mulberry. this woman is the creator and the one who went around that mulberry bush and tagged it. it would be fair to call her a web pioneer. she's probably best known as the creator of flickr, sold to yahoo! f35 million dollars. i want to talk about findery for a second, but i want to talk about hunch. >> it was acquired by e-bay. what is that like. >> you create this little baby and you sell it far lot of money. congratulations. and then you kind of check online and somebody threw it in the trash. >> that's one way to think about it. flickr was acquired by yahoo! and still is to this day known as flickr. for some companies, that's the right thing to do. the right thing to keep the name and the right thing to continue it as flickr. it's a community site. it's very difficult to rebrand it as a yahoo! site. so that's a very important thing to think about when you're doing a -- when you're doing an integration into a larger company. and yes, it is a sad day when no longer you go to hunch.com and it redirects to e-bay. that was a sad day, a recent day. >> did you stick around e-bay because you stayed at yahoo! for a while? >> i stayed with yahoo! for three years but did not go with the hunch acquisition. >> why not? >> i had already left before the acquisition happened. so it was the right thing to do for that particular product. >> so did hunch -- i'm sorry, did they get folded into e-bay? >> hunch got folded into e-bay. >> they are used it for some fact. >> and it's a wonderful and remarkable team who were -- the hunch team is one of the most brilliant teams around. an army of national language processing. it is remarkable, smart people. >> let's say nbc decide to buy findry, what prevents in these -- in these, what they call them, acquiring hiring. what prevents you and your team from standing around for a little bit and just taking off and essentially leaving? >> golden handcuffs. the contracts are written usually in such a way that -- >> you've got to stay. did you stay at yahoo! for exactly the period of time or did you stick around? >> i stayed for exactly the period of time. but they had actually written the contract in such a way that, you know, three years i was there, which is a long time. i think that's kind of typical. sometimes there's two years, sometimes there's four years, but mine was three years and i stayed for three years. >> at that time, did you have in your mind to stick it out? >> it depends on the entrepreneur and it depends on how the corporate development team handles the acquisition. there's some products that come in and they are neglected, they are not cultivated. the founders are not put into an environment in which they are thriving. you know n my case, i actually made the decision that i was going to make this great. and i think the that that's the key to a successful acquisition, successful integration and corporate development when being brought into a big company, is to decide in advance, even before i got there, i'm going to make this work. and it turned out that working on flickr during that time, i worked there for the first year that i was there, on flickr, that it was more like making flickr more like yahoo!. and i decided white-collar i was there that the more interesting product was to make yahoo! more like flicker. so i left the flicker team and worked on products within the company. that i wouldn't learn about anywhere else, like search. search a s a massive undertaking. i was never going to do that. and if i learned about search, i would do it there. this is yahoo! university and it made my time there actually really a very pleasant time to be there. >> so how do you come up with an idea for findery. i was playing around it this morning and i realized i live close to el palo alto, the original tree that palo alto is named after. i have to say that i don't quite get it and maybe i haven't played around with it enough and contributed to it, but what keeps people coming back and who is the community and why did you create it? >> it was really about place. so it's about -- we have all the mobile devices and carry them with us everywhere. and it seemed to me as if all the products i was seeing out there over and over again were about, were about mulberry pie or venues, restaurants, readings and reviews and recommendations. and about where to go. and i think that we can say with a great deal of confidence that where do i eat tonight, that problem has been solved. solved, done. >> whatever that was. >> there are a lot of applications out there solving that problem, but what we are trying to solve the s the meaning of the place, the spirit of the place, the history of the place. what is the thing about this place, in particular, that is different from other places? i am here. >> it rather struck me as sort of being the historical marker. if you brought up history, if we could make an iron marker that says on this spot, in fact, there was one spot, i forget where it was, i think it was madison, wisconsin, i was -- i used to live in manson, yeah, there's a spot where elvis got into a fight. >> there you go. >> i thought of exactly the same thing. i was in north korea and in there, and everywhere you would see, this is what i came across. or whatever. and the rocks and the mountains. and i made my first book there and thought, somebody from nbc a minute ago in the lobby was talking about the microphones. i thought, that does make sense when you get famous people on there posting. what did you do there? >> that would be fantastic. >> kilroy was here. >> you are living in it. and i have lived in my neighborhood since 2006. so eight years. and it wasn't until three years ago when findry began that i learned about the entire jazz district that was near my house, that janice joplin used to live nearby, kurt cobain, all these interesting things. >> you are learning this on top of google maps, so why don't you just google, believe me, this is the question i asked about microsoft, what is to stop microsoft from doing it? we don't have that anymore. you can imitate google maps, to some extent. >> you can. >> so what are you giving me that google maps isn't giving me? >> they have had this feature for a very long time but it hasn't -- >> it's a community aspect. >> it's a community aspect. my background is in media. and you generate community building and all that kind of thing. those are the things that i think are really important in the creation of a product like this. and google, god bless them, are really trying hard with google plus and a lot of the other products out there to make them a more social company, but as we know, google's main thrust is, you know, organizing the world's information. information that takes a while from data to become information to become knowledge to become wisdom in that kind of scenario, to become, you know, living as, you know, something that people kind of have conversations about. >> it seems like a fascinating way for tourism, especially in history, but are businesses using it? i'm thinking about generating revenue, are they using it in creative ways? >> we have a lot of businesses that are on there using them in creative ways. we have, for example, a real estate company. there's the corcoran group, a big real estate group in new york that sells high-end real estate. they have put their listings on there, but more interestingly they have been putting all the local knowledge that they have. that is really what real estate companies are good at these days. they have been disintermediated by the internet. real estate is one of those industries. and they have -- they have shown that you, mr. and mrs. jackson, who are arriving from chicago are not familiar with the upper west side. we are going to show you about our knowledge of the upper west side. we have businesses that are, for example, american eagle recently came on, and they started using it in a really interesting way. they started putting on, you know, the outtakes from their photo shoots. we are flying down here with a bunch of people modeling denim jeans in costa rica and telling the backstory behind the scenes at the shoots. so this is very different from what you would do on another location base product, like where you would be, where you would be kind of advertising deals or that kind of thing. >> i need to interrupt and end your interview on television. i would like to take a couple more minutes and we can talk about this for a couple minutes, but for tv viewers, i'm going to toss to a commercial break. on the internet, on our website, we will talk a bit about etsy, but in the meantime, if you're watching television, we'll take a closer look at amazon and book publishers when "press here" continues. welcome back. we have talked often on this show about net neutrality. the idea that internet service providers shouldn't throttle or control data. they shouldn't decide what website you get to visit. it never occurred to us a website would try to slow down anything, but sure enough, amazon.com has slow delivery of books published . and they admit they don't keep enough books in place as a way to put pressure on the publisher. our expert is keith raffle, the author of many books and the occasional critics of publishers and book sellers. his latest book is "a fine and dangerous season." john kennedy was at stanford in real life. we'll get to that in in a second, but in the meantime, i got that right, right? that amazon and hashat are in a price war, and in order to punish hashat, they are slowing the delivery of the books? >> yes, but i would characterize amazon.com a website so much as a book retailer. >> fair enough, that you buy on the web. >> so when barnes&noble says to mel, we will not carry your books because they are published by amazon publishing, i don't remember a big story on the front page of "the new york times." >> let me make sure you're not making some ajal jnaloganalogy, get this from barnes&noble because it is published by amazon. >> correct. >> this is just the first time it is coming to light with amazon. >> because now it's on the web. now it's via the internet, but typically to get your book featured at barnes&noble, publishers pay extra money to have it featured. so amazon is saying right now we want the price presumably to be lower, as scott said, so until you decide to make it lower own these terms we won't feature your terms anymore. >> what do you think of that an as an author? >> if i was an author published by hashat, i was be devastated. >> there are some big names -- >> it can take weeks to get books? >> it can be. james patterson, a huge author and friend of mine, mark sullivan, i'm sure mark is not happy. i have another friend, shelley king, with a book coming from hashat, who is not happy. but the question i have to ask is, amazon.com and hashat have a disagreement. the authors are saying amazon.com put my book out, fair enough, but why are they saying, hashat, use your best efforts to sell my book. just get it up on amazon.com and say yes. >> why did you just collapse? >> putting the author aside from it, amazon's whole thing is that they are consumer e century eccentric. >> amazon says the customer comes first. so you are making a great point. they are not coming first. on the other hand, amazon's answer to that is, and they said this on their website, go look some place else then. we are happy for you to go someplace else. not only that because we don't want to hurt authors, but we'll chip into a fund to help guests. we'll chip into a fund. >> is it a genuine offer? >> yes. >> what did hashat say? >> we need to give authors some of the money they may have lost. >> there is, you say, go somewhere else, but when we take out, let's say barnes&noble and amazon, i mean, there are books a million, there are other -- i don't want to do the extra work, i just expect when i walk into use barnes&noble as the bad guy, when i walk in and say this guy wrote a book i heard about on tv, where is it? you're a book seller. of course you are going to have the book, wouldn't you? but it don't work that way. >> barnes&noble says i'll order it for you, just like amazon is saying right now. this is typical in the book business and don't want to seem like i'm an amazon flak here or anything like that. it's terrible for authors, it's terrible for customers that it's not available. but it's business. and typically the business that goes on right now at amazon is they want prices to be lower, not higher. so they are playing a longer term game saying it will be better for both authors and readers in the long term if we can get prices lower. >> who has the upper hand in this right now? >> amazon does. >> so you think the prices will be lower? >> well, i think the right way to judge almost anything in publishing, at least if you're me, is by two criteria. the first one is, is it good for readers. and the second one, is it good for authors? one is not. is it good for publishishers? that's not how i judge thing. so what amazon has done generally in the business, this is inarguable, they have lowered prices and have more selection, great for readers and are paying authors more, good for authors. >> keith, you spent some time, and i apologize, i don't remember, you have been on so often. you were an expert in intelligence and worked with the senate. help me out. >> given what's going on with nsa and everything else -- >> no, i'm not going to ask you a tough question, but remind me. >> i was council to the senate intelligence office. >> thank you. when you write about this, you have a lot of credibility because you understand a lot of the issues. but one of the most surprising things to me is that this book is factually about john kennedy living and being in palo alto at stanford. i don't think anybody really knew that. >> you need to go on findry and mark all those. >> i actually went to the ad dress where he lived on mayfield avenue on the stanford campus. his house is not there anymore, but i have pictures of myself taken in front of it. good idea. >> with a minute left, what was john kennedy doing at stanford? >> well, sir john kennedy graduated from harvard in the spring of 1940. what is he going to do with himself? his brother's law school roommate that we want to stanford said stanford has two things over harvard. if you know john kennedy, you know what the two things would be. first, great weather. and the second is girls. and jfk says -- >> the weather first or -- >> j.f.k. said, i'm there. >> keith raffel's book is not available at barnes&noble, but you can find it on amazon unless he switches, in which case it won't be there either. up next, a service so much better than google. we'll talk to the guys when "press: here" continues. welcome back to "press: here." i like linked in. last time the co-founder was here we talked to him for the whole half hour, but i don't like all the linklinkedin e-mai. a lot of people think linkedin sends too many e-mails. it's the most filtered e-mail according to my guest who came one a list of e-mails of shame that most often are sent to junk mail. dmetry helps run a subscription service that says on average 58% of the stuff in your e-mail is never worth reading. thank you for being with us this morning. the other interesting statistic that i saw, which i thought, that's about right, 28% of the time when you're in the office you are dealing we mail. you've seen the pictures of people in their old style offices and there's no computer on it. >> what were they doing? >> what were they doing? just pushing papers around. there's nothing to argue about. what sort of things are you discovering about people other than linkedin is the least favorite e-mail? >> linkedin, facebook and twitter are in the top three of the worst offenders. so what our service does is we know what's important to you based on your interaction. we respond to how quickly, how often, et cetera. >> if i'm deleting ine ining li e-mails, you get the sense that i don't care. >> you would unsubscribe to the black hole. that means you never want to see it again. >> you have unsubscribed from different lists and feel like they don't unsubscribe me. >> that is really dangerous because you are showing that you are a person who cared about their inbox to the spammer. >> it is based on past interactions. what about all that's gone through the junk mail and found this one mail sitting there for a month ago that i should have responded to, but they may have not had an interaction with you before. so how do you solve that problem? >> we are pretty smart. so we'll pick it up. we'll notice it eventually. >> that was confident. >> your algorithms? >> patent pending. >> a large percentage are gmail users? >> over half of our users have gmail. >> there are new filters and features for doing exactly what you guys are doing, but it's not good enough, apparently? >> it's a funny story. two months after we went into beta, gmail is only what we supported, but now we work with any e-mail provider. we had a small base, so half of them leave on that day, okay? time to regroup. >> reassess. pivot. maybe you should pivot. >> gmail is free. so half of those people came back. and today, over half of our user base is on gmail and prefer to pay money for something gmail offers. >> that has to be devastating to the gmail team that 60% of your customers are paying, i'm sorry, 60% of your customers are on gmail and are paying $100 a year or whatever it is to get something that gmail is offering them for free. >> yep. >> what are they doing wrong? do you have any idea? >> it's not that they are doing it wrong, but gmails algorithms are looking at your personal interactions. if you do openly e-mail and care about them, then we'll serve them to your inbox. if you don't, they go into the other unemployment folder. >> you can do that in independent language. it doesn't matter, you are not looking for a spam word. >> exactly. there's a really important point, we never look at the body of the e-mail, only the header, just a bunch of data that arrives in every e-mail and kind of the relationships between the different headers and how you interact with them. >> is that how much it costs $100 a year? >> we have three different plans but that's the average. >> i know it's not a ton of money, but still paying for something online considering you get some filtering with gmail, i'm kind of surprised that people would pay for it. what do they get out of it mostly? what's the main benefit? >> they get their time back. if you spend a third of your time doing e-mail, then paying $100 an e-mail for cutting that significantly is not that big of a price. >> not only that, but what are your numbers as far as conversion? they are really good. you start with the premium model and then, hey, try it out and see what you think. and then the conversion rate is enormous. for a premium, what is it, do you remember? >> if you do 50 to 60 e-mails, it's 43%. so 43% of free trials, if you get 50 or 60 e-mails will pay us $100. >> so that's a huge conversion rate compared to most. >> yep. >> and this is private in the sense that you're just looking at the headers. >> exactly. >> i've only got a minute left, but are you sitting on like an aws or something, or on a web service and are laying on top or running the service yourself? >> we have our our server forum. >> so that's a phenomenal amount of traffic. >> it's very expensive. that's part of the reason it's not free. in fact, yeah, i've done a campaign that premium is very bad for the company. it is bad for the consumer and certainly bad for the companies. and i have seen a lot of companies move away from the premium model to traditional pay for your services. that's part of the thing. gmail makes no money by serving you apps. we make our money by you deciding this is a valuable service and want to pay us money. >> you get what you pay for. >> exactly. >> are there e-mail services it doesn't work with? >> nope. it works with exchange, yahoo! mail. >> we wish you the very best of luck. i am enthusiastic about it, as are other reporters. appreciate your time. >> thank you. "press:here" will be back in a moment. a reminder that you can find an archive of all the interviews at pressheretv.com. katerina fake, we went so long with that one and added content that you can find with her, talking about etsy and women in technology. in the meantime, that's our show for this week. my thanks to my guests. i'm scott mcgrew. thank you for making us part of your sunday morning. hello and welcome to "c, mmunidad del valle." we feature the music. this is your "communidad del valle." >> nbc presents "comunidad del valle" with damian trujillo. >> this is a fourth grader at the dual language academy here. her name is ruby jiminez. she's a fourth grader and her mom is here. welcome to the show. >> thank you. >> a full disclaimer, my kids also go there, so they know this big girl very well. but we want

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