Facebook acquires fitness mobile app maker ProtoGeo

Facebook has now acquired a 2 year-old helinski company, ProtoGeo. The company, consisting of only 10 employes is the maker of the Moves app, a mobile app that can track the distance consumers walk or run and measure calorieds burned. This , i suppose, could be defined as Facebook's way of gaining entree into the market for fitness and health monitoring technology.

Although Facebook hasn't yet disclosed how much was paid for the company, a spokesman for Facebook made it clear that the price for ProtoGeo was not anywhere near what the company had paid for other higher-profile acquisitions recently.

Facebook, as we all know, started this year with a shopping spree, which included buying Whatsapp, a mobile messaging service, for $19 billion in February and virtual reality headset maker, Oculus VR for $2.3 billion a couple of weeks after.

Facebopok said Moves, which would continue to operate as a separate app fits into its recent strategy of offering a variety of standalone mobile apps, such as Instagram for photo-sharing, Facebook Messenger for messaging, and Whatsapp.

Sampo Karjalainen, whose official title is "designer CEO" of ProtoGeo, began working at Facebook's Menlo Park headquaters last week, the Facebook spokeman said.

The Moves app has been downloaded more than 4b million times for Android and iPhone, according to ProtoGeo.

By: Ezekiel .T. Ogidan

Facebooks new face recognition System - Deep Face

 
We have seen face recognition technology in several Sci-Fi movies and it’s not new in the market. Even with the technology advancement, it is becoming cheaper, faster and easily available. A new dimension of possibilities has popped up with Facebook’s new face recognition system, "DeepFace". This technology can be boon for the security agencies, however, people anonymity won’t be possible.

This new technology has the ability to even predict who a user is trying to tag in a photo, since tags are not so accurate.This technology, they said, will operate with "near human accuracy" so that user wont have to tag photo´s manually in the future.

It actually maps 3D facial features, creates a colorless model, and then narrows the specific characterization. The Facebook API group said that its accuracy method scored 97.25%, which is closely to human accuracy score of 97.5%.

The researchers said in the released report that, “In modern face recognition, the conventional pipeline consists of four stages: detect => align => represent => classify. We revisit both the alignment step and the representation step by employing explicit 3D face modeling in order to apply a piecewise affine transformation, and derive a face representation from a nine-layer deep neural network.”









To help them develop this technology, the company looked at 4.4 million tagged faces from the 4,030 users in its network to test the system. This will help it to better recognize the specific features of each user.

“Thus we trained it on the largest facial dataset to-date, an identity labeled dataset of four million facial images belonging to more than 4,000 identities, where each identity has an average of over a thousand samples. The learned representations coupling the accurate model-based alignment with the large facial database generalize remarkably well to faces in unconstrained environments, even with a simple classifier.”the researchers said.

The company aims to bridge the gap between computer and human accuracy. However, we still have to see how the technology will run to strike the balance on privacy issues.

by: Ezekiel.T.Ogidan

Facebook to build drones and satellites to beam internet round the world

A still from a promotional video showing how facebook and internet.org will deliver internet access via aerial drones

Mark Zuckerberg is putting together a lab where a team of Facebook engineers will build flying drones, satellites, and infrared lasers capable of beaming internet connections to people down here on earth.

Revealed this afternoon by the Facebook CEO and founder, it’s known as the Facebook Connectivity Lab. According to Zuckerberg, the lab’s engineering staff already spans “many of the world’s leading experts in aerospace and communications technology,” including researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, NASA’s Ames Research Center, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. And the company is now adding engineers from a British company called Ascenta, an outfit that helped create the world’s longest solar-powered unmanned aircraft.

All this may seem like a stretch for a social networking company. But it’s a necessary part of Zuckerberg’s efforts to bring the net to the vast parts of the world that still don’t have it — an effort known as Internet.org that makes an awful lot of sense for a company whose continued expansion depends on the continued expansion of the net. And though the general public may not realize it, Facebook has a long history with building new hardware that can advance its cause. The company declined to comment on the lab, but it confirms that the lab will be run by Yael Maguire, the former MIT Media Lab researcher who played a big role in the Open Compute Project, Facebook’s effort to build a more efficient breed of computer servers and data centers for driving its web and mobile services.

Hinted at in earlier press reports, Facebook’s flying-internet efforts mirror a similar project that’s underway at Google. Known as Project Loon, it seeks to provide internet access to the hinterlands through high-altitude balloons. Like Facebook, Google stands to benefit in big ways if the net expands. The original services built by these two web giants are now used by enormous swaths of the online population, and eventually, the companies must push into an entirely new audience. As public companies, they’re under enormous pressure to continue the growth of their businesses — in perpetuity. In addition to Loon, Google is looking to expand the reach of high-speed internet landlines through a service called Google Fiber.

According to post on the website by Internet.org — a consortium that also includes such tech outfits as Samsung, Ericsson, Nokia, and Qualcomm — the new Facebook lab is exploring the possibility of using solar-powered high-altitude planes to provide internet access in suburban areas. These could “stay aloft for months, be quickly deployed and deliver reliable internet connections,” the site says. Then, for more remote areas, the lab is looking towards low-orbiting satellites. In both cases, it aims to beam internet access to the people using what’s called free-space optical communication, or FSO. Basically, this is a way of transmitting data through infrared lasers.

Facebook’s announcement comes two days after the company acquired a startup called Oculus, saying it would use the startup’s gaming headset as a way of moving its social network into the world of virtual reality. Compared to that, the Connectivity Lab is a rather straightforward business move. On Tuesday, while discussing the Oculus buy, Zuckerberg painted both projects as platforms that represent not the near future of Facebook, but the distant future.

source:Wired.com

Facebook acquires Oculus VR for $2billion in cash and stock

Today, (actually, about 30 minutes ago) Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg announced that facebook has agreed to acquire Oculus VR, a virtual reality company who just launched their newest virtual reality headset, the DK2 alongside Sony's Project Morpheus, for $2billion in cash and stock. 

The fact that this is coming up just a few days after the official release of the DK2 suggests that Mark Zuckerberg must have seen something he liked. He described how Oculus VR comes in as a step towards making facebook better in his post on facebook:

"I'm excited to announce that we've agreed to acquire Oculus VR, the leader in virtual reality technology.

Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. For the past few years, this has mostly meant building mobile apps that help you share with the people you care about. We have a lot more to do on mobile, but at this point we feel we're in a position where we can start focusing on what platforms will come next to enable even more useful, entertaining and personal experiences.

This is where Oculus comes in. They build virtual reality technology, like the Oculus Rift headset. When you put it on, you enter a completely immersive computer-generated environment, like a game or a movie scene or a place far away. The incredible thing about the technology is that you feel like you're actually present in another place with other people. People who try it say it's different from anything they've ever experienced in their lives.

Oculus's mission is to enable you to experience the impossible. Their technology opens up the possibility of completely new kinds of experiences.

Immersive gaming will be the first, and Oculus already has big plans here that won't be changing and we hope to accelerate. The Rift is highly anticipated by the gaming community, and there's a lot of interest from developers in building for this platform. We're going to focus on helping Oculus build out their product and develop partnerships to support more games. Oculus will continue operating independently within Facebook to achieve this.

But this is just the start. After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face -- just by putting on goggles in your home.

This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.

These are just some of the potential uses. By working with developers and partners across the industry, together we can build many more. One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people.

Virtual reality was once the dream of science fiction. But the internet was also once a dream, and so were computers and smartphones. The future is coming and we have a chance to build it together. I can't wait to start working with the whole team at Oculus to bring this future to the world, and to unlock new worlds for all of us."

by: Ezekiel .T. Ogidan 

Facebook Wins Jan Koum (whatsapp co founder) Over

SAN FRANCISCO — Jan Koum fled the former Soviet Union with his mother when he was 16, leaving his father behind. He worked in the engineering trenches for a decade at Yahoo before starting out on his own. When he was a young man growing up in Mountain View, Calif., his family relied on food stamps to get by.

Now Mr. Koum, the co-founder of WhatsApp, is a billionaire several times over and a business partner with Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief who, in many ways, is his polar opposite. Mr. Zuckerberg, 29, who dropped out of Harvard en route to overnight riches, bought Mr. Koum’s mobile messaging company on Wednesday for at least $16 billion, betting big on an entrepreneur who does not follow the typical young-and-brash Silicon Valley playbook.

Mr. Koum, 38, and his co-founder, Brian Acton, prefer to operate lean and below the radar, with just 55 employees and a nondescript office. They despise advertising and value the privacy of their 450 million users so much that they do not even collect their names.

Mr. Zuckerberg, by contrast, has built his immensely profitable empire by collecting reams of personal data on his 1.2 billion customers and using that to sell ads aimed at them.

Even as Facebook grows more corporate and more complicated to use, Mr. Koum and Mr. Acton, 42, are obsessively focused on just one thing: offering a simple, private, nearly free way for people to share text, photo and video messages with the people they care about.

“You don’t want to get in the way of two people communicating,” Mr. Koum said last spring in an interview at WhatsApp’s headquarters in Mountain View.

“Imagine if I said, ‘Let’s stop for a second, let me pull down this slide. Would you like to see a preview of this game?’ ”

After repeatedly insisting that he would not sell his company to an ad-driven behemoth like Facebook, Google or Yahoo, Mr. Koum has now reversed course.

Mr. Koum offered little explanation for his change of heart on Wednesday during a conference call with Mr. Zuckerberg and Wall Street analysts to discuss the deal.

“Facebook is a social network and offers many different and important functionalities than WhatsApp offers as a communication service, and we’re excited to benefit from the unique expertise, knowledge and infrastructure that Mark and the team have built out over the last decade,” he said.

Mr. Koum said WhatsApp would operate independently and would not offer advertising. Mr. Zuckerberg said that he wanted WhatsApp to focus on increasing the number of people who use it to one billion and that he would not pressure the company to add to its modest revenue from its dollar-a-year subscription fee anytime soon.

Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Koum and Mr. Acton declined interview requests on Thursday.

Mr. Koum and Mr. Zuckerberg do share a common ambition — to connect everyone in the world using their services.

“We want WhatsApp to be on every single smartphone,” Mr. Koum said last month during an onstage interview at the DLD conference in Munich. He expects five billion people to be using smartphones within the next decade, and he wants to serve every one.

The inspiration for WhatsApp came after both founders left their jobs at Yahoo in 2007 and took some time off. Mr. Acton moved to New York to live with his girlfriend (and at one point proclaimed on Twitter that he had applied for a job at Facebook and been rejected). Mr. Koum did some traveling to Argentina and other countries and realized that it was difficult to stay in touch with friends.

International area codes made it difficult for people to call him. Email was simple, but it was not as streamlined as a text message. Text messages, however, were expensive, costing at least 25 cents for each one sent from Europe to the United States. And online chat services from Google and AOL required knowing people’s screen names.

Two years later, Mr. Koum returned to the United States, bought an iPhone and reunited with Mr. Acton to build WhatsApp. The service would take advantage of a phone’s address book to make it as streamlined as text messaging, and it would be nearly free like other Internet messaging services.

Privacy was vital. “For us, everything is built around us knowing as little as possible about the user and what they do on our network,” Mr. Koum said at the Munich conference.

“I grew up in a country where I remember my parents not being able to have a conversation on the phone,” he explained. “The walls had ears and you couldn’t speak freely.”

Just as important to the founders, who share a hippie ethos and distaste for cutthroat capitalism, was the business model.

Instead of financing the service with ads and games like other services free to draw eyeballs to advertisements, Mr. Koum and Mr. Acton made WhatsApp a free software download that would charge a nominal fee after the first year. They would make the app usable on a broad range of smartphones, from dated BlackBerrys, which they both still use for texting, to sleek new Android phones and iPhones, so that people rich and poor all over the globe could take advantage of the service.

Those early decisions allowed the company to remain small and independent even as the app took off in several parts of the world, especially Europe. Users enjoyed the simplicity and low cost of communicating with friends and family around the globe. And they also appreciated the privacy of a service that did not analyze or store their messages — a rarity in the Internet age.

Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Ventures, the venture capital firm that invested $60 million in WhatsApp and will make as much as $3 billion in the sale, compared Mr. Koum and Mr. Acton to the founders of YouTube, the video service that Sequoia also funded before it was bought by Google.

“They’re both mavericks, they’re both independent thinkers,” Mr. Goetz said. “Like many of the best entrepreneurs we’ve been affiliated with, they were driven and focused on building something for themselves.”

Unlike Snapchat, another messaging service that Facebook flirted with buying last year, WhatsApp’s messages are intended to offer a permanent record of life’s conversations. Mr. Acton and his family, for example, use the service to share photos and videos of his baby.

In the interview last spring, the founders said they were happy with the success of WhatsApp, which then had a mere 40 employees and 300 million active monthly users, exceeding Twitter, a service designed for the public broadcasting of short messages.

They were also firm on never wanting to sell their company.

“Facebook and Google, Cisco and Apple, and all those companies, they never sold,” Mr. Koum said. “They always took on the path of independent companies and marched them forward and that’s what we want to do. We want to be as good or as great as those companies.”

source: New York Times