Second largest in california history. Global news, 24 hours a day, powered by more than 2700 journalists and analysts in more than 120 countries. Im alisa parenti, this is bloomberg. Bloomberg technology with emily chang is next. Emily im emily chang and this is bloomberg technology. Coming up, well take a look at a big year in consumer tech. What worked, what did not and what is worth your money . Plus, we discussed facebooks role on the platform for clinical propaganda. Is the social network overstepping by helping controversy all World Leaders used the platform . Ham says the firm is a tech company at heart. Our exclusive interview. Advanceddeveloping an hard ponder. Is part of a broader push to turn what is a Luxury Fashion device into a serious medical device. 20 of the population will be using a wearable device by next year. That growth rate is slowing. Joining us from chicago, along with a bloomberg tech reporter who broke the story about apple. What exactly are they working on here . . Already modest your heart it already monitors your heart to a certain extent. Moment andin the historical. It shows your heart rate over a. Of time. But an ekg, the device they are , what that is able to do is anticipate future cardiac events. It can see if you are going to have a stroke, or have a blood caught and should see a doctor. It is that Preventive Medicine and health care which is a huge opportunity for apple, potentially. Emily how does this fit into apples overall plan . The preventive idea is crucial. They have talked a lot about prospects. They are set to grow by as much of a third over the next five to 10 years. They are trying to position the watch toward the health care industry. It senses a great opportunity been just luxury products. Waywatch was marketed that to begin with. We do have some breaking news. Ofly the executive alphabets just getting in the full release. Googlesidt, who was ceo then became executive chairman. Larry page returned as ceo. The then restructured company and became ceo of alphabets and schmidt became executive chairman of apple that. There is likely some more to the story, those schmidt has been at the company for a long time. We will have more on the story momentarily. About appleaking and its health efforts, what is this signify about where apple wants to take the watch, and how much will this help monitor help sales . Remains the moment, it something of a luxury. Do just asking . , do you have a watch . They are trying to make it a central part of your life. If you have any concerns about Health Issues owing forward, you really feel like you need to buy one. Emily nicole, i want you to tell us a little bit about how wearables are doing right now. There was a lot of optimism about the potential for wearable devices but they have not lived up to the hype in terms of adoption. Where do things stand right now . Nicole that is exactly the case. Back in late 2015, we were very foolish on wearables or it that was primarily because we expected the apple watch to perform very well. When that did not happen, we downgraded our forecast last year significantly. We just updated that again. We bumped it up slightly, but nowhere near where we were at the time. Now we estimate that this year, 45 Million People in the u. S. Use a wearable at least once a month. Next you, that will rise by about 12 to about 50 million u. S. Users. Emily just once a month . Isnt the goal to be wearing them every day . Nicole most people probably do, but that is how we estimate usage. Emily do you think a feature like a more advanced heart monitoring feature would actually significantly boost sales of Something Like the apple watch . Nicole like you were saying, they are trying to turn this from a luxury nice to have item into a need to have item. While i think that that kind of Health Information would be of a lot of interest to some people who have risk factors and there are other ways of people watches i apple do not know that is something that the mass market will feel like they need. Especially at the current price point. Emily so, alex. Are talking about how wearables are slowing down and it seems march speakers are the hot thing this year. They could surpass wearable sales. I wonder if there is a similar question there as to whether they will continue to dominate the market as they are right now . Alex you mean in terms of for the watch itself . I think is interesting with the speaker. When they were first developing the home part, they saw some of the lessons they learned from the watch. They gradually shifted and realized that is how they should market. This is a music device. It is interesting the relationship between the two devices. Emily it is coming out early next year. To a lot of competition from google home and amazon echo. Alex webb, thank you so much. Nicole, thank you as well. Sticking with gadgets, with 2017 coming to an end, big tex companies are still fighting to win your heart. And more notably, your wallet. The biggest offerings from apple, amazon, and google . It has been a jampacked year for new tech products. All the big players are buying for every part of your life. Google is no longer just a search company. Amazon is more than a retail channel. Apple more than ever is going for the high end aaron they are all trying to fight to be your number one. ,pple is going for the high end the smartphone but the iphone x. Without a doubt, this was the most anticipated gadget of the year. Perhaps the biggest iphone update in the companys history. So far it has been a hit with consumers. Apple is expecting and 80 billion holiday quarter. Google wants to sell you a 400, super loud, highend speaker that works well with it new pixel to phone. Amazon is trying to be everywhere in your room. They have released several speakers. Devicen alarm clock and of the future. It integrates services and is a solid holiday gift for the tech lover in your home. Apples home pod, will come out in early 2018 after being delayed. The iphone maker is already working on its next iphone as well as an ipad with a psyd for next year. Google is working on a new home speaker with a screen where it amazon is always working on new echoes. Happy holidays. Emily that was bloomberg technologys mark gurman. Returning to headlines, we prefer you just a few minutes ago out of that saying eric schmidt is stepping down from his executive chairman role to become a Technical Advisor to the company. This ending a 17 year Senior Leadership position at the internet giant. Joining us now on the transition, number Television Editor at large cory johnson. Cory i remember when he got the job. It was an amazing thing to see these entrepreneurs with a new ideas get one of the best people in Silicon Valley. He was well known for what he did. He came with a knowledge of how Enterprise Software works so much. He was known for his mind in Silicon Valley. Google became one of the Great Companies in the history of the world. As much as it was the founders, it was eric schmidt deeply involved. He was an executive chairman. He was very much involved. Nonexecutive chairman is a very different job. Essentially it is a board level advisory role. He will still have an active role in the business. , just simplyble remarkable what he has done in 17 years at google. Emily so this from larry page. Continuing his 17 years of service from the company he will be helping us as a Technical Advisor. I am incredibly excited about the product our company is making an about the strong leaders driving innovation. Presumably that is a reference to other alphabet companies. Corey think about how much bruce comes into google that she will pare down some of these things. Company witho the a goofy idea of letting smart people give highs salaries and explore things. One of the most interesting things about his long career in technology was recognizing how the very latest development in technology would be very pertinent in the near future in enterprise and consumer facing technology. From Silicon Valley and putting his company at the forefront of that. Emily the question remains is there anything more to this story . If he transitioning out because he is ready to transition out or is there more . Corey there have been discussions about him going to all kinds of places. We have to get rid of the kinds of places we read in the past and higher eric schmidt. This guy a so plugin and understands technology. It means there are a lot of opportunities available to him. He has been moving away from the executive role at google for a long time with the move from ceo to i remember when that happened. It was 2011. Page came in as ceo and in 2015 he restructured and turned the company into a bet. Corey he has had a remarkable career at Silicon Valley. He has also been very involved in philanthropy. I would not expect that to stop either. Emily thank you for giving us the more context. Sing has raised 50 billion. Cash reserves at 12 billion. Raised goesmoney toward Autonomous Cars and electric car charging networks. Coming up, facebook theres a lot about getting influential people on this platform. Now the companys practice of working with politicians, some use it to silence opponents is under scrutiny. Next. This is bloomberg. Emily facebooks influence in elections worldwide continues to be under scrutiny. It is a politically agnostic tool, but they actively work with hearties and leaders. A teamtiative is run by that is neutral and that it works with anyone seeking or securing power. Bloombergs sarah frier broke this story. Fascinating story. What exactly does the Facebook Policy Team do . They do withike celebrities or sports stars, this team trains politicians about live video, how to build a base of followers, and all of those tactics that then when they end up running for of office, they have a very close relationship with them and continues to help them. Sometimes they turn it into a Campaign Advertising relationship. Emily this is no matter what their politics. Sarah absolutely. Dutere was one of them. Withhave worked closely the far right party in germany. The Scottish National party. This is something that facebook just does that based across all kinds of political parties. They drew draw the line at some very strong extremists. They do not work with the far right for example. This is something that is looking very concerning today because we are seeing facebooks influence and power locally in shaping elections. The fact that politicians are anding special training, they are using it against their citizens, definitely is an uncomfortable position for the company to be in. Emily and you spoke with a formal a former member of the team because she was uncomfortable. Sarah right, my colleague spoke with her. She said the team was has started to help to create democratic relationships within societies and evolved into an election nearing strategy. She said she did not like how it was turning. Emily back to the question, if facebook is a neutral platform, why do they need to help politicians learn how to use it . Everyone else learns how to use it on their own. What are they saying about their role here . Sarah i think it goes back to their longstanding competition with twitter. We have seen twitter become the bullhorn for important people around the world. Our president included. Naturallyas never been that kind of place for politicians and leaders. So they have had to train and ease people into it. They have been very successful in getting these politicians to get massive followings on their network. From that perspective, it seems like a good idea. When you look at it from the context of now youre helping the people in our, but the citizens in some of these countries may be new to the internet and not as digitally savvy. It creates a power imbalance. Frier, thank you so much for sharing that with us. We will continue to follow. Coming up, facebook is not only dabbling in politics it is making a push into music. Signing a multiyear deal with universal music. How it ends up the competition with youtube, next. This is bloomberg. Emily facebook has signed a multiyear licensing deal that lets the network carry artists from the worlds biggest labels. Under the agreement, facebook users will be able to upload songs of the universal label and share using through facebook instagram, and the art technology. Joining us from l. A. , lucas shaw. Lucas four , they have great ambitions in video. In recent years, any video that is included a song, say you are at your wedding and you dance to that video gets taken down because you do not have the right to use that song and facebook does not have the right to host videos using that song. It has been a source of frustration for users and facebook. This solves that problem for them and in the long, give them the potential to improves their relationship with the music business so that it could get the right to professional video in the future. For the music business, it has been irritating for them to have videos violating copyright on facebook. It helps them establish facebook as a competitor to you to. Two youtube. Emily do you expect we will see a deal this with other record labels . Lucas yes. Facebook has been talking with sony and warner for several months. I do not know if they will announce them or how, i would be surprised that they did not have deals with all three of the majors in the next three months. This signify to the competition, whether it is youtube or spotify. Lucas what you have seen in the music business is there have been growth recently because of paid Services Like spotify, apple music. Free has been an untamed wilderness. Youtube is where everyone goes. The music business is trying to bring order to what people can and cannot listen to for free. Universal music, made a deal with spotify that gave them greater control over what music was available for free. With youtube, and a deal announced earlier this week, they got greater control over what music was available for free. If they get to a point with facebook where they spoke is hosting full songs, they will exert a lot of control over what is available for free. You canl want to say listen to any feature you want if you pay. If you are not going to pay come you can only listen to certain songs. They have made a lot of progress this year toward that end. Emily quick question, only 30 seconds left. Mark dribbles about a spotify ipo. What is the latest we know . Lucas a report in the wall street journal said the fcc was leaning toward approving their direct listing. It is not a huge surprise, but we had supported earlier the fcc was looking into it. Lay, lucas shaw, in a thank you. Still ahead, our exclusive interview with bank of america chair brian moynihan. His thoughts on bitcoin and why he is skeptical about bitcoin. This is bloomberg. Alisa parenti in washington. Lets start with a check of your first word news. The house of past federal funding to keep the government running for three more weeks. The bill still has to clear the senate before the shutdown deadline on friday. 188. Ure passed 231 it would maintain current spending levels through january 2019 and provides emergency funding for Missile Defense work as well as other pentagon expenses. Authorities say the driver of an suv who drove into a crowd is an Australian Citizen with a history of mental ole miss and no known link to terrorism. Vice president pence has outlined president trumps strategy in afghanistan. Pence says trump has put pakistan on notice that the country has much to lose if it continues to harbor terrorists. Says he says too often they provide safe haven to terrorists and says those days are over. The department of homeland securitys internal watchdog says his office will investigate how a small says aws was lanes of dollars in contracts after hurricane maria. He said he would look into why a bronze star llc never delivered the emergency tarps and plastic sheeting as promised. The supplies were needed to cover homes damaged by the storms wind. Im alisa parenti. This is bloomberg test after 5 30 p. M. Here in washington. It is already the weekend. 6 30 in hong kong. We are joined by sophie with a look at the markets. Sophie already the weekend we are gearing up for a happier friday as we close out the penultimate week of 2017. Investors react to the latest u. S. Gdp figures. Moving to the board to check on the yen, which is sticking bitcoin looking set to snap a three base slide and we are watching copper. Kong up next more with bloomberg technology. Our top story, stepping down. The transition and a 17 career eric schmidt is stepping down as Technical Advisor to alphabet. Investors large and small are determining how Much Technology will in florence the market. The company has made strides such as ai and Voice Recognition to improve the Banking Experience for its customers. Moynihan sat down with us in an exclusive interview and talked about the transformation. Since i have been ceo i have been trying to do something. We are about 25 billion in coding. That is a lot of feature functionality and improvements. Its about 2. 5 to 3 billion per year and a little higher when youd do mergers and stuff. Its a talented group of teammates and a bunch of huge Computer Technology systems and frameworks. That is what we do. Money is digital. Activity is digital. Together for our customers and teammates is huge. What will happen between improvements in Voice Recognition and artificial intelligent, ada storage and retrieval and wifi networks, being able to transmit on a wifi basis times of data without having a battery go down in 10 seconds, all of that is important. Having all of the data in the world unless the person is going to act on it, which requires storage, analytics, and distribution, the last part you hit a note. The question is you have to have it all come together. The advances are tremendous. When we think about a voice or text Artificial Intelligence for bank of america specifically question mark we think customers want to get the answer quickly. It takes hightech. We have millions come into our branches every day, we have to do a great job there. Have to do a great job of erica in that old build and it will interface alexa and other things. What it is really using all of those things the number one thing is you cant put it ahead of the customer. All of the digital wallets we android take,y, there is still a small percentage of it. It is growing, and a decade from now it will be a big number, but you have to have it in order to make it go there. Year, grown 100 per yearoveryear. It is still a minor amount of payments that go out of customers accounts. It is a tremendously great project for customers, we just have to drive it out there. Without human adoption, we have lost out on that before. We think of ourselves as a Technology Driven company. When you put it all together, at the end of the day we are high touch and hightech, because you cant do one without the other. In five years, only people work here and how many of them will be we would call them tech able now . Is there a shift in the balance . Ryan it is hard to say, because itsve a lot of brian a little hard to say. You have to realize we are investing and as we downsized ranches we upsize a number of people. Everybody is technology oriented. The company has to be. If you go downstairs in the branch you can see they are working off ipads and doing what you can do yourself, because it is the fastest way to do it here coding . No. But they are serving customers there is anlogy, so automated rebalancing based on risk perception, which is growing quickly. It is a piece of technology, but still people need to get behind it. Customers never appear, they want to know that i do the right things, did i do this right. We have Financial Advisors in the branches. David does it going have a future in bank of americas existence and what is it . Brian when you separate this question you have the block chain technology. That is most important and i think we have 37 patents already. Ways stry uses it in we have to figure out ways we can verify very complex transactions where a lot of information and money is moving together. When you are talking about is the movement of money, one half of the money move today is moved digitally tiered when you get to anonymous currency, thats a different question. And that is a policy question whether we want an anonymous currency out there and that is where you see people struggle. David do think we do . Brian i think we wanted. The reason why the largest nomination is 100 bills is to make money harder to move. I think that is what the western economy learned over time. The ability to find the money is to have it come through in a huge in the industry does. It helps you find all kind of interesting things in that is important for Law Enforcement and other kinds of things. The speculation on what other people reflect on you see great debates on it here at the idea of digitizing money is not new. The wire system is a digital system. What is exciting is when you can walk around bryant park and be able to tap your phone or Something Like that as opposed to carrying dollars. Those are exciting things. Thats how you and i Exchange Money if you and i have lunch together. That is exciting. At the end of the day after the expenses, five of them will be moving coin, currency, and checks around the system. If i can take that down in a safe, verifiable, know your customer that is a very valuable thing for us. We could pay them to reprint the money rather than having to cycle it back in and out because it was cheaper to move it around. Emily that was a good america Ceo Brian Moynihan speaking to bloombergs david westin. Disney lost their bid with fox to keep sensitive documents out of the antitrust case. Disney bought to shield the information as well as data on revenue, pricing, and subscribers. The u. S. Government seeks to interview as many as 60 witnesses ahead of trial. At the biggest stories of 2017. This is bloomberg. Emily from bitcoin to the theory him, to light going, the value of the current he exploded in 2017. One of the biggest players is going base, an online is coin base. It almost tripled its base this year now standing at 13 million accounts. He caught up with the ceo talk about the growing interest in cryptocurrency. There has been an influx of interest in Digital Currency. Heart of it has been driven by institutional money getting interested in the space. Have seen large curative large derivatives space. That has driven a lot of interest. It is a signal that traditional institutions are starting to move into Digital Currency here it Digital Currency. Emily what does that mean for you . Does it create new challenges . This is an asset class more and more people are going to trade. But we offer spot market data and we are discussing it with them. Largest digital institution in the country. We are offering custodian products where a lot of investors need a place to store Digital Currencies on behalf of their lps and their clients and we lost a product on that called going base called coinbase custody. Are you concerned people will go work with more Traditional Companies and coin base . Brian due to currency moving so fast i do think a company dedicated to it with 200 people will do not Industry Knowledge over the last five years will have a sustainable competitive advantage. Are the irs is asking about profits. What are your customers saying about this . Unprecedented. Y we pushed back strongly. We took it to court. The judge gave us a big vote of confidence in they ,educed the request of the irs it wasnt down to zero, but it was a partial victory. I think if we look longterm, we want to help people pay all of their taxes on Digital Currency gains. I think this should look Like Fidelity or Charles Scwab where everyone gets to 99 statements. We are working with the irs where everyone can pay their taxes, but this is a new technology that doesnt fit into the existing remark perfectly, and we need to work with everyone. Emily are you giving advice to your clients about how to report their game to the irs . Brian we try to stay away from tax advice. That is not what we do. But we do provide them a cost basis report they can send to their accountant. Thats it we have in place until there is Something Like 1099s. Emily lets talk about some of these other currencies. What do you see happening with ethereum versus bitcoin in the future . Brian they have sort of evolved down different paths. Bitcoin have come down quite a bit, 50 or 60 . Bitcoin is ending up being a little more like digital gold, kind of the oldest digital torency, the one people flee and times of uncertainty, but it hasnt become a Payment Network to paper transactions like people might want. If the rim has grown to do that and. Doingng ethereum is more transactions per day then bitcoin. It is much more programmable than bitcoin. You can send a to b, or subtract lead to a. Ethereum is like a programming language you can run on a globally decentralized computer here at it is a mindbending concept, but it is much more programmable. Emily when it comes to the price, how do you see bitcoin versus ethereum playing out . Do you see the bitcoin spike continuing . Do you see ethereum surpassing like some say it will . Brian yeah. In Broad Strokes how i think of it, bitcoin does have a scarcity built in. If something is more scarce, the price can be driven up. If the rim has taken a different approach, which is there may be a moderate inflation curve like they may target a 2 to 3 inflation rate per year, if the rim is not gold like bitcoin is. It is ethereum is not gold like bitcoin is. One broad thing you could look at is where are the users going and where are the developers building the new apps, . I see developers building more on it. Today. Bes hat was going going base ceo. News, a big blow to spanish prime minister. These are live pictures from barcelona. Towardsextent independence for catalonia in spain. We will be right back. This is bloomberg. Emily lets keep taking a look back on some of the biggest interviews of the year. Amazon says a switch to the cloud is just beginning. I sat down with amazons the eeo and asked if he growth of the unit has surpassed his wildest expectations. Certainly grown fast and i dont think any of us would have had the audacity to predict it would grow as fast as it has, but i think we always believed it had a chance to be a significant business, and that is because just inside of amazon, we had a lot of internal Development Teams that want help moving fast on top of a technology platform. The fact that amazon wanted it made us think that a third party would have wanted it. I dont think we wouldve predicted it would be a 15 billion business growing quickly, and i dont think we would have predicted we would have the several times the business of the next 14 providers combined or that we would have millions of active customers or a six to seven year head start. All of those things were surprises to us. Emily of course now your competitors want this, too. How do you stay in a leading position . It is not a surprise to us that a lot of Tech Companies want to replicate what weve done. Fors a great value customers, that is why it is being adopted so fast. I think there are the differences between platforms. The big thing is there is a lot more functionality by a large amount and anybody else and we are also iterating at a faster clip. There are different ecosystems around these platforms. It is not just the thousands of system administrators, but most isp providers will work on one platform. Some do two, very few have the time to do three. And it all starts with aws. I think the maturity of platforms are in really here we haveces this expression internally that there is no compression out rhythm for experience. Thats because you cant learn certain lessons until you get to a different of the scale. A lot of the competitors have not learned the lessons yet. Emily you just added ge as a customer. Tell us about the length you are going through to not just get new customers, but keep the customers you have. Of active millions customers. The best way to think about it is we have millions who have use the platform in the last 30 days. The most big successful startups have completely built from scratch. Like interest,es airbnb, robin hood, over the last three years the enterprise and public adoption has dramatically increased in the cloud and aws. You see every meaningful vertical business in aws. Has, capitalp, Service FinancialService Capital one, manufacturing, ge. They have an they have been working with aws for a long time. Even though we compete with them in our video business. Haver Public Sector we more than 3000 Government Agencies worldwide and a lot more customers then you will find elsewhere. Emily that was Amazon Web Services ceo. That does it for this edition of bloomberg technology. You can check us out online. That is all for now. This is bloomberg. 7 00 a. M. In hong kong and we are live from bloombergs asian headquarters. I am yvonne man. Welcome to daybreak asia. Top stories this friday, separatist have won the election in catalonia. The National Prime ministers own party struggling for support. In asiapacific market yet to try gains on wall street, u. S. Equities breaking a losing streak as traders assess the tax cuts. From Bloomberg Global headquarters, im betty liu in new york where it is just after 6 p. M. Nike stepping forward around the world, domestic sales have lost ground to rival adidas. Eric