Kevin Garber: [00:02] This week on the "It's a Monkey" podcast.

Aki Anastasiou: [00:04] I had the chance to interview one of the founders and one of the 10 finalists of the XPrize, a guy called Doctor Walter De Brouwer, who's got a device called the Scanadu Scout.

[00:18] It's the size of a tiny...How bit should I call it? Almost like a puck that they use in the sports thing. It's tiny. If you can see my hands, it's about this big. You hold this against the temple of your head for 10 seconds. In 10 seconds, you will get on your phone displayed your vital stats.

[00:39] You get your heart rate, your blood pressure, your oxygenation levels, your stress levels. All of that diagnostics about your health at the tip of your fingertips on your smartphone that would take them like 15, 20 minutes to hook up when you got to an emergency section in a hospital.

[00:56] This is where health gear is going in the future. We're getting those glimpses of healthcare at CES. The word that I love them using overtime is that you are going to become the CEO of your health.

[01:09] [background music]

Kevin: [01:14] Good morning, good evening, good afternoon wherever you are in the world. My name is Kevin Garber. I'm the co-founder of ManageFlitter and the CEO of ManageFlitter, and also the co-host of the It's a Monkey Podcast, where we come to you every week and we talk about everything relating to tech, startups, entrepreneurship, economy, and all sorts other bits and pieces in between.

[01:34] I've just realized its Friday, the 13th. Did you realize that, Kate?

Kate Frappel: [01:41] No, I didn't. It's bad luck, isn't it?

Kevin: [01:44] Good luck, bad luck. It's something. [laughs]

Kate: [01:46] We'll just stay away from black cats.

Kevin: [01:50] Welcome to the New Year, 2017. This is our first podcast of 2017. Last week, we played a repeat of Melanie Perkins of Canva, great interview from a couple of years ago. Have a listen to that if you haven't listened to it. Before that, a repeat of Phil Libin who is the founder and ex-CEO of Evernote, also a great listen.

[02:11] Now, we're back with all the live podcasts. We've got a fantastic show coming up for you. Later on in the show, we're going to talk to Aki Anastasiou. He's a Tech Journalist from South Africa, 702 and CNBC Africa. He's a journalist at both those media outlets.

[02:29] Before we get into this week's podcast, I just wanted to mention some of the fantastic guests that we've already got lined up for the show over the next couple of weeks. I'm excited to say that David Heinemeier Hansson who is the creator of Ruby on Rails and the founder of Basecamp is going to be on the show in a couple of weeks. That's pretty exciting.

[02:53] We're also going to have Dr. John Demartini who is a really incredibly well-known world authority on human behavior and personal development. Besides Dr. John Demartini and David Heinemeier Hansson, we're also going to be talking to Margaret Heffernan in an upcoming podcast episode.

[03:20] She is the CEO of five businesses and has a TED Talk that has nearly hit three million views, which is pretty impressive. She's written some very interesting book about workplace aspects like conflict avoidance, selective blindness that lead organizations and managers astray. Very, very smart woman, worked for the BBC for many years.

[03:47] We've got fantastic guests coming up in the future weeks. Make sure you subscribe on your podcast player. As usual, we talk about some of the latest tech news. This week, as always, an interesting, an exciting week in the tech news. Big announcement from Atlassian.

[04:02] Atlassian is a company that's turning over nearly $600 million bootstrapped by two Australian guys who I believe are still under 40 years old. They have a project management tool called JIRA and some other products that help developers in teams to collaborate together.

[04:23] Our offices are right next to theirs. We look out over them. We see the team wondering around. Kate, they had a very big announcement this week about an acquisition.

Kate: [04:32] Yes, Atlassian have acquired the 18th acquisition. It's Trello for $425 million.

Kevin: [04:41] What was so interesting about that? Atlassian must have really wanted the Trello. First, it's a big number, $425 million, particularly when Atlassian only have $266 million in the bank.

Kate: [04:56] Yes, I think it nearly broke their bank.

[04:58] [laughter]

Kevin: [04:58] Broke their bank. Some of that was paid in stock, but most of it, I believe, was paid in cash. All of the indicators point that Atlassian really wanted this, because the founders were very smart founders.

[05:16] One of the founders, Joel from Fog Creek Software, I think, Stack Overflow is also his product, which is a very well-known question and answers' site. He's written some fantastic books on how to lead and manage developers, which is great. He's got the line, "You need to look for people that are smart and get shit done."

[05:37] I've never forgotten that line. That's certainly what we always look for. Anyway, he's a smart guy. I'm pretty sure that Atlassian are only paying cash, not shares because they have to. They might have insisted that "Fine, if you guys want us, we want the cash."

Kate: [05:54] This is what we're worth."

Kevin: [05:57] This is what we're worth." Although sometimes people like to take shares because they align interest in other ways. $425 million which is only seven percent market capital of Atlassian share price at the moment, it's still a relatively small portion of what Atlassian is worth. In terms of their actual cash outlet, it's huge. You've used JIRA and Trello, right?

Kate: [06:22] Yeah, both of them. Trello is much more intuitive, I think, for the everyday user or somebody who's in more marketing business, HR. JIRA has got way more functionality, but it's a little bit harder to understand. It's made for developers.

Kevin: [06:40] JIRA is more structured. Trello, there's a lot more flexibility so you can use it. It's like cards. Almost like posted notes that you can shift around, and move around, and put them in columns and categories.

Kate: [06:52] It's like an improved style of a to-do list.

Kevin: [06:55] They've executed on it really well. Trello is really easy to get up and running.

Kate: [07:02] There's a lot of crossover between the two as well. I'm interested to see where it goes.

Kevin: [07:06] Why Atlassian might have gone down this route is that Atlassian or JIRA was started out as an on-server product, not a cloud product. They left with a lot of legacy, a lot of complexities around that. Whereas, Trello was started as a get-go from a cloud product.

[07:26] Atlassian might be wanting to accelerate their efforts, also have something that was natively built for the cloud. Atlassian might have some technical debt. There are some people that have complained about some of the Atlassian's cloud offerings. Of course, Trello has got a lot of users. They've got nearly 20 million users.

Kate: [07:50] Yeah, I believe so. This other thing is, Trello have nearly twice the amount of integration opportunities than JIRA.

Kevin: [08:00] They have, maybe, a more mature API and you can integrate it with CRMs or...

Kate: [08:07] I believe so. It's not equal on medium from a former Atlassian employee. It's what research he's done.

Kevin: [08:16] Anyway, it's interesting. Great for the Trello founders. They have these exits of $425 million based on an investment from investors of 10 million. That's a huge return for them. In our industry, that's what people are in for, is to take an investment, build it into something big that's usually valuable for someone else.

[08:44] That's the puzzle that we're all trying to pull together. I did see on Trello's website, their blog announcement. I don't know if you read their blog announcement on Trello that Trello users were cynical and unhappy that they'd been bought. As the one user said, "When has a product ever been acquired and it landed up becoming a better product?" That's a fair call.

Kate: [09:09] In one of the statements too, Atalssian has said that the cultural values between the companies are similar. Their goal to get to 100 million users is also very similar. They're hiring all of Trello's staff. They're not letting anyone go. Potentially, it could be a good thing.

Kevin: [09:30] Yeah, there's something magical when a product is independent, and it's simple when you have to integrate in teams. There's famous research that's been done on mergers and acquisitions that most acquisitions don't work out. Cultural issues, the DNA of organizations is different.

[09:51] Anyway, we'll follow that. Congrats to the Trello people. Atlassian, they're smart people. They surely know what they're doing. We'll see what their next acquisition is.

[10:08] Another story, we've often been complaining that Apple has not been speaking about AR and VR. We've been wondering, what's been going on with Apple not giving any hints of any VR or AR efforts.

[10:25] There was a comment this week by the famous Tech Journalist, Robert Scoble, who says that Carl Zeiss, the famous German lens company, has been working on AR mixed reality set of smart glasses with Apple to be released as soon as this year.

Kate: [10:50] That's interesting. I've done a rapport, Apple inside. I have done into the latest, highest that Apple have done and some of the technology that they're working with behind the scenes and their pageants as well. It definitely looks like they're going to be doing something in the AR space.

Kevin: [11:09] That would be really fantastic. We'll check to Aki from the CES Conference a little bit later in the show and his thoughts about AR and VR. They're smart people at Apple. They absolutely would realize the opportunities on the AR and the VR side of things. Amazing how secretive Apple maintains itself to be. Nothing leaks from that place. Very, very seldom.

Kate: [11:42] That's true. It's also important to remember that Apple, if you think about in history, haven't been innovators of the first technology of something. They've always watched someone else do it and then done it 10 times better. It's what makes them good at what they do.

Kevin: [12:00] Yeah, it is true that even the iPhone, it wasn't the first Smartphone that was out there.

Kate: [12:09] No, same with the iPod, everything. They just sit back, watch, learn, and do it better.

Kevin: [12:17] I was checking my emails long before anyone else on my Siemens sl35 or 45. People used to be amazed. I remember when that Siemens phone could play MP3s as well. It was a great party trick. I'd pull our headphones. It wasn't even that long ago. I'd pull out headphones and say, "Hey, listen to this." They're like, "Wow, you're playing music on your phone."

[12:43] [laughter]

Kate: [12:45] Amazing, how many songs could you fit on there?

Kevin: [12:47] Maybe 10, 5 to 10. I upgraded it and that was quite a bit before the iPhone. Second move advantage is underrated in business. Look what people do, look at the problems and then build a vision around the next phase of it, and the way you...

Kate: [13:12] Definite. We can only speculate, but earlier, there's some quite strong Tim Cook, who's the CEO of Apple, stating or hinting at the fact that they're going to, not entirely, but almost skip over VR and go straight to AR. They've got the basis of the iOS devices that they could their AR technology on top of.

Kevin: [13:36] Interesting. I guess the VR technology in the corporate world, AR, the used cases in a way make more sense, maybe consumer VR. It's still such early days. The used cases really haven't evolved yet.

[13:56] I saw one of the airlines somewhere is experimenting with VR for passenger. You put on the VR and instead of this painful economy class journey across the ocean where you just feeling squashed and angry with your neighbor, fighting over elbow space, you put on the VR headsets and it takes you somewhere else and you're in this...

Kate: [14:26] Relaxed.

Kevin: [14:27] Relaxed in good place.

Kate: [14:29] You could experience Hawaii before you even got there.

Kevin: [14:37] It would be really good like that in environments where you have to isolate yourself. As long as it's not a game that uses your hands, and your arms and...

Kate: [14:49] That's true. It could be just a passive experience.

Kevin: [14:52] Yeah, next phase of just watching movies across the ocean when you're on long flights. We'll keep an eye out on Apple and see what else leaks over the year. Anyway that's the tech news for this week.

[15:07] Reminder, you can check out the previous episodes at itsamonkey.com. You can subscribe to receive email updates at itsamonkey.com. You can tweet us @monkeypodcast. You can email us. Give us a review on iTune. All of those exciting things.

[15:28] We really do appreciate you taking a couple of minutes to drop us a line or to give an iTune review. We're going to take a short break. After the break, we're going to be chatting to Aki Anastasiou who's the Tech Journalist at 702 and CNBC Africa about the CES Conference that's held every year in Vegas at the beginning of January. We'll be back shortly.

Dave Zoradi: [15:50] Hi. My name is Dave Zoradi. I'm the Customer Support Specialist here at ManageFlitter. ManageFlitter is a tool that helps you work faster and smarter on Twitter. With ManageFlitter, you can clean up and grow your Twitter account. You also get access to useful twitter analytics, social content scheduling, and much more. Go to manageflitter.com and start your free trial today.

Kevin: [16:13] You're back with It's a Monkey Podcast. We talk about everything related to the tech economy, entrepreneurships, startups. Of course, every year at the beginning of the year, there's the famous CES Conference that happens in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. I haven't quite been to that conference yet.

[16:31] I tend to do more to some of the entrepreneurial ones, the TechCrunch Disrupts, the [inaudible] . I would like to eventually to head off to CES. I managed to track down someone who was at CES this year. At the end of scope line, I'm proud to say I've got Aki Anastasiou who's a Tech Journalist at 702 and CNBC Africa.

[16:50] Secret as well, we used to work together a long time ago at 702 in South Africa. I get real pleasure having you on our show.

Aki: [16:59] It's a great pleasure, Kevin. Nice to touch base, again, after all these years. Thanks for having me.

Kevin: [17:04] Aki, so CES, it starts on the Thursday goes through to the Sunday. Was it 50th year anniversary this year? It started in 1967?

Aki: [17:15] Yeah, absolutely. It's its 50th year anniversary. It really is an amazing, amazing show. I've been very privileged to have been attending...I think next year is going to be my 10th one. It's a fascinating show and especially when you bump into people that have been to more than 20 of them. It's one of those shows that's really...To give you an idea of the scale of the show.

[17:41] If you can imagine 40 rugby fields together displaying the wares of all the top consumer technology companies in the world, there were 3,600 exhibitors this year. Roughly about 180,000 people visited the show and it's really a massive show and this is not open to the public. It's just trade and journalists that go to the show.

[18:08] It's been a very interesting show and this is the show I was talking to Gary Shapiro who is the CEO of the company that organized the show. He's been involved with the show for more than three decades, just touching through some of the technologies that they viewed at CES.

[18:27] You had the first VHS, for example, that was there, the first flat screen TV. Blu-ray Disc was first introduced. The compact disc was introduced at CES, even went back to some of the earlier turntables. A lot of technologies and consumer goods that you and I have used over the last few decades that were first introduced to the public at CES, so it's that kind of show.

Kevin: [18:53] I was really excited to see that a product that I've been really pushing for a long time. A multi-screen laptop was showcased this year at CES but in fact, it was stolen, right? Someone stole it.

Aki: [19:07] Yeah, are you talking about the EPSON stand?

Kevin: [19:08] The Razer?

Aki: [19:09] That's right. The Razer. Yes, it was quite astonishing that there was that kind of theft that happened. In fact, I think two prototypes went missing from the stand this year. You think that there're cameras and that sort of thing. I've never ever heard of that happening at the show before but certainly, you're touching on those new technologies like the Razer that you spoke about.

[19:38] They were a plethora of those kind of devices and you can see that mobility is key and ultra-light notebooks that were launched. Some interesting designs on tablets and of course, the big guys like Razer, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus, they're all displaying new kinds of stuff and they really had great, great products this year.

[20:06] HP has some product as well. We saw a lot of that computer stuff. A big progress, I must tell you, given on gaming. We saw some interesting gaming leagues that were launched. Even Samsung launched a game device and they're actually going back to the notebook business interesting enough because it's one of their businesses they left a few years ago.

[20:27] Now, they're going back and they introduced a really nice Chromebook, which I'm quite interested in because of the quality. Certainly, the quality is improved. The cost of these notebooks has improved and really innovative designs pushing the parameters.

[20:43] You mentioned the one that you mentioned, and the truth is a lot of the products that you see at CES and you hear of at CES, and even the ones that actually, over the last few years, you think, "Wow. That's a great product. It would be really well," and then you never hear about the product as well.

[20:57] A lot of the companies come there. They test the new products. They benchmark them against the public that are there and they used them almost as a feasibility study because the truth is many of the 20,000 products that were launched at CES this year will not see consumer hands.

Kevin: [21:14] What about Apple? Do they have a presence at CES?

Aki: [21:19] That's the funny part. You got companies like Apple. You got companies like Google and you got companies like Microsoft. They are the big gorillas in the room, and they're not even at CES. It's interesting that you should mention them because they have underlying companies that are almost keeping the show.

[21:39] They tie the loose ends of the show because the show has evolved to such a point over the last few years and especially this year. It was really, really evident that the devices that you see, the technology that you see around us is all being driven by the software that's driving the technology and artificial intelligence and the big data that's happening in the background.

[21:59] The companies are driving this, the likes of Amazon, the likes of Microsoft, the likes of Google, the likes of Apple, for example. They have these technologies that are really making things work in the cloud and they're not even able to, but yet the show is centered around these organizations.

Kevin: [22:19] I guess it's testament to their power in a way that they don't have to be there with the mere mortals. I could tell the AR and VR is getting a lot of buzz at the moment and I think Tim Cook alluded to their AR initiatives recently. How common were there? VR headsets everywhere, any interesting new technologies on the AR/VR front that's really grabbed your interest?

Aki: [22:48] Listen, AR/VR was massive at the show. I think that AR is going to be more prominent in the enterprise space and there are a lot of companies working on a lot of different things, so we saw more consumer stuff. There was more VR than AR to be both [inaudible] but there were lots of the AR demos.

[23:14] For me, the HTC VIVE was really, really impressive. There were a lot of prototypes that we saw, companies developing different stuff. Sony had some AR stuff and there were some companies that you never heard of that had AR and VR stuff. Certainly, I would say that virtual reality was most definitely one of the big themes of the show.

[23:40] It's a technology. If you look at the profile of the average person that comes to the show, I would say that the average age of the attendee is probably 40-plus. I sometimes felt that they don't get the true potential of VR and AR. It's the millennials and the generation Z that are really hungry for AR and VR.

[24:06] They are the ones that are going to drive these technologies forward. The tech companies see it but I think that nobody has quite yet managed to get that perfect solution, the perfect device that's going to sit on like everybody's going to use and it's one of those technologies that are still maturing.

[24:28] A lot of people are asking a lot of questions about will it go main 3D, for example, which was all out. It was such a high technology. In about five years ago at CES, everybody was talking about 3D, 3D and where is 3D today? It's nowhere to be seen.

Kevin: [24:47] You're talking about the 3D printing that is, right?

Aki: [24:50] No. 3D glasses.

Kevin: [24:51] 3D glasses.

Aki: [24:52] 3D printing, which we will touch on as well, is a huge one but 3D as in television viewing.

Kevin: [25:02] Watching on TV with 3D glasses, yeah.

Aki: [25:05] 3D glasses in watching TV shows, that's not transpired. You look around at your friends and your mates. Do you know anybody that uses 3D on their televisions? I don't.

Kevin: [25:16] No, no one. That's the wonderful thing about our industry as you can never predict which way it's going. The trends in 3D printing, tell us about 3D printing. There was a lot of promise projected on to 3D printing as well and it still seems to be bumbling along. It's there but it hasn't quite broken through, right?

Aki: [25:38] Yes and no. I think that the early adopters, the companies that were there from the beginning. I'm sorry. The name of the one company that slips through my mind then I could picture the CEO in my mind that I interviewed a couple of times showed me some 3D printer, name brands that you know.

Kevin: [25:57] I actually don't know any 3D printer names, Aki. [laughs]

Aki: [26:00] There's one. It will come to me now. They have a massive stand. A few years ago, 3D printers were there. There were all at [inaudible] but they were very expensive. They weren't affordable and the companies that were exhibiting then. There's a point that Australia made. Many of them haven't survived.

[26:18] The ones that have survived are the ones that have come into that sweet spot. It's like solar. You remember, the solar panels many years ago used to be expensive and as the prices dropped, the guys that were manufacturing them at the higher rates couldn't survive. This is why you got a Taiwanese company like XYZ who has got the number one spot with 3D printers.

[26:39] They're really affordable now. The enterprise point where you can take them into your home, but question remains to be seen. What are you going to be using 3D printers for, if it's not on an industrial base?

[26:51] Are you going to make blocks and tiny toys and printed stuff around your home? All the applications, are they really a part from being a hobbyist, which would enjoy doing something like that, 3D printing is still a luxury purchase?

Kevin: [27:06] At New York, a year ago or two years ago, I saw an organic 3D printer that was basically the size of a briefcase. They're absolutely fantastic. The purpose was not so much to print replacement parts but it was for diagnosis that they could take a biopsy and replicate a tumor and analyze it outside your body or something like that. That was absolutely mind-blowing technology.

Aki: [27:36] The company I was thinking about was MakerBot. That's the company. It's interesting you mentioned 3D printing because last month, before Vegas, I've gone on another trip in the US and I was over in Silicon Valley.

[27:50] I was visiting a couple of the big institutions I was at the stand for them at University of California, San Francisco and have a look at the 3D printing stuff that they're doing. They're printing extraordinary stuff in the medical field with 3D that are literally changing people's lives, so the applications on the other side of 3D, I believe, are critical and in the manufacturing sense, it's a no-brainer.

Kevin: [28:18] Any other cool stuff that you saw that even for novelty value that is worth mentioning?

Aki: [28:25] There were some crazy things that I saw. Obviously, the televisions were big again this year. The televisions are settling in on 4K, which is going to be the de facto standard for television across the world. The panels are becoming thinner. Samsung are demoing this new quantum-dot technology. They call it QLED.

[28:50] LG's panels were amazing. They got the finger on the pulse. You saw a lot of random stuff and interesting technologies but the artificial intelligence for me, which we touched on earlier was the one that was really interesting and of course, the drones but it's all moving through the Internet of Things.

[29:15] The Internet of Things was all over the place. Everything that is coming out today is connected to the Internet. Everything is sharing some data that fits into your home seamlessly and the companies that were really driving the innovation where the companies also trying to incorporate all of those Internet of Things devices into one.

[29:38] Right now, if you think of your home and you think you've got your gists. You got your alarm system. You got your watering system. It's so disjointed. You've got separate apps connecting different things and the companies are trying to put all of that together.

[29:52] At the touch of your fingertips, you have control of all of your Internet of Things devices from one central point that you can control. Almost like a Facebook but for your gadgets around your home. I think that's where with the Internet of Things being such a massive thing at the show this year. That was great.

[30:14] The other thing that, for me, is very interesting and I've been watching the progress of this over the last few years is health. eHealth is growing exponentially and it's being driven by the quality of the census out there.

[30:31] The quality of the processing power that's there, that's becoming so much smaller and smaller over the years and this is what's allowing many companies to push the boundaries in developing really interesting technologies.

Kevin Garber: [30:44] Were there any eHealth, or quantified self, or diagnosis type devices that were of interest there that are almost consumer ready or interesting prototypes?

Aki: [30:58] There were several. In fact, you talk about the stuff that we don't see happening. This is the engines of the companies that collect the data and make sense of it. In fact, one of the big companies is out from Stellenbosch in South Africa. They were there again. Their technology and algorithms is used by a lot of the players like Apple in their health products.

[31:19] It's used by Fitbug in their health products. All of these companies, they're just simply collecting data. When you start using the data and putting the data to some algorithm and making sense of it, that's when it gets really exciting. The technologies that are out there, they are so many. I saw stuff that you can attach to your muscles, for example.

[31:41] Tiny senses that you put on while you're training. It gives you a full analysis of your muscles and what they're doing. It's all attached by electrolysis through your body. It's picking up all those impulses that your body is sending out. From that point of view, I really think that this year is going to be the year of eHealth.

[32:05] We're going to, in a few weeks' time, hear which device is going to win the tri-quarter XPRIZE that's been driven by Peter Diamandis and his foundation, the XPRIZE foundation. This is one sector which, I think, is going to explode this year, Kevin. I had the chance to interview one of the founders and one of the 10 finalists of the XPRIZE, a guy called Doctor Walter De Brouwer who's got a device called the Scanadu Scout.

[32:37] It's the size of a tiny...How big should I call it? Almost like a puck that they use in a sports thing. It's tiny. If you can see my hands, it's about this big. You hold this against the temple of your head for 10 seconds. In 10 seconds, you will get on your phone displayed your vital stats.

[32:58] You get your heart rate, your blood pressure, your oxygenation levels, your stress levels. All of that diagnostics about your health at the tip of your fingertips on your smartphone that would take them 15, 20 to hook up when you go to an emergency section in a hospital. This is where heath gear is going in the future. We're giving those glimpses of healthcare at CES.

[33:21] The word that I love them using over time is that you are going to become the CEO of your own health. It's certainly shifting the way that we look at our health. It's shifting from very much the consumer. The consumer is getting more control of their health, more control of the analytics of their body. I find that really interesting.

Kevin: [33:42] It is. The quantified self, in a way, the fact that we need to go get a blood test and I only have this points in time where things get measured, in a couple of years, it's going to look totally OK.

[33:57] It's going to be, maybe you sleep on a mattress that's got some senses and every night you getting startup data that pings you when there's an issue, has already uploaded something to your doctor. There's the dystopian version of technology of the future, but this is the good stuff.

Aki: [34:15] Well, listen, you spoke about the mattress. That [inaudible] the mattress. I interviewed the CEO of the Smart Mattress at CES. What this mattress does, is you lie on this mattress. It's a king size mattress, so you and your partner lie down. What this does is it's monitoring your vital stats while you sleep throughout the night.

[34:35] It's monitoring how restless you are. It's monitoring your blood pressure. It's monitoring your heart rate. If you're sleeping and you start snoring, there are sensors that analyze that you're snoring and then the way your pillow lies, they've got a little lever or a little pump that lifts your head up until you stop snoring.

Kevin: [34:56] [laughs] That's fantastic.

Aki: [34:57] This smart bed is there. It's available and it's going to be launched this year.

Kevin: [35:01] Does it pour a glass of water into your mouth, moreover? I need one over my head. I'm one of these lucky people that sleep well, a little bit too well sometimes and just wake me up. Terrific, I used to go to the Johannesburg Computer Show in the '80s. My father used to drag me.

Aki: [35:22] Computex? No, not computex. Was it at Gallagher states, I think?

Kevin: [35:27] It was the Rancho show grounds, is the one I remember.

Aki: [35:33] That's it.

Kevin: [35:34] We've come a long way.

Aki: [35:36] Before we go, there's one technology that we didn't mention. I need to mention. It's important to mention is that the vehicles, an autonomous driving vehicle, electric vehicles that would mess up with the show. Cars, when featuring at the show a few years ago, now all the big guys are there.

[35:54] Mercedes Benz, VW, Audi, BMW, they are all there. In a sense, you get an idea that is this an automotive show? Automotive technology is changing in such a rapid pace. Those guys are in the room and they're really very much of consumer technology moving forward.

Kevin: [36:13] You mentioned a little bit a while ago these devices being connected to each other. Imagine if every single car on the road was connected to each other and they have an awareness of each other.

[36:25] I know in South Africa, there's about 10,000 deaths on the road every year. I think Australia, 2,000 to 3,000. America, 50,000. All of those lives, again, this is what technology is about. The future is on its way.

Aki: [36:42] The next five years are going to be fascinating. Hold on, because it's going to be an amazing ride.

Kevin: [36:48] Aki Anastasiou, a Tech Journalist at 702 and CNBC Africa, really fantastic talking to you. Thanks for joining us on It's a Monkey podcast.

Aki: [36:56] Kevin, the rest to you. Thank you, mate.

[36:58] [dog barks]

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Kevin: [37:32] That CES Conference sounds huge, Kate, 180,000 people.

Kate: [37:36] That's a lot of people.

Kevin: [37:44] That's a lot of people. It's spread over a few days, I assume. That is a lot of people.

Kate: [37:50] Do you know how many vendors?

Kevin: [37:51] I think he mentioned it, but...

Kate: [37:55] A lot.

Kevin: [38:01] A lot.

[38:01] [laughter]

Kevin: [38:01] A lot. I think what would be so interesting to visit that conference would be the exhibition. There's a lot of prototypes. That would be really...All the experimental...

Kate: [38:14] See where things are going, what people are thinking.

Kevin: [38:16] Yeah, that would be really fantastic. It would be really great one year to head over there. Interesting what he said about the mattress that is already there, smart mattress that monitors you while you sleep.

Kate: [38:29] Yeah, he had some interesting things to say about the eHealth space and tracking your fitness and your sleeping patterns. It's going to be big.

Kevin: [38:40] It's going to be big. I think when everything is integrated, that's the huge magic promise. You don't have 10 million devices tracking this, tracking that, smart devices you have to connect them. Everything is absolutely seamless.

Kate: [38:58] If it can stop or slow down the amount of times you have to visit the doctor, I'll be happy.

Kevin: [39:04] Yeah.

[39:04] [laughter]

Kevin: [39:07] I think we'd all be happy with that. There was an interesting study done. There was a system developed. I don't know if it was by IBM or one of these big companies, artificial intelligence diagnosis system for cancer. They did some research and they had the system diagnose people for cancer. They had a doctor diagnose people for cancer.

[39:36] The results, in terms of identifying the cancer, was exactly the same between the doctor and the machine. There was one advantage that the system had over the doctor was that it could recommend treatments and particularly novel or experimental treatments in a much more effective manner.

[39:56] Obviously, they had access to the most current database, the complete database, something computers are really good at. They don't have limited capacity. They could match and they could say, "Oh, that's unusual instance of X cancer."

[40:12] Someone is actually doing a trial of something in Belgium at the moment. Check that out. Whereas the doctors, they're going to be limited in the scope of what they know of latest research in treatments.

Kate: [40:25] X doctor is only going to have a limited knowledge. You could hope that your doctor is going to be up to date with the latest research and have knowledge on that, but you can't assume.

Kevin: [40:35] The eHealth is definitely...There's a huge promise to make our lives easier. We'll see where that goes. Cars, of course, will come back to a lot of the time. We talk about self-driving cars, autonomous cars, cars that talk to each other. If cars, as I mentioned with Aki, if cars all have an awareness of each other...

Kate: [41:02] There'd be hardly any car crash.

Kevin: [41:06] Theoretically, they just have a sense of each other. If you could tie that to pedestrians as well, say, a pedestrian on your phone talks to the cars...

Kate: [41:16] Like location tracking type thing?

Kevin: [41:19] Yeah, so the cars have a sense of where the pedestrians are.

Kate: [41:26] They'd probably have a motion sensor or something too, so it would notice stopping time if it could predict someone was going to walk in its path.

Kevin: [41:33] They definitely would. Over and above that, as well, just these checks and balances everywhere. I don't know if we spoke about it. I don't think we spoke about it in one of the previous podcast because it was pretty recent. The Tesla car has a feature called autopilot which is a self-driving feature. You have to be sitting there.

Kate: [41:54] Can you turn it off?

Kevin: [41:56] Yes.

Kate: [41:56] The few emergency-break that would tend like that...What's that setting called when you're on highway?

Kevin: [42:04] Yeah, and you can set the speed, cruise control.

Kate: [42:06] Cruise control. That's it.

Kevin: [42:06] It's an advanced version of cruise control. There's a video going around of a track that was driving on a highway. There's two cars in front of him. The one car, it cuts off the other car but in a way that was quite dangerous. What is interesting, the Tesla breaked automatically, immediately and then these two cars crash.

Kate: [42:36] Non-Tesla cars?

Kevin: [42:38] The non-Tesla cars crashed. The Tesla autopilot predicted this crash before it actually happened. You're watching and then these two cars, the two non-Tesla cars driving in the lane in front of them. The one cuts off the other one and the timings were a bit off.

[42:58] Quite well before the crash, maybe a second or two before the crash, the Tesla breaks, and then these two cars crash. That type of sophistication, literally, even if it helped this chap, who was driving the Tesla, saved a couple of seconds, slammed into the back of them, huge difference. That's where...

Kate: [43:20] Sometimes it's not always the best case to break. Most cases, yes, but in the case where you've got to speed up to get around something or get into another lane, do you think that these cars would be able to do that?

Kevin: [43:32] Absolutely. They wouldn't just have a simplistic view of just breaking. They would factor in. That's probably why it's still not mature, that technology. All these use cases, they're just learning the whole time and factoring in all these different use cases.

Kate: [43:50] I think we're going to have problems in the transition between self-driving cars and people who are still driving themselves. I feel there's going to be crashes and instances most likely caused by the peopled riving themselves, but also just from misunderstanding that don't understand how the self-driving cars work. They might go left and so does the self-driving car. Once they are all self-driving, I think we'll be fine.

Kevin: [44:17] Look, there's quite a few states in the US, I think, three states where self-driving cars are legal already. You see them in San Francisco. They got a sign on them. They're there. That's already happening. There've been very few crashes. There have been a few. The Tesla had a fatal one, I believe, but that's not a self-driving car.

[44:40] I can't remember what exactly happened with that one. They are already there in the US. I think the technology they'll get right. The bigger challenge is the biggest employer in the world is transport -- truck drivers, bus drivers, train drivers, taxi drivers. I think it's going to come in really hard and fast.

[45:05] I think it's literally going to happen overnight because the benefits are so huge. It's Uber's long term play, no doubt. Uber's long term play, absolutely. There's just no advantage. It sounds pretty brutal, but there's no advantage to them having a driver.

[45:21] Would you pay more, assuming the technology is safe and all of that's given, would you pay more just so you could have a chat to someone on the way home?

Kate: [45:32] No.

Kevin: [45:32] Pay double?

Kate: [45:33] I don't think so.

Kevin: [45:35] I think very few people would. I think maybe as a novelty on occasion, you'll get a limo with a chap in a taxi that you can chat to.

[45:42] [laughter]

Kate: [45:44] I'd be down for if it worked out to be cheaper like a ride sharing type thing. If it could have the smarts to now that somebody else two streets away from me was going in the same direction, then put us all together, that's fine.

Kevin: [45:57] There is Uber pool which woks in San Francisco and in New York. It's brilliant.

Kate: [46:02] Yeah, that would be a good idea.

Kevin: [46:05] It would be a lot cheaper to not to have a driver. I think Uber takes 20 percent of the cab of the Uber fare. Immediately that 20 percent is there as a festive, they give five percent back to the passenger. It's five percent cheaper. The poor Uber drivers are out of a job.

Kate: [46:30] There'll be more jobs in monitoring all these as well.

Kevin: [46:32] I know, but it's...

Kate: [46:33] It's not for everyone.

Kevin: [46:35] Yeah, and it's not fun when you're the one that...

Kate: [46:38] Loses your job.

Kevin: [46:39] Loses your job.

Kate: [46:39] Definitely.

Kevin: [46:40] That I think more than the technology. The technology, they'll nail. I have no...Anyway, that's CES in Vegas, which I'd love to go to one day. Have you ever been to Vegas?

Kate: [46:52] No, I haven't. I have a friend there, though. She's always like, "Kate, come over and visit."

Kevin: [46:56] Maybe we can go to Vegas one day and do some podcasting and chatting to people in the prototypes. We'll have to get some videos going as well.

Kate: [47:09] That would be good. I hear it's pretty crazy there.

Kevin: [47:10] Yeah, I'm sure. Americans do things big and in style sometimes. Anyway, we hope you enjoyed the podcast. Let us know if you do. We're also experimenting with periscoping the podcast. We periscope the chat that Kate and I have. Keep an eye out on the Twitter feed. It's usually Tuesday evening American time when we periscope it.

[47:35] Sometimes it changes, but we will try to keep it Tuesday evening American time, Wednesday morning Australian time. Happy New Year wherever you are. As I mentioned, we have some fantastic guests coming up in the future podcasts. We look forward to bringing those to you over the next few weeks. Have a good week.

Kate: [48:07] See you.

[48:07] [music]