From Marhard where Innovation, Money and Power Collie in Silicon Valley, NBN.
This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow.
I'm Caroline Heid at Bloomberg's World headquarters in New York and.
I'm Ed Ludlow in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Technology.
Coming up. We'll bring you the full coverage of Super Bowl fifty eight, from the streaming to the advertising, the actual cellular infrastructure within the stadium. We have got you covered.
Plus Bitcoin tops forty nine thousand dollars for the first time in a month. We'll look at the ups and downs of the crypto industry as many are still coping with a tumultuous few years, and.
President Biden launches a TikTok account to reach young voters amid his re election campaign. We'll break down the broader media strategy by the White House amid what is a crucial election year. Happy Super Bowl Monday to all who celebrate and are a little tired and a projected record breaking one at that that it was. We spoke of course to the paramount CEO of Backage on Friday before the big game. Is what he had in anticipation.
It's been an incredible season for the NFL. On CBS, we set the high watermark for ratings since the property returned in nineteen ninety eight. He set the high watermark for ad sales for Super Bowl, and it's looking like on Saturday on Sunday we'll set an all time viewing number with any lux.
Of course, it was a big win for Kansas City Chiefs defeating I'm Afraid at San Francisco. Forty nine is becoming the first back to back Super Bowl champs in like nineteen years now. Viewing figures not out yet, but it is forecast to be the most watched Super Bowl in history. Makes Felix Jennet joins us for a little bit on what we anticipate in terms of actual eyeballs in the way in which people viewed on Paramount Plus and CBS or even Nickelodeon. What are we anticipating in tens of years.
Well, the game couldn't have gone any better for CBS and Paramount. I mean the fact that it was a close game went to overtime. There's lots of drama keeps viewers' attention. It's really the perfect script for them and I think it'll be huge numbers. I'd be surprised that they will break the all time number. Yeah, they're going to have to factor in the streaming numbers what happened on Nickelodeon.
There were some you know, streaming problems at the outside of the game, but I think overall, you know, adding the Taylor Swift Kelsey drama and the kiss on the field, I mean, it's just really perfect for them.
Bloomberg Technology Senior producer Jackie Lopez, our glorious lead, is saying that the Nickelodeon production was out of this world. It's an interesting experience, right, you know, I watched through the Paramount Plus streaming app when we spoke about backish. It's kind of like great for the platform, but it's a shop window.
You know.
They had the Halo season two ads going, then there are the third party ads. What did you make of it? Felix is a technology spectacle for Paramount Global, but also for their for their business, which is still ad based.
Yeah, and I think they need, you know, Nickelodeon needs a win. You know, they need some good news to spend a terrible time for cable networks. And it's fun, it's like a different experience for the kids.
You know.
I even thought that their ad for Pluto TV was one of the best, and saw a lot of buzz for the raising couch Potatoes Is the couch Potato Yeah, which was really good, I mean, very good night all across the board for them, all.
Right, Blue Begs, Felix, Jellette, thank you and Carol, I think you and I, partly because we covered it a lot on the show in recent weeks and months, paid attention to Timu, like the regularity of the ads, but also the idea like you can shop like a billionaire on a platform that's like discounting. It was very interesting for.
Me and maybe that we've been saying the company wrong all this time because the way in which the jingle goes in the sound on is Temu. But it really is an interesting like habit. The fact that they just kept rolling the same one out again and again and
ultimately everyone's still engaging with it. The phenomenal stats, but for me, what caught the eyes was the fact that it was movies that did well, it was non US car makers that seemed to be doing well, and ultimately they were all pretty focused on being emotional in some way if they weren't being humorous, there was an emotional tap.
To it all.
But I don't know.
I was on the edge of my seat. I mean, of course I was more about USh Or on his roller skates. But other than that, this Deadpool one had all my kids talking.
Yes, excited about Deadpool. Wicked is one that was there as well. And I know that Taylor Swift was at the center of this super Bowl but in the commercial ad context Beyonce, which we can talk about later in the program.
Country though maybe Country is for the win in terms of music in every single way. Let's get more of a read through on really the real insights that can go from just last night's own adverts. We've got Kevin Krim with our CEO of Edio. Look, it measures the immediate impact of TV advertising, cross linear, across streaming, and
that's where, of course this game was taking past. Kevin, give us the sense it felt like you're pointing out actually that it was the movies and the auto ads that really stuck out in terms of us all then diving in and wanting to interact with them immediately.
Right, So, great game last night, as you said, and what Nielsen measures with its audience numbers is how many people watched.
What we're measuring ado is.
What happens next? What are those behaviors that every marketer is trying to drive of engagement with their brands, that deepening of loyalty, of consideration of intent, and what we saw top two best performing ads were movies.
As you mentioned. Number three was Volkswagen. Really interesting to see.
Volkswagen returning to the game after ten years of being absent, showing their heritage in the US with the Beetle and then teasing their all electric VW Bus, the ID Buzz that's coming later this year, and.
Boy has Eve been under some pressure of late. I'm just wanting to know ultimately what you're measuring when you're coming to us with numbers like two and forty three percent increase in terms of engagement. When it came to Deadpool and Wolverine, what are you seeing? Is it searching?
Those are people grabbing their phones other connective devices and searching for it, going to YouTube to watch the trailer, the extended trailer, which is often a called action, going to Wikipedia to learn more about the cast. Those are the kind of behaviors that we pick up in our measurement, and we're looking at lift above a normal baseline set
of behaviors. So these new films, new cars, new products like Temu relatively new still, those are the kind of things we're seeing very large lift above those baseline levels. Something that is more ubiquitous you're going to see lower lift, But those still are interesting numbers. When you're a marketer trying to drive people into your product.
What you don't expect the morning after a Super Bowl is to wake up and think about probiotic healthy sodas. But you know, Poppy was so present, right. I want to use them as a case study for the spend because you know, they ranked super high on the list. But that must have been some expensive real estate for them to be so positioned. And the question is what does the data tell you about what they get out
of it? You know, how do we know that people flood to the shops thinking about their gut health and wanting to drink healthy soda?
Right, So we saw Poppy number four on our rankings, huge lift above its normal levels of engagement. What their ad did so smartly is talked about the benefits the differences between their soda and a typical sugary soda, low sugar, probiotics.
And it's a high priced product.
I didn't realize until I saw that ad and I looked it up that it's a two dollars a can soda if you're buying it, you know.
At the typical grocery store.
So for an independent soda company based in Austin, Texas to really break through, you're spending about seven, maybe even a little more million dollars for that thirty second spot.
Your creative costs are on top of that.
Now, the intelligently, I think, didn't invest in a celebrity, they didn't need it, they felt. Instead, they went with just big, bold claims about how they're different. It was a bright, cheery and an engaging spot and it performed.
Something Not in your top ten is Verizon and Beyonce, and your data is on online engagement. So I find that so surprising. You know, when you say online engagement, if somebody watches this video and goes, okay, Beyonce, what are you saying that they're doing They're just going straight to Google and searching for this or are they engaging in another way online?
Well, what we're seeing with that kind of ad is there, and our methodology separates the engagement with the brand from the engagement with the celebrity, So we'll certainly see that Beyonce is at the top of our celebrity rankings when it comes to that measurement. But for Verizon, and it's a great you know ad. I think it's the most fun I've seen Beyonce having in a long time.
It hits on a bunch of fun themes.
The risk with that kind of huge celebrity like Beyonce is that you are siphoning off potentially some of your engagement with your brand to the celebrity. So the challenge is always to work together in an authentic way to get this celebrity to be really tightly aligned with your brand.
And again, I think this performed well.
It was well above the average for our measurement of all ads on the Super Bowl.
But you know, I think comparing it with T Mobiles ad.
With with you know, the cast of Scrubs and Jason Momoa, that one may have hit their benefits even more squarely. And so they were a little ahead of Verizon according to our measurement.
I mean, I found the Duncan one pretty funny but that doesn't seem to have come up in particularly your numbers as well. I mean, was that again misspent money on the power of celebrity that is Jlo and actually a.
Husband it was. It performed very well.
It was in our top twenty or just shy of it so out of one hundred plus ads. Still a great outcome for Duncan, which is almost a you know, an everyday household name in this country. And it was a great ad, really well executed. That was a very authentic use of celebrity and some nostalgia all wrapped into one very fun ad and it performed. I mean, to get people to even be engaging with Duncan at all, whether it's through their app or through web searches is quite a feat and they hit it.
I wonder ed how much interaction there was with Satoshi Nakamoto on the back of just a T shirt or sweatshirt by one jacked course seat, but there were no.
Con see jay Z and then just the random guy next to them, which floads of people.
Saw some magnums of red. As you so well pointed out, it's been brilliant to get the inside trap with the doo ceo Kevin Krimp, thank you so much for joining us. Kevin and all things adds a little bit more to do with Super Bowl coming up in the show. But coming up, we're going to get serious around of course, the Ukrainian military forces saying that Russia is using Starlink terminals on the front line. We'll tell you how Starlink
is responding to those claims across the social platform. Next, of course, and what have.
You got, Just real quick look at Amazon shares down a hot percentage point the news Jeff Bezos sold twelve million Amazon shares last week Wednesday Thursday, net proceeds around two billion. We knew on February second that he has a plan to sell fifty million shares over the course of the next twelve months. But it's the first time he sold stock since twenty twenty one. And if you think back to twenty twenty twenty one, he did twenty
billion dollars worth over those two years. So it's definitely one to watch this this Bloomberg technology, it's time for talking tech and first up, Nvidia CEO Jensen Wong says advances in computing over the next few years will scale back the high costs of developing artificial intelligence still why expects the global costs of data center's powering AI to
increase in the next five years. This comes in response to a Wall Street Journal report that open Ai CEO Sam Autman is seeking to raise seven trillion dollars from investors and in a shift toward the United States and other Western markets. AI firm G forty two tells Boomberg News that it's pairing back its presence in China. The Abbada based firm has been at the forefront of the United Arab Emirates push into AI. Its partnerships include one with open Ai and Sarah Brass Systems.
Plus.
Elon Musk is cutting ties with Delaware. The billionaire reincorporated the brain implant company Neuralink, to Nevada from the first state. The change was completed Thursday in a notice sent to shareholders. Musk has suffered a number of legal setbacks in Delaware, including one over his pay and another over his acquisition of Twitter Caroline.
Let's get into some other news relating to Elon muskad because Ukraine it's accusing Russian military forces of using Starlink terminals on the front line, saying that the use of Stalink's Internet service is becoming, they say, is systemic. This is as the Starlink satellite Internet service is also we understand, being used by Sudan's power military rapid support forces amid
a nationwide internet blackout that the UN is saying. Of course, that blackout is really brutal for the humanitarian crisis that's being injected after a ten month civil war. All of this ultimately questioning how Starlink is being used and what the company ultimately knows about it. We say, Numerg's match Chaffkin is with us now. And when we think of Russian Ukraine in particular, Starlink has come back and said, not to our knowledge is it being used right.
Well, Starlink denied that its devices were being used in Russia, that its service is being used in Russia, although the claim was not necessarily that the devices were being used in Russia, but in Russian occupied Ukraine, so in other words,
in Ukraine. And this kind of calls back to this earlier incident that happened, which was reporting the Walter Isaacson book, where Musk apparently according to Isaacson, stopped the service from being turned on in Crimea, which is international law recognizes
Ukraine Russia ANX in twenty fourteen. So you have this situation where Starlink, which was developed essentially as a civilian technology Musk has talked about, you know, this was for Netflix and chill, this is something that was meant to be used for video calls and so on, has been partly because you know, it's pretty useful and the way it's used has become like a de facto military technology, and SpaceX has been trying to capitalize on that while
kind of beating back criticism that it's doing so in an irresponsible way.
Caroline made a good point, which is the wording Musk used was to the best of our knowledge, And one user on X said, what do you mean the best of your knowledge? And his response was the link doesn't work. By that, I think he means that the technology doesn't work in the Russian jurisdiction. I guess what more do we know about SpaceX and Starlink's ability to troll things in jurisdictions?
Right?
I know there's that map on the website that shows where the product's operational.
Yeah, I don't think they're able to control the use in a very granular way, and it's it's possible that these devices. Musk has denied that Russia purchased these devices. Possible the devices were captured. Of of course, it is also possible, like were purchased through an intermediary or something like that. And of course we should look at all these claims as claims. Right, this is the Ukrainian military reporting something
that they overheard through their intelligence. So again it's all pretty fuzzy.
I'd say.
What it does show though, is that, you know, Elon Musk has kind of made a show of weighing in on foreign policy, of expressing sort of not not exactly pro Russia sentiments, but views towards Russia that I'd say are more sympathetic than the one viewed by the United
States government. And that creates like an additional layer of complexity when something like this comes up, because you know, whatever is going on, you have you know, this very loud, you know, very very opinionated CEO weighing in on political issues, and that creates, you know, again an additional air of complication as they're trying to market this potentially to military groups in the US and US allies.
All right, Bloomberg's Max Chafkin over in New York, Bitcoin hitting forty nine thousand for the first time in a month. For some, bitcoin and crypto are back, but for others there's still trauma from years of volatility in a battle between fomo and selling it again. The total market cap of the biggest digital currencies, bitcoin and Ether has been boosted by the SEC's approval of spot ets, but it also masks the reality of what the last few years
have been like. If you were a crypto investor starting in twenty twenty one, you've lived through ftx's collapse and thousands waiting to learn if they can access their funds on the exchange even if you had some bitcoin twelve one thousand, other smaller old coins don't exist anymore or are now I liquid. And then there's the ride itself if you're hoddling crypto, lingo for holding onto an investment,
and no matter the cost, you've been through it. Bitcoin jump from forty four thousand to forty eight thousand bar token since February twenty twenty two, but in the interim there's been days where the price has swung thousands of dollars and we hit a lower fifteen thousand five hundred, and for all the drama, we still aren't clear on the real world use case of digital assets. The latest bounce hasn't settled the biggest worries about crypto. Let's bring
in Bloomberg Shnali Bassak. That was a long monologue about where we actually are now with crypto.
How do you read it?
What is the use case?
It's an interesting question here because, of course, now you have bitcoin, which of course is the king maker of the crypto industry, and you have seen, interestingly enough, ed you have seen the price of bitcoin heart back to levels that we haven't seen since December of twenty twenty one. Now we are well off those highs, as you were saying, we have breached above sixty thousand in the peak of what we saw in crypto euphoria when people were buying bitcoin at home before FTX had collapsed.
But we are riding back higher.
And you're seeing the launches of these ETFs, particularly for black Rock and Fidelity in particular, have the greatest number of assets being brought in, according to Bloomberg Intelligence ever for an ETF launch of any asset class. So you are seeing traditional Wall Street hop in and help give that value proposition to bitcoin. We are seeing it finally hop back up to levels that we saw when you initially saw the excitement around the ETF The question is
does it reach new highs once again? You still have the having coming up in coming weeks. There is an argument to be made that some of that is already priced in. But interestingly, it's not just Bitcoin actually that's seeing a lot of love lately, even some other alts coins or tokens outside of the initial big two Bitcoin ethereum. Take Slona. Solana is up thirteen percent over the last seven days, and this is a network that had seen
an outage just a couple of days ago. Really, so a lot of love coming back to the crypto markets today.
Three point eight billion dollars taken in by Black Rocks, I show a Bitcoin trust, two point one by Fidelity. We thank Jannalibassch for the inside track on all things crypto.
Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology Ed Love loow here in San.
Francisco, Caroline Hein and Neiork.
Let's get back to the digital campaign trail with President Joe Biden's re election campaign launching a TikTok account in a bid to reach younger voters. Move that comes as the popular short form video platform confronts concerns over its ties to China's bringing bloomber Kdie lines out in DC showing the video, it's one way to engage with the younger voter.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And the White House already has been engaged in trying to use tech talk, not outright via its own actual account, but of course they've engaged with content creators on the platform before in order to push their messages and reach these younger individuals. And that's exactly what the campaign is trying to do here now, engage with younger voters who the president is going to rely on to show up for him in November if he wants to
win a second term. Now, this account does belong to the Biden campaign, not to the President himself, but essentially what they're trying to reach is that key demographic. A Pew Research survey from just two weeks ago found sixty two percent of US adults between eighteen and twenty nine use TikTok. Thirty three percent of adults overall do, so that's who they're trying to reach. But you can understand how this may seem a bit ironic here, considering this
administration also has voice concerns about this platform. Biden himself signed into law legislation that bans the use of TikTok on government phones. If you work for a government agency and have a phone tied to that agency, you aren't allowed to use this platform. Of course, under the Biden administration, Siphius is also threatened to ban TikTok in the US if ByteDance were not to divest from the platform here.
So you have those concerns on the one hand, and campaign officials have told Bloomberg that they are taking protections in order to make sure this account is secure. But on the other hand, the end voters are there and they say they want to meet them where they are.
Yeah, I mean we've had already Republican Senator Josh Harley from Missouri's going to the other social media platform x to say, look, why on earth they interacting on TikTok at the moment and really feeling that this is again a Chinese by app to that perspective, Is there any anticipation that Biden and Harris individually wouldever start taking to TikTok or does this have to remain a campaign sort of at social presence well.
Campaign officials have told Bloomberg that no decision yet has been made whether Vice President Harris or President Biden will have their own accounts. For now, this does seem to just be going through the campaign, because, of course you also have on the other hand, on the Republican ticket, candidates like Nikki Haley still very much in this race, even though it looks unlikely she'll be campaigning against Biden in a general election, who has actually called for the
outright banning of TikTok because of concerns over China. So certainly there is pressure there on the Republican side, and there could be a little bit of a political headwind if if Biden were to push even further into the TikTok realm, and you mentioned Senator Josh Holly, I would just note that, of course, there have been a lot of legislative efforts to ban this platform entirely largely, though they do seem to have stalled out. As we've seen
born out in recent weeks. It's very hard for this Congress to get anything over the finish line, and the TikTok ban probably would be pretty difficult as.
Well there with a context and the reality. Kaylie Lynes, we thank you so much for joining across the board on TikTok, but let's keep this conversation going on basically social media and its role of generative AI in the US election. In fact, the image generating AI platform mid Journey is considering banning people from using its software to make political images over the next year, in particular pictures of Biden and Trump. Discuss all of this with doctor
Nazua Ara. She is the chief researcher and cryptography and Autonomous Robotics research centers at the Technology Innovation Institute. From you, doctor, we want answers ultimately of what can be done practically speaking, as we think about Biden's voice being created by a deep fake, you're saying that LLM Large Language Model providers can put gudrails in place we see to minimize the generation of election related content. Is mid journey the way
to do this. How are you seeing it being put into effect?
Good morning? Yes, indeed, I mean what you showed and the adoption of AI, it's potential impact on the security of the infrastructure and online activities are pertinent, especially when we talk about in the context of election cycles. As you mentioned, the most common threat using generative aies and guns are deep figs. This could be through the voice, through the video, through the image, and the text, and obviously they aim at spreading the false information, releading information,
identity theft, and gaining access to sensitive information. Let alone all the malicious chatbots that can be you used as primary tools for social engineering, the malware the ransomware that can be created using this generated AI on the deep figs. In particularly today, we see a lot of tools that are being developed, however they are in their infancy. One of the approaches is watermarking. In fact, Meta announced a
few days ago that Facebook and Instagram will start doing so. However, in my opinion, this could be quite easily evaded even for images for text where gradients or even voice tradients can be easily manipulated. The deployment of model guard rays of policies, especially when it comes to content related to elections.
Today you can basically classify the content and when it comes to election related content, these guardless can be applied by the LLM model, hosting companies and the content providers, and strict policies can be applied Another way to think about other countermeasures is that we can generate signatures and profiles of whatever voice or whatever text or whatever image
comes up as the deep fake. Those can be logged into a distributed system, and then we can enable auditing and tracking from the al alam hosters or from the content providers.
Doctor, here's the thing that you've outlined where the technology is available. Who has a better command of the technology the threat actors who intend to spread malicious content or misinformation or the platforms who are trying to ward off against it.
So today, obviously the one that has the upper hand is the threat actor, right, So they use the large language models and then they can use them and the content context of gangs to generate those deep fakes. However, as I was saying, there are some countermeasures that the LLM owners and the hosting companies can these measures or these countermeasures can be put in place in order to minimize the impact and to minimize the capabilities of those
threat actors. In addition to the guardrails and the strict policies that I was mentioning, there are other cybersecurity protocols that need to be followed by those llms, and today as we see those are I would say very weekly or very loosely adopted. For example, the adoption of multifactor authentication to log or to access this model can be applied. Which this multifactor authentication could be a password, could be
a passphrase, could necessitate the provision of an email. It could even be a biometric and this would slaw or this would prevent some of the threat actors from this from passing this MFA. Deploying adequate cryptographic and privacy measures can also be done by those large language models. Deployment of others cyber defense, especially safety tech systems to prevent
online HOWM can also be deployed by these lms. So there are other, let's say, traditional cybersecurity protocols that need to be adopted by the large language model providers.
NASUS from the Technology Innovation Institute, we appreciate your expertise. Thank you. Sticking with AI. An analysis by Morgan Stanley strategist says US companies are discussing cost control on earnings calls at a record rate, AMIDE a push to reallocate funds and invest in new technologies and from me Carr, I think back to that conversation I have with ruthe Porat. That's exactly what they're doing, cutting where there's no growth and reassigning to the AI initiative.
But this goes outside of the world of just technology firms. You think are ups coming out of their earnings talking on one side of the mouth about the need for efficiency the job cuts they have to enact, and then the other side how they're really really focused on general to AI and wanting to deploy more assets, more money towards that. The team over at Morgan Stanley, Mike Wilson
leading it really just saying there is this overlap. Yes, you're hearing operational efficiency again and again and again, but actually the same people uttering it are tending to talk up a lot about the AI opportunity and the investment in technology, and they say they're really starting to see basically this ongoing narrative of both job losses, basically an AI.
Spading for investors. Then they look at EPs and say, did it work. That's been the story that's.
Earning season Absolutely fascinating. That's sort of the charts. You've got to go into the Bloomberg terminal and have a little look at the story and just show how they've been trying to look at the transcript mentions of operational efficiency and then who's talking up AI coming up. Look, we're going to keep deep diving into some unlooked parts of the tech universe that we should look at more. And we're going to focus on diversity next, particularly in
mention capital. Joey Mack from Chicago Blend's gonna be joining us. This is Bluemberg Technology. Let's just have a discussion about diversity or lack there of right now, because Amazon has allegedly retaliated against three female employees after the women ensued the company for pay discrimination. Now, the plaintiffs are caused
in saying this within some new court papers. The lawsuit, which was far back in November, alleges that the company pays women less than men for similar work and that females employees will they face systemic discrimination when seeking promotions. But we want to bring this conversation more broadly to say the VC space where women founded companies also get less funding than the average nationwide. But look, there's some
drummers of hope here. Chicago, for example, the best city for women founders, according to a new report by a Chicago nonprofit. Chicago Blend is a nonprofit working to advanced diversity, equity, and inclusion in Chicago's VC community. Peace to say CEO Joey Matt joins us some more and actually East Coast fed the best here.
It was Chicago, Boston.
New York, and then swiftly behind them comes in the West Coast San Francisco, La, Seattle. Are used seeing improvement here visa the founding of companies that we saw in the prior five years.
To this set of data, we are in fact, over the last five years, we found that women have actually made some really great gains in terms of being represented among venture backed companies that are that are raising venture dollars. As mentioned earlier, you know, in Chicago, more than thirty six percent of our venture backed companies in the last five years had at least one woman founder, which is the highest rate of representation of any city included in
this report. However, when we look at the amount of money that those women founders those companies are raising, it's closer to about fifteen percent of all the VC dollars that were deployed to Chicago companies. So you know, there's still quite a bit of work to do to address that that funding gap.
What are the factors behind the data, Joey, What is it that makes Chicago an attractive place to be a venture capitalist or found a startup.
One thing that's working really well in Chicago is the fact that there are a number of organizations and programs that are focused on deploying capital, especially early stage capital, to women founders. And oftentimes when raising venture capital, being able to demonstrate traction is really essential. So ensuring that those founders are able to get that early stage capital, that non dilute of capital, very early in their startup
journey is really essential. And I think that there's been a lot of work here in Chicago and elsewhere around the country to focus on that, and.
That's what we're seeing.
Sorry sorry to interrupt, but there's also been a lot of work on diversity of all its guys. Is so for example, black found and businesses as well. And you're shining a light on that's doing better. And you've got the second highest proportion in terms of percentage of you se back companies with a Black or African American founder about ten percent way of the numbers we're seeing for women, Joey,
I'm interested in the politics the context of this. We had ari An Simone on the show recently of the Fearless Fund, and we're starting to see a dei pendulum swing. We're seeing people pushing saying that you shouldn't allocate funds from a VC or grant perspective to just a minority, be it women, be it people of color. Are you seeing that in action or are you actually still seeing progress?
We are seeing progress. Look, there's a lot of misinformation that's been put out there around the virtue of diversity, equity and inclusion in business and venture capital more broadly. But when you look at the funding numbers, even from our own report, we're finding that women, people of color, people are starting found who are founding companies, they're still
raising significantly less than their counterparts. So what's really important here is ensuring that we are continuing to demonstrate why it's good to invest in diversity, the fact that when you have more diverse teams, they're more likely to have insights into other market opportunities that can ultimately produce better products and services for customers and ultimately produce higher returns
for investors. We need to continue focusing on that, continue making that case and demonstrating that there's also need to be made in addition to being good for society.
Chicago ranks number one or number two on your measures, but which cities or regions are showing the kind of most rapid improvements. There may have been low down the list, but are making progress to climb the table.
Something that we've found really interesting is in Boston, for example, they actually do really well when it comes to the percentage of dollars that are going to women founded companies. So we can look to other parts of the country to see where there are, you know, higher proportions, higher concentrations of underrepresented founders who are raising venture capital, as
well as the amount of money that they're raising. But the truth is, whether you're looking at Chicago or any other part of the country, there is still a significant funding gap for women founders of color, and that is something that we need to focus on industrywide.
Chicrgo Blen CEO Joey Matt Great to have you on the program. Thank you for your time.
Let's go back to the Super Bowl because as we were discussing earlier, one ad that went viral was Beyonce using a Verizon commercial to announce that she would soon be releasing new music.
Now.
In the ad, she jokes with Comedia and Tony Hale about doing something that would quote break the Internet, meaning Verizon's five G network, and of course she can't break it even with an AI version of herself, but she did hint that new music was going to be coming just before the commercial ends ed and well, the Internet went wild.
If Beyonce can't break it, can anyone break it? Let's stick with Verizon and the Super Bowl and bring in Verizon Senior Vice president and Chief Network Officer Lynn Cox. And the serious side to this is that it went off without a hitch on the field. The teams communicated with one another, the fans in the stadium posted to social media with vigor. What were you actually doing to support that during the game.
Well, Caroline, thank you for having me. We are thrilled with the formance of our network yesterday and frankly all weekend long. I was there rooting the team on behind the scenes, just supporting any way I could. You know, we take this very seriously. We have a deep partnership with the NFL, and our customers expect a lot out of our network. The most reliable and consistent network. So we have spent years planning this deployment and we had, for the first time ever, our entire trunch of seaband
spectrum deployed. That's triple the capacity that they would have experienced last year at the Super Bowl in Phoenix. And as always, it's millimeter waves time to shine. With sixteen hundred megaheartz of capacity on millimeter wave, so customers could pretty much do anything they wanted to do on our network, whether it was in the bowl, in the tailgating areas, in the concourses, the network performed just phenomenally.
Yeah, would that anyway? Take us behind the scenes, take us to you coaching your team. Was at any moment where you're when in your mouth, were you're ever so slightly worried or was it really like cool heads prevailed throughout?
Cool heads prevail? I was not worried. You have to understand the pride this team takes and designing the network, deploying the network, and operating it. We had a team of sixty five engineers in our network command center monitoring every single sliver of that stadium. What is performance like for this group of thirty customers sitting in this section
or fifty customers. I mean, we have more than twenty of our test force engineers walking in and around the stadium throughout the day, testing to make sure the network we designed was performing exactly as we expected. So, Frankly, my job is to get out of the way and let them do what they do. They are experts at it, at what they do. They're the unsung heroes, Frankly of the network. The technology is tremendous, but it's that team of engineers that really bring it to life.
Let's look at this from the network's perspective. You know, beyond Age tried to break the Internet or the five G network, has Cary pointed out. But what kind of workload and duress does the network go under relative to any normal day? What is it you had to brace for?
Yeah, you know, customers are telling us they more and more need to be connected all the time, and especially at an event like the Super Bowl yesterday, that need for hyperconnectivity to share their experience. We pushed more than fifty two terabytes of data in and around the stadium on game day yesterday. That's up nine and a half
percent year over year. As we deploy the capacity with our midband spectrum and our high band spectrum, consumers are using more and more of it, so frankly, they're telling us exactly what they want to do. Gone are the days where a simple text message is good enough. People want to FaceTime during ushers halftime show and be able
to share that with friends and family. They want to live stream, they want to however, they want to connect with friends, family, and social We are there to support them to do that.
We thank you for taking us behind the scenes on what was a herculean and effort. I'm sure Verizon Senior Vice president and Chief Network Officer Lincox. Great to catch up with you the day after the big Game. And boy was it a big game. I mean, I wish I could just dwell more on usher and back in history and well people taking to rollerskates. But that does it for this edition of Bloebo Technology.
A little bit more somber out here on the West Coast, particularly in San Francisco and the Bay Area, but recap great conversations about Super Bowl fifty eight on the podcast Apple Spotify, iHeart, and we're posting as well to all of the bloombog platforms from San Francisco and New York City. This is bloombog technology.