Mark Zuckerberg kicked off Facebook’s annual F8 develop conference in San Francisco by saying he is worried by the growing number of people and countries that are turning inward, wishing to build walls instead of bridges, and seeking to limit global communications. Facebook stands for connecting all people in a global community, he said, and it takes courage to choose hope over fear. A big theme of this year’s event is bringing people together with new platforms and services.
Some highlights from Day 1 of F8:
- Zuckerberg presented Facebook’s roadmap for the next ten years.
- Artificial intelligence will power new services with better than human perception.
- The next big platforms are Virtual and Augmented Reality.
- The main Facebook website connects over a billion people.
- Messenger and WhatsApp together are now handling 60 billion messages a day – about 3X the volume of SMS worldwide
- 900 million people are using Messenger each month
- Launching M, an AI-powered chat-bots on Messenger – for businesses, this lets customer interact with sales tools and support systems in an more automated, user friendly format. Beta launch is underway with APIs being released for the Facebook Bot engine.
- Launching Facebook Surround 360 – a professional-grade, 17-camera system for 360-degree VR viewing at 8K 60fps. The system minimizes required post-processing by implementing custom software and codecs. Eight SSDs are used to capture content at 32 GB/s. With RAID0 there is up to 2 hours of continuous raw capture. Facebook will open source the project on Github this summer.
- Released Live API – letting apps to stream live video from any device directly to Facebook.
- Facebook continues to work on drones, satellites, laser communication systems. The Aquilla solar-powered, drone plane will fly at 60,000 feet for months at a time, delivering Internet access to those below.
- The first Facebook-backed satellite will launch later this year, bringing Internet access over Africa
- Aries and Terragraph are two new systems that Facebook has developed to improve connectivity on the ground in urban and rural areas.
- Reducing data consumption is a priority – FB continues to improve its Lite applications and is introducing an Augmented Traffic Control tool to help developers simulate data conditions in other countries
- Telecom Infra Project – the idea is to make it cheaper for telcos to operate their network, in the hope that they pass these savings on to consumers in the form of cheaper data plans
- Free Basics – this program subsidizes the cost of basic mobile data services. So far, it has connected 25 million people in 37 countries
The keynote video is online.
