Global news, 24 hours a day, powered by more than 2700 journalists and analysts in more than 120 countries. This is bloomberg. Bloomberg technology is next. Emily im emily chang. This is bloomberg technology. Coming up, samsungs attempt to steal the smartphone thunder from apple. Introducing the new galaxy 8 phone ahead of apples next big iphone event. Mutual funds take into account ubers year of drama, slashing their valuations for the ridesharing giant. Of bitcoin surges, investor interest is only growing stronger. Are we in a crypto currency bubble, and when could it pop . Its a redefining moment for the samsung note line as the south Korean Company unveils the brandnew note 8, the largest Samsung Phone yet. It could be its most important. After last years exploding battery fiasco, consumers could be hesitant to pick the model backup. Samsung feels confident that the problems are fixed and wants to move forward with what it hopes will be its, quote, its, quote, best mobile device yet. Selina wang and mark gurman are with us. Now that weve seen the official unveiling, what are your takeaways from a consumer perspective . Mark i love the bigger screen. I think that being able to replace a tablet and your computer by just one device, its a great thing. A lot of people are going to like that. When the note 7 was announced, everybody loved it until it started exploding. As long as they fixed the exploding part, they are in good shape. Emily how much do you think the him exploding issues will impact new sales . Mark it will be a joke for a few weeks. People have been laughing about it for the next last year. I think samsung will be laughing all the way to the bank. Emily selina, how did samsung sell this new phone . Did they refer to any of the drama from last year . Selina there was a lot of excitement, a gigantic line. At the start, the addressed exploding they addressed the exploding smartphone issue. They addressed it with a sense of gravitas. An executive at samsung said, you know, we will never forget what happened, but we thank our fans for helping to inspire us and move us forward. A really big part of the presentation, the event was focused on the note loyalists. The people who stuck with the phone even after it exploded and came back and were excited to buy the note 8. There was a lot of excitement. From people i spoke to, it seems they emphatically think samson has mostly gotten over the debacle of last year. About markettalk share. Samsung regained the number one position in the Global Smartphone market earlier this year. Apple, 12 . Will the new note 8, the new iphone coming in september, the essential phone will that shake up the numbers significantly . Mark i dont think the essential phone will shake up the numbers. I think it will be a niche player. I think essential will be happy with that. They are probably not going to get a single percentage point. The chinese makers are right on apples back. Maybe they will cross them, maybe they wont. The iphone will be constrained for the first few months of the launch, the premium model. We will get a good indication of where the answer the iphone versus apple the apple versus samsung fight will be. Ly what do you think will selina it will probably top what it did for the note 7 and the s8, which blew previous versions out of the water. Excitementot of here. Samsung is regaining its lead as the number one smartphone player. Estimates say the united states, both apple and samsung have about 3 4 of the market. Theres a lot of stickiness to the samsung ecosystem, so sales are pretty robust right now. Emily we talked about this a little bit yesterday, but remind us where samsung has the edge in terms of actual features, as compared to what youre expecting with the new iphone. Mark thats a good question, and i think its something not a lot of people understand. Samsung is heavily brutally vertically integrated. Samsung has been ahead of the pack in some chiprelated things, too. The biggest thing the battery. They make some of their own components for batteries. They sell to apple. They make displays. They make their own screens. They also make apple screens. If i was in charge of samsung, why would i want to give my biggest competitor priority in terms of the screens . Thats why you see the advanced screen technologies appear in the samsung devices three or four years before they do in apple. Emily apple has minimized its dependence on samsung. What our customers most excited asked what our customers what are customers most excited about . What do they want . Selina one of the biggest differentiators of the note is the gigantic screen and the infinity display, the curved edge, so that you get as much room as possible. Because of that gigantic screen, you can do a lot more without having to scroll. You can launch two apps at the same time. Say you are on your way to work and you want to have google maps pulled up at the same time as spotify, you dont have to scroll back and forth as much. Theres a dual camera lens on the back, so you can take more professionallooking photos. Consumers were very excited about that at the event. You can have soft focus, focus more on the figure you are trying to take a photo of. The other big differentiator here is that stylus. It means you can write and draw on your phone, like youre holding a pen and pad. Those are the main things that consumers were most excited about at the event. Emily theres one more topic i want to cover. The New York Times out with a story detailing how apples ambitions have become more modest since the inception. Apples ceo revealed to us exclusively back in june his vision for apples role in the future of cars. Take a listen. Tim we sort of see it as the mother of all ai projects. It is probably one of the most difficult ai projects actually to work on. Autonomy is something that is incredibly exciting for us, and, but we will see where it takes us. We are not really saying from a Product Point of view what we will do. We are being straightforward that its a Core Technology that we view as very important. Emily so, the big question, of course, is what will they do from a Product Point of view, which is the one thing he wouldnt say. The New York Times is talking about a Shuttle Service that will test this technology on the apple campus. What do you know when it comes to the latest on the car plans, aside from focusing on the underlying technology, rather than building a car it self . Mark it is a great story. It sort of detailed, similarly to our tech talk in october, about how apple started by building electric cars they want to take on detroit and tesla. They are building a car. They completely abandoned it when they acquired new hardware engineers. Now they are working on underlying software, as tim cook told you in your wonderful interview in june. We will see. Are they going to just continue to make software . Will they go back and build their own car . I dont think theyve made that decision yet. Emily the New York Times seems to believe they have made that decision. That they have said will use some of their software to test the Shuttle Service. We dont know if they will have an icar. Who knows how expensive that would be. Emily , certainly a lot of details to be reported on. Im sure youll bring us new details as you have them. Mark gurman, selina wang. Thank you both. Coming up, ubers year of drama is weighing down its valuations in the eye of mutual funds. Which funds are cutting estimates for the ride hailing the gimenez . Ridehailing behemoth . This is bloomberg. Emily whole foods shareholders a vote by the grocery shareholders went as expected and moved to deal one step poster to completion closer to completion. Just last week amazon sold 16 billion worth of unsecured bonds, in some part to fund the acquisition. Blackrock, vanguard group, and t. Rowe price have lowered their ober valuations uber valuations by as much as 15 . They have faced a persistent drumbeat of bad news, on top of an ongoing seo ceo search. Valuationeld up its as assigned to employees, partners, and prospective competitors that it is a transformational, once in a generation company. Any evidence that uber may be less valuable that in appears may scare off less valuable off it appears may scare employees and shareholders. Ric 15 cooper uber blackrock, just 1 . Its a useful sign, especially as this big softbank deal gets done and we dont know what the valuation for the secondary shares that are going to get bought, for people selling into that deal and people doing the selling, having these professional assessments of the companys valuation could give them a guidance. Emily that was my question. Youve been reporting about new investor interest. Is that happening at that 69 billion valuation . Is it significant that the valuation would be flat, rather than increasing . Eric there certainly is strong interest from the company and insiders to see the primary valuation stay at 69 billion. Emily even if it is flat, is that a good thing . Eric its hard to say, you note i mean . Given the you know what i mean . Given the circumstances, a flat valuation is the best theyre going to get. In the secondary in terms of what they are actually paying, netted out, its going to be a lower value. Emily who is selling the shares, other investors, employees, former employees . Eric thats the big question. Is benchmark doing the selling . Is travis doing the selling . The range of the secondary sale that we reported was anywhere from 2 billion to 10 billion. You can get a sense of how uncertain people are about what the appetite for selling is going to be. Emily there are new numbers out from uber, showing fairly positive revenue numbers. Gross bookings up 17 . Trips up 150 in the last year. Losses falling. What you make of the numbers . What do you make of the numbers . Eric they are good. Its all about perspective. Uber is losing historic amounts of money. If you annualized the 600 million losses they had in this quarter, you get to, like, 2 bi llion. If you compare that to amazon when they had their worst it loss worst ebitda the scale is significant. They are still humongous compared to any company. Emily for most of that quarter, uber still had a ceo, even though the investigation was ongoing. It would be interesting to see the numbers for the current quarter. Ch. Sear labor day is approaching. They said they would have someone in place by then or at least have voted on it. Jeff immelt seems to be the only name out there. There eric there were reports that meg whitman was back in the mix. We have held our tongue there. Theres a lot of confusion, the idea that they had put her out there. It seems like jeff immelt is their main candidate. There have been these other candidates purportedly still in the mix. We will see. Emily do you think labor day is a realistic deadline . Will we know by then . Eric i think everybody is exhausted and would love to see a deadline met, but it requires groups of investors who dont get along to get along. Hard to say whether they are going to be able to meet the deadline or not. They would love to see it met if everybody can get along. Emily im sure you would love to see it met, too. Eric newcomer, thanks so much. The debate over u. S. Tax reform is coming into focus as congress is set to reconvene. U. S. House Speaker Paul Ryan was at an intel plant on a tax reform business tour. Ryan said the current tax code is, quote, a junker. He talked about the chances of a Government Shutdown. Speaker ryan i dont think a Government Shutdown is necessary, and i dont think most people want to see a Government Shutdown, ourselves included. Congress and the house has all ready done its work on the issue. Emily ryans comments just a day after President Trump said threatened to bring the u. S. Government to the brink of a shutdown if needed to pressure Conference Congress into funding a border wall with mexico. Coming up, after the events in charlottesville, virginia, tech firms have all taken a stand against neonazi groups, but the debate in Silicon Valley over its dealings with hate and hate groups continues. A feature i want to bring to your attention, our interactive tv function. Watch us live. If you miss an interview, you can go back to it. Send our producers and message. Click along with the charts. This is for bloomberg subscribers only. This is bloomberg. Emily the success of apples iphone has caused a Ripple Effect in the airline industry. China airlines have surged more than 30 in the last eight days, adding more than 4 billion to its market cap. Eva airways had its best week in a year. They expect to benefit from taiwanese supplier orders from apple. Since the events in charlottesville, virginia, a surprising topic has come to the forefront in Silicon Valley. Deepseated divisions about how far Tech Companies should go to silence hate groups, specifically nazis. Can and should they act on moral judgment alone . Max chafkin explores the topic. Max, you point out that a lot of these ceos, tech ceos got a lot of praise for denouncing nazis, when thats not exactly heroic, but just an obvious thing that you do. Explain. Max one of the sort of interesting things that has played out over not just the past couple of weeks, but the past six months, is that Silicon Valley has had kind of a hard time navigating the era of donald trump. Thats partly because, even before the election, there was all this controversy around Companies Like facebook and google, as to whether or not they were Media Companies or technology companies. If you are a technology company, then you dont have to take any responsibility for any of the content that is on your platform. If you are a media company, obviously you do. These Companies Want to be technology companies. They are valued higher. You dont spend as much on content moderation. The thing that happened two weeks ago, suddenly these companies realized, hey, maybe we have to take at least some responsibility. That came to the forefront when google and go daddy and a bunch of other companies took down a nazi publication that had basically been on the internet until then. Cloudflare was the last of those companies to cut off the daily stormer. It has taken a more laissezfaire approach to these things. We had the ceo on the show, and he said he is still uncomfortable with his decision to take down the site, that ultimately he did so because the daily stormer was claiming they had cloudflares support, quoteunquote. He believes no person, no company should have the power to do such a thing. Take a listen to what he had to say. We turned to the experts in terrorism and illegal content, Law Enforcement, regulators. We say, here is this content. What would you like us to do . That feels like the principle of areprocess, that they politically enshrined organizations who can make these decisions, as opposed to these decisions being made based on the political whims of me or Mark Zuckerberg or jeff bezos. Emily he is arguing that Internet Companies should be regulated more like utilities, that this decision should be out of their hands. What do you think . Max i dont know that hes really thought through that one. If you are regulated as utility, you were about burdens you worry about burdens. That creates a whole additional set of burdens. There are price controls. Theres a whole bunch of stuff that, if you really think through it, you dont necessarily want. The other thing i would point out is, this is not something that necessarily has to be solved by Law Enforcement or the government. Free speech lets businesses do business pretty much with whoever they want. They point out in the article, if you own a bar and some of the is spouting off about nazi believes or whatever, you can throw them out. Cloud floor cloudflare or google can choose not to do business with anybody. I think we have seen that is possible, in the sense that the daily stormer is still available. Its a little bit grandiose to think that cloudflare or google or any other company has to have some kind of grand governments system governance system to deal with the bad actors. They can just get rid of them. Emily is it a slippery slope . Where do you draw the line . Max thats the counter argument. If they get rid of the nazis, maybe they will get rid of the black lives matter activists. Frankly, i dont put a lot of stock in that. The fact is that there are multiple competing companies. They all want as much business as possible. I dont think its too hard to see the difference between, you know, White Supremacy and some activist causes. We can count on our Business Leaders to make those distinctions reliably. I think the slippery slope argument it mostly serves to allow these Tech Companies to wash their hands of making some hard decisions. Emily we will see if they indeed make those decisions. Max chafkin of bloombergs businessweek. Call it the crypto effect. Chipmakers ride the wave. Can it last, or is it a bubble about to burst . If you like bloomberg news, check us out on the radio. Listen on the Bloomberg Radio app, bloomberg. Com, and in the u. S. On sirius xm. This is bloomberg. Track your pack. Set a curfew, or two. Make dinnertime device free. [ music stops ] [ music plays again ] a smarter way to wifi is awesome. Introducing xfinity xfi. Amazing speed, coverage and control. Change the way you wifi. Xfinity. The future of awesome. Mark im Mark Crumpton in new york. You are watching bloomberg technology. Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell says he and President Trump are working to prevent a debt default. A statement adds that he, the president , and their teams are, quote, in regular contact. This comes after the New York Times reported that the re