currency to
Speaker 1: get something in value, right, Um of Generation Z and
Speaker 1: Generation Y a willing to do the same less so
Speaker 1: it baby boomers. Um. But you know, if you are
Speaker 1: a marketer today and you're thinking about your target segment,
Speaker 1: target population, right for the lot for the most part,
Speaker 1: it's actually Gen ZS, gen X, gener wise and millennials, right,
Speaker 1: So you want to stay with the trend and keep
Speaker 1: targeting them, and if they are actually responding to this
Speaker 1: data exchange data boutter economy. So what you really want
Speaker 1: to do is be their butler and concierge by sending
Speaker 1: a curated, relevant message. That's what you want to be doing.
Speaker 1: So supposedly this was just reported the Times not too
Speaker 1: long ago when Tim Cook discovered that Uber was capturing
Speaker 1: the unique identify er the fingerprints of each phone and
Speaker 1: using it to track Uber users, even those who have
Speaker 1: removed the app. Um, he threatened them with taking kicking
Speaker 1: them out of the app store. So raises a couple
Speaker 1: of questions. First, how bad is the behavior of Uber?
Speaker 1: And second, it seems like Apple has an awful lot
Speaker 1: of power because have they kicked Uber out? That pretty
Speaker 1: much would have been the end of Uber. Sure, I mean,
Speaker 1: first of all, it's terrible behavior on part of Ober.
Speaker 1: They violated the two simple mantras of data privacy, which
Speaker 1: is notice and consent. You need to notify consumers what
Speaker 1: are you doing with the data? And then you need
Speaker 1: to ask for consent. They wanted at them both, right,
Speaker 1: They didn't tell them they were tracking them, and they
Speaker 1: obviously never got consent exactly. Um. And of course, you know,
Speaker 1: if you at the end of the day, it's an app,
Speaker 1: it is a big eighty billion dollar company, but it
Speaker 1: is an app. The way people access app is through
Speaker 1: an app store. If an Apple or Samsung decided to
Speaker 1: kick them out, that's it for them. I mean, how
Speaker 1: are they gonna It's fatal? Another way, you would think
Speaker 1: no one would want to mess around do anything that
Speaker 1: would even remotely put them at risk. I'm surprised Apple
Speaker 1: didn't just freeze them out for a week to flex
Speaker 1: some muscles and say, hey, anybody else thinking about doing this,
Speaker 1: It's gonna cost you a lot of money. But it
Speaker 1: raises the question does Apple and Android have too much
Speaker 1: power over the the app economy and modern technological life.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't see that way. I don't think
Speaker 1: they have too much power. I think they have appropriate power.
Speaker 1: It is their own store at the store, and you know,
Speaker 1: consumers have a choice. You know, they can go to
Speaker 1: a Google Player store or an Apple app store, and
Speaker 1: some of the other third party companies also have their
Speaker 1: Amazon as an app store. Tour. Um, I think, you know,
Speaker 1: their power is a reflection of consumer preferences and so right,
Speaker 1: so um, that's that's quite that's quite fascinating. Let's let's
Speaker 1: talk about the location based advertising numbers you you were
Speaker 1: referencing it earlier. It's expected to grow to fifteen billion
Speaker 1: dollars in eighteen. This was under two billion just three
Speaker 1: years ago. That's a compound and annual growth rate. How
Speaker 1: long can this continue? Global real time location based advertising?
Speaker 1: How long can this grow at that astonishing rate for
Speaker 1: many years? In the forceable the future? Right now, we're
Speaker 1: only scratching the type of the iceberg here, right And
Speaker 1: it's because a small fraction of people are the ones
Speaker 1: who are opening up their GPS data and saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: here's where I am send me an offer. That number
Speaker 1: is only gonna grow. And in everything that I've seen
Speaker 1: last ten years in different parts of the world is
Speaker 1: telling me that, um, you know, this is a very
Speaker 1: tiny portional the actual potential of how much can be
Speaker 1: monetize in this space. So there's a fascinating um data
Speaker 1: point in the book where you talk about the psychological
Speaker 1: component of how people behave in groups and they're using
Speaker 1: apps and when they're UM shopping, and and the data
Speaker 1: point that jumped out in there were about five and
Speaker 1: a half million people riding the subway in New York
Speaker 1: City every day. That puts it about seventh worldwide. You
Speaker 1: did a study that found on crowded subways, people were
Speaker 1: twice as likely to respond to a mobile offer than
Speaker 1: commuters on non crowded train What is the thinking behind this?
Speaker 1: Why would crowdedness affect mobile purchases? So this is actually
Speaker 1: one of my favorite studies in the book. Basically, you
Speaker 1: know what we did is we exploited leverage the variation
Speaker 1: in crowdedness and different parts of the time, different times
Speaker 1: of the day, in different cities, and send people offers
Speaker 1: and effectively measured how people responded to these offers when
Speaker 1: they're in this crowded train station or subway stations, right,
Speaker 1: and these are real time, real DEO sinc. So it's
Speaker 1: just this one station, even this one, so we know
Speaker 1: exactly we are working away a telecom provider which has
Speaker 1: sending person of the market share. We know where you're
Speaker 1: which train you are in. In five we also know
Speaker 1: which compartment in the train you are in. So that's
Speaker 1: a level of because you know, the definition of location
Speaker 1: has changed completely in our companies can identify you within
Speaker 1: three feet. So what we saw is that as the
Speaker 1: level of crowdedness increased from one person persquire meter to
Speaker 1: up to five percent persquire meter. The propensity for people
Speaker 1: to positively respond to these marketing offers continue to kept increasing,
Speaker 1: and to the point where at five m pers cwire
Speaker 1: meter was fairly crowded, they were percent more likely than
Speaker 1: to respond to the offers uh than in the previous metric.
Speaker 1: And what was happening was people basically said, look, when
Speaker 1: I'm surrounded by all these strangers, I don't really know them.
Speaker 1: The first thing I do is I take my phone out.
Speaker 1: I immerse myself in this phone. This is my escape.
Speaker 1: This and at that time, in those twenty minutes of commute,
Speaker 1: if you can send me a relevant offer, you've got
Speaker 1: me there, you know. I love There's this old photo
Speaker 1: of everybody standing waiting for a commuter train, and it's
Speaker 1: from the fifties, and the men have hats and the
Speaker 1: women are wearing dresses, and everybody has newspaper open. And
Speaker 1: then they the same train station you see taken recently.
Speaker 1: It's the same run of people, only everybody standing looking
Speaker 1: at a cell phone. So what is it about crowding
Speaker 1: on a train or anywhere else that generates those negative emotions?
Speaker 1: Is it simply it's a relief to to think about
Speaker 1: something else, And is that why people respond to ads? Say,
Speaker 1: in those circumstances, it's an escape device, right, So when
Speaker 1: you're surrounded by people that you don't know, it creates
Speaker 1: and conjures many negative emotions, you know, some sort of adversity, hostility, stress,
Speaker 1: and so on. So shopping is actually a big stress reliever.
Speaker 1: You know, psychologists have talk even for millennials because we
Speaker 1: keep reading, well, these millennials are all about experiences and
Speaker 1: not consumerism. Is that true? I don't Actually, we didn't
Speaker 1: see any study evidence so far. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: we've been consistently looking at different demographic splits and we
Speaker 1: continue to find certainly, you know, with like gen X
Speaker 1: and gen Y, it's a lot more, but it's still
Speaker 1: the same qualitative result with millennials. And we've been talking
Speaker 1: about mobile phones, but mobile tablets are also a significant
Speaker 1: part of the market. Or these devices in the midst
Speaker 1: of essentially killing the desktop PC, is that a dying
Speaker 1: um product um? I don't necessarily think so, okay, I
Speaker 1: actually think that, you know, desktops or laptops are actually
Speaker 1: here to stay. Part of the reason is there's still
Speaker 1: a tremendous amount of productivity and work that you can
Speaker 1: get done on these larger devices that it's just hard
Speaker 1: to get done on a tablet or a smartphone. I
Speaker 1: find I generate contents on the desktop and I consume
Speaker 1: contents on the mobile device. And you know what, people
Speaker 1: still buy products a lot more on desktops than on tablets. Okay,
Speaker 1: but that being said, you know, one of the biggest
Speaker 1: myths that unwrapped in the book is that, you know,
Speaker 1: the smartphone or the tablet is not very effective in marketing.
Speaker 1: Actually that's not true. It may lead to four or
Speaker 1: five percent of your sales, but it has had an
Speaker 1: influence up to your all of your sales because people
Speaker 1: first got exposed to your product on the smartphone, so
Speaker 1: they see it on the smartphone and then we'll either
Speaker 1: book market or email themselves or what have you um
Speaker 1: in order to make the purchase on the desk exactly.
Speaker 1: Is that a temporary phenomenon as we just get used
Speaker 1: to mobile technology tablets or is this just an ingrained
Speaker 1: behavior that's not going to change. It is changing. It
Speaker 1: is changing. In fact, you know, when I first started
Speaker 1: doing this studies into tos and ten or nine, just
Speaker 1: one the tablets were being introduced. You know, we saw
Speaker 1: these numbers were one one and a half percent. Today
Speaker 1: they are up close to five percent, so it's increasing. Uh,
Speaker 1: it takes some time, but there's a ton ahead room.
Speaker 1: There a lot of room. We have been speaking with
Speaker 1: Professor An India Ghosts, author of the book Tap Unlocking
Speaker 1: the Mobile Economy. If you enjoy this conversation about all
Speaker 1: things mobile technology, will be sure and check out our
Speaker 1: podcast extras. You can find that on Bloomberg dot com,
Speaker 1: SoundCloud and Apple iTunes. Be sure to check out my
Speaker 1: daily column. It's on Bloomberg View dot com. You can
Speaker 1: follow me on Twitter at rit Halts. I'm Barry Hults.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Masters and Business on Bloomberg Radio. What
Speaker 1: could your future hold more than you think because at
Speaker 1: Merrill Lynch we work with you to create a strategy
Speaker 1: built around your priorities. Visit mL dot com and learn
Speaker 1: more about Meryll Lynch. An affiliated Bank of America, Mary
Speaker 1: Lynch makes available products and services offered by Merrill Lynch.
Speaker 1: Pierce Federan Smith Incorporated, a registered broker dealer. Remember s
Speaker 1: I PC. Welcome to the podcast, um and India, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for doing this this is. This is
Speaker 1: an area I find absolutely fascinating. I I consider it
Speaker 1: a privilege to have been born in a period where
Speaker 1: I got to watch the arc of technology changed so dramatically.
Speaker 1: The Internet came out, I was still young enough to
Speaker 1: a stop to it, but it wasn't always there. It's
Speaker 1: something I had to learn at a point in my career.
Speaker 1: As opposed to you know, I'm fascinated by my nephews
Speaker 1: and nieces who they grew up. There has always been smartphones,
Speaker 1: has always been tablets, has always been um Internet, and
Speaker 1: to them it's just second nature, as opposed is to
Speaker 1: a And I'm fascinated to watch how that effects um,
Speaker 1: the way they interact with it. Tell me, UM, some
Speaker 1: things about the book that we didn't get to what
Speaker 1: what what do you think is significant that we simply
Speaker 1: didn't touch in any of our questions previously? Well, I
Speaker 1: guess you know, Um, we go out a lot um.
Speaker 1: One of the things that we haven't talked about are
Speaker 1: you know these forces that are actually going to help
Speaker 1: companies unlocked this economy? Right? So I actually in my
Speaker 1: book of Forces Shaping the Mobile Economy, and you list
Speaker 1: about ten of them, and there are nine forces. There
Speaker 1: are nine context, location, time, saliency, crowdedness, trajectory, social dynamics, weather,
Speaker 1: and text mix. We didn't talk about whether I have
Speaker 1: to ask about that because that's fascinating. Um, how does
Speaker 1: weather affect people using mobile technology? Okay? So, um in
Speaker 1: various space? You know, it's if I have to, if
Speaker 1: I had to ask somebody. Um, if it's a nice,
Speaker 1: sunny and bright day, are people more likely to be
Speaker 1: on their phones? Are less likely to be on their phones?
Speaker 1: My instinct is to say less likely they're out and
Speaker 1: about enjoying the weather sturn start. Actually it's actually the opposite. Okay, Um,
Speaker 1: they may be up and about, but they're still on
Speaker 1: their phones. Um. So I might be taking a stroll
Speaker 1: in Center Park and I'm there for three hours, but
Speaker 1: in at least half of that time, I've been on
Speaker 1: my phone. And so you're taking pictures, you're doing Facebook
Speaker 1: or Instagram, you're using the mapping software. As opposed to
Speaker 1: if it's a really nasty, rainy day, you're inside watching
Speaker 1: TV or on your computer. Right, if it's a rainy
Speaker 1: day and nasty day, you are watching TV, but then
Speaker 1: you also have your tablet in front of you. So
Speaker 1: people are doing prow processing and multiple devices. So, um,
Speaker 1: you know, one of my colleagues are quotas on a
Speaker 1: different paper. He actually had a study. Um I wasn't
Speaker 1: part of it, but he esteemed did it, and they
Speaker 1: actually showed that on a sunnier day, people are more
Speaker 1: likely to spend time on their smartphones and make more
Speaker 1: purchases in the online space done in the offline space.
Speaker 1: Really that's quite fascinating, But what's the psychology behind that?
Speaker 1: Is it they're just out enduring the day, or you
Speaker 1: would think presence is such a big movement these days. Hey,
Speaker 1: it's a nice day, we're out and about must your
Speaker 1: face being the phone is a constant harangue. I'm sure
Speaker 1: lots of people have heard from their significant others. Are
Speaker 1: we always engaged with our phones? Even on a on
Speaker 1: a beautiful day. If you're on the high Line or
Speaker 1: in Central Park or wherever you happen to be, you're
Speaker 1: more likely to purchase online than offline. So they actually
Speaker 1: related back to one simple thing, which is mood transformations. Basically,
Speaker 1: when the day is sunnier and nicer, you feel much better.
Speaker 1: I mean you're mooding, You're in a better mood overall. Right,
Speaker 1: when you're in a better mood overall, you're more likely
Speaker 1: to actually go down to that device and start looking
Speaker 1: for things to do, Like shopping is another mood and answer. So,
Speaker 1: now you've got a brighter, sunny day, You've got you know,
Speaker 1: online shopping that is very easily accessible. Would you rather
Speaker 1: step out and walk a few blocks to get to
Speaker 1: the store if you can get that done online on
Speaker 1: your phone. Turn sut that most people prefer to continue
Speaker 1: to be wherever they are, at work, at home, get
Speaker 1: on their phones and buy that product. So controlling, and
Speaker 1: this was a nice control fee experiment, you know, the
Speaker 1: test group and the control group, and they continue to
Speaker 1: find that we are more likely to actually buy things
Speaker 1: on our smartphones, even on anice or sunnier, brighter actually extend,
Speaker 1: extend the mood, elevate or why do I want to
Speaker 1: go into a fluorescent lit whatever shopping supermarket, whatever when
Speaker 1: I could be outside? And I recall there have been studies.
Speaker 1: I'm going to mangle this, so I apologize in advance.
Speaker 1: There have been studies that look at stock market performance
Speaker 1: based on weather and around the world, not just in
Speaker 1: New York, around the world, rainy day and sunny days
Speaker 1: actually have a skew that correlates with sunny days better
Speaker 1: market absolutely days worse, which just tells you, Now, I
Speaker 1: wonder how that changes as we replace human specialists with algorithms,
Speaker 1: but historically there's been this art correlation. Um, let's talk
Speaker 1: about saliency. What is saliency relative to mobile technology? Okay,
Speaker 1: So this is also one of my favorites. You know,
Speaker 1: we live today in the world of information overload and
Speaker 1: attention deficit economy, too much information, too little attention. Saliency
Speaker 1: is the force which basically says, can I give you
Speaker 1: the best offer? As a company? Can I give you
Speaker 1: the best offer and prop it up right at the
Speaker 1: top where you can see it? Okay? I don't want
Speaker 1: you to have to incur the cognitive cost of having
Speaker 1: to search things or browsings or you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of clutter out there, okay. And so what salience
Speaker 1: it refers to is the ranking effect. How do I
Speaker 1: get my ad or my offer to be ranked at
Speaker 1: the very top up so that more people are likely
Speaker 1: to see it, respond to it, and it does not
Speaker 1: get lost in the clutter down the screen. How do
Speaker 1: you do that? Okay? So here's where, you know, the
Speaker 1: combination of the same ranking algorithms used by search engines
Speaker 1: in sort of the online internet space can be deployed
Speaker 1: in the mobile app economy. So when I open up
Speaker 1: Yelp today, for example, just to give an example, UM,
Speaker 1: yelps will Yelp has a standard set of algorithms which
Speaker 1: is not actually necessarily based on the kind of bidding
Speaker 1: our auctions that happened on search engines. Right. So I
Speaker 1: am foreseeing a world where within a given app, when
Speaker 1: you've got multiple competitors wine for your tension, we will
Speaker 1: get back into that bidding an auction space, and companies
Speaker 1: will want to bid more, get a better placement and
Speaker 1: a better rank to get more of attention. Um. And
Speaker 1: we did. There's actually, uh you know, elements of this
Speaker 1: in Germany in a massive study involving three seventy four
Speaker 1: cities and towns of Germany with three thousand companies using
Speaker 1: one single app, and we saw these ranking effects were
Speaker 1: dramatically powerful, quite fascinating. And then the other one I
Speaker 1: wanted to ask from from the nine forces trajectory, what
Speaker 1: is trajectory? Okay, so this I have to say, I
Speaker 1: guess I get excited about all of them, but this
Speaker 1: is the most fascinating just because it's the most futuristic. Now,
Speaker 1: I would tell you know, our listeners brace for impact
Speaker 1: because this might be like, wow, it's really happening. But
Speaker 1: here's what it is. Blooming Days is right next door,
Speaker 1: big store, multiple floors, mass a few blocks away, right,
Speaker 1: multiple floors. What if imagine a world where the retailer
Speaker 1: knows not just where you are, but also where you
Speaker 1: have been in the past. We're not too hard to
Speaker 1: figure out. You get that data pretty regularly. Well now, basically,
Speaker 1: you know, the WiFi in these department stores is a
Speaker 1: great instrument for them to get access to our real
Speaker 1: time horizontal and vertical data. Which floor do you go to,
Speaker 1: which or do you go to, how much department within
Speaker 1: a store, which department within a store, which floor, how
Speaker 1: much time you're spending when that's department store? And we
Speaker 1: actually did that. So my chapter on trajectory talks about
Speaker 1: the studies we have done with chopping malls in different
Speaker 1: parts of the world, where again it's very important for
Speaker 1: us to follow the notice and consent formula. Notified consumers
Speaker 1: when they sign on the WiFi that you will get tracked,
Speaker 1: but in return for that, we are going to send
Speaker 1: you more relevant and less frequent offers. And it works
Speaker 1: like a charm. And what what is the responsive consumers
Speaker 1: who are participating in those sorts of exchanges. Are they
Speaker 1: spending more or they're making more purchases? So we have
Speaker 1: thirty five percent higher response rates, we have an order
Speaker 1: of vanguage like twice two and a half times more spending.
Speaker 1: The individual store is benefiting. The overall mall is benefiting too.
Speaker 1: And another nice thing is with this trajectory best advertising.
Speaker 1: Because of the fact that our recommendation and go itthems
Speaker 1: is so accurate, we can make you spend more money
Speaker 1: and spend less time so as to prevent crowdedness. And
Speaker 1: these stores, So let's talk a little bit about these
Speaker 1: big um suburban malls and other types of shopping areas
Speaker 1: we've seen. We mentioned in a number of stores that
Speaker 1: have been closing, we've generally been become over retailed is
Speaker 1: an expression. I like that in the nineties, all these
Speaker 1: big stores, you don't flick the switch and open them
Speaker 1: all their multi year in some case decade long projects.
Speaker 1: They began building them, really expanding them. In the eighties
Speaker 1: nineties and two thousands and failed to acknowledge or think
Speaker 1: about what the Internet was going to do to those retailers.
Speaker 1: And now we've seen a ton of empty stores, a
Speaker 1: lot of retailers that that over retailing, that excess retail
Speaker 1: footprint is in the process of I hate the phrase
Speaker 1: right sizing, but coming back to what is in a
Speaker 1: more appropriate per capital footage square footage, we're i think
Speaker 1: twice as much retail square footage as in America versus Europe.
Speaker 1: How much can technology bridge that gap for these retailers.
Speaker 1: Can they really make the store experience more relevant, faster, smarter,
Speaker 1: more enjoyable. Um. Yes, So the answer for all of
Speaker 1: this is yes, yes, and yes. And here's why. Right
Speaker 1: so that the WiFi technology that I mentioned, you know,
Speaker 1: that's been used to cure it offers in real time
Speaker 1: to people shoppers in real time. It's not just about
Speaker 1: the commercial aspect of it. In terms of retailing. We
Speaker 1: have now seen evidence where they can use the same
Speaker 1: data to redesign the department store or the mall to
Speaker 1: figure out, you know, where are crowds, you know, sort
Speaker 1: of aggregating and how do you dispose the crowds? How
Speaker 1: do you optimize the workflow so as to have more
Speaker 1: homogeneous distribution of crowdedness. Okay. In addition, you can find
Speaker 1: know where the hot spots are and have a higher
Speaker 1: retail price for those stores to we have their stores
Speaker 1: in the hot spots, right. Um, So there's a very
Speaker 1: interesting you know, and since you mentioned you have interested
Speaker 1: in architecture and design, there's a very interesting architectural element
Speaker 1: to these trajectory data. It's not just about you know,
Speaker 1: commercializing three shoppers. You can actually completely change you know
Speaker 1: what We're talking with airports now in the Middle East,
Speaker 1: for example in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, about how these
Speaker 1: trajectory data can be used to redesign the layout of
Speaker 1: the retail segment of the airport. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: where should be? Where should the most coveted stores be.
Speaker 1: Should they be closer to the terminals are further away?
Speaker 1: You know, does and all of those things. That's quite fascinating.
Speaker 1: With the malls, it's not gonna be the Is it
Speaker 1: going to be the individual stores or is it gonna
Speaker 1: be the the mall owner that's going to have to
Speaker 1: implement these technologies. Yeah, so between the department store and
Speaker 1: the mall. There are these differences. You know, some of
Speaker 1: most centralized ammonies centralized um you know stores right right um.
Speaker 1: In fact, in the US, the Mall of American Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: I have a colleague here who was a professor in
Speaker 1: the University of Minnesota at Carlson, and he was telling
Speaker 1: me that, you know, he was beginning to do these
Speaker 1: talks with them all of America. And you know, most
Speaker 1: likely I'll also get involved, because you know, both of
Speaker 1: them are aware of the work that we have done
Speaker 1: in the Far East. But look here in Minneapolis, in
Speaker 1: the U. S small of America wants to use WiFi
Speaker 1: data to Sandy's trajectory based offers to consumers and use
Speaker 1: it for you know, design layouts and all of that.
Speaker 1: So it's not just that they're in this department in
Speaker 1: the store. They could say they're walking towards Macy's. Let's
Speaker 1: get them a Macy's coupon. Yeah. So, in fact, and
Speaker 1: more than that, so even within Macy's, you know, are
Speaker 1: you walking to the two me luggage store or to
Speaker 1: the Armani's men's session. It is getting very granular and
Speaker 1: I and I find this awesome fascinating. That's amazing. It's amazing.
Speaker 1: It's it's reminds me of the scene in Minority Report
Speaker 1: X where Tom Cruise is walking in the store is
Speaker 1: giving a customized pop up add to him. It's not
Speaker 1: on his mobile phone. It's a three D hologram projected
Speaker 1: in space in front of him, and the the expectation
Speaker 1: is they're either tracking him by his mobile device or
Speaker 1: some other piece of technology. We're going to get Minority
Speaker 1: Report on steroids. Really, yes, and that very soon because
Speaker 1: and they have to take years, five years how far
Speaker 1: away is and I would I would reckon two to
Speaker 1: three years really, because they have to do this otherwise
Speaker 1: these guys are going to go out of business. Then
Speaker 1: there's only going to be the Amazons and the jet
Speaker 1: dot coms. And it's just too competitive. If they're not
Speaker 1: grabbing people's attention, they're in a desk place. Wow, that's
Speaker 1: that's amazing. So I know I only have you for
Speaker 1: a limited amount of time. Let's let's jump to some
Speaker 1: of my favorite questions that I ask all my guests. Um,
Speaker 1: let's let's start a little bit out your background. Have
Speaker 1: you always wanted to be in academia? You also do
Speaker 1: a lot of consulting work as well. What were you
Speaker 1: doing before, um, h N while you you were briefly
Speaker 1: Warden if memory serves, UM, I was at Warden for
Speaker 1: a new year between two total eleven and two thousand
Speaker 1: and twelve. UM. But before you know, I decided to
Speaker 1: join academia. UM. Well, I know I did my PSD.
Speaker 1: Everybody has to do it. But before that I worked
Speaker 1: in the industry for a couple of years with IBM
Speaker 1: and with a company called HC. L. Hewlett Packard. Both
Speaker 1: of them were in India. And you you mentioned your
Speaker 1: you get both a master's and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon,
Speaker 1: that's right, and from there to IBM or from there
Speaker 1: to Warden. No, so from there I joined n YU
Speaker 1: after my PSD, and I've basically spent twelve years at
Speaker 1: en VYU and one year at Wharton UM. But before
Speaker 1: my master's and PhD in the US at Carnegie Mellon,
Speaker 1: I did an NBA in India UM and undergraduate and engineering.
Speaker 1: And where does IBM fit into that timeline? So after
Speaker 1: my m b A, UM, you know, I wanted to
Speaker 1: do something in I T consulting, so I got a
Speaker 1: job with x C L Hulett Packard and then I
Speaker 1: spent a year there and then I moved to IBM
Speaker 1: again very similar portfolio, e commerce consulting. That's really when
Speaker 1: I started getting interested about the Internet. It is nine
Speaker 1: song just the Internet was kind of blowing up, blowing up,
Speaker 1: and I guess you know, I didn't find those two
Speaker 1: years very satisfactory. Um. I guess I wasn't. You know.
Speaker 1: You call it intellectual challenge or not enough curiosity, and
Speaker 1: that's what made me think about academia. And you also,
Speaker 1: you still do a lot of consulting for a lot
Speaker 1: of retailers and uh, tech companies, mobile companies. Who do
Speaker 1: you consult for? So I've considered a lot for you know,
Speaker 1: telecom providers, for tech companies Facebook and Apple and Samsung.
Speaker 1: And then you know, I also worked with Esctelecom in
Speaker 1: South Korea with China Mobile. Um I've worked with other
Speaker 1: smaller startups and so on. UM. So I try to
Speaker 1: mix it up and it keeps it always interesting and
Speaker 1: I love it. I love it. So tell us about
Speaker 1: some of your early mentors, who were the people who
Speaker 1: affected how you think about the world about technology. So
Speaker 1: I think I, I, you know, my early PhD days
Speaker 1: at Carni emil and is when I had you know,
Speaker 1: a few amazing individuals who played a role. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: one of them was a professor in economics. His name
Speaker 1: is Odeya Ragin. He's a professor now in the University
Speaker 1: of Michigan and an Harbor, and you know, he became
Speaker 1: my closest mentor. I would basically spend you know, a
Speaker 1: lot chunk of the time with him. Um. In fact,
Speaker 1: he even brought me a laptop, so you know, PSC students,
Speaker 1: you know, poor people every dollar accounts. And the fact
Speaker 1: that he would go out of his way, he didn't
Speaker 1: have to write, um, just buy me a laptop was amazing.
Speaker 1: And it just so happened that we connected very well.
Speaker 1: And you know, he gave me some awesome advice over
Speaker 1: the years. So he had a huge role at the beginning.
Speaker 1: And then when I came to n YU as a
Speaker 1: very young junior assistant professor, there's a professor and why
Speaker 1: you called body of Wisenfeld. She's a professor of management. UM.
Speaker 1: She was appointed as my mentor. And initially I was
Speaker 1: a little surprised because she's from management. I am a
Speaker 1: more of a con person, but it just founded that
Speaker 1: I was the best decision and why you probably took
Speaker 1: for me really because she has and I thank her
Speaker 1: very explicitly, both her and the origin and my acknowledgments
Speaker 1: that there's a couple of lines just for them that
Speaker 1: you know, I'm in depthing grateful to them and why
Speaker 1: you does this. As a matter of course, they have
Speaker 1: a mentoring program between junior and senior professors, Is that right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we try to do this because you know, the
Speaker 1: world of academia is very cutthroat, especially in these very
Speaker 1: competitive top tier schools. You know, getting tenure is a
Speaker 1: non trivial process. You know, lots of people come in,
Speaker 1: as in your professors, only a handful of them get tenured.
Speaker 1: You can get lost along the way, you know, you
Speaker 1: can get devastated. You So having a mentor is really useful,
Speaker 1: and I think Stern really does it well by also pairing,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of different back people with different backgrounds.
Speaker 1: So I had a quant background. They could have given
Speaker 1: me somebody from the quant area. They didn't. They decided
Speaker 1: to give me somebody who's more qualitative in terms of
Speaker 1: you know, or more behavioral, but somehow that you know,
Speaker 1: that is magical that that's a great, great idea, quite
Speaker 1: quite fascinating. Tell us about, um other thinkers who influenced
Speaker 1: your approach to looking at and analyzing technology. So this
Speaker 1: might sound very very strange, but my biggest influences in
Speaker 1: this space haven't necessarily come from technology. Um. One of
Speaker 1: my biggest hobbies, which I try to pursue religiously, is mountaineering.
Speaker 1: I'm basically altitude climber. Someone a previous guest was also
Speaker 1: a high altitude climb I'm trying to remember who it was.
Speaker 1: But I was surprised because I didn't expect it was
Speaker 1: like really yeah, yeah, so yeah, I and most people
Speaker 1: think I'm crazy, right, you know, why would you want
Speaker 1: to go and climb these mountains with big fifty sixty backpacks? But? Um,
Speaker 1: what what have you climbed recently? Um? So, I've climbed
Speaker 1: a fair bit in South America and you know, Bolivia, Ecuador.
Speaker 1: I climbed climbing Jarrow in Africa. I have climbed parts
Speaker 1: of the Himalayas. I've climbed a lot in the Cascades,
Speaker 1: Rainier and a fur forty. How did you find your
Speaker 1: way into mountaineering? Like, how did how did that become
Speaker 1: a thing for you? So almost you know, like by luck,
Speaker 1: I guess. So I started doing my undergrad in a
Speaker 1: the northern part of India, in a state called pun Job,
Speaker 1: which is actually very close to the photos of the Himalayas. Now,
Speaker 1: you know, every other weekend or every other month, my
Speaker 1: friends and I would just back our backs and go hiking.
Speaker 1: And I realized that was when I was eighteen, and
Speaker 1: I'd gone these hikes a few times a year. I
Speaker 1: loved it. And then I also realized some are physically
Speaker 1: and mentally it was easy for me to do these
Speaker 1: things compared to some of the others other friends, and
Speaker 1: they started egging me that, hey, you know, if you're
Speaker 1: just good at this hiking, maybe you should take it
Speaker 1: up a notch and think about something more challenging. And
Speaker 1: I said, yeah, you know, I could do that. So
Speaker 1: I joined this Himalin Mountaining Institute. Of course, a one
Speaker 1: month boot camp course, very very tough, you know, like
Speaker 1: forty people got in, only seven came out alive. Kind
Speaker 1: of camp. But um, that really kind of uh you know,
Speaker 1: taught me that outdoors is where I belong. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: if I had my way, my job would have been
Speaker 1: that of like a professional mountaining guide. Um, but then
Speaker 1: I realized, while, uh, you know, it's not the best
Speaker 1: paying jobs, so maybe I should do something else. Why,
Speaker 1: you know, continuing to claimb So before I interrupted you,
Speaker 1: you're gonna say that one of the people who influenced
Speaker 1: your thinking right was ad Vestures. He's a one amazing
Speaker 1: legendary American climber. He's climbed all fourteen eight thousand meter
Speaker 1: mountains without bottle oxygen. And here's why I was most
Speaker 1: I read all his books, in many books, but his
Speaker 1: mantra has been there are no short cuts of the top.
Speaker 1: It's all about diligence, you know, the kind of preparation, preparation,
Speaker 1: planning discipline. You know, in my profession, people often say, wow,
Speaker 1: you know that person is so super intelligent. Okay, I've
Speaker 1: always believed that in academics, intelligence is highly overrated. Success
Speaker 1: to me is diligence and one percent intelligence, And that
Speaker 1: the fact that it's all about diligence and planning actually
Speaker 1: came from reading and sort of experiencing vicariously what d
Speaker 1: Vestures has been doing all his life. Yeah, I referenced
Speaker 1: Michael Morbison's paradox of skill all the time, which is,
Speaker 1: in the market, you have lots of really smart people.
Speaker 1: It's a given that these folks are smart, and paradoxically
Speaker 1: that makes luck all the more significant. If you put
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of really sharp people in a room,
Speaker 1: whoever gets a lucky break and and it turns out
Speaker 1: to be the same in sports, where you have all
Speaker 1: these people who are physically gifted, hardworking, and so they're
Speaker 1: also highly skilled, and then a lucky bounce uh uh
Speaker 1: an officiating mistake, the lucky break often affects the outcome.
Speaker 1: It's just a given everybody is smart or skilled or
Speaker 1: what have you. And I also believe that you know,
Speaker 1: you can create your luck to some extent. You know,
Speaker 1: if you are our discipline, hardworking, planning, you know, driven person,
Speaker 1: you can influence some extent that luck. Um there's an expression,
Speaker 1: and I know I'm mangling this, but it's hard work
Speaker 1: is the mother of of fortune, meaning the you know,
Speaker 1: the harder you work, the lucky you tend to get.
Speaker 1: Although that said, every now and then a little bit
Speaker 1: of luck the right way if you go along a
Speaker 1: long way. So so back to mountaineering, what do you
Speaker 1: do to prep to do? Forget an eight thousand meter
Speaker 1: meter or foot meter eight thousand meter mountain? What do
Speaker 1: you do for a five thousand meter So a lot
Speaker 1: of training and I would train easily four or five
Speaker 1: months continuously in a given year. What are you doing
Speaker 1: when you're training. I'm carrying big backpacks and I'm climbing
Speaker 1: hundreds of floors every single day. And some of the
Speaker 1: security guards and the tall skyscrapers of New York City,
Speaker 1: you know, there's weird you know, Indian American guy who
Speaker 1: comes with the backpack and says, it's kind of use
Speaker 1: the stair of it. So I've had to get permission
Speaker 1: from the condor the CoAP boards to do funny um.
Speaker 1: But I do a lot of that um and then
Speaker 1: our stairs roughly equivalent to going up the side of
Speaker 1: a mountain or is it just the vertical exercise? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not nearly as great as it lambing
Speaker 1: a real mountain, not even the same. But it's about
Speaker 1: the closest thing you can do in a city like
Speaker 1: ours where we don't have any mountains. Right that said,
Speaker 1: every now and then, you know, when I'm getting in
Speaker 1: the middle of my training, I do take a drive
Speaker 1: out to you know, New Jersey or Upsett, New York,
Speaker 1: Bear Mountain and so on, and do multiple rounds with
Speaker 1: heavy backpacks, run up to the top down Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: as fast as possible, go up and down, up and down.
Speaker 1: You know, it's about feet or sort of the top
Speaker 1: two or three rounds and that's pretty exhausting. What can
Speaker 1: you do to prep for altitudes where the oxygen is thinner?
Speaker 1: Is there is there something you could literally because the
Speaker 1: last trip I had to Colorado where we were in um,
Speaker 1: I'm drawing a blank on which of the ski resorts veil.
Speaker 1: I was shocked at at how much the lack of
Speaker 1: oxygen impacts you. It's not even like running a mile.
Speaker 1: You're walking a hundred yards across a space and you're like, wow,
Speaker 1: I am genuinely out of breath and out of shape. So,
Speaker 1: you know, one can be the most well trained athlete
Speaker 1: on sea level and yet suffer the worst altitude mounted
Speaker 1: sickness MS. Right, It's just one of those things where
Speaker 1: it's very difficult to plan and predict how it's going
Speaker 1: to be for me myself, you know, for the same
Speaker 1: level of training for similar altitude I've experienced different symptoms.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's been fantastic, sometimes not so good. What can
Speaker 1: I do? Not a whole lot. You know, there's something
Speaker 1: called a training mask. You may have seen those pictures
Speaker 1: of you know. Sometimes it has three different nozzles. You know,
Speaker 1: each nozzle represents a certain percentage of air that can
Speaker 1: come in. You can try to simulate the high altity thing.
Speaker 1: It's not nearly as great as the real thing. Some
Speaker 1: of the real professional climbers, they use a tent, a
Speaker 1: tent that is able to actually suck out the oxygen um.
Speaker 1: I forget the name of the tent, but it's a
Speaker 1: new product I'll just launched by some of the big
Speaker 1: sporting companies who encourage climbers to spend twenty four hours
Speaker 1: before they fly out of the big So it's the
Speaker 1: opposite of a hyperbaric chamber where you're pumping in that's
Speaker 1: right here, you have less oxs exactly. Yeah, you just
Speaker 1: suck it out. Yeah, that's that's amazing. So let's shift
Speaker 1: gears a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about books.
Speaker 1: Tell me about some of your favorite books. What do
Speaker 1: you like to read so well, you know, like I said,
Speaker 1: I love all books in mountaineering. I've I've basically read
Speaker 1: a ton of them and not just give us a
Speaker 1: few names. Okay, well, no short coust of the top
Speaker 1: and my favorite, no shortcuts to the top by my
Speaker 1: advers yours. It taught me a lot about life lessons. Um.
Speaker 1: Then you know there are there are books written by
Speaker 1: written on K two. The Savage Mountain, you know, is
Speaker 1: one of them. Why is K two considered so challenging
Speaker 1: versus others? So? Is it just the sheer assent or um? So?
Speaker 1: K two is basically built like almost a perfect pyramid.
Speaker 1: It's extremely steep, and you know it is um So
Speaker 1: even though Everest is a dead but higher it's considered
Speaker 1: less technical from a climbing perspective than K twys Um.
Speaker 1: There's also you know, it's more treacherous because of the
Speaker 1: steepness and the terrain. The weather comes in very quickly,
Speaker 1: quickly and very unpredictable. And if you look at the stats,
Speaker 1: you know, one in seven climbers of climb Everest have
Speaker 1: died really one in seven, right historically, um, And that
Speaker 1: number is you know, going down all the years because
Speaker 1: technology has improved so much, so we have fewer debts.
Speaker 1: But up until you know, two or three years back,
Speaker 1: that was a number. With K two, it's one in three.
Speaker 1: That's even more instant, it's even more insane. And that's
Speaker 1: not the worlds. The world's actually statistically is Annapurna, which
Speaker 1: is also one of the telemeta mountains, and it's one
Speaker 1: in two. So, um, flipper coin, maybe you make it?
Speaker 1: Maybe you know something like that. Yeah, yeah, I, UM,
Speaker 1: I don't watch TV this weekend. I'm not climbing anything. Um,
Speaker 1: give us some other books. But what else do you
Speaker 1: like along the lines of K two? Have you ever
Speaker 1: read uh, the Shackleton Story Endurance. Um, it's a fascinating book.
Speaker 1: It's very familiar. I may have read it. Um. This
Speaker 1: is Antarctica now, okay, Okay, I know the name because
Speaker 1: of the store. There's an amazing narrative about the book.
Speaker 1: The book came out, I want to say, in the
Speaker 1: thirties or forties. Maybe it was right before the war
Speaker 1: or right after the war, fifties, and it did okay,
Speaker 1: but you know, no great shakes. And thirty years later
Speaker 1: somebody both the rights to it reissued it and it
Speaker 1: just explodes. It was the right time and it's one
Speaker 1: of these stories that you the same thing about the
Speaker 1: no shortcuts. Everybody should have died, and I don't. I
Speaker 1: won't spoil the ending, even though everybody knows it. But
Speaker 1: it's just that the ship gets caught in the ice.
Speaker 1: The ice crushes it. You're in Antarctica with essentially you
Speaker 1: don't have a cell phone, you don't have any way
Speaker 1: to communicate with people. There's a hope that you're supposed
Speaker 1: to meet people six months from now. How do I
Speaker 1: get from this side of the world to there with
Speaker 1: essentially whatever supplies we can scrape up from the ship
Speaker 1: as it's you know, being crushed in the ice. It's
Speaker 1: in It's insane, I'm sure. Um. Some of the tales
Speaker 1: of K two are are similar. Let's let's move away
Speaker 1: from extreme um activities. What other books, technology, economics? What
Speaker 1: else have you enjoyed over time? So um, I mean
Speaker 1: this is not necessarily technology. But again, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the other breed of folks. I greatly respected by
Speaker 1: our special forces. Um, so I have. I'm fascinated by
Speaker 1: the U. S. Navy series, the Delta Force, the Army Rangers,
Speaker 1: and again, just like movies, I've ready a tone of
Speaker 1: these books. One of my favorites Lone Survivor, which became
Speaker 1: a movie yea, with marks Mark Wahlberg as the guy,
Speaker 1: but the real guy was Marcus Lottrell. Um So, I
Speaker 1: actually follow his Twitter feed. Um So again, I think,
Speaker 1: you know, I read a lot of these books written
Speaker 1: by on special forces. Um in the world of technology,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, I tried to read not necessarily so
Speaker 1: many books, but a lot of the internet websites like
Speaker 1: you know, Mashable and tech Crunch and Fast Company, because
Speaker 1: one of my occupation has us is I have to
Speaker 1: be always updated with the latest and the best right
Speaker 1: and so in some ways, if I have to do that,
Speaker 1: I have I don't have a whole lot of time
Speaker 1: to actually spend reading an entire book. Um So, it's
Speaker 1: it's sort of a trade off there, you know. And
Speaker 1: early in my career I started on a trading desk
Speaker 1: and the head trader was a former Marine jungle combat instructor.
Speaker 1: And I share your um interest in special Forces and
Speaker 1: you hear some of the stories you hear are just astonishing,
Speaker 1: and it's amazing how parallel it is to other aspects
Speaker 1: of life. It's really and we're we're finding more and
Speaker 1: more things are applicable. One of the things that I
Speaker 1: found astonishing, and this is out of the Special Forces
Speaker 1: before they go on a mission, the night before, they
Speaker 1: go through a visualization technique where they're going through each
Speaker 1: step of the of the plans, whatever the insertion or
Speaker 1: event is, and part of the training is okay, X
Speaker 1: goes wrong, visualize not only what your tools and resources
Speaker 1: are and how you can respond to it, but imagine
Speaker 1: how you're gonna feel emotionally when this happens. And so
Speaker 1: what people have said to me is when something actually
Speaker 1: goes wrong and you feel that panic rising, you've already
Speaker 1: prepped yourself for it and you can manage it. You
Speaker 1: can deal with it because left unshaft, your emotions in
Speaker 1: those circumstances are deadly and you can't have that happened.
Speaker 1: And it's so parallel to investing. If when you say
Speaker 1: to people, all right, so the market's gonna be down thirty,
Speaker 1: how are you gonna behave? What what's your emotional state
Speaker 1: going to be? If you could get people to go
Speaker 1: through those exercises, their behavior is better when events actually
Speaker 1: hit age that. That's any other books on special services
Speaker 1: or special forces that you think are are worth mentioning. Well,
Speaker 1: I really loved um. I think it's called thirteen Hours
Speaker 1: in Benghazi. Uh, you know came out last year to
Speaker 1: last year in the book and the movie has made
Speaker 1: awesome recommend that highly again like and I'm biased, um,
Speaker 1: but again, you know, you get to understand the psychology,
Speaker 1: psychology on the mental fortitude and the process of these
Speaker 1: special people. And you know that really motivates me because
Speaker 1: it's not just about what I have to deal with
Speaker 1: an mountains, but even in daily life, like you mentioned,
Speaker 1: you know, we have a lot of academic publication is
Speaker 1: a tough process. I mean, you know you've you published
Speaker 1: our parish, right, So it just teaches me to be
Speaker 1: more resilient. Um, you know, just be stronger mentally. So
Speaker 1: it makes it it makes it easier for me to
Speaker 1: deal with these things. It's really astonishing. My my office
Speaker 1: is about fifteen percent veterans. We find they work very
Speaker 1: well in the world to finance because they're dealing with
Speaker 1: complex logistics and and getting them done. And in our
Speaker 1: office there are no bullets was in by your head,
Speaker 1: so it's actually easy for them. What most people look
Speaker 1: at and say, gee, this is really hard this really complicated. Well,
Speaker 1: you're not in a plumbing aircraft. Nobody's shooting at you.
Speaker 1: It's relatively easy compared to And you know, my favorite
Speaker 1: NBA students or e m BAS students, and I might
Speaker 1: get beaten for this, are the wets because these guys
Speaker 1: are the most disciplined in the class, that the most ready,
Speaker 1: they have prepared, and that the least in so flashy
Speaker 1: flamboyant or showing off. Damn my favorite stuff. If I
Speaker 1: just teach a class with only wets, I would just
Speaker 1: do anything for that. Do you have a lot of
Speaker 1: people who come out of the Armed services? Yeah? So,
Speaker 1: you know all the most of the top business schools
Speaker 1: have special programs for um X R vets um so.
Speaker 1: In fact, in last fall, I actually had an ex
Speaker 1: X Navy Seal person in my class. No one a
Speaker 1: mess with Yeah, yeah, absolutely not UM but it was
Speaker 1: such you know, and he was one of a few
Speaker 1: other UM you know, X Army, X Special Forces, X Marines.
Speaker 1: It's just awesome to have them in the class. You know.
Speaker 1: I I shouldn't tell these stories, but we used to
Speaker 1: go out off the trading desk and one of the
Speaker 1: guys is a forming Army ranger. The head of the
Speaker 1: desk is a former Marine combat instructor. I'm like a
Speaker 1: skinny nothing back then, as opposed to a fat nothing now.
Speaker 1: And we would go to bars and and any time
Speaker 1: there was trouble, I always felt like I could say
Speaker 1: or do anything. I got these two monsters with me.
Speaker 1: You know, guy wants to cause trouble, It's like, all right,
Speaker 1: bring it, you know it was. It creates a full
Speaker 1: sense of of confidence right when you're when you're as
Speaker 1: long as they're they have your back. But it really
Speaker 1: is true the attitude that you develop when you think
Speaker 1: about these highly technical, highly dangerous missions. You know, the
Speaker 1: the Armed Services are really good at learning how to
Speaker 1: do these things, if nothing else, through just repetition and
Speaker 1: trial and error, and eventually they get it down to
Speaker 1: a science. And and these guys are really quite amazing.
Speaker 1: It's astonishing. All right, let's let's get back into uh
Speaker 1: no more literal war stories. Let's get back into um
Speaker 1: our favorite questions in the last ten minutes or so
Speaker 1: we have so what changes have you noticed since you
Speaker 1: be again focusing on mobile? How has the industry shifted
Speaker 1: and is it just a never ending fluxus is always
Speaker 1: going to be in change or what do you say? Um?
Speaker 1: I think the biggest change has been that the change
Speaker 1: from focusing on strategy to tactics, and that the reason
Speaker 1: that changes happened is because of the increasing accessibility of
Speaker 1: data that lets companies actually measure the effectiveness of their tactics.
Speaker 1: And now they can go back and justify the r
Speaker 1: O I you know, why am I spending on mobile?
Speaker 1: And so up until recently, the focus was do we
Speaker 1: have a mobile strategy, meaning like do we have a
Speaker 1: mobile app a mobile website? Today it's more like, well,
Speaker 1: obviously we have to have one of those, but is
Speaker 1: the investment worth it? So people are recognizing, hey, this
Speaker 1: is important yestely, and earlier there was ambiguity. But earlier
Speaker 1: there was more of a recognition that it's important, but
Speaker 1: there was no where to measure how important it was,
Speaker 1: however active it was. And that's changed now. So what's
Speaker 1: the next big shift we're going to see in this space?
Speaker 1: I think it's gonna be this intersection of mobile with
Speaker 1: the consumer Internet of things, right, and so you know,
Speaker 1: more of us, more of us varying variable devices and
Speaker 1: we're talking about this earlier about getting used to you know,
Speaker 1: you're smart refrigerator, making a phone called reminding you that
Speaker 1: you just run out of groceries, you know, and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. I think that's going to be more of
Speaker 1: a norm than an exception. So the likes of Alexa
Speaker 1: or in a Kartana or series and so on, Artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence is going to start taking an important role in
Speaker 1: our lives. You know, some may say they will take
Speaker 1: over our lives. I don't think it's like like that,
Speaker 1: but I think they'll have a very important influence. And
Speaker 1: so you know, this intersection of AI, consumer, IoT and
Speaker 1: the mobile phone is right in the middle. It's all
Speaker 1: going to be propelled and powered and sort of you know,
Speaker 1: influenced by the mobile phone. Quite quite interesting. Let me
Speaker 1: shift it up, knew a little bit. Tell us about
Speaker 1: a time you failed and what did you learn from
Speaker 1: that experience? So, um, just after high school. You know,
Speaker 1: this was in India, and you know, in India, if
Speaker 1: you want to do engineering, sort of the one brand
Speaker 1: everybody recognizes I I T. And everybody wants to go
Speaker 1: in an Indian Institute of Technology. Correct, right, So a
Speaker 1: lot of the folks in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street.
Speaker 1: Have I T backgrounds. I always thought, you know, I'd
Speaker 1: be able to get in because I had great grades
Speaker 1: in high school. I was like crushing it. But for
Speaker 1: various reasons, I didn't make it. That was devastating because
Speaker 1: I didn't make it. At the same time, all my
Speaker 1: friends who I knew would make it made it. That
Speaker 1: was a big failure. But basically, you know, I learned that, um,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, you know, life can push you back,
Speaker 1: throw you out a few times, but you've got to
Speaker 1: just come back. And you know, momentarily there's some disappointment.
Speaker 1: So I promised myself in my first team of engineering,
Speaker 1: I'd still went to a decent engineering school. N I
Speaker 1: N I T y um. It's most people will stay
Speaker 1: it's it's great. But for me it was a disappointment.
Speaker 1: But you know, I'm still proud of where I went.
Speaker 1: And I told myself in the first year that since
Speaker 1: I always had a plan to do an NBA and
Speaker 1: in India, the big NBA brand are these I M S.
Speaker 1: And I promised myself on day one, I'm going to
Speaker 1: get to the I M S. You know, come hell
Speaker 1: or or hell or heaven or whatever it is. Hell
Speaker 1: or high water hell or high water right? And um,
Speaker 1: I just religiously studied like a zombie for four years.
Speaker 1: Just make that happen. And it happened. So so the
Speaker 1: lesson learned was just double your efforts, don't give up.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, life is a marathon. It's not
Speaker 1: just a spraint. Okay, you didn't make it to the
Speaker 1: I I T. But look, if you make your iams
Speaker 1: and then eventually do the things you want to do,
Speaker 1: you can still make it happen. And our last two
Speaker 1: favorite questions. If a millennial or recent college graduate came
Speaker 1: up to you and said, hey, I'm interested in getting
Speaker 1: into information services, mobile technology, what have you? What sort
Speaker 1: of career advice would you give them? So what I
Speaker 1: would ask them is and are you thinking it from
Speaker 1: an engineering perspective or from a business perspective? Okay, that's
Speaker 1: the first thing, because you're about to enter into an
Speaker 1: undergraduate program. Do you want to get into more of
Speaker 1: the technical engineering aspects or more of the business aspects.
Speaker 1: That's the first thing. Once you decide that, then it's
Speaker 1: a question if you get into business, you know, do
Speaker 1: you want to be the strategy is the big sinker?
Speaker 1: Or do you want to be the tactical tactician, the
Speaker 1: one who's going to be analyzing the data, building the
Speaker 1: models and that sort of thing. So you know, every
Speaker 1: stage there's a decision tree to be asked, and this
Speaker 1: is a kind of question I'll ask them. And our
Speaker 1: last question, what is it that you know about technology smartphones,
Speaker 1: mobile tech today that you wish you knew ten or
Speaker 1: fifteen years ago when you first we're starting out. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a great one. Actually, you know, sometimes I do wish,
Speaker 1: um I had known earlier, um, how accurate the measurements
Speaker 1: will get to be, because basically what I mean is,
Speaker 1: you know, I've always been a fan of metrics and measurement,
Speaker 1: and ten years back, the accuracy of the data and
Speaker 1: the quality of the data was nowhere near as good
Speaker 1: as where it is today, right um. And so along
Speaker 1: the way, you know, I had to build models or
Speaker 1: design projects, and these are all long term things. So
Speaker 1: if I knew five years from now how accurate the
Speaker 1: data would be, how great the metric would be, I
Speaker 1: would design it differently. So, you know, hindsight is we
Speaker 1: have been speaking with Professor and India Ghosts of n
Speaker 1: y U Stern School of business and author most recently
Speaker 1: of tap Unlocking the Mobile Economy. If people want to
Speaker 1: find some of your own other researcher papers, they can
Speaker 1: go to the n y U Stern site to find
Speaker 1: your list, your CV and your list of publications. That's right.
Speaker 1: I have a homepage that's also on the end yu
Speaker 1: Stone website, so please go there and and again my
Speaker 1: emails there as well. If somebody has to reach out
Speaker 1: to me, I'm on email. My Twitter hashtag is a
Speaker 1: g h y C. I'm on LinkedIn, so either way
Speaker 1: it's well. Thank you in India for being so generous
Speaker 1: with your time. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions.
Speaker 1: Be sure to write to us at m IB podcast
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg dot net. Be sure and check out any
Speaker 1: of the other hundred and fifty or so prior podcast
Speaker 1: we've had. Just looked up or down on iTunes or
Speaker 1: SoundCloud or Bloomberg dot com and you could see the
Speaker 1: full run of all of our guests. I would be
Speaker 1: remiss if I did not thank my head of research,
Speaker 1: Michael bat Nick. Taylor Riggs is our producer, and our
Speaker 1: recording engineer and audio producer is Medina Parwanna. I'm Barry
Speaker 1: Rihults have been listening to Manasters and Business on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: Our world is always moving, so with Mery Lynch, you
Speaker 1: can get access to financial guidance online, in person or
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