Satellites, drones and Wi-Fi: This is how Facebook wants to cover the world with Internet

Satellites, drones and Wi-Fi: This is how Facebook wants to cover the world with Internet

Facebook’s idea is clearly to eliminate all obstacles that prevent new users from accessing the Internet and, of course, its own services

Late last month when Facebook renamed its free Internet services as Free Basics, the social networking giant was making clear that Internet.org meant much more than an app offering free access to a bunch of websites. Facebook has other plans for the Internet, much bigger plans.

Facebook’s idea is clearly to eliminate all obstacles that prevent new users from accessing the Internet and, of course, its own services. Free Basics is an attempt to bring down the affordability barrier that exists in many countries.

The other barrier that Facebook wants to eliminate is technology and it is working across the globe on technologies that brings Internet to remote parts of the world. In India, it has pioneered an ambitious Express Wi-FI programme that brings affordable Internet to a community level with Facebook plugging the technology gap and its local Internet service provider partners helping out with data.


Munish Seth, Country Manager-Connectivity Solutions India region, says they are using the old cable operator model to get Express Wi-Fi working. “We use commercially available Wi-Fi access point technology with software developed by us to help the local entrepreneur manage his customers and for the customers to electronically buy Internet usage for as low as Rs 10,” he explains, adding that the target has been entry-level phones.

Seth says his team helps the local entrepreneur with technology, business solutions and marketing. In this model, implemented now in over a 100 villages across India, users come to a community area to access the Internet.

However, the more ambitious project is to make connectivity ubiquitous. Just last week, Facebook announced its intention to launch a satellite in partnership with France’s Eutelsat Communications  to bring Internet access to large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Part of the Internet.org platform, AMOS-6 is under construction and will be launched in 2016.

Also under construction is Aquila, a solar powered plane with the wingspan of a Boeing 737. Yael Macguire of Facebook’s connectivity lab calls it a “crazy idea” and says the unmanned aircraft will be solar-powered and this will let is stay up for months on end. The cruising altitude will be around 60,000 feet (18km), much above commercial aircraft, and this will give it a footprint of 100 km diameter.

“We want the airplanes to be where the people are. If they are not, then they are not being used effectively and the cost goes up. It is really important that they can station keep, or stay in a particular region and connect a particular people,” Macguire told IndianExpress.com. “They will move, but around a small zone. When the plane moves the RF system will adjust so that it keep having the same terrestrial footprint.” In fact, the first full-scale Aquila has been completed in under 14 months and tests are now on. 

So while these aircraft try and create a grid of connectivity, there will also be dark spots without connectivity in areas with no substantial population. Those areas could be fed by the satellite. But Facebook’s plan if very different from the postman type internet strategy that some others are working on. Macguire says this is because Facebook does not want some people to have a different type of Internet or broadband experience where they are not connected all the time.
 
The concept seems to be to have multiple grid layers — like the aircraft powered grid overlapping on the Express Wi-Fi grid on the ground. “We want to make sure that various Express W-Fi networks are interconnected. The UAVs, meanwhile, will provide the equivalent of the microwave backhaul. We think of these of building blocks to ensure it is a robust network,” explains Macguire.

Macguire says most of the people who need connectivity are already near the cities which have the optical networks. “So one of the ideas we are exploring is to use a laser system to intereconnect these planes,” he says, adding that lasers are cheaper as they don’t come under the regulatory framework and have lots of bandwidth. However, there are challenges too. “For instance, we have to be able to hit what is the size of a Rupee from 17.7 km away to be able to interlink the UAVs,” Macguire underlines the challenges ahead. In the labs the team has been able to achieve 10x of existing state of the art data speeds and capacities.

But with these kind of plans, it is only natural that we see Facebook running internet services across the world. But Chris Daniels of Internet.org is categorical that Facebook does not want to become a service provider, while Macguire chips in that becoming a UAV or statellite company is also ruled out.

However, not everyone is convinced. Academic and tech guru Vivek Wadhwa says in a scenario where Google’s Loon and Facebook’s satellites and drones start covering the world with free Wi-Fi in three or four years, traditional telecom service providers will be more than threatened. “They will start screaming at the governments that they will go bankrupt. If you have Wi-Fi everywhere no one is going to use their services,” he says. Wadhwa sees regulatory battles ahead which will be much greater than what we have seen over Net Neutrality. “After all, this could wipe out the entire telecom industry.”
Source : indianexpress

Facebook Messenger for Android – How to Disable Chat Heads

Facebook chat heads saw first light in 2013 and since then, they have kept on gaining more popularity, especially in the instant messaging world.

Using chat heads, you can quickly keep in touch with your friends. The service was first available on the main Facebook app; however, the feature has since then been integrated into the Facebook Messenger app, which was separated from the Facebook app back in April 2014. As of now, the chat heads feature is not something new to Facebook users as it has been around now for more than a year.

Facebook Messenger chat heads a default feature
Facebook Messenger was separated from the main Facebook app, which means that to use it; you must first of all download and install it from the Play Store. When this application is installed on your device for the first time, it sets up with the chat heads feature enabled. However, as a matter of fact, not everyone is a fan of chat heads on Messenger and as a result, the next section will detail out how to disable chat heads on Facebook Messenger.

How to disable chat heads on Facebook Messenger
While some might think that disabling a chat head is a one-time thing, you’ll be surprised to learn that what usually happens here is dismissing the chat heads. In essence, this happens when you simply tap and hold it and then drag it to the “X” or the bin that shows up at the bottom of your Android screen. While this will get rid of the chat head, it will not do it on a permanent basis; instead, you will see the chat heads re-appear as soon as a new conversation or message comes in.

The most annoying part about Facebook Messenger chat heads is the fact that they not only show up on your home screen, but they do so and appear on top of every other open application. To disable these chat heads permanently, simply start the Messenger app and head to the settings button located at the top right corner of your Android screen. Tap on this option and a submenu will appear with several tabs.
On these tabs you’ll notice the “Chat heads” tab right from the top. Tap on it and you should be able to see an “On” button that you must again tap on to turn the chat heads off. You can also re-enable these chat heads at any time you feel like.

Source : pressandupdate

How Facebook is teaching computers to see

Facebook’s Moments feature uses facial recognition, but there’s a lot more Facebook can offer with better computer vision and AI.

Facebook today launched its Moments product, which uses Facebook’s image recognition abilities to scan your photos for your friends and then lets people create private photo albums with a particular group, such as the people in the photo. The idea is to make it easier to share photos from a big event among attendees without the cumbersome process of emailing snapshots to everyone or the awkward end-of-event huddle while six people take the exact same group shot. It’s not a cure for cancer, but behind the scenes of this new feature is an impressive technology that Facebook has been working on for years.

A key element of the Moments feature is the ability for Facebook’s algorithms to recognize people’s faces across different photos, so that Moments knows who was at the event. This requires computer vision expertise that companies such as Google, Microsoft, Baidu, and others are currently researching for everything from self-driving cars to silly web products such as Microsoft’s How Old Do I Look?

In launching the Moments product Facebook is sharing data about its own successes in computer vision research. Namely, that Facebook can recognize faces with a 98% accuracy, and it can do so quickly—the company says it can identify you in one picture out of 800 million in less than 5 seconds. Finally, it can do all of this even if it doesn’t have the full frontal shot of your face (or even if your face isn’t in the photo at all), thanks to a machine learning algorithm that can look at other elements in the picture and associated with the photo’s data.

Inside Moments
Fortune spoke with Yann LeCun, Facebook’s director of artificial intelligence research, to understand how his team helped a computer understand who you are, and where Facebook is heading next with its AI research. Perhaps the first thing to understand is that when LeCun discusses computer vision, it’s not the same as how a person sees, although the process of teaching software how to recognize an object has some similarities.

For example, Facebook’s facial recognition, which is the basis of the current efforts, can’t identify you. It only can recognize if a person in one photo is the same as a person in another photo. Identification is a completely separate step.

Video : http://for.tn/1BgeIsg

Because Facebook is about connecting people, its computer vision efforts have focused on recognizing faces as opposed to cats, cars, or other non-human subjects. To do this, it uses a database of celebrity and politicians photos called Labeled Faces in the Wild. This collection of images has 13,000 photos of people with different hairdos, different outfits, sometimes wearing glasses and more. Facebook used this collection to train its machine learning algorithms. Other companies have used this data set as well, and some universities have even trained systems with a higher than 98% accuracy rate using Labeled Faces.
So how did Facebook get from giving a machine a picture of Angelina Jolie to somehow using that photo to help identify your sister across different photo albums on Facebook? LeCun is the man to ask. About 20 years ago when he was working at Bell Labs (now AT&T’s Image Processing Research Department), he happened upon a way of thinking about teaching computers to see that wasn’t really used outside of academia until about three years ago.

How computers learn to see
That technique is called convolutional neural networking, and takes its name from both a mathematical operation called a convolution, and inspiration from how the human brain learns. The brain learns by establishing connections between neurons, and the more often a signal is sent over those neurons, the denser those connections get. In a similar vein, when computers establish similarities between two images it assigns a weight to those similarities. In convolutional neural networks, the goal is to train the machine to recognize the changes in weights between those connections so it can tell with increasing accuracy if the image matches.

The process of doing this is incredibly complicated and involves different calculations that work to establish how important certain aspects of the image are to the actual process of recognizing what the image is. For example, if you want to train a computer to recognize faces, the pixels related to the background are less important. The tricky—and frankly amazing— part of this is that the machine learns on its own how to tell what part of the image is most relevant, and then can generalize those relationships going forward. It still takes a lot of human effort to nudge the computer into recognizing the right way to weight the similarities, but once the model is built, it can generalize going forward.

The process can take a few days on a powerful computer.

Convolutional neural networks have become the basis for almost all of the computer vision research done today, after a team of researchers led by Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto, used that technique to win a competition where image recognition algorithms vie to be most accurate. Hinton, whose team and startup were later acquired by Google, won the competition with a test error rate of 15.3%, compared to 26.2% for the second-place winner.

Don’t post that photo!
As research continues, the opportunities for use in our day-to-day life are significant. Yes, there is the ability to match people’s faces in a crowd that might lead to greater government surveillance, but there is also an opportunity to use better facial recognition to manage your privacy. For example, with automatic facial recognition at scale, any picture of you uploaded to Facebook (or perhaps even the web) could result in a notification.

For example, if you are somehow captured in the background of a tourist shot of Times Square, you could get a notification and the option to blur your face. Applied to children, the blurring or removal could be automated. LeCun notes that Facebook is interested in such tools, but also stresses that Facebook’s interest in machine learning goes far beyond image recognition.

Facebook’s goal is to get a computer to understand empathy. Obviously, it won’t be able to feel what humans do, but it can be trained to recognize what emotions are and how people will react. With that level of understanding, Facebook could, say, offer a warning when you are about to post a photo of you drunk and ask if you really want to do that.

“This would not be face recognition,” said LeCun. “We don’t care who is in the picture. We would use other types of image recognition and train them differently to say that this looks embarrassing and then tap you on the shoulder to make sure you want to post this publicly.”

This isn’t something Facebook can do today, but LeCun offered these concepts as a thought experiment to show where Facebook could head with its AI research. Of course, this sort of expertise informed by an algorithm can make people deeply uncomfortable. Today Facebook doesn’t turn on its auto tagging features in countries like Canada and the EU because of privacy concerns, and there’s a certain creep factor in having a computer second guess your photo-sharing choices or having software trying to parse your jokes to try to understand what you find funny.

“What we’d like to do is make machines more intelligent, understanding text, images, videos and posts,” LeCun said. “Anything that can happen in the digital world we want to understand the context.” Because there is so much digital content people could easily become overwhelmed by the information flooding their feeds. The efforts of LeCun’s team will help connect people with the content that is most relevant to their interests and priorities. It’s a complex solution to a simple goal: to make sure that you see what you want to see on Facebook.

“That’s the big mission that we at Facebook are trying to fulfill,” LeCun said. “Machines that understand people.”

Source : fortune

The Next Race for Space: Google vs. Facebook

 

Between 1955 and 1972, the Space Race inspired both the United States and the Soviet Union to compete with each other for cosmic dominance. There weren’t any rules. There weren’t any defining goals. It was two major competitors locked in one-upmanship as each attempted to probe further, better, and more elegantly into space. After the United States on the Moon, the competition wound down, and while there have been developments and ongoing research in space since, no country has explored the potential of the cosmos with equal ferocity.

Today, a new Space Race is dawning, but it isn’t between two countries. It’s between two tech corporations, and they’re competing just as ferociously as the Cold War participants of yesteryear. Google and Facebook, two of the most dominant online forces in the world, are now working on independent competing projects to beam global Internet access from outer space—and no matter how it turns out, consumers stand to benefit greatly.

Google’s Vision
First, let’s take a look at Google’s current efforts and their vision for universal Internet access. Back in 2013, the company introduced its ideas for global Internet with Project Loon, which still exists today. The plan was to have a series of hot-air balloons floating around remote locations to beam down Internet access. If the hot-air balloon idea seems silly, consider the fact that their balloons have been known to stay in the air for over 100 days, providing Internet connection speeds of 22 MB per second.

There are real limitations to Project Loon, however, and Google intends to step up its efforts by reaching out of the atmosphere. Google recently acquired the drone company Titan Aerospace, with the intention of creating drone planes to circle the globe—which could be used for Internet provision or for mapping purposes.

Even more interesting are Google’s plans to launch a fleet of satellites in the near future, which according to The Wall Street Journal will cost up to $3 billion to produce and launch. These satellites would be able to provide global Internet access, not just access for remote areas, but the project is still in the planning phase.

Facebook’s Vision
The rivalry between Google and Facebook is evident, as Facebook attempted to acquire Titan Aerospace before Google jumped on board. Undiscouraged, Mark Zuckerberg recently launched a service called Internet.org, which takes advantage of existing mobile phone networks to close the gap between portions of the world with mobile coverage but without Internet access. In a related formal announcement, Zuckerberg made his plans clear: Facebook intends to launch a fleet of atmospheric drones to fly, unmanned, around the world and beam basic Internet access straight to every corner of the globe.

Does that sound familiar? It should. While Google is working on both aerial drones and outer space satellites, Facebook is essentially striving to achieve the same goal.

SpaceX: The Third Player

Joining the party is Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX is preparing to launch its own series of 700 satellites in order to provide constant, universal Internet access. SpaceX already has ample rocket propulsion and space technology to get the satellites into orbit—the only problem it has is getting the actual service to the masses from there. In terms of technological development, SpaceX is currently outclassing both Google and Facebook—but Google and Facebook may have access to more funding and more popular appeal.

Who’s Going to Win?
There are a number of complicating factors preventing each of these major players from moving forward any time soon. It’s a brand new idea, so technological and logistical hiccups are an inevitability as these tech giants discover new challenges to this type of Internet provision. Add in the ambiguous regulatory and legal hurdles that are bound to come up, and these companies may be locked in developmental limbo for years.

All three companies have similar, yet distinct plans for the same ultimate goal: providing universal Internet access. SpaceX has access to better space technology, which gives it an advantage. Google is hedging its bets with its Titan Aerospace acquisition and its plans to launch a series of satellites, and it also has the most buying power of the three, which gives it an advantage. Facebook already has the Internet-beaming technology in place with Internet.org, which gives it an advantage. Each company’s unique position and unique approach makes it incomparable to the others in a one-to-one basis. This Space Race is highly complex, especially considering how many details these companies are likely shielding from public release.

At this point, it’s impossible to say who will win the race to provide Internet to the world. All three companies may launch their respective efforts around the same time, or one may pull a few years ahead. However it turns out, the result for the average person will be the same; greater global Internet access can only be a good thing for mankind. More connected people means greater resources, more information, and more sheer potential for every person on the planet. It will be an interesting race to watch, but in the end, it doesn’t matter who wins.

Source : adweek

Facebook targets ads on your gender and Internet speed

Facebook targets ads in India, Turkey and Indonesia based on your gender and Internet speed

 

In Indonesia, Facebook users who were updating their status updates came across an ad for Durex condoms. But not everyone saw the same ad.

Facebook worked with Durex to create an ad campaign tailored to the country's more traditional sensibilities, persuading Indonesians to think of condoms for more than just safety with a call to "make love pleasurable." The ads would load different content depending on whether the user was a man or a woman, and each message was conceived with regional gender roles in mind, said Nikila Srinivasan, Facebook's product manager of emerging markets monetization.

The campaign managed to boost ad recall by about 25% along with smaller bumps in plans to purchase and recommendation of the brand.

This is Facebook's answer to globalization, where emerging markets like India, Turkey, Kenya and Indonesia have millions of eager Internet users but lag in online infrastructure, with low-technology smartphones, spotty or slow service.

Facebook may boast a user base of 1.44 billion people, but there are still wide swathes of its own audience and millions of would-be Facebookers that the social network remains unable to effectively reach.
Facebook's answer — at least for now — is the Creative Accelerator program.

Based on technology that can read how fast or slow your most common connection is, the Creative Accelerator works with advertisers including Coca-Cola, Nestlé, condom-maker Durex and soapmaker Lifebuoy to craft ads targeted at emerging countries, crafted for every device from a basic smartphone to an advanced iPhone 6 Plus.

Now, three months in, Facebook says these specially tailored ads have returned encouraging results in countries like India, Indonesia, Kenya and Turkey where big brands have run campaigns.

Facebook is touting the success stories. An ad for Lifebuoy soap called on Indonesian moms to promote hand-washing in their families.

Facebook's solution: its technology could sense the users' Internet connection speeds so that on slow Internet, the ad appears as a photo, but at higher speeds, it renders a video. The result: mothers saw the ad, and the brand benefitted from Facebook reported that 9.4% more moms associated the brand with the phrase “protects effectively from germs” after the campaign ran.

There are also regional cultural considerations that must be accounted for, Srinivasan said. Striking a chord with users in, say, rural India calls for a different approach than reaching people in metropolitan Kenya. Facebook works with a brand's local offices in each country to calibrate ads to particular family structures or societal norms.

Mobile ads are now the lifeblood of Facebook's revenue growth: In the first quarter of this year, they accounted for 73% of the company's total advertising yields. Around 87% of the company's monthly users access it from a phone or other mobile device.

Mobile's dominance is even more pronounced in the emerging markets that Facebook has its eye on, where Internet users increasingly forgo desktops and laptops for smartphones and flip phones alike, oftentimes on slower 3G or even 2G access.

With such a patchwork of connection speeds and devices, one-size-fits-all ads risk losing out on thousands of valuable eyeballs when they fail to load, said Srinivasan. She says companies have to create campaigns that work across connection speeds.

The ads push is one of a raft of initiatives geared towards the emerging markets: In addition, Mark Zuckerberg-brainchild Internet.org aims to connect masses of new Internet users and bare-bones Android app Facebook Lite is meant to provide a more data-efficient experience for slower connections.

Treading far from controversey, however, Creative Accelerator is completely separate from Internet.org, which has been mired in controversy over criticism from net neutrality activists. The stripped-down web experience of the platform, which delivers access to a handful of sites, does not allow for photos or ads.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

Source : mashable

Facebook Opening French Deep Learning Lab

In order to get the best artificial-intelligence talent, Facebook is going to Europe.

Facebook’s French offices in Paris’s 7th arrondissement, normally filled with sales and marketing folks, are getting some new tenants this week. Yann LeCun, the Facebook scientist responsible for some of the most cutting-edge artificial-intelligence projects around, is opening a new lab in Paris that’s slated to include approximately 12 researchers. The ambitious project is an example of Facebook’s dedication to becoming one of the world’s top companies in automatically recognizing faces in pictures or teaching computers to understand human speech: Instead of getting Europe’s top talent to come to America, Facebook is making the trip in reverse. The lab is slated to start operations on Tuesday, June 2, and LeCun will remain in New York overseeing research in New York, Paris, and California.

"The reason we’re doing the lab in Paris is to take advantage of the pool of talent in Europe," LeCun told me when we hopped on the phone Monday morning. "The highest concentration of experts in Europe is in Paris and London. Zurich is third, then there are lower-density regions in Germany, Spain, and Italy." LeCun cited the Xerox Research Centre in the French city of Grenoble, which is doing cutting-edge machine vision research, as an example of France’s pull when it comes to machine learning and deep learning.

LeCun, who was poached by Facebook from academic work at NYU several years ago, is one of the world’s top experts the field of "deep learning." Deep learning basically involves teaching computers to understand, extrapolate, and make inferences from extremely complicated data like photographs, technical manuals, and and voice recording. It’s also extremely important to the future of the world’s biggest tech companies. Google lured Geoff Hinton, another of the field’s top experts, away from academia to work on projects.
Facebook has also aggressively sought to open its deep-learning and machine-learning projects up to the general public and to academia because, as LeCun says, corporations and academia "need each other." Earlier this year, Facebook made some of its deep-learning tools available to the public, and (just like Google) publishes research papers on a regular basis.

LeCun and Hinton recently collaborated with another expert, Yoshua Bengio of the Universite de Montreal, to publish a research paper on the state of deep-learning research in Nature. In the paper, which is aimed at computer science experts, the trio explain the technique’s applications for teaching computers to learn information from images, video, audio, and speech. While at the moment, deep learning is used by Facebook for techniques such as facial identification in images, it can be used for much more. And Facebook intends to be at the forefront of corporations adept at deploying deep-learning techniques. As LeCun told me, it has big ramifications for any institution—from law enforcement to health care—that uses images in the course of their work.

"If you have imaging data or anything else that needs analysis, it will be easier for you to find techniques to apply to your program. There are areas like medical imaging which have a lot of applications for medical diagnosis—broadly, it is is a very positive development," he told me. "There is the use of deep learning for cars for driving safety. There are uses such as detecting pedestrians, collision avoidance, or even self-driving cars in the future. There is Mobileye, the Israeli company working on machine vision for cars, Nvidia’s big project to do the same thing, and Uber's research lab in Pittsburgh near Carnegie Mellon University. There are a lot of people in a lot of domains looking at a lot of applications."

Facebook’s Paris lab will initially contain six researchers; the company says by the end of 2015, there will be 12 researchers. The company's offices in Paris mainly hold marketing and sales staff.

WE ARE FOSSASIA

Source : fastcompany

Facebook Responds to Critics by Unlocking Internet.org

Facebook on Monday announced that it will expand Internet.org to ensure that it doesn't conflict with the principles of a free and open Internet. CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to criticisms of Internet.org and outlined plans to make the free service even more open.

"Soon, we're going share an open technical spec, and any compatible service will be available through Internet.org across the whole world," he said. "This will give people even more choice and more free services, while still creating a sustainable economic model to connect every single person in the world. This is the next step forward for Internet.org."

To participate in initiative, websites will have to comply with three guidelines. The Internet.org versions of their websites must encourage users to explore the entire Internet, must use data thriftily, and must offer pages that are optimized for both smartphone and feature phones.

The Controversy

Internet.org seeks to give free Internet access to the billions of people who are offline, despite being within reach of cellular connections. Because the costs of data are often too much for those in emerging markets, Internet.org has been partnering with telecoms and websites to offer basic Internet services for free.

Users can access a small collection of websites free of advertisements. However, despite its presentation as an altruistic service, Internet.org has drawn heavy fire as of late.

Criticism from Net neutrality proponents recently sparked a backlash in India, one of the underserved and underconnected markets Internet.org has targeted. The Times Group spoke out against Internet.org and proposed to pull The Times of India and its language publications from the program if its rivals agreed to do so as well.

The Internet.org initiative ran into trouble because it was partnering with a select group of content providers, putting outsiders at a disadvantage. While Internet.org isn't supported by ads, simply being included in the service meant participating websites would get traffic that was unavailable to organizations on the outside looking in.

The Forecast

With Internet.org now doing more to avoid hurting online competition, the service could offer a world of promise for reaching the goal of universal Internet access.

There's a need for an initiative like Internet.org, maintained Patricia Vila, senior account executive at the Conroy Martinez Group, who experienced connection problems firsthand during her six years in Cuba, when she helped launched CNN's Havana bureau, among other things.

"I'm ecstatic that Facebook is pushing this program and being proactive," she told TechNewsWorld. "The goal here is to bring people out of poverty, and the way we bring people out of poverty is by educating them and introducing them to technology."

The move to open the Internet.org platform to everyone is a step in the right direction, but there are still many concerns surrounding the program, noted Michael Dub, a partner at DXagency.

"I'm skeptical about Internet.Org being able to fully reach their goal, as meeting the platform's guidelines and having the available resources to implement changes will be challenging, especially for smaller companies throughout the world," he told TechNewsWorld.

Along with possible trouble in complying with Internet.org's guidelines, there are Facebook's infamous privacy concerns, according to Dub.

"That includes lack of encryption and allowing Facebook to track users," he said, "and then sharing that data with telecom companies

Source : - technewsworld

Facebook Opens Internet.Org To All Developers In Response To Net Neutrality Concerns

Facebook is turning Internet.org, its project to provide free internet to new users, into a platform. The move comes amid criticism of the program’s “walled garden” approach to hand-picking services, and claims that it violates the principles of net neutrality.

Criticism of net neutrality has been particularly strong in India, where a zero rating program from operator Airtel ignited raised the issue. Facebook lost a number of partners in India, who withdrew from Internet.org in response to the debate, and that gives today’s announcement some added spice.

“Our goal with Internet.org is to work with as many developers and entrepreneurs as possible to extend the benefits of connectivity to diverse, local communities. To do this, we’re going to offer services through Internet.org in a way that’s more transparent and inclusive,” Facebook said in a blog post.

In addition, on the user side of things, Facebook said that Internet.org users will soon be able to venture beyond the initial limits of the portal and search for, and use, new third-party services. In other words, Internet.org will go from being a static portal to a basic (and free) layer of Internet.

While the platform will be open to all prospective developers, there are three central principles that partners must adhere to, Facebook said:

— “Services should encourage the exploration of the broader internet wherever possible.” — this is fairly vague, but it looks to imply that locking users inside your app isn’t ok.

— “Websites that require high-bandwidth will not be included. Services should not use VoIP, video, file transfer, high resolution photos, or high volume of photos.” — Facebook points out that operators are giving up resources for the project for free, so this is a limit to prevent them totally being taken to the cleaners.

— Facebook expects partner services to be optimized for smartphones and feature phones, and be free from JavaScript or SSL/TLS/HTTPS elements.

Facebook and its operator partners for Internet.org have been accused of taking a “king-maker” role because they choose the services that are included in the free Internet portal, and potentially promoted to millions of new users. That position of power gives selected companies a leg up over their competitors — but opening up the platform levels that off, on paper at least.

“We’re building an open platform, and anyone who meets these guidelines will be able to participate,” Facebook added.

Internet.org was first available in a handful of African countries, but it has since expanded to Asia with launches in India (population of 1 billion-plus) and Indonesia (population of 250 million) among others.

The open-platform approach may quell some of the criticisms of the program, but it remains to be seen whether companies — and particularly young startups — will have the interest, time and resources to adapt their services to yet another platform. That’s particularly pertinent in India, where many startups are scaling quickly and already have their resources and teams stretched without piling on additional work.


Source : - techcrunch

Facebook Hello – Latest Free Android Dialer App Update

According to the stats, Americans make 1 billion calls every day on mobile phones, but the experience isn’t as amazing as many would want, because from time to time, they have problems with their phones not recognizing numbers and they hardly manage their numbers, and not to mention that they rarely use WiFi calling. Facebook wanted to make some changes and brought an application, an Android-only dialer application that allows its users to make free calls over WiFi network.

Hello is the application that was built by Facebook Messenger’s team of developers, and it connects with Facebook, allowing you to see who is calling you, even if the person isn’t in your list of contacts, to block annoying people that keep calling you, to search for other people and places. When someone calls you, Hello shows information about the person behind the other line, displaying details that have been shared with you on Facebook.

Besides, you have the option to look for people or businesses on Facebook and with a simple tap, you can call them on their mobile phones, after finding out their numbers. If you receive a recommendation from your friends regarding a certain restaurant, you can use “Hello” to find its location, a contact number and to make a reservation, all within the application. If the restaurant, or any other company, isn’t registered to Facebook, you won’t find information about it, which means that you will have to open your browser and search on Google for address or phone number.

With Hello, unwanted calls from stalkers or annoying people, can be blocked. You will go to Settings to block certain numbers or you can choose to block calls automatically from blocked numbers. When you’ll block a number, you will receive a voicemail with that person’s call and you can review it later, in the recent calls.

Hello allows you to see profile pictures and other info found on Facebook and you can improve your experience using the settings from Facebook and in the application.

The application was added to Google Play, and the new version comes with bug fixes for the issue that caused the app to crash on a few Samsung models, such as Note 4; there was a glitch causing the system bar to render black instead of blue in Lollipop and now it’s fixed, as well as the issue causing the appearance of a 0 in front of some Brazilian numbers.

More about Hello you can find out by watching the video below:





source : - pressandupdate

India and Facebook sparring over Internet.org and net neutrality

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has worked hard to justify his worldwide internet initiative amidst great criticism from India. The social media guru has been accused of having dire ulterior financial motives with the internet plan.

Intenet.org is set to provide internet to areas of the world where people need it the most, yet have no access. India however, feels that Zuckerberg is using his internet expansion as a way to garner a sponsored service that people will have no choice in when accessing the internet.

Last week Zuckerberg took part in a question and answer session on Facebook and he was questioned about Internet.org. His responses seemed to raise curiosity about net neutrality.

His Internet.org project has been accused of offering service to people in areas of India yet leaving them with only a choice that will serve to benefit Zuckerberg.

After the Facebook Q&A, Zuckerberg addressed the criticisms and explained his views and support of net neutrality. In a Facebook statement Zuckerberg said, “We fully support net neutrality. We want to keep the internet open. Net neutrality ensures network operators don't discriminate by limiting access to services you want to use. It's an essential part of the open internet, and we are fully committed to it but net neutrality is not in conflict with working to get more people connected. These two principles: universal connectivity and net neutrality: can and must coexist.”

He went on to say, “To give more people access to the internet, it is useful to offer some service for free. If someone can't afford to pay for connectivity, it is always better to have some access than none at all."

On the flip side of this statement, some feel that the situation stands at Facebook working to create an entirely separate internet by personally choosing the Internet.org partners. In doing this, the company is essentially discriminating against providers that are not on their personal list. If a competitor is on the Internet.org portal, that company would be at a disadvantage because of Internet.org, or Facebooks, probable success.

Indian businessman Osama Manzar rejected Zuckerberg’s statement. He said that Internet.org had a lack of available options and in his opinion was a grave disappointment.

Manyan said in a written statement, "I thought you were working on creating an app that could bring critical and decisive content to the people on the ground in remote areas. I also thought you were keen on provisioning access to the internet to the people who are still deprived and live in remote areas.”

Manyan said that he downloaded the Internet.org app and that he found the only way he could access the app was by using a specific operator.

Manyan said, "This is the first time in my life of accessing the internet for over 20 years when I was told I have to access it only through a particular service provider." He went on to say that many may find Internet.org as a way for Facebook to gain more subscribers.

He also wrote, "While you have been making people believe that Internet.org is a not-for-profit initiative to ensure maximum connectivity to those billions still unconnected, there is a huge confusion and insecurity that is evident from several efforts that are also trying to push Facebook in the name ofInternet.org. As far as Internet.org is concerned, please concentrate on ensuring open access and widespread network access, which will not only secure you more business but mirror ethical conduct."

The group ‘Savetheinternet.in’ issued a statement in the Hindustan Times that showed their adamant disapproval of Internet.org that said, “The reason you're reading Mr. Zuckerberg defend Internet.org so vehemently is because enough Indians - users, startups, media companies - have realized that Facebook is not, and should not be, the internet. In less than 24 hours, many of Facebook's ‘partners' on Internet.org have quit. Internet.org is not open and, despite its name, is not the internet."

In many developed nations, net neutrality has been brought to the public attention and stringent rules are being placed. The issue at hand is the countries that lack the awareness amongst the population amidst government officials that will not provide a closed internet that cannot be controlled by large prestigious companies.

Net neutrality has been widely debated in the last several years and with the debates moving forward about the lack of competition and other factors of Zuckerberg’s internet goals, it will be interesting to see just how far Zuckerberg, Facebook, and Internet.org will go.

Source : - the-newshub