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"There's a certain class of content which is only going to come onto Facebook if there's a good way to compensate content owners for that,"

"We've recently rolled out the business model for this. We'll give a revenue share on a portion of the views to content owners

To grasp the scope of change unraveling in content creation, which is increasingly fragmented, consider all the mobile apps on your smartphone.

Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), the division within the company dedicated to AI

some are new, like a working unsupervised learning model

The company has made substantial investment in artificial intelligence in the last few years

Today, YouTube is unveiling 360-degree virtual reality videos and a virtual movie theater for all YouTube videos, available to anyone with a Google Cardboard headset. The goal is to “democratize virtual reality” and “bring VR to everybody

social network is now seeing 8 billion daily video views. Facebook itself recently debuted 360 video. And the social networking giant owns Oculus,

But Facebook, its biggest competitor, is rapidly encroaching on YouTube’s turf.

Today, Facebook Messenger has 800 million monthly active users – more than 100 times the number of iPhone owners when Apple launched the App Store. Messenger’s current active user base exceeds even the total number of iPhones ever sold. Messaging apps now have more active users than social networks.

If and when Facebook announces a Bot Store, it will mark the “end of the beginning” of a new era: messaging as a platform. Conversational user interfaces are about to change the way billions of users interact with the world around them.

Pavel Durov announced the expansion of the Telegram Bot Store and Ted Livingston staked out Kik’s claim to be the WeChat of the West. By the end of the year, Slack had announced the Slack App Directory, supported by an $80 million fund to fuel the growth of the ecosystem, and Google was rumored to be developing its own chatbots.

Using partners that have existing payment systems would be one option, but many of the most obvious partners have become direct or quasi-competitors to Facebook over recent years, including both Amazon and Apple. Once a user’s first transaction is completed, the rest is straightforward, but it’s that first transaction that’s going to be the hard part. Crack that, and Facebook should quickly become a major player in e-commerce, adding yet another arrow to its quiver and opening up a whole new set of revenue streams.

Brands like Disney have worked with tech firms like Disney-backed Imperson to create chat bots on Facebook's Messenger service so people can have conversations with computerized versions of characters like ABC's "The Muppets" star Miss Piggy without needing to staff an actual human on the other side of the conversation.

it creates a new kind of engagement, which is around messaging person-to-person like most messaging platforms but also person-to-business or person-to-brand or person-to-publisher

It expands the platform beyond just personal communication

Tesla founder Elon Musk, big-name venture capitalist Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and several other notable tech names have launched a new artificial intelligence startup called OpenAI,

OpenAI has the talent to compete with the industry’s top artificial intelligence outfits, including Google and Facebook—but the company has been setup as a non-profit.

The apparent aim is to build systems based on deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence that has proven extremely adept in recent years at identifying images, recognizing spoken words, translating from one language to another, and, to a certain extent, understanding the natural way that we humans talk.

By the time many college freshmen arrive on campus this fall, they’ll have already met their roommate, their core friends, and many of their classmates on Instagram. They’re connecting through class accounts, Instagram pages set up by one or several incoming members of a college’s freshman class to help everyone meet before the school year officially starts.

Many class accounts spawned Instagram group chats in which students not only find roommates, but also figure out plans for orientation, discuss rush, and debate whether or not there are good parties for freshmen.

Yet all the teenagers I spoke to said that they couldn’t imagine a Facebook version of class pages. In fact, several said they’d signed up for Facebook only in the past couple of months, so they could join the official Facebook group that their college’s admissions department created.

“will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure.

There are all these different kinds of utilities for basically all the different things that you would want to do with everyone you know. And we basically built this whole platform around the town square

If you want to message someone on Instagram, you have to use Direct, if you want to message someone on WhatsApp you have to use WhatsApp. But I think people tend to have one of the messaging apps that they prefer the most. So giving people the choice to say, “Hey, I want to use WhatsApp because I prefer that as my service where I can not only message people on WhatsApp but I can message people on Facebook or Instagram as well and have those services connect …” I think that that will unlock a lot more convenient and seamless experiences. So connecting the services in that way I think will be valuable.

The social media giant will roll out the digital currency in around a dozen countries by the first quarter of next year,

Facebook has a huge ecosystem of users it can provide new value for using the nascent asset class. Its crypto can reduce friction for these users, enabling them to make purchases or make transfers to each other without having to leave the platform,

it’s clear that in the future, tech companies—not publishers—will be the chief distributors of the news we consume.

Google’s AMP

is a continuation of that trend

Mattel unveiled its new, $300 3D Printer, the “ThingMaker,” which will allow children to print their own toys at home

While there are affordably priced 3D printers available today, the software that works with them can sometimes have a learning curve that can hinder adoption. With the new application, live now on iOS and Android, the goal was to make it easy enough for anyone to design their own toys – even younger children

The idea isn’t just to print an object and be done, however – instead, kids will print parts that can be assembled to form larger creations, like dolls, robots, dinosaurs, scorpions, skeletons, bracelets or necklaces, for example

When we launched ads two years ago, ads were available in just eight countries. In September, we opened for business in around 200 countries

Facebook’s global sales team was beginning to push Instagram’s advertising to small businesses, providing them with the ability to target marketing at particular users

that international expansion was a priority, with 75 per cent of its more than 400m users based outside the US

“We plan to build this [platform] the way we’ve developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case—messaging

WeChat Pay and Tenpay (Tencent’s business-oriented payment platform) accounted for 38.8% of the total amount spent via mobile payments in China during Q3 2018

games were the most popular category of miniprograms, used by 42% of WeChat miniprogram users in China

ay you’re a time-starved man with a hankering to dress better. Just sign up on Trunk Club, one of whose style experts will call or email you shortly after to talk about your vision for your wardrobe. A few days later, a bemused FedEx employee shows up at your door bearing a trademark "trunk" (made of cardboard), which contains 10 or so items of clothing.

Finding someone who knows style is less important than finding someone who understands sales and relationship management

We have between 40 and 50 now, and 90% are women. They tend to have a background that includes sales, but rarely retail.