From the conference in laguna beach where we had conversations with some of the biggest names in tech. Lets start with my interview with arianna huffington. We spoke about the changing role of travis kalanick. Arianna he is on the board, and he is very active. He obviously built uber into the juggernaut it is now. He passed the baton. It was a very nice transition of power. The new ceo has been amazing. He has been handling all the problems whether it is what is happening in london with the suspension of ubers license to the deal in process with softbank, he has been a great leader. He has shown he is very committed to building a thriving culture and company. Emily you mentioned the difficulties faced in london, multiple legal probes elsewhere, how do you see the lifechanging around the world Going Forward . Arianna we need to do better at serving the communities where uber exists around the world. We need to make sure we add value to communities. Added value in terms of transportation and jobs. The launch of 180 days of change starts with allowing people to rebuild their relationship with drivers. Emily would you say the fractiousness of the board from the outside is now changing . Arianna the board is changing. The new measures that are going to be put in place include additional, independent board additional, independent Board Members and chair. All of these things are really going to make sure that uber has an ontract governance before going ipo in 2019. Emily we understand that uber has been a close confidant for travis kalanick. What is your relationship with him . Arianna he is a friend. He is only 41 years old, and we are excited to watch his journey and see what he is going to do. Emily we have recently seen the Harvey Weinstein scandal come out and how men can use positions of power to harass. What is your reaction . Arianna we see two issues here. There is this cult in Silicon Valley and hollywood where, if you are delivering results or great performance, then a lot is for given. The other issue is for us to break the silence. People see things but they do not say anything, especially if whoever is involved is someone powerful in an organization. You also see that in politics also. I would love to see more republicans talking out about what is happening at the white house. So, breaking the silence. Ideally before it has to come to that point where you have women coming forward finally to speak out themselves. Emily what are your biggest concerns now that we are nine months into this Current Administration . Arianna my biggest concern is that so few republicans are speaking out. It was great to see senator mccain last night speaking out and now senator corker speaking out. This is not a partisan issue. It clearly involves the safety of the country. We need republicans. They have a lot more impact if they speak out about what is happening. Emily facebook, twitter, google, they are now having to answer the congress for russian meddling on their platforms. what is the responsibility of these companies when it comes to foreign actors weaponizing the tools they create . Arianna they do need additional oversight. Facebook is investing in new employees and Machine Learning to catch these foreign actors. No one wants to see fake accounts being started. There is another problem which is what we are trying to address globally. A lot of these companies have incentives to hijack more and more of our attention. We see that being a problem when it comes to teenagers and college students. We see it in the newspapers, the Mental Health problems increasing in teenagers dramatically. Emily you are in a partnership with samsung to turn a smart phone into a dumb phone. What do you mean by that . Arianna when you do not want to be interrupted like when you are with family or sleeping, then you can put your phone into something called drive mode. During that time, you will not be able to receive calls, texts, notifications, but you can specify if you want to receive calls from a specific child or person. It is one directional. If you put it into drive mode, it will tell you when you are supposed to be out of it. It will also alert you to win you are spending a lot of time on apps. For example, it will let you know if you have been on instagram for nine hours and ask if you want to change that. Emily what is the next that . Arianna it is our work with corporations. Where we work to improve culture and outcomes when it comes to productivity and wellbeing. We are also a media platform which increases awareness around these issues. Also, new models. There are a lot of people who are practicing and taking care of themselves and recharging. I have seen the impact this has on their productivity and performance. Emily that was arianna huffington. Coming up, we will have more from laguna beach including our conversation with facebook vp of messaging products. How he plans for Facebook Messaging to become the default messaging app. That is next. This is bloomberg. Emily this week, bloomberg learned that facebook is looking to hire individuals with security clearance. They want to eliminate the possibility of foreign actors of using facebook for social media campaigns before elections. Facebook declined to comment on this story just sticking with facebook and one of the tech leaders in attendance at the the good of each conference was the vp of facebooks messaging products. He was recruited personally by mark zuckerberg. I asked marcus how much revenue the company is driving into advertising. We do not break out revenues for specific products, but i can still say it is very early in the developed for messaging as a business or facebook could the early signs for facebook. The early signs are promising. If you redirect people from either a facebook ad, instagram ad or a messenger ad, you redirect them to a conversation inside messenger, then that is a great roi opportunity. It gives businesses more opportunity to create conversations with customers and generate more revenues. I have cons of examples for you, but a good one to share for instance is that tmobile is now selling data plans and devices on messenger, and they are seeing an increase in comparison to traditional web shopping, because they are able to recreate the the experience would have inside a store with ui elements inside messenger. Emily the competition in the chat space is heating up. How do you see messenger standing out amidst the competition . It is a very different Geographical Split between different types of messaging apps. What we see is that whatsapp is very strong in certain markets like latin america or india. We are very strong in north america and western and central europe. I think one differentiation that messenger has are groups. When you create a group, you are seeing identities and not just numbers. You can send media very quickly. When you add a device, it works flawlessly. You have all of these great chat extensions from creating a playlist with friends to playing games or making plans. You can do all of the things much better on messenger, and it is a key differentiator for us. We will continue to invest in groups and in real time. You can upgrade from texting to live video in groups. It is a very delightful experience with augmented reality. So, we are going to continue to invest in it. Emily you have new features like location, polling, spotify, the ability to buy movie tickets from fandango or share recipes from the food network. How do you see the trends continuing . Those types of experiences, once you have them, you tend to stick with messenger and create more conversations on messenger. When people actually get what they want, when we can infer intent from a conversation and then leverage them to suggest the right thing at the right time, what we see are that people are having a better experience and sticking around on messenger to create more groups and more conversations. Emily with ai technology, some people are saying that facebook seems to be a little behind when it comes to the home ai game. To do think that facebook and Facebook Messenger have some catching up to do . I think we are having a very different approach here. The current experience you have is that they suggest things that you want to do based off of conversation, and it is really popping up at the right time. Our results tend not to disappoint when you have an intent you want to complete. We only surface suggestions when we feel confident that this is what you want to do. The model we have been working on right now is the model we have been talking about with suggestions in conversations, and we are continuing to invest in bringing a more fullfledged assistant to market. We have been really working on it for a while. We really want to ship something that is valuable and will not let people down. We do not want to rush to market. We will get it right, and then once we get it right, we will ship it to the 1. 3 billion people on messenger and counting. Emily facebook along with google and twitter will speak before the House Intelligence Committee about russian meddling on the platforms. What responsibility does facebook bear here . What mistakes do you think were made . One thing i want to say when those things come up, we have spoken about the responsibility of the platforms, but i want to highlight one thing. We talk about the downsides of the platforms but not the upsides. This is something i feel very passionate about. The number of people who connect with other people around the world, they are able to connect with them in ways that they cannot connect with friends or family, the fact that we had turned on safety alerts and we have the ability to reassure people that everything is ok, the fact that we were able to raise millions of dollars for harvey on the platform, these are things we do not talk about. There is so much goodness on the platforms. When we operate at this scale, the are things that happened that should never happen on the platform, but we do have a clear, crystal plan on how we will go about it. We are hiring more and more people, and we are collaborating with special counsel in congress on these investigations, but we are taking this very seriously. We have a clear plan that was outlined recently, and we are going to go after it very aggressively. Emily these platforms can be used for good, but they can just as easily be used for bad. When it comes to advertising, we are seeing blind spots in how facebook develop its advertising system. These are things that facebook has apologized for, but as you continue to build out advertising capabilities in messenger, are you looking for ways that your platform can be abused and are you taking steps to prevent it . We can definitely be better at this. All of these things that are currently being raised are things that have made us realize that, as we roll new things out, we need to continue to be more thoughtful and try to over think how the platform can be used in ways that it was not designed for. Going forward, that is definitely what we are going to do. We tend to learn very quickly and fix things very quickly. I have no doubt we will do it again this time. Emily that was facebook vp of messaging products. Details on when gm might see a payoff from ridesharing investments. This is bloomberg. Emily automation in the drivers seat. Shares in gm have risen over the past year. Deutsche bank expects a big push coming for gm self driving cars. Dan we actually think one of the big advantages we have today is that we have everything integrated under one roof. We have the advanced software engineering, the vehicle manufacturing piece, the vehicle engineering, and what is allowing us to move so quickly is that we have all of that capability under one roof. That gives us that real speed advantage. Emily so you are saying that automation is not a choice now . Dan we are moving as fast as we can to get to commercial deployment of this technology. We believe the best way to do that is to have capability under one roof. Emily investors are starting to realize gms ability to diversify. Whether it be through ridesharing, self driving cars, some of these things are still out in the future. How does it all come together. How does it all come together for you . Dan when you think about mobility and automation, we believe there will eventually be automation in all vehicles along with electricity. Having all of these abilities under one roof its us a Real Advantage on how fast we can move and get this technology deployed commercially. Emily how do you leverage what you have learned . Dan we have a very productive investment relationship with lyft which gives us a perspective into the ridesharing business. We still think it is in the early stages of shared mobility. We are just at the beginning, and there is much more to come. Emily uber has had some struggles the past few months. Do you see some opportunities there . Opportunities to take advantage of a weakness . Dan we see ridesharing over all as at the intersection of autonomous. Ridesharing today accounts for 1 10 of 1 . We still have about 99 of the opportunity, so it is still very early days. We think the Autonomous Technology we will bring to fruition is the key to unlocking a lot of next opportunities. Emily why have you not bought lyft outright . Dan we have a lot of possibilities when it comes to going to market. We could go to market in different partnerships. All options are open at this time. Emily at one point do you now that you have learned all this, do you make a decision to move forward . Dan the more clarity that comes as Technology Gets closer to commercial deployment, then the more clarity we will have when it comes to this decision. What really matters is to get the vehicle profitable. We do believe in an all electric future at general motors, and we believe that, in order for that to come to fruition overtime, we need to get it down to a better price compared to internal Combustion Engine cars. We, as a company, have the capability to solve that problem. We do still have a little more work to go. Emily gm is moving faster than i think a lot of people expected. When you say self driving cars will be on the roads in a few years, what you mean by a few years . Dan i really cannot get more specific than that at this point in time. All i can say is that things are moving very quickly. We think we have a good approach when it comes to integrated technology which allows us to move at a good speed. We feel we have an obligation to move this technology to commercial appointed as soon as possible because of the impact it could have on improving road safety. Emily that was gms president dan ammann. Coming up, more from the laguna beach conference. Bob iger is confident that disneys portfolio of super hero films will pack a punch in the coming months. This is bloomberg. Emily welcome back to the best of bloomberg technology. The name of the game at cisco the last few years has been transition on legacy hardware to software and services. The push has been led by the ceo chuck robbins. I caught up with him at the wsj conference in laguna beach and asked about ciscos role in building the cities of tomorrow. What we see happening around the world whether its a company, a city, a country, technology is at the heart of every strategy. Cities are no different. Whether its meeting the objectives cities have around Revenue Generation or solving some of the problems they have like parking or like lighting costs, etc. , all of those can be solved or achieved through the use of technology. A quick example, 20 of the lighting costs in the world are 20 of the energy costs that come from lighting. By connecting these lights and controlling them more effectively, you can reduce that in the cities by 50 75 . The network is at the heart of making that happen. Emily how do you turn that into big business . We are operating in 120 cities around the world right now. We also have digitization agreements with 16 countries around the world where we are helping them with education and health care. All of it continues to contribute to the transition you talk about as you open the show, around moving to more software with Software Platforms in addition to the network. We have innovation going on across all of these areas in helping the cities achieve their objectives. Its a long road with these businesses but we think its going to be a great business for a long time. Emily you have said cisco will not stick its neck in the sand and ignore the changing industry. How would you rate your progress so far in making that transition . I never think we are going fast enough but i dont think any ceo does. When we started this, we had a couple of big objectives we want to drive and one was the transition to software. In eight quarters, our deferred Software Revenue on our Balance Sheet doubled from 2. 5 billion to 5 billion. Thats significant and we have an over 10 billion Software Business today. We wanted to also move toward more recurring revenue as a percentage of our business and last quarter we exited at 31 which was up four points from the prior year. Thats a big move for big business. Our product revenue, we had over 1 billion of that coming from recurring revenue which was up 40 yearoveryear, is the first time it had over been over one billion in one quarter which represented 11 of the product revenue. We made progress there and we have massive innovation we have been working on in the core franchises. Emily when will see software and Services Revenue become the driving force of growth . If you look right now, at where we are headed, i think they are going to be the drivers of growth over the next few years particularly if you look at the launch we did the summer. What are the things we wanted to do was reenergize our core franchises and bring a Software Model to our core franchises. We did that this summer. We launched the very early phases of what we call intuitive networking which is intentbased networking which is a category. It allows you to take the priorities of your business and drive them through to how you run your infrastructure as well as drive context out of the infrastructure through analytics. We have rewritten all of our software, we got analyst capability coming out of every aspect of our technology and we launched a subtraction business on top of our core switching platforms which people did not think we could do and we are having a good uptick on that. Emily you have been aggressive on m a. Are you open to more acqui