LISBON— Rural broadband, Messenger bots and security improvements were the order of the day as several Facebook’s executives took the stage at the annual Web Summit technology conference here this week. The representatives talked about to everything from satellite-based web access for poorer countries to why you shouldn’t use the same password for all of your apps. And naturally, it was all streamed on Facebook Live for the world to see.
Bringing broadband to the world
Facebook’s chief technical officer Mike Schroepfer opened Web Summit Tuesday morning with a keynote explaining the company’s agenda for the next 10 years. Expanding Internet access to the 4.1 billion people worldwide without it is a huge part of that mission, and Facebook has projects afoot for rural, suburban and urban areas.
In the farthest reaches, Facebook is betting on satellite access — an effort set back by September’s launchpad explosion of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the AMOS-6 satellite that was set to provide Facebook Internet access across Africa. Schroepfer played a video of that explosion, saying “You don’t make big bets unless you have huge failures.”
Things are going better with Facebook’s solar-powered Aquila drone, a major subject of Schroepfer’s talk at last year’s Web Summit in Dublin. The propeller-driven aircraft, with the wingspan of a Boeing (BA) 737, flew for the first time in July. “A constellation of these will eventually provide the Internet backbone we need over suburban areas,” Schroepfer predicted.
In cities, Facebook is testing two systems, Terragraph and ARIES, that will provide Internet access over unlicensed wireless spectrum. That has the promise to inject some competition in a market currently dominated by cable Internet.
Schroepfer also touted Facebook’s efforts in teaching computers to recognize photos and making virtual reality a tool to connect with far-flung friends. He called social VR “the technology that’s going to enable these deep social connections over long distances.”
Banter about bots
Facebook executive VP of messaging products David Marcus also spoke at the event on Tuesday. He’s the guy behind Facebook’s launch of Messenger bots, the software-driven chat partners that even he admitted has gotten a little oversold.
“You’re right that there was a lot of hype,” Marcus said. “It’s never as good as it’s portrayed and it’s never as bad as it’s portrayed.”
He said the key to what he called “a much more complex and refined experience” than the traditional chat-bot environment of typing plain text and getting scripted replies: leveraging the same artificial intelligence that goes into the machine-vision efforts Schroepfer talked about.