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Facebook is becoming much more than just a social network

Facebook has recently opened the doors on a huge new state-of-the-art lab at its Menlo Park headq...
Newstalk
Newstalk

18.40 8 Aug 2016


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Facebook is becoming much more...

Facebook is becoming much more than just a social network

Newstalk
Newstalk

18.40 8 Aug 2016


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Facebook has recently opened the doors on a huge new state-of-the-art lab at its Menlo Park headquarters in Silicon Valley. But rather than cooking up new ways of sharing cat videos or tweaking its news algorithm, the engineers manning the lab will be focused on developing cutting-edge hardware, as the social network begins a new chapter in its quest for global dominance.

If you are reading this and from Ireland you are statistically more likely to have a Facebook account than not have one. The social network which grew out of Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room in Harvard over 13 years ago has become an internet phenomenon, with 1.7 billion people around the world using it at least once a month.

Facebook has become an iconic company and according to Forbes it is the fifth most valuable brand in the world. Not bad for a company that many see as just a platform to post photos, upload funny cat videos and let your family and friends known when you are #blessed while lying on a sun drenched beach while the rest of us suffer the misery of an Irish summer.

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But Facebook is no longer just a social network, it is a giant corporation which is beginning to spread its tentacles far beyond the world of social media.

With over $23 billion currently sitting in the bank and profits soaring, Facebook can quickly and easily become a big player in a lot of other markets.

It demonstrated this in the mobile messaging space — where it already had a competitive solution in the form of Facebook Messenger — by scooping up WhatsApp for over $19 billion in 2014. In one swoop Facebook became the king of messaging, and now owns the world’s two biggest services with user bases of 1 billion (WhatsApp) and 900 million (Messenger). It also picked up Instagram and its paltry 400 million users for a measly $1 billion.

While these services are seen as complementary to its social network, the company is now looking to expand beyond software and services, and into hardware.

Known as Area 404 — in a reference to the 404 error message you get when a website you are looking for doesn’t exist — the new 22,000sq ft lab was built to bring together all of Facebook’s disparate hardware projects in one place.

A long time ago Facebook decided that the server technology on the market was simply not good enough to house the billions of photos and videos its users have uploaded to the social network, and so it went about engineering its own servers and the racks to hold them — technology it has since made available to everyone else to help reduce costs and cut energy use.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Facebook is also now in the virtual reality market, having bought Oculus for $2 billion in 2014. Earlier this year it began shipping the €700 Oculus Rift headset which works with PCs to allow users player VR videogames.

Facebook’s engineers also worked with Samsung to produce the much cheaper €100 Gear VR headset as the company seeks to establish itself as a major player in the burgeoning VR space — and Zuck is in it for the long haul.

“This is early, and it’s going to be a long-term thing,” he told Businessweek. “This is a good candidate to be the next major computing platform. It’s worthy of a lot of investment over a long period.”

But virtual reality and all it promises is just the tip of Facebook’s ambitions. It also wants to connect the entire globe and rather than waiting for mobile phone networks or internet companies to do it, it is building the technology to do it from scratch.

At the end of June, Facebook’s impressive solar powered drone — known as Aquila — took its maiden voyage. While that flight lasted just 90 minutes over the Arizona desert, the goal of the project is to see the solar-powered drone — whose 42 metre wingspan is the same as a Boeing 737 passenger plane — is to stay aloft for 90 days while it beams wireless internet connectivity to remote part of the globe.

Another project linked to Aquila is being developed at Facebook’s Connectivity Lab in southern California which will see lasers being used to deliver the high speed broadband connection to end users.

Now, Facebook is bringing all of these potentially revolutionary technologies together inside its new hardware lab and with virtually infinite resources and a vision to be at the forefront of technological advances for decades to come, Zuckerberg is building a company that will last for generations.


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