>> good morning. i'm scott mcgrew. when someone comes up with a new invention, a new way at looking at things, the classic reaction is it's been tried before or it will never work and nobody wants it. in nearly every case the critics are wrong. take the automobile, for instance. henry ford reportedly said if i had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. i know not to react that way when i hear a new idea. don't say it's been tried for or it will never work. except it is awfully tempting in the case of boom technology. the young group of entrepreneurs that want to build a supersonic airplane to take travellers from new york to london in a little less than four hours at twice the speed of sound. bud schoal is -- he dropped out of high school, a data center in his parents' basement, and then went back to college. i'm going to apologize, and i think you saw that setup coming that i'm going to apologize. it will never work. it's been tried before. nobody wants it. what's your reaction? >> well, it has been tried before. the funny thing about supersonic travel is it's not new. it's existed for 50 years. the problem was the technology hasn't existed to make it affordable for practical travel. concorde, round trip ticket new york to london would set you back $20,000. that's a bucket list kind of thing. that's not transportation. fast forward 50 years, now we have the technology to do it in a way more affordable way. >> what technology? the materials? >> it comes down to three things. ear dynamics, ear dynamics, and propulsion. materials, now they're light weight, stronger, can take higher temperatures which are better for the stresses of supersonic flight. then engine technology has improved vastly, where concorde fluid after burner, which it looks cool in an air show. fire comes out the back. yes, it's a way more fuel efficient, and it's also super loud. >> you can make it affordable, but then again, the technology to avoid the sonic boom, i mean, i've heard that nasa and lockheed are working on one for 2019 that would lessen the sound. how are you able to avoid that sonic boom, or it's not even a loud flying over the u.s. because it's so loud. >> our approach on this is very internet style. let's start with the minimum buyable products. it turns out there are over 500 routes in the world where you can fly supersonic and give people a big speed up without worrying about the overland issue. that's where we're starting. new york to london, san francisco to tokyo, seattle to shanghai. all kinds of routes that are mostly over water. we can still get a big speed up without worrying about the sonic boom. that said, this airplane is much quieter than concorde. instead of sounding like a bang, it's more like a car door slam. could that be allowed over land? we'll have to see. >> it's $2,500 each way new york to london. what's the price -- who is your target audience? could we possibly see sort of a morris law in terms of the drop -- >> that's where we're headed. our long-term ambition is anywhere in the world in five hours for $100. we're chipping away at that. today the technology exists to do is for the same price as a business class ticket. if you can afford to buy business class, you can afford to fly supersonic. >> you haven't built the airplane yet. you have a bunch of experts, though. first of all, i would say leer should do this. they build airplanes. you don't. your first idea is a groupon. you're a pilot, but you don't design airplanes. how did you bring in so many experts? >> well, i think people underestimate what they can learn when they're motivated. i have been a pilot for 15 years. i have loved airplanes since i was a kid. it makes no sense for going backwards in air travel performance when our computers and phones are better. i started self-teaching aerospace. if you are going to put together a dream team, anybody in the world, who do you want? we found a bunch of those people, and then we got them. >> one of the smart people, richard branson from virgin, what's his involvement with the project? >> yes. virgin group has opgs on the first ten aircraft. that's a $2 billion deal there. >> they haven't given you any money. options. >> options on aircraft. richard has tried to buy concorde multiple times for virgin. when this thing delivers, there's no way virgin is not going to go for the airplanes where. >> where is the faa on this? what's been your involvement with the regulators? >> i mean, the regulators are all permanently very excited. they want to see some progress in air travel. one of the things that makes this practical is today all of the key technologies on this airplane, the materials, the aerodynamics, they've all been regulatory approved for other aircraft. we're going to follow the rules. the rules are fine. >> this sounds very similar, and i think this would be quite flattering to you, to elan musk. here's a guy that essentially didn't know a whole lot about rockets. sent a rocket -- a capsule to the international space station after a long period of time. he had one advantage, and that was he helped found pay pal so he had a lot of money. where is the money going to come from? >> it comes from investors,ing and it comes from customers. the money is really not the problem here. there's -- >> really? you are the first person who has said sat in that chair and said the money is not the problem. >> no. when this thing comes to market, we're going to sell over 1,000 airplanes. >> you have to build the airplanes with money. >> you do, but 1,000 airplanes times $200 million each. >> yes, but have you to build the airplanes. >> the investor return on that is awesome. >> i get that. you have to build the airplane first. >> right. investors are super excited. >> okay. all right. >> and boeing and airbus. >> well, boeing and airbus, it's the classic story of optimization versus disruptive innovation. it's really true here. they've been optimizing the same basic design for 50 years. it's that they've been making it safer and more efficient, but they haven't changed the standard of airplane performance. boeing -- they're in a battle with airbus for single market share. they're actually trying to make money on each striemliner they sell. you have your board and say i want to build a supersonic airplane. they'll probably find a new ceo. this is the kind of thing that needs to be nurtured in new companies. >> the airplane would then be sold to the major airlines? >> yes. very straight forward. we'll make the airplanes. sell them to airlines. >> tell them about the supersonic ride, and also -- the passenger experience will be like flying first class domestically. there's bun on each side of the aisle. you get your own personal overhead bin. it's going to be awesome on board. >> i'll take just the personal overhead bin. come back when you have an airplane. i believe you know elan musk did it and others did it. come back when you have yourself -- >> maybe we can do the show on the plane. >> this isn't years away. our first airplane will fly towards the end of next week. >> blake scholl from boom technology. we're excited to watch it happen. >> thank you. >> google has an answer for -- the battle of the home assistant when "press here" continues. >> welcome back. i remember years ago trying to convince someone they needed a dvr, and they did not see the value. today, of course, everybody knows they need a dvr. i bring this up because my new got to have thing is a home assistant. the amazon ecco sitting on the kitchen counter. you just talk to it, and it plays music or it tells you the cubs score. it has a voice. its name is alexus. less than two weeks from now google will release its rival. they call it the google home. now, that voice does not have name, but it will have the power of google behind it. that may be enough. dave evans, a futurist. he holds patents on all kinds of things, including the connected car. he is an expert on the internet of things as well. you were just telling me about what nine alexas in your house. >> six more arrive today. that will bring me up to nine. >> have you had trouble convincing people. you'll say, well, i have siri on my phone. >> i don't think one negates the other. i think having it on your phone is powerful too. a phone gives you context, gives you location. it's with you all the time. in your pocket. the convenience of having something in your own home. you're sitting on the coach and you say turn on my lights or play music or how many ounces in a cup. whatever you need. you have this in the kitchen perhaps. it's a powerful thing. the two compliment each other very well. >> i'm one of those people that use siri more and haven't splurged yet. what are the features most that you find the most convenient? >> for alexa. >> i like the language interface. i don't have to take the device out and push a but orn on it. i just speak. >> you can, in fact, say call me an uber. as long as you set up the account ahead of time, it just -- it does. it's phenomenal in that way. google now is -- they've caught on. they've got their little -- it looks like an air freshener. they're going to -- why did it take us so long to figure out this was going to be a thing, and now, you know, other companies are copying it almost in a panic? >> i think it's sort of a perfect storm of technology. everything is in the cloud. everything is accessible. services are in the cloud. they're open through open api's. i think the voice technology has gotten really well. the fact that you can now speak, and it actually understands. you're not asking to clarify that or say that again. the text to speech is good where it speaks back to you. it's phenomenal, and i think network connectivity is ubiqutous. it's the perfect storm of capabilities that enables it. this would be challenging to do a decade ago. you would have had a frig in your home, and it wouldn't -- the price point, the technology, and it's a perfect storm that's come together to enable it. >> amazon and google haven't traditionally been gadget companies. they have made gadgets. typically it's been sort of a means to an end when they've done so, to get consumers into the ecosystems and to spend more time and to engage. do you see these devices as a means to another ends, or are they in and of themselves that they're going to be big sellers and make a lot of money? >> on one hand, you're selling the device itself, right? over time you might see premium service on the devices. bottom line, those devices help you buy things. from amazon's perspective, you are now using echo or alexa to purchase something with a very low barrier to capabilities. it's very easy. use your voice. alexa, buy me x. >> it's one -- it's one click. tloo o one click was a revolution. >> this is no click. >> your company makes an app that brings all these things together. if this and that is a competitor of yours, more or less, right, is that fair? you smile. >> we think we're next gen. it proved the market for us. stringify is a whole other level. our ability to -- we call them flows. our ability to create flows, we can do very powerful flows. >> one that's an example i like is if my wireless sensor detects this or, you know the one i really liked is if my forecast says it's going to rain the turn the lights blue in the hallway before i leave. >> set your irrigation at the same time and adjust your temperature on the thermostat. >> this is i think where it's really at. it's one thing to build the device, but it's to be the os of all of this is where it's really going to be at. >> we often jokes that everything is getting connected, but it's not connected together. that's what we come in. we let people connect anything to anything regardless of manufacturer protocol or standard. we make it easy to people with no technology background to connect things together in really powerful ways. at the end of the day all this technology, unless it solves really problems, this is -- we let you build great experiences. >> what do you expect as far as thinking about amazon, google, maybe facebook as the os, as the underlying infrastructure to build on top of? we've seen technologies consolidate into the main players. it's just another example where these are the platforms. >> they're different ecosystems. on one hand, therein lies the problem. which ecosystem do you now align to, and we're seeing more and more of the proliferation. that's where it comes in, because we unify all of that. consumers want choices. they want to be able to bring products and just know that they -- >> it doesn't look like android is going to be that, as it were? >> it will be a player, for sure. >> regarding the technology, google's ceo recently said that the ability to distinguish between actions and things like that will happen in the future. they're even working towards being able to detect emotion in voice. tell me about that. how far along are we on that? >> if you call companies today and for customer support, right, your carrier, what have you, the cable company, and you express anger in your voice, that will immediately accelerate you to the top of the cue. partly we're already there. from a visual perspective, we can recognize 40 different emotions from a -- >> when we horse race this between amazon and google, it's the two main players right now. >> it would seem to be that google will have the ultimate advantage. hardware is relative. the box is in the microphone, speaker. google has google behind it. i mean, it's got the world's knowledge in a way that amazon may not have. i mean, is that a fair assessment? >> i think what google has is they have a few things in their advantage. they have their deep mind technology, their machine learning, which is really powerful. they also have android, which is pretty prevalent across a lot of devices. on televisions, on phones and so on. they have a lot of apps that use g mail through e-mail and google calend calendar. they have a large footprint, and they can give you continuity of experience, braz perhaps some other folks can't do that. >> dave evans is the cto of string ify. i highly recommend it. we'll be right back. zpliefrmgt welcome back to "press here." you can give me a call right now. area code 408-432-4747. that is my actual phone number. my direct line. i will not answer. i pretty much never answer the phone at my desk. you can't leave a voice mail because it's full. i don't check it. for most people the office phone is just -- you can get ahold of me. i use e-mail all the time. i use twitter. it's great. the office phone, forget it. craig walker knows all about office communication. he is the inventor of grand central. google voice. he became google's first entrepreneur in residence, and now he runs dial which promises to make office communication delightful. now, let me ask you if it you -- i mean, you have done all these different things with start-ups with office communication. what is the love for this? were you the kid that had little phones or tin cans and talking to the neighbors sort of thing? >> it was -- it came from just being frustrated of how it was, right? grand central was started because i had three phones. i had my cell phone, a work phone. each one was different. why can't there be a number and i'll take it wherever it's most convenient? that was really the most idea behind google voice and grabbed central. now, take that to the business. you're not sitting at your desk. the workers are around. work is no longer a place you go. it's a thick you do. being able to take calls and take messages anywhere you are on any device you are using seems that that would be good idea. >> i have been covering tech for a decade, and i covered cisco back in the mid 2000s, and this was a dream then. they had kraed this unified communications platform, and since then you've just seen everything from skype all the way up to slack and facebook at work. there's this promise of do anything anywhere at any time talking to anyone. where did we go wrong? why has this been so difficult? >> that first generation of what they used to call unified communications was more complex hardware sitting in a closet. the i.t. guys had to manage it. it basically just cost more and was more complicated. now with everything in the cloud, there's no hardware. there's nothing on premise. everyone has their mobile device, which is probably their primary phone. it's -- we're able to build these features. >> right. >> you are an office communications company that doesn't have any hardware. >> exactly. >> i bring the hardway. my ipad, laptop, iphone, whae. >> exactly. >> you think of the i.t. department at a business. they're going to have to provide you a network. they're going to have to give you a laptop, and you bring your own cell phone. wouldn't it be great just to use those three things for everything, and then you can do voice, video, messaging, voice mail, collaboration all on the things they already have to provide. >> you bring your own devices, and most of time you're getting calls and multiple times, and you are crossing with your family. how do you separate all this work and regular life? >> yeah. well, interestingly enough, people give out their personal cell phone for work a lot of times because they don't have this. that blurring has happened. the way dialpad works is your personal cell phone can actually have two identities. if i'm calling my wife, it will show me as my cell phone number, but if i'm calling a business associate or a client, it will show me as my work number. i'm able to separate those two. i have two different voice mails, two different caller id's, two different messaging platforms, and i'm able to keep that line -- >> i'm with you a bit, mark, when you have a work twitter account and a personal twitter account or a facebook or whatever, you think did i just post that to the right -- >> it does seem that sort of we're in this voice resurgence, and i'm thinking of hillary clinton and her emails. i bet they wish they had a lot of those conversations via voice and not via e-mail. >> yeah. well, and voice is actually a super, super effective way to get things done. you can trouble shoot on the fly. you can get in arguments and solve problems. immediately without the back and forth. you can get the inflexion and the emotion that you don't get in text and in messaging. all those things used to be great because they used to take down this noise on the voice, but now the voice -- there's so much noise in the texting and the messaging and the tweeting and everywhere else that now voice is this pure thing again. i do think there's a great resurgence there. >> who are you displacing? i mean, i think about ring central or, you know, video you have something like -- do you have any number of companies? when you go into a business, what are they using and what are they ripping out? >> generally they're ripping out a legacy pbx. motorola is a customer of ours. >> let me interject. >> they're looking to replace the big box in the back. you can get rid of the entire thing. get rid of the desk phones. frankly, if you want to keep a desk phone, you can, but most don't. you use your computer and your device for all these. you are ripping outer sivgo. you are ripping out avia and shore tell, and then ring central, they were kind of like the first gen of this, but not born in the cloud and born for mobile. it's kind of nice coming along in 2015 building it and having that latest gen all cloud service. >> everything is so cloud dependent. we keep that phone just in case of emergency. what's the backup if it everything gets -- >> yeah, so the nice thing about the system is let's say your entire business internet goes down. we're all off line here. we'll still ring you on your cell phone. you do have that outside of the internet too. you kind of have a "pst" m which is a traditional phone system as a backup. most of the voice technology is that we have seen over the last few years or i should say communications technology are actually bad for the traditional carriers. what's your relationship with a carrier? what's the future of the carrier? your view? >> that was one of the motivations at grand central. the traditional carriers, they've been monopolies in the past. they haven't rein ino vated on the feature side. what was the last carrier feature? call waiting? you know, caller id? not a lot of innovation, right? we work with some carriers to get wholesale things like numbers and terminations, stuff like that, but once you have those raw materials, we can create anything. >> craig walker is ceo of dialpad and we appreciate you being with us. >> thanks for having me. >> we'll be right back. welcome back to "press:here." i this lee eco, this new chinese company. you were at the launch of this the ovther day. it was phenomenal. >> crazy event. i saw them about a year ago when they first kind of came to silicon valley introducing their phones. at that time everything from their microphones were not working at the press conference when we went to this event. >> there were fog machines. >> you were eating the about burrito. everything -- everybody was saying hello to you, directing you much better than a lot of -- >> it's almost as if -- this is a very chinese company. it's almost as if they were watching videos of product launches and saying, all right, let's do that, but let's do it at 110%. somebody said it almost seemed like it was a try-out for the hbo show "silicon valley." is this all going on the way -- >> they had their own character. their ceo and founder, who is a charismatic guy, he runs out on to stage, and they're supposed to present their electric vehicle, and they do not have it. he went on for a minute, skps we weren't sure whether this was a staged event. zoo that was the audition for "silicon valley." >> here comes this guy. we know a car is coming, and then he explains the car is not coming. then we think, oh, you got us. then, no, the car never actually came. >> what blows everybody away is how many products they're trying to release. >> vr, phone, 7 foot television. >> cars. taking on all the big markets. he mentioned that they're the chinese netflix. are they the disney? are they the amazon? he said they're all of them together basically. >> i'm glad we had a chance to talk about this because i had the exact same impression. mark new from cctv, and cnbc, t with us. my thanks to my guest. craig walker runs dialhpad. earlier we heard from the ceo of stringify, dave evans, talking about the new home assistance like amazon echo, and blake scholl of boom technology. all of those interviews are available in their entirety for free on press news tv and itunes. i'm scott mcgrew. thank you for making us a part of your sunday morning. hello. i'm damian trujillo. today our show has the pos ada tradition. right here on "communidad del valle." >> nbc bay area presents "communidad del valle" with damian trujillo where. >> we begin with world aids day. the organize rg committee is on the south bay. and the public health department here in the south bay. welcome to the show. let's start with you. december 1 st, world aids day. >> yes. >> december 1st is world aids day in recognition of world aids day our committee, the world aids day committee, which is made up of several agencies and, ones within our coun